That's okay; humankind has guns. Remember we don't even fuck with skunks; an advanced species may be able to raze us down for fun (we could certainly extinct skunks), but where's the profit and--more importantly-- why do you want to piss something off that's got nuclear missiles?
There are millions or billions of healthy vegatarians.
"Billions" would be at least 14% of the earth and really at least 25% since we have almost 7 billion people as of yet on this planet.
Most people who try veganism get horribly sick and wind up being pescapalian (they eat fish) or they only eat chicken. Almost every vegetarian I know eats things like chicken ceaser salad/wrap/whatever because they need the meat; they won't touch red meat. Me, I can't go without meat for a week without my immune system failing; after a few days I lose my ability to heal (seriously, not only don't wounds heal, but the skin will start to deteriorate and form sores of its own accord).
The fact remains that spiders kill bugs, eagles tear animals apart while they're alive, etc. World isn't a happy place with Obama riding a flying unicorn with a rainbow coming out of its ass.
The squawking I always hear from these developers is that you never know your target, because everyone implements Android on a different platform with different amounts of CPU and RAM and sometimes there's a different set of system services running on it (like Motoblur etc) and so on. And also that some of them run 1.5, 1.6, 2.0. 2.1, 2.2.
So they are complaining that some machines have different specs... like just about every freaking computer out there. They also complain that there's more than 3 versions of Android, I guess, since there's 3 of iOS and I always hear that iOS is better about this. They also complain that other software might be installed (Motoblur is a software package Motorola installs).
Welcome to the world of embedded developers. It's a very specialized place, and when they meet something not so specialized they go apeshit. The problem is cell phones are general purpose computers now, not embedded devices.
Think about PC developers complaining about how their stuff might crash with Crossfire but not with 4 nVidia cards, even though this is supposed to be transparent. Or maybe it'll blow out on a specific AMD CPU combined with a specific VIA north bridge. Or a particular sound card gives troubles. How ridiculous does that seem? Oh and on top of it all, you might be running XP or Vista or Windows 7 now. The market is so fragmented, it's impossible to write programs for!
Am I the only one immune to Steve's RDS and the only not-gay person immune to this girl's sweet, impossibly-blood-boiling begging and flirting? (I have a friend that can basically get any guy to do anything, she has her own reality distortion field... oh it gets my blood moving alright, but it doesn't distort my judgment... various tech presenters get the same thing these days: a look from me and a lot of interest, but a critical eye looking for the eventual letdown).
I don't want to run for office. I'm of the mind that the media and government and politicians and school system have polluted people so much that they can't make competent decisions anymore: they don't know what's good for them. Unfortunately I also have something against forcing my ideals on others, you know... the whole benevolent dictator thing, the paper democracy of lies and manipulation.... It's not my thing.
I would make a horrible revolutionary. If this country fell that far I would be in the ranks, and probably eventually leading them in starting over; but I wouldn't be able to take a controlling position either upfront or backstage when all is done and said. I don't think the people that start or eventually move up through and lead the revolutions should lead the new countries. That worked really bad for the French.
The secret to playing Go well is to understand a lot of philosophy that's represented in Go. Go is a simple game, but to play Go requires you to make strategic use of limited resources. You have alternating turns; a single stone is influential and powerful because to approach is to be outnumbered. One stone... versus one stone approaching, but that approach submits the turn so it's now one stone outnumbered by 2 stones... then even, then 2 vs 3, etc. You must keep concentration around a position to control it; but you must spread out to gain influence so you can gain territory. You must learn when to run and when to fight, when to threaten elsewhere to improve your position and force the opponent's response so that you can win a fight... how to read through the position... how to recognize from far when a position is dead or alive-- and recognizing dead positions early lets you force them or avoid them to kill or to bring a better position you can revive them from.
Many, many considerations go into playing Go. The same considerations apply to life: balance, judgment, forethought, accepting the loss from mistakes... to not just play the game but, also, to understand the meaning of the game is to understand life.
Think for example on economics. It is not possible to help the poor; sorry, you can't save them all. You can't save every stone in Go either, and the attempt often collapses your position. That said, the more you save, the easier it is to win. Stones that can't be connected and can't escape can be made to live in a small area, costing your opponent a rather severe 10-15 points. Others may provide you connections to save even more stones. In life, attempting to save everyone causes a societal collapse; but careful effort to do the best you can for those in need is advantageous to society. In Go this is extremely difficult to get quite right; in life it is no easier (and no harder).
Beginners in Go often try too hard to save every stone, by the way.
