In fact, stating that it "already happened" at all shows that the poster is implicitly assuming that there is a universal "real" time. Which, as anyone who has studied relativity in any depth will know, is a load of dingo's kidneys.
...although in fairness, I should point out that in London we have the Congestion Charge now, which costs you £8 per day to take your car into central zones.
OTOH, even before the Congestion Charge, I would never drive in London if I could avoid it - it's just not worth the stress. And the public transport is far from perfect, but at least it's there.
"The cars honked at you because they thought you were a bum? Don't you think that's a bit of a stretch?"
Nope - the first time I was honked, I looked round to see some guy making offensive gestures and very clearly mouthing "BUM" at me. Second time I looked around a bit more slowly to see a quite smartly-dressed middle-aged woman looking at me with an expression of great distaste. After that, I stopped bothering to look.
"In truth, they honked at you [...] because you were walking down a road without adequate pedestrian space"
Nope - it was a nice wide pavement, and I was not near the traffic. I wasn't wearing anything particularly scruffy, either
"Also, what about air conditioning? The US has a lot more air conditioning, and compared to fresh air you'd think it could harbour a lot of illnesses."
Yeah, I'm sure air conditioning has a lot to do with it too - circulating everybody's colds / flus / random minor virii around the whole office.
Mind you, we don't have air con in our office, and on a hot summer's day, it's like walking into an oven. A sweaty oven. Full of techies. I'm not for a moment going to claim that that's any more healthy...!
Mmmmm.... I love the smell of developers in the morning....
"my gym, in the south of the UK has an escalator. I use it too"
I have no problem with people using escalators, but in that pic it's an escalator for what, 15 small steps? Hardly seems worth it - I mean, if it was a disabled access ramp then that would be great, but it's not.
In British cities, we generally do a lot of walking compared to US cities. I once asked *in the visitor's centre* for directions to the public library in a US city. After getting a load of driving directions, when I told them I didn't have a car, the woman behind the counter looked horrified, and was stunned into disbelieving silence for several seconds, before giving the classic response:
"Well in that case, I don't think you can get there from here..."
Turns out it was only a ten-minute walk away. And virtually every car I passed on the way honked at me. Why? Because they thought I was a bum - after all, only bums don't have cars, right?
I'm not saying this is true of every US city - certainly people seem to walk in New York, for example - but by way of contrast, I live in London and I probably do about an hour of brisk walking every day just getting between tube stations, the office, and my home. That's not counting actual "exercise time", that's just getting about day-to-day. Even when I used to work in the northern cities like Leeds and Stockton-on-Tees, which don't have the Tube, I still did about an hour walking around at lunchtime.
I'm not trying to troll here, but I think this picture says a lot : Only In America.
It might look nice to you, but if these guys are serious about being "web 2.0" and/or replacing Office then they really need to work on their accessibility. Even that offline message has two big accessibility no-no's: text-as-images, and table-based layout.
I tried looking at that page with Fangs (screen reader emulator) and you know what it said?
"thinkfree dash Internet ExplorerTable with one column and twenty rowsTable with one column and sixteen rowsTable endTable end"
That's what a visually-impaired person would get from that website. That's it, nothing else.
And while accessibility might not be important to you in your current situation, it's extremely important to anyone with a disability, and also to the public sector. All government web systems must be accessible, and until accessibility gets taken more seriously on these kind of projects, the desktop is going to win out every time.
"Cheese.
It's common knowledge that the moon is made of cheese, and we all know that the sun is yellow.
What color is cheese?
There's your connection, right there."
I just love the fact that this is modded +4 informative
My partner is Chinese. She has a lot of family over there, and most of them would probably say that, on average, they get their fair share of happiness, no more or less than enyone else in any other country.
