The pun was stupid, though. Expressing it in TeX was cool, and I enjoyed that..but TeX for a visual pun, not a mathematical insight!? That's not funny, it's stupid. The humor is in seeing the rotated 5 written like an infinity sign and seeing the connection, not in seeing \rotatebox{90}{5}. I wouldn't've gotten it if I hadn't known about the pun before.
Did you mean a lowercase mason as in someone who builds stuff? Because we don't need an uppercase Mason as in a member of the secret society. We already know where the seeds are hidden.
Why don't they jump on real turtles instead of playing Mario?
That is brilliant. You don't have to say another word about Nintendogs ever again.
And the mental image is great.
Re:Most violent book I have ever read
on
God Mode
·
· Score: 1
You don't read the Bible for the gore, though. A lot of stories are horribly violent, but the point is either (rarely) to scare you away from doing something or (more often) to demonstrate that horrible violence is really horrible. And a couple of times, like in Revelations, it's more poetic.
A lot of people are interested in video games because of the gore. And I don't mean that you should take out all blood and make everything like Pokemon (where you don't die, you "faint") - it makes sense to include what would realistically happen. But the games where blood spews unreasonably so that viewers laugh, the games where women wear clothing so skimpy you can't explain in context why they're wearing it...there isn't a reason for it. You don't gain anything towards the objective from seeing the women dressed like that or the blood spewing like that. Your interest in the game is as much from the gore or the sensuality as from the goal itself
That's the difference. The Bible is far less gratuitous. I hesitate to use this term with something I consider a holy book, but the suspension of disbelief is far easier to maintain with the Bible - or with any other scripture, for that matter - than with the equally violent video games.
The goals are always important in considering the morality of an act. That's why a society can establish monogamy without having to say "all sex is good" or "don't have sex ever". That's why a government can defend its monopoly on force without saying "nobody should ever lose their liberties" or saying "it's okay to kill people". Murder and slavery are immoral - except as punishment by a just government. For a long time, sex was considered immoral - except within the bounds of marriage. Similarly, blood and gore are immoral - unless they're used to instruct instead of to excite.
My personal poison is Halo, and I've found that during the game I increasingly find myself looking after the welfare of my marine NPCs. I do generally tend to steer away games that are violent for violence sake.
I've noticed that too. I have no problem playing Halo objective games - I'm only killing them because they're in the way of the flag. I used to have a problem with Slayer; if it's Team Slayer I'm now more or less fine with it (but I'm not good), but if it's free-for-all I don't get the point. I tried playing Quake II once, because I had downloaded it anyway to mess with the modding tools. Something in my system just won't let me shoot something that has recognizably human parts and spews recognizably human gore.
If it weren't for the MJOLNIR armor, I would be unable to get past that whatever in my brain and keep playing Halo (or alternately, I really wouldn't want to suppress that reaction).
approach to, um, fighting fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (x) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (x) Technically illiterate politicians^WSlashdotters ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free (x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
The people who invest in MSFT do, because if MSFT stock goes up it's because Microsoft has been selling more software. Besides, I think they pay dividends, which gives you a small fraction of the world's blood money for pre-installed Windows.
Re:You fucking scientists, that's what you get for
on
Plants Produce Methane
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· Score: 1
I'm not sure if my vocabulary was wrong or we're just using different terms. You're saying "acceleration", which is just dv/dt, and yes, the integral to infinity of any positive function dv/dt gives v_final=infinity. I used "force", which has a factor of gamma, right? Or does Newton's Second stay even under relativity?
If you let one object (gravitationally or magnetically) attract another object, the classical force between them approaches infinity. But they don't reach FTL speeds, do they? Force contracts at relativistic speeds, right?
Okay. I've heard these criticisms of Bose. I've also heard that Dr. Bose, the MIT professor, is a reasonable guy; i.e., nothing I've heard would make me believe that he's an evil marketer or anything. Does anyone have Dr. Bose's own opinion of why the devices are so expensive and why audiophiles hate them?
I suppose one answer is that as a professor he's more interested in getting the mathematics to work than fudging it to sound right to the human ear, but as an MIT professor, I'd think that at least he's smarter than that - and very likely, he's already calculated the mathematics of human perception.
Has "W", as you call him, influenced you so much that you think the US is the only country that matters or is technologically adept enough to have Slashdotters?
