> The stories are, despite what was said by Taco, > hardly original. They feature disposable, > simplified plot structures and generalized characters > that fit extremely shallow archetypes.
The stories, such as I've seen (my younger daughter really loves this amine/manga stuff, so I've seen a few videotapes and read a lot of comic books) are typically lame kid's fluff, some of it boring the the point of making me actively angry. If I've got to hear see or read another cliched magic-laden story about "demonic possesion" or another battle in a high-ceilinged hall where one of these damn goons throws glowing balls at the other, and they go "boom" and the other guy falls on his ass and slides a while, then he gets up and does it back, back and forth, ding-dong ad infinitum, any more of that I'm going to howl like a dog. But I'm kind of allergic to most of the stuff the mass entertainment media extrude anyway.
But the style of that anime, the graphics and the timing, is so new-n-different, it has so little respect for the stylistic customs and traditional metaphors of U.S. animated cinema, that it's practically revolutionary, it threatens to break down the value of Hollywood's fixed aesthetic assets, so I dig anime. From a distance, that is.
It would be nice if you would actually read the books you "quote" and thus get the details right. Three-quarters the brain mass, indeed. Not that Bell Curve isn't quite the load of crap, but you even managed to misquote the bogus numbers out of that, and in this case your two wrongs don't happen to cancel each other out and make a "right."
Besides, even if races differ in any qualities beyond the superficial ones, individuals obviously differ far more widely than races. Or maybe you think that for some, any, reasonable definition of "intelligence," your white ass has got more of it than, say, Miles Davis or Toni Morrison. What I'm trying to say here is, you damned racists are full of shit.
Why I'm wasting my breath lecturing a troll is another question, one I can't really sensibly answer.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
: What you ought to be teaching is, how do we-
: Yes, Little Jackie, it has to be.
: You're stuck, Kindly Dad, you've got a worn gear-tooth.
: Yes, Little Jackie, it has to be.
So as though the NYT weren't enough, Thomas Friedman has a/. account now! But the Polish working class want their pensions and health care system back! youse dirty capitalist &^%$#.
Good God this is wonderful! Is it stable? I take back the negative things I said elsewhere about Palms. In fact, I think I'll go shopping and check out some prices. Now if I can only find a Palm-compatible PDA which accepts compact flash memory cards, so I can store a decent amount of data in there... Thank you for posting this!
Guess HP's gone downhill. I ran my HP41 over with a Chevy Suburban (yeah it was lying in soft sand, but still, a Suburban) and a while later dropped it in eighteen inches of water and it still is running, fifteen-plus years after I bought it.
I sure hope the HP48GX is made of stronger stuff than that 49 the top poster was complaining about, because I take it in the field daily to do land surveying, and we surveyors just destroy equipment, it comes with the territory. On the other hand, if it breaks it's not all that bad, because unlike my old 41, that 48GX is the company's property, not my own personal purchase.
Well, I can and do program my HP48GX right from the keyboard. (I wrote a simple little program just this morning while in the field.) And I have a LISP interpreter and also a copy of Turbo C v.2.0 (which I bought back in 1989!) on my HP200LX. Can you write any program at all for use on a Palm Pilot, no matter how trivial, on the Palm Pilot itself? Can you write a program for Windows CE on a Windows CE machine? No, you need a cross-compiler or something like that (and a damn costly one too) running on another real computer. Yeah, wow, a Palm Pilot or a WinCE PDA have processors that can run circles around the 80186 in my HP200LX, but you can't program it on itself, so as far as I am concerned my HP200LX still blows away any PDA currently shipping.
Jesus H. Kee-rist, that's just the thing you need here in the year-2000 United States of Amerika, our new police state. Absolutely perfect to get your ass shot.
Someday I should tell you about the day a lady copy pulled a gun on me because she saw I had a ninety-glass in a case hanging from my belt.
> > Actually, you can make the Windows BSOD other colors.
> True to form for Microsoft. They can't make the > system stable, but they can make it crash in the > color of your choice.
And then to make it truly Microsoftesque, they don't document this "feature" anywhere either; you have to illegally reverse-engineer it on your own to figure it out.
Yours WD "burnt-out" K - WKiernan@concentric.net
caffeine puts me to sleep
on
Caffeine Vault
·
· Score: 2
No kidding! When I was younger, up to about ten years ago, I got the same effect off caffeine as everyone else - it helped me stay awake and made me a bit jittery. But for the last three or four years I've had an odd reaction, which I am curious to know if anyone else shares.
First thing in the morning I always drink one cup of coffee, and it clears away the cobwebs. (For all I know that could be the effect of the sugar - I sweeten my coffee with honey at home.) But then any time in the day after that, whenever I drink a cup of coffee, rather than getting me all tensed up, it has the paradoxical effect of making me want to put my head down on my desk and take a nap. So where I used to dose myself with coffee to stay alert at work, now that technique doesn't work at all anymore.