The same analogy explains other aspects of life. Other analogies explain other aspects of life. The best thing you can do for your life is to consider those things; you will understand things that way. It's called philosophy, and it's what we don't have in this world anymore. Philosophers are nerdy self-absorbed idiots taking a mental vacation.
Moral relativism is the modern refuge of the coward. If you cannot see why North Korea's mass starvation and rigidly controlled media is worse than the US, or if you think that the mote in the US's eye means it should not criticize the beam in North Korea's eye, then you need to grow a pair.
If something is not harmful nor fearful to a people, it is morally a cultural decision.
If something is harmful and fearful to a people-- the risk of being condemned for their thoughts, the risk of being murdered (not legal duel-to-the-death, but outright murder; you can refuse a duel, they will call you a coward but you can keep your life), the legal sanction of the strong taking from the weak by force-- then it is wrong. A society with rules, laws, and behaviors that strip a class of people from their security has a moral problem.
It's not the poor that can't provide food for themselves; it's the poor that obtain ownership of land and raise a farm and SHOULD now provide food for themselves, except the law does not provide them recourse against the neighbor that robs them of their food or burns their crops. The poor are just poor and society cannot provide for them; it can, however, protect them. It is the moral obligation of the individual to provide for those around him, and society has no business enforcing this (Robin Hood mentality); but it is the moral obligation of society as a whole to punish those who actively harm others.
Unfortunately understanding a proper moral core is difficult for people. They either believe that the rich should provide for the poor and the law (taxes) should enforce this (and by extension, that everybody can take the easiest job possible and can be an asshole because if they get fired they can live comfortably as a poor person); or that any form of cultural morality is relative and there are no inherent morals in society. I submit an economic and psychological model, where we consider base needs (Maslow's Pyramid), altruism, and economics. The need for security is the basis: people aren't scared because they have no food, they're just hungry. If people are frightened because they are weak and poor, they cannot rise up to feed themselves; society must protect them, even if it cannot supply them with food and shelter.
I love how in theory the theory and practice are the same, don't you? Enjoy your dream world.
For the record, Net Neutrality will irritate the hell out of AT&T and Verizon because they'll be forced to carry huge amounts of shit on their pipe or rent boxes from Netflix et al to avoid the tons of downstream. Netflix will probably find some way (SSL?) to break a regular caching system.
On the other hand, small ISPs like Juno and NetZero won't get any traction ever again. Small-scale DSL competitors won't pull it off either, thanks to leased lines being per-capacity and per-use charged or just extravagantly expensive for "unlimited" and they can't throttle Netflix. Oops. Not that THAT matters because holy hell, Netflix doesn't work on this ISP? Who would want that, go back to Comcast! (their pipe would be too narrow to carry Netflix traffic, even without the cost factor).
Especially since being a Level 1 provider costs bazillions of dollars and being anything else involves renting pipes off the people you are "competing" with, amirite?
"Regulation" is good, but doesn't describe what actually happens in the US. Well, it does, but not in the way you think it does. It has been said often that regulation prevents giant monopolies from squashing consumers and squashing out competition; and also that regulation in the US helps solidify big business by throwing things at them they can handle ($$$) but that the small competition can't afford to follow ($$$).
The truth is that Net Neutrality is the government taking over the Internet, while a lack of Net Neutrality is big business taking over the Internet. Sorry little man, but you can't win; what we have now is both sides being too stupid to realize that somebody has ground rent up to now on a large piece of land somebody else had a cabin on, and now they're negotiating on whether to pay the rent or buy the ground while we've been playing in the part of their back yard they didn't realize was theirs until now.
Yes, but at this point we are all in agreement that the entire concept and the reaction thereof is a symptom of crackheadedness; whereas if I had linked to the UN report or to El Reg in the first place, someone might have debated the merits of the stunningly well-conceived idea that we should all be vegetarians to combat global warming.
They cite a report the UN accepted as fact as their factual basis. Or they're flat out lying. I trust PETA to be completely insane and retarded; that said, I also trust them to be selective with evidence, which means their evidence chain might blatantly ignore facts that are inconvenient but will at least point at something wholly true.
Partial truths, not partial perspective (i.e. an "interpretation" of a "fact"). Somebody out there, for some period of time, convinced the UN that goat farts are the leading cause of global warming.
The point is that some ridiculous ideas have been thrown around and landed in some high places. That you want to associate something like this to crazies just goes to show that crazies do indeed get ridiculous shit into politics.
By the way, since PETA didn't cite, I will. That this landed on the UN discussion table and was taken seriously doesn't mean it's not wholly insane.