Having talked to many of them myself, the impression I get is that most of them don't really concern themselves with civil rights or democracy campaigns or Falun Gong or Tibet or Taiwan. This is not through callousness or "blinkers", it's certainly not through fear of reprisal. They just don't see it as their business, and if you ask them about it, they'll look at you as if you just asked them for a stoat. They have far more relevant things to think about, like which restaurant to go to when Auntie X arrives, what digital camera to go for, what to give the kids for Christmas.... etc etc.
They mostly concern themselves with what's in front of them, and are quite happy to leave politics to the politicians. If you break the law, you'll get punished, and that's that, whatever the rights and wrongs of the laws may be.
They are no different from the average American or Brit, in other words. If you think that's harsh, I suggest you take a moment to compare and contrast this with the gradual but undeniable erosion of civil rights and freedoms in the West in favour of corporate interests and "the War On Terror".
Of course, I can only speak for the ones I've talked to. Other generalisations are left as an exercise for the reader;)
Nuclear power doesn't derive its energy from the sun.
Maybe not from the sun, but ultimately from a sun (star), yes - unless anyone knows of any other way to make uranium and plutonium?
And why, in this era of 3D-accelerated graphics cards and sophisticated user interfaces, are Web pages limited to clunky text boxes and radio buttons for user input?
....so that they can be read and rendered correctly on the simplest user interfaces on the simplest devices that may NOT have 3D-accelerated graphics cards. Screen readers for one.
"if phone sex operators are using this service......"
I used to work for a large Telecoms distributor, who launched a similar service on their web site, called "Call Me".
One day all the sales staff in the call center complained that they were getting incoming calls and picking them up, and the voice on the other end would talk dirty to them, describing their underwear and exactly what they were doing with their fingers in great detail..... you know the kind of thing, right? (ahem) or you can imagine, I'm sure...
Turns out that some enterprising soul had set up a premium rate porn line number at something like £5 per minute (that's about $8-$9) and then spent a few hours entering that premium rate number into every CallMe website they could find. So we were getting automated dials from CallMe which connected our sales staff to porn, at the companies expense.
Anyone know what kind of measures Google has put in place to stop this kind of thing?
"I would like to point out that that all hydrogen fuel cells generate dihydrogen monoxide as their principle biproduct, which is an even worse greenhouse gas."
...so does that make this fuel cell the ultimate vapourware?
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, stating that it "already happened" at all shows that the poster is implicitly assuming that there is a universal "real" time. Which, as anyone who has studied relativity in any depth will know, is a load of dingo's kidneys.
What on earth do you mean? It's perfectly balanced between the three main food groups - starch, stodge, and burnt crunchy bits...
Hear hear!
...although in fairness, I should point out that in London we have the Congestion Charge now, which costs you £8 per day to take your car into central zones.
OTOH, even before the Congestion Charge, I would never drive in London if I could avoid it - it's just not worth the stress. And the public transport is far from perfect, but at least it's there.
"if you're going to give an anecdote like that, please include the city name." Kansas. ( cue much Eric Idle-style "Say no more!" quips, right? )
Nope - the first time I was honked, I looked round to see some guy making offensive gestures and very clearly mouthing "BUM" at me. Second time I looked around a bit more slowly to see a quite smartly-dressed middle-aged woman looking at me with an expression of great distaste. After that, I stopped bothering to look.
Nope - it was a nice wide pavement, and I was not near the traffic. I wasn't wearing anything particularly scruffy, either
"Also, what about air conditioning? The US has a lot more air conditioning, and compared to fresh air you'd think it could harbour a lot of illnesses."
Yeah, I'm sure air conditioning has a lot to do with it too - circulating everybody's colds / flus / random minor virii around the whole office.
Mind you, we don't have air con in our office, and on a hot summer's day, it's like walking into an oven. A sweaty oven. Full of techies. I'm not for a moment going to claim that that's any more healthy...!
Mmmmm.... I love the smell of developers in the morning....
"my gym, in the south of the UK has an escalator. I use it too" I have no problem with people using escalators, but in that pic it's an escalator for what, 15 small steps? Hardly seems worth it - I mean, if it was a disabled access ramp then that would be great, but it's not.