Re:You fucking scientists, that's what you get for
on
Plants Produce Methane
·
· Score: 1
FTL travel is impossible...for tardyons...in anything resembling normal spacetime...through simply applying a conventional force to accelerate them past the speed of light. If the only thing you do is keep applying a finite force to an object at rest, you can never get it to the speed of light.
On the other hand, there's plenty of loopholes (pun intended) in spacetime that you can use to effectively reach somewhere before a beam of light traveling in normal spacetime could.
Using GPL carries a very high risk that your company will be attacked by socialist whiners when you do anything out of lockstep with their beliefs.
And using MSFT carries an even higher risk that your company will be attacked by capitalist lawyers when you so much as think anything out of lockstep with their beliefs.
MSFT is a great investment - if your goal in the world is simply to make money and help people make money.
Why do the ball-in-a-cup fanboys have to post this same advertising drivel every time there's an article about video games? Nobody's buying your product anyway. And stick-in-a-hoop has much more processing power and you know it.
One good reason is that you can more easily sell stuff on your land than in malls (and I can't see how you'd sell services like arcades and stuff on someone else's land), and if you're any good and you're dedicated you can easily make enough much money back.
Way off-topic, but...assuming there is a God, and assuming He is exactly the same God mentioned in the Old Testament (and the stories weren't seriously corrupted), and he hasn't changed his worldview (ignore the Jesus stuff for now)...would you have much of a better explanation for Sharon's stroke, just after he withdrew from a bunch of territories and left Likud, than Jehovah striking him down? Because He's been known to do that to a bunch of kings of Israel and Judah.
Lest someone think you're referring to mainstream Christianity (as opposed to some radical groups):
"For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known." -1 Corinthians 13:9-12.
Or verses 9-10 according to Eugene Peterson's version: "We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled."
"You asked, 'Who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge?' Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know." Job 42:3
"Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain." -Psalm 139:6
"The heart of the discerning acquires knowledge; the ears of the wise seek it out." -Proverbs 18:15. This implies that these people don't already have perfect knowledge!
Christianity does not require nor imply knowledge of anything except that Jesus is Lord.
There's a difference between defending Bush and supporting him. There's no way I can defend him: he's a liar and a cheat who uses his office for personal gain and who has broken his oath to the Constitution several times, has no respect for international law nor international diplomacy, and needs to take public speaking lessons. What can possibly be said in his defense?
However, I support him. To effect his goals, he has been maintaining US hegemony. The 9/11 attacks came about* due to a perception that the US was weak - if we had allowed that image, we might in a few years find ourselves on the defensive side of a war. People hated the US, people hate it, and people will hate it. The only thing that might change this is a complete overhaul and a perfectly honest government that drops in status for quite a while - and then regains strength on the basis of its honesty. If we fight offensive wars we know we can win, we maintain the strength of our military and deter possible rivals. This has financial benefits too: we're on the verge of hitting our national debt limit and no one's blinking, because nobody would dare ask the US to repay that debt (either they're in the Anglophone entente that we're contributing to greatly, or they'd have to answer "you and what army?"). I support neither the means nor his ends, but the i>other ends that result from him maintaining a strong "cowboy" military.
In short, no blood for oil, but if you're going to shed the blood anyway, why not take the oil?
*Even if you take the view that 9/11 was staged (of course I don't think that Bush would kill that many American civilians - nor attack his own Pentagon - nor let one flight fail by twiddling his thumbs in a school so he appeared innocent), then it's still true that the US's military image has improved greatly since then, because we've put a strong military offensive out there and we took down two reigning governments.
Before someone replies to you with "isn't that already a crime", let me suggest rephrasing that:
It should be a crime (not just violating an oath) for a government employee to attempt an action which he should have known was in violation of the Constitution. The punishment should be a prison term (for treason) and future ineligibility for any government office.
This means that every time the Supreme Court strikes down a law, they can potentially strike down its legislator too. Give it about three years and we'll have the best law-making body in the history of the world (or, alternately, the most corrupt court system, but that's far less likely).
Who says you have to join it with carriers? Use something free after mail-in rebate as a phone, and an an unlocked SIM slot on the 770 for the Internet connection.
Slashdot Mirror
The pun was stupid, though. Expressing it in TeX was cool, and I enjoyed that..but TeX for a visual pun, not a mathematical insight!? That's not funny, it's stupid. The humor is in seeing the rotated 5 written like an infinity sign and seeing the connection, not in seeing \rotatebox{90}{5}. I wouldn't've gotten it if I hadn't known about the pun before.