The biggest problem is if the molten core shifts around, then the localized heat sources change, which changes the temperature of the ground surface, the oceans, and the atmosphere given enough time. This would eventually lead to civilization-annoying weather pattern changes, causing regular cycling climates (hot summer, cold snowy winter) to become either more extreme (hotter summer, colder winter) or tilted (hotter summer, winters that are cold and rainy). This of course distorts any functioning agrarian society while the whole disaster continues; things have to be moved around after the weather settles down again.
And for the record, the earth's magnetic core is a molten iron blob subject to magnetic fields. The sun is a huge nuclear generator radiating a huge magnetic field. What happens when you rotate one around the other? Hint: nuclear bombs won't produce the kind of momentum that keeps that much metal spinning for millions of years... that would blow the whole planet to dust.
I want to see him represent multiple plaintiffs in multiple individual suits for free lol. He can't take multiple days in court at once though; and a class action would be pretty shitty in comparison to getting hit by everyone who spammed you. Actually hmm, how about an opt-out class action for $10 per person plus an injunction to cease opt-out e-mail advertising?
If he was really interested in making a change, he wouldn't be taking the settlements, he'd be dragging them all through the coals. Instead, he's just a money grabbing slimeball.
He's sued the holding company running AdultFriendFinder 4 times, and will continue to sue them until they stop spamming. The courts won't award him 1.1 million dollars per violation, unfortunately. Also several are pissed that he drags them through court instead of settling; I haven't determined why he settles some cases and drags others through court. Maybe because he can squeeze them for lawyer fees by dragging the case through court (they do have to pay their legal team), but he doesn't incur any himself beyond initial filing.
They all want to settle because they don't want an injunction against them the twelfth time they land in court with the bastard.
Slashdot Mirror
Obama riding a unicorn.
Alan Campbell should have done that with his series, The Deepgate Codex. Or maybe he should do a remake... I would love to see a remake of the series.
That's okay; humankind has guns. Remember we don't even fuck with skunks; an advanced species may be able to raze us down for fun (we could certainly extinct skunks), but where's the profit and--more importantly-- why do you want to piss something off that's got nuclear missiles?
So, if we quit fast food, we get the pick of good managers in retail, and otherwise solve the world's overpopulation problem?
I just quit fast food.
There are millions or billions of healthy vegatarians.
"Billions" would be at least 14% of the earth and really at least 25% since we have almost 7 billion people as of yet on this planet.
Most people who try veganism get horribly sick and wind up being pescapalian (they eat fish) or they only eat chicken. Almost every vegetarian I know eats things like chicken ceaser salad/wrap/whatever because they need the meat; they won't touch red meat. Me, I can't go without meat for a week without my immune system failing; after a few days I lose my ability to heal (seriously, not only don't wounds heal, but the skin will start to deteriorate and form sores of its own accord).
The fact remains that spiders kill bugs, eagles tear animals apart while they're alive, etc. World isn't a happy place with Obama riding a flying unicorn with a rainbow coming out of its ass.
Yes I'm trying to insinuate that white iPhones are for liberal arts degree faggots that don't like pussy. Genius.
The squawking I always hear from these developers is that you never know your target, because everyone implements Android on a different platform with different amounts of CPU and RAM and sometimes there's a different set of system services running on it (like Motoblur etc) and so on. And also that some of them run 1.5, 1.6, 2.0. 2.1, 2.2.
So they are complaining that some machines have different specs... like just about every freaking computer out there. They also complain that there's more than 3 versions of Android, I guess, since there's 3 of iOS and I always hear that iOS is better about this. They also complain that other software might be installed (Motoblur is a software package Motorola installs).
Welcome to the world of embedded developers. It's a very specialized place, and when they meet something not so specialized they go apeshit. The problem is cell phones are general purpose computers now, not embedded devices.
Think about PC developers complaining about how their stuff might crash with Crossfire but not with 4 nVidia cards, even though this is supposed to be transparent. Or maybe it'll blow out on a specific AMD CPU combined with a specific VIA north bridge. Or a particular sound card gives troubles. How ridiculous does that seem? Oh and on top of it all, you might be running XP or Vista or Windows 7 now. The market is so fragmented, it's impossible to write programs for!
Am I the only one immune to Steve's RDS and the only not-gay person immune to this girl's sweet, impossibly-blood-boiling begging and flirting? (I have a friend that can basically get any guy to do anything, she has her own reality distortion field... oh it gets my blood moving alright, but it doesn't distort my judgment ... various tech presenters get the same thing these days: a look from me and a lot of interest, but a critical eye looking for the eventual letdown).