Walking. Seriously!
In British cities, we generally do a lot of walking compared to US cities. I once asked *in the visitor's centre* for directions to the public library in a US city. After getting a load of driving directions, when I told them I didn't have a car, the woman behind the counter looked horrified, and was stunned into disbelieving silence for several seconds, before giving the classic response :
Turns out it was only a ten-minute walk away. And virtually every car I passed on the way honked at me. Why? Because they thought I was a bum - after all, only bums don't have cars, right?
I'm not saying this is true of every US city - certainly people seem to walk in New York, for example - but by way of contrast, I live in London and I probably do about an hour of brisk walking every day just getting between tube stations, the office, and my home. That's not counting actual "exercise time", that's just getting about day-to-day. Even when I used to work in the northern cities like Leeds and Stockton-on-Tees, which don't have the Tube, I still did about an hour walking around at lunchtime.
I'm not trying to troll here, but I think this picture says a lot : Only In America.
I just love the fact that this is modded +4 informative
Does anyone have the .torrent for this?
Sure - here : http://willowpondlane.com/blackbox/images/download www.gif
"Highly Critical Hole" ?
by quokkapox (847798) on Tuesday January 31, @07:07AM (#14605136)
I'm going to file this for posterity along with "640k ought to be enough for anyone"....
Stopped me getting laid for most of it.
Next question...?
My partner is Chinese. She has a lot of family over there, and most of them would probably say that, on average, they get their fair share of happiness, no more or less than enyone else in any other country. Having talked to many of them myself, the impression I get is that most of them don't really concern themselves with civil rights or democracy campaigns or Falun Gong or Tibet or Taiwan. This is not through callousness or "blinkers", it's certainly not through fear of reprisal. They just don't see it as their business, and if you ask them about it, they'll look at you as if you just asked them for a stoat. They have far more relevant things to think about, like which restaurant to go to when Auntie X arrives, what digital camera to go for, what to give the kids for Christmas.... etc etc. They mostly concern themselves with what's in front of them, and are quite happy to leave politics to the politicians. If you break the law, you'll get punished, and that's that, whatever the rights and wrongs of the laws may be. They are no different from the average American or Brit, in other words. If you think that's harsh, I suggest you take a moment to compare and contrast this with the gradual but undeniable erosion of civil rights and freedoms in the West in favour of corporate interests and "the War On Terror". Of course, I can only speak for the ones I've talked to. Other generalisations are left as an exercise for the reader ;)
Nuclear power doesn't derive its energy from the sun. Maybe not from the sun, but ultimately from a sun (star), yes - unless anyone knows of any other way to make uranium and plutonium?
So when are they going to add some into my boss?
I already fear the inevitable : a.s.l
"if phone sex operators are using this service......"
I used to work for a large Telecoms distributor, who launched a similar service on their web site, called "Call Me".
One day all the sales staff in the call center complained that they were getting incoming calls and picking them up, and the voice on the other end would talk dirty to them, describing their underwear and exactly what they were doing with their fingers in great detail..... you know the kind of thing, right? (ahem) or you can imagine, I'm sure...
Turns out that some enterprising soul had set up a premium rate porn line number at something like £5 per minute (that's about $8-$9) and then spent a few hours entering that premium rate number into every CallMe website they could find. So we were getting automated dials from CallMe which connected our sales staff to porn, at the companies expense.
Anyone know what kind of measures Google has put in place to stop this kind of thing?
You'll have to try it to find out...
But the most important thing is.... does the Microsoft "Genuine Advantage" CRACK work in Firefox too?
Minutes? Pah! I thought EVERYONE knew that you can override any encryption system in the world by typing "OVERRIDE" at the console...
OK, lemme see if I've got this straight:
but none of those are "intentionally maiming" ?
*sigh* sometimes you have to wonder where and how the line gets drawn...
(wince)