No one deliberately clicks on "goatse.cx".
I did. Watch, it's easy to click goatse.cx with nothing happening:
click here: goatse.cx
\lim_{x\to8}\frac{1}{x-8}=\infty \qquad\Rightarrow\qquad \lim_{x\to5}\frac{1}{x-5}=\rotatebox{90}{\mbox{5} }
I don't know what's sadder, that you tried to make a visual pun by encoding it in TeX, or that I understood it.
and possibly an astronaut and/or a Mason.
Did you mean a lowercase mason as in someone who builds stuff? Because we don't need an uppercase Mason as in a member of the secret society. We already know where the seeds are hidden.
Why don't they jump on real turtles instead of playing Mario?
That is brilliant. You don't have to say another word about Nintendogs ever again.
And the mental image is great.
You don't read the Bible for the gore, though. A lot of stories are horribly violent, but the point is either (rarely) to scare you away from doing something or (more often) to demonstrate that horrible violence is really horrible. And a couple of times, like in Revelations, it's more poetic.
A lot of people are interested in video games because of the gore. And I don't mean that you should take out all blood and make everything like Pokemon (where you don't die, you "faint") - it makes sense to include what would realistically happen. But the games where blood spews unreasonably so that viewers laugh, the games where women wear clothing so skimpy you can't explain in context why they're wearing it...there isn't a reason for it. You don't gain anything towards the objective from seeing the women dressed like that or the blood spewing like that. Your interest in the game is as much from the gore or the sensuality as from the goal itself
That's the difference. The Bible is far less gratuitous. I hesitate to use this term with something I consider a holy book, but the suspension of disbelief is far easier to maintain with the Bible - or with any other scripture, for that matter - than with the equally violent video games.
The goals are always important in considering the morality of an act. That's why a society can establish monogamy without having to say "all sex is good" or "don't have sex ever". That's why a government can defend its monopoly on force without saying "nobody should ever lose their liberties" or saying "it's okay to kill people". Murder and slavery are immoral - except as punishment by a just government. For a long time, sex was considered immoral - except within the bounds of marriage. Similarly, blood and gore are immoral - unless they're used to instruct instead of to excite.
My personal poison is Halo, and I've found that during the game I increasingly find myself looking after the welfare of my marine NPCs. I do generally tend to steer away games that are violent for violence sake.
I've noticed that too. I have no problem playing Halo objective games - I'm only killing them because they're in the way of the flag. I used to have a problem with Slayer; if it's Team Slayer I'm now more or less fine with it (but I'm not good), but if it's free-for-all I don't get the point. I tried playing Quake II once, because I had downloaded it anyway to mess with the modding tools. Something in my system just won't let me shoot something that has recognizably human parts and spews recognizably human gore.
If it weren't for the MJOLNIR armor, I would be unable to get past that whatever in my brain and keep playing Halo (or alternately, I really wouldn't want to suppress that reaction).
This post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (x) vigilante
approach to, um, fighting fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians^WSlashdotters
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
"Hackers manage to make Windows Embedded run on the Zanzibar gate switch"
The people who invest in MSFT do, because if MSFT stock goes up it's because Microsoft has been selling more software. Besides, I think they pay dividends, which gives you a small fraction of the world's blood money for pre-installed Windows.
I'm not sure if my vocabulary was wrong or we're just using different terms. You're saying "acceleration", which is just dv/dt, and yes, the integral to infinity of any positive function dv/dt gives v_final=infinity. I used "force", which has a factor of gamma, right? Or does Newton's Second stay even under relativity?
If you let one object (gravitationally or magnetically) attract another object, the classical force between them approaches infinity. But they don't reach FTL speeds, do they? Force contracts at relativistic speeds, right?
Okay. I've heard these criticisms of Bose. I've also heard that Dr. Bose, the MIT professor, is a reasonable guy; i.e., nothing I've heard would make me believe that he's an evil marketer or anything. Does anyone have Dr. Bose's own opinion of why the devices are so expensive and why audiophiles hate them?
I suppose one answer is that as a professor he's more interested in getting the mathematics to work than fudging it to sound right to the human ear, but as an MIT professor, I'd think that at least he's smarter than that - and very likely, he's already calculated the mathematics of human perception.
Or maybe he doesn't live in the US.
Has "W", as you call him, influenced you so much that you think the US is the only country that matters or is technologically adept enough to have Slashdotters?