(which are likely to suffer from the same thing android phones do: OS version fragmentation.)
They're likely to suffer from a competitor-purported myth while all running the same OS, video system, and packaging manager?
I don't want to run for office. I'm of the mind that the media and government and politicians and school system have polluted people so much that they can't make competent decisions anymore: they don't know what's good for them. Unfortunately I also have something against forcing my ideals on others, you know... the whole benevolent dictator thing, the paper democracy of lies and manipulation.... It's not my thing.
I would make a horrible revolutionary. If this country fell that far I would be in the ranks, and probably eventually leading them in starting over; but I wouldn't be able to take a controlling position either upfront or backstage when all is done and said. I don't think the people that start or eventually move up through and lead the revolutions should lead the new countries. That worked really bad for the French.
The secret to playing Go well is to understand a lot of philosophy that's represented in Go. Go is a simple game, but to play Go requires you to make strategic use of limited resources. You have alternating turns; a single stone is influential and powerful because to approach is to be outnumbered. One stone... versus one stone approaching, but that approach submits the turn so it's now one stone outnumbered by 2 stones... then even, then 2 vs 3, etc. You must keep concentration around a position to control it; but you must spread out to gain influence so you can gain territory. You must learn when to run and when to fight, when to threaten elsewhere to improve your position and force the opponent's response so that you can win a fight... how to read through the position... how to recognize from far when a position is dead or alive-- and recognizing dead positions early lets you force them or avoid them to kill or to bring a better position you can revive them from.
Many, many considerations go into playing Go. The same considerations apply to life: balance, judgment, forethought, accepting the loss from mistakes... to not just play the game but, also, to understand the meaning of the game is to understand life.
Think for example on economics. It is not possible to help the poor; sorry, you can't save them all. You can't save every stone in Go either, and the attempt often collapses your position. That said, the more you save, the easier it is to win. Stones that can't be connected and can't escape can be made to live in a small area, costing your opponent a rather severe 10-15 points. Others may provide you connections to save even more stones. In life, attempting to save everyone causes a societal collapse; but careful effort to do the best you can for those in need is advantageous to society. In Go this is extremely difficult to get quite right; in life it is no easier (and no harder).
Beginners in Go often try too hard to save every stone, by the way.
The same analogy explains other aspects of life. Other analogies explain other aspects of life. The best thing you can do for your life is to consider those things; you will understand things that way. It's called philosophy, and it's what we don't have in this world anymore. Philosophers are nerdy self-absorbed idiots taking a mental vacation.
Moral relativism is the modern refuge of the coward. If you cannot see why North Korea's mass starvation and rigidly controlled media is worse than the US, or if you think that the mote in the US's eye means it should not criticize the beam in North Korea's eye, then you need to grow a pair.
If something is not harmful nor fearful to a people, it is morally a cultural decision.
If something is harmful and fearful to a people-- the risk of being condemned for their thoughts, the risk of being murdered (not legal duel-to-the-death, but outright murder; you can refuse a duel, they will call you a coward but you can keep your life), the legal sanction of the strong taking from the weak by force-- then it is wrong. A society with rules, laws, and behaviors that strip a class of people from their security has a moral problem.
It's not the poor that can't provide food for themselves; it's the poor that obtain ownership of land and raise a farm and SHOULD now provide food for themselves, except the law does not provide them recourse against the neighbor that robs them of their food or burns their crops. The poor are just poor and society cannot provide for them; it can, however, protect them. It is the moral obligation of the individual to provide for those around him, and society has no business enforcing this (Robin Hood mentality); but it is the moral obligation of society as a whole to punish those who actively harm others.
Unfortunately understanding a proper moral core is difficult for people. They either believe that the rich should provide for the poor and the law (taxes) should enforce this (and by extension, that everybody can take the easiest job possible and can be an asshole because if they get fired they can live comfortably as a poor person); or that any form of cultural morality is relative and there are no inherent morals in society. I submit an economic and psychological model, where we consider base needs (Maslow's Pyramid), altruism, and economics. The need for security is the basis: people aren't scared because they have no food, they're just hungry. If people are frightened because they are weak and poor, they cannot rise up to feed themselves; society must protect them, even if it cannot supply them with food and shelter.
I love how in theory the theory and practice are the same, don't you? Enjoy your dream world.
For the record, Net Neutrality will irritate the hell out of AT&T and Verizon because they'll be forced to carry huge amounts of shit on their pipe or rent boxes from Netflix et al to avoid the tons of downstream. Netflix will probably find some way (SSL?) to break a regular caching system.