FTL travel is impossible...for tardyons...in anything resembling normal spacetime...through simply applying a conventional force to accelerate them past the speed of light. If the only thing you do is keep applying a finite force to an object at rest, you can never get it to the speed of light.
On the other hand, there's plenty of loopholes (pun intended) in spacetime that you can use to effectively reach somewhere before a beam of light traveling in normal spacetime could.
Using GPL carries a very high risk that your company will be attacked by socialist whiners when you do anything out of lockstep with their beliefs.
And using MSFT carries an even higher risk that your company will be attacked by capitalist lawyers when you so much as think anything out of lockstep with their beliefs.
MSFT is a great investment - if your goal in the world is simply to make money and help people make money.
Why do the ball-in-a-cup fanboys have to post this same advertising drivel every time there's an article about video games? Nobody's buying your product anyway. And stick-in-a-hoop has much more processing power and you know it.
One good reason is that you can more easily sell stuff on your land than in malls (and I can't see how you'd sell services like arcades and stuff on someone else's land), and if you're any good and you're dedicated you can easily make enough much money back.
Way off-topic, but...assuming there is a God, and assuming He is exactly the same God mentioned in the Old Testament (and the stories weren't seriously corrupted), and he hasn't changed his worldview (ignore the Jesus stuff for now)...would you have much of a better explanation for Sharon's stroke, just after he withdrew from a bunch of territories and left Likud, than Jehovah striking him down? Because He's been known to do that to a bunch of kings of Israel and Judah.
Lest someone think you're referring to mainstream Christianity (as opposed to some radical groups):
"For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known." -1 Corinthians 13:9-12.
Or verses 9-10 according to Eugene Peterson's version: "We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled."
"You asked, 'Who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge?' Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know." Job 42:3
"Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain." -Psalm 139:6
"The heart of the discerning acquires knowledge; the ears of the wise seek it out." -Proverbs 18:15. This implies that these people don't already have perfect knowledge!
Christianity does not require nor imply knowledge of anything except that Jesus is Lord.
There's a difference between defending Bush and supporting him. There's no way I can defend him: he's a liar and a cheat who uses his office for personal gain and who has broken his oath to the Constitution several times, has no respect for international law nor international diplomacy, and needs to take public speaking lessons. What can possibly be said in his defense?
However, I support him. To effect his goals, he has been maintaining US hegemony. The 9/11 attacks came about* due to a perception that the US was weak - if we had allowed that image, we might in a few years find ourselves on the defensive side of a war. People hated the US, people hate it, and people will hate it. The only thing that might change this is a complete overhaul and a perfectly honest government that drops in status for quite a while - and then regains strength on the basis of its honesty. If we fight offensive wars we know we can win, we maintain the strength of our military and deter possible rivals. This has financial benefits too: we're on the verge of hitting our national debt limit and no one's blinking, because nobody would dare ask the US to repay that debt (either they're in the Anglophone entente that we're contributing to greatly, or they'd have to answer "you and what army?"). I support neither the means nor his ends, but the i>other ends that result from him maintaining a strong "cowboy" military.
In short, no blood for oil, but if you're going to shed the blood anyway, why not take the oil?
*Even if you take the view that 9/11 was staged (of course I don't think that Bush would kill that many American civilians - nor attack his own Pentagon - nor let one flight fail by twiddling his thumbs in a school so he appeared innocent), then it's still true that the US's military image has improved greatly since then, because we've put a strong military offensive out there and we took down two reigning governments.
Before someone replies to you with "isn't that already a crime", let me suggest rephrasing that:
It should be a crime (not just violating an oath) for a government employee to attempt an action which he should have known was in violation of the Constitution. The punishment should be a prison term (for treason) and future ineligibility for any government office.
This means that every time the Supreme Court strikes down a law, they can potentially strike down its legislator too. Give it about three years and we'll have the best law-making body in the history of the world (or, alternately, the most corrupt court system, but that's far less likely).
Best. Paraphrase of Two Treatises on Government. Ever.
Hm...a mechanical pencil can move its lead back and forth...can you make a Turing-complete mechanical pencil?
Who says you have to join it with carriers? Use something free after mail-in rebate as a phone, and an an unlocked SIM slot on the 770 for the Internet connection.
Good point...since it's only a red light, would it only pick up red wavelengths?
Would that further mean that optical mice don't work on a pure blue surface?