On the other hand, small ISPs like Juno and NetZero won't get any traction ever again. Small-scale DSL competitors won't pull it off either, thanks to leased lines being per-capacity and per-use charged or just extravagantly expensive for "unlimited" and they can't throttle Netflix. Oops. Not that THAT matters because holy hell, Netflix doesn't work on this ISP? Who would want that, go back to Comcast! (their pipe would be too narrow to carry Netflix traffic, even without the cost factor).
Especially since being a Level 1 provider costs bazillions of dollars and being anything else involves renting pipes off the people you are "competing" with, amirite?
"Regulation" is good, but doesn't describe what actually happens in the US. Well, it does, but not in the way you think it does. It has been said often that regulation prevents giant monopolies from squashing consumers and squashing out competition; and also that regulation in the US helps solidify big business by throwing things at them they can handle ($$$) but that the small competition can't afford to follow ($$$).
Bruce Schneier Headline: "1000 crimes would have been solved without CCTV, 1001 crimes solved total with CCTV."
The truth is that Net Neutrality is the government taking over the Internet, while a lack of Net Neutrality is big business taking over the Internet. Sorry little man, but you can't win; what we have now is both sides being too stupid to realize that somebody has ground rent up to now on a large piece of land somebody else had a cabin on, and now they're negotiating on whether to pay the rent or buy the ground while we've been playing in the part of their back yard they didn't realize was theirs until now.
Yes, but at this point we are all in agreement that the entire concept and the reaction thereof is a symptom of crackheadedness; whereas if I had linked to the UN report or to El Reg in the first place, someone might have debated the merits of the stunningly well-conceived idea that we should all be vegetarians to combat global warming.
They cite a report the UN accepted as fact as their factual basis. Or they're flat out lying. I trust PETA to be completely insane and retarded; that said, I also trust them to be selective with evidence, which means their evidence chain might blatantly ignore facts that are inconvenient but will at least point at something wholly true.
Partial truths, not partial perspective (i.e. an "interpretation" of a "fact"). Somebody out there, for some period of time, convinced the UN that goat farts are the leading cause of global warming.
The point is that some ridiculous ideas have been thrown around and landed in some high places. That you want to associate something like this to crazies just goes to show that crazies do indeed get ridiculous shit into politics.
By the way, since PETA didn't cite, I will. That this landed on the UN discussion table and was taken seriously doesn't mean it's not wholly insane.
The sun expanding would make the earth hotter too. actually, the anthropogenic global warming crowd occasionally brings up that livestock farming is hands-down the biggest cause of global warming. Because of the emissions from the animals, mind you.
I remember when they told us it was driving cars...
Magnets.... frequency... what?
The biggest problem is if the molten core shifts around, then the localized heat sources change, which changes the temperature of the ground surface, the oceans, and the atmosphere given enough time. This would eventually lead to civilization-annoying weather pattern changes, causing regular cycling climates (hot summer, cold snowy winter) to become either more extreme (hotter summer, colder winter) or tilted (hotter summer, winters that are cold and rainy). This of course distorts any functioning agrarian society while the whole disaster continues; things have to be moved around after the weather settles down again.
And for the record, the earth's magnetic core is a molten iron blob subject to magnetic fields. The sun is a huge nuclear generator radiating a huge magnetic field. What happens when you rotate one around the other? Hint: nuclear bombs won't produce the kind of momentum that keeps that much metal spinning for millions of years... that would blow the whole planet to dust.
Hopefully a bunch of lawyers band together to SLAY the golden goose...
I want to see him represent multiple plaintiffs in multiple individual suits for free lol. He can't take multiple days in court at once though; and a class action would be pretty shitty in comparison to getting hit by everyone who spammed you. Actually hmm, how about an opt-out class action for $10 per person plus an injunction to cease opt-out e-mail advertising?
If he was really interested in making a change, he wouldn't be taking the settlements, he'd be dragging them all through the coals. Instead, he's just a money grabbing slimeball.
He's sued the holding company running AdultFriendFinder 4 times, and will continue to sue them until they stop spamming. The courts won't award him 1.1 million dollars per violation, unfortunately. Also several are pissed that he drags them through court instead of settling; I haven't determined why he settles some cases and drags others through court. Maybe because he can squeeze them for lawyer fees by dragging the case through court (they do have to pay their legal team), but he doesn't incur any himself beyond initial filing.
They all want to settle because they don't want an injunction against them the twelfth time they land in court with the bastard.
He became a lawyer specifically to fire a low-orbit ion cannon at spammers.