And where some people, after having drunk a cup of coffee late at night, find it difficult to go to sleep soon afterwards, for me, if it's late, a cup of coffee sends me right off to dreamland. For me, caffeine is a more effective sleep-inducer than an alcoholic drink. A while back I had to drive home from one of my company's branch offices at 3:00 AM and I made the mistake of drinking a cup of coffee from a vending machine at a rest stop en route. I was tired but OK until then, but immediately after drinking the coffee I started drifting off while driving and being awakened by the vibration from running over the reflectors on the lane stripe - if I hadn't given up and pulled over to the side of the road for a quick nap in the driver's seat, I think I'd have wrecked my car.
A is 44.1 kHz / 16 bit. B is a lossy 128 kbps MP3. If I really want to hear the music, I'll pick A.
1. To play in your car? I really want a car mp3 player.
2. To "hear the music" you don't need high fidelity reproduction but an active imagination.
At least I think so, but I'm old. Once upon a time before computers I owned a high-tech stereo system, the hottest piece of electronic gadgetry I had. It read sound data off my collection of engraved 12"-radius vinyl discs, ones I had worn flat with diamond needles, achieving way less reproduction accuracy than you get nowadays out of a $49 K-Mart boom box. The cover art on my discs was infinitely (Ok, four times) better but all in all despite my costly and superb walnut-cased speakers the overall fidelity was inferior. Here's the point: in no way whatsoever was what I heard inferior to the technically-better-reproduced stuff youse punks listen to today.
By the way, probably more than half of the albums I bought back then, probably two thirds, I'd heard first on a cassette I got from a pal. A bootleg, a Lars-go-piss-yourself-in-fear illegal copy, dig? I wouldn't have ever bought the vinyl if I hadn't ripped off the cassette, you know what I mean? And then the record co.s wouldn't have ever sold that particular copy, hey Lars how hard can this be to grasp? Me and all my friends too. Oddly enough the record companies didn't go broke way back then. Jack Valenti is a moron.
What has any of this pessimistic metaphysics of yours to do with the specific case we're discussing, where the reporter is probably going to get away with stiff-arming the police because there's a well-known precedent where reporters, priests too, enjoy the right to keep their interview subjects anonymous? As far as him being booted by Forbes, what else would you expect of Forbes, editorial nobility?
Nothing new. In spite of the trendy internet tie-in (gaaad how we usians adore novelties, we've fabricated a whole terror filled mythology about a leaky damn computer network) there's nothing new or novel about this, any more than whenever the first guy knocks off a Pick-Kwik with an atomic laser cannon, a crime is merely another crime.
This has been a first rate troll, too. A massy, philosophical one. I really enjoyed reading it.
I greatly admire the work of Linus Torvalds and the rest of the Linux kernel hackers in all but one area - they refuse to come over to my house and mow my lawn and wash my car. I mean, a free, high-quality OS isn't enough; they should also come here and do everything else on this mile-long shopping list of things I'd like someone else to do for free. Since they don't, I guess they suck.
If you want someone to fight for your so-called "right" to wave guns around like the heroic lead characters in some moronic TV detective show, isn't that what the NRA and that complete jackass Charlton Heston are collecting all those membership dues for? Why in God's name should the ACLU be obliged to get involved in all that gun rubbish? The ACLU does the first amendment, and that's plenty.
Isn't it enough that the ACLU has stood almost perfectly alone for nearly a century in defending your first amendment rights against fierce, unremitting opposition - those constitutional free-speech rights without which you gun nuts wouldn't even have the opportunity to openly complain about government restrictions to your gun usage? Evidently not. No, every time I turn around I've got to read some damned gun nut whining about how, in addition to their enormous, primary task of preserving free speech which they achieve almost single-handedly, the ACLU fails to also support their pathological and revolting gun hobby.
Not when the state executes the wrong guy, who was convicted on fabricated evidence, and who petitioned the state to allow him to prove hids innocence by DNA testing, which the state refused to allow in the name of so-called "closure". That's an incentive for the real killer to commit more murders.
Suppose all your favorite web sites get bought out, one after another, by the big vanilla corporate conglomerates. Suppose these conglomerates debase the content of these sites so that they serve corporate profits rather than your interests. Will they not cease to be your favorites? Won't you go looking elsewhere for something more congenial to your tastes? Sure you will. The difference between old media like radio and the Internet is, when none of the local stations any longer play the music you want to hear, you simply can't start up a new station featuring material more to your tastes. Whereas, fifteen minutes after Microsoft buys out slashdot and changes all the content to what they call "pro-innovation" stuff, a hundred disgusted ex-readers will fire up their own weblogs to fill the gap.
The big difference is the cost of the technology. Once again everything boils down to dollars and cents. How much does it cost to make a TV show or a radio show? Far, far more than I will ever be willing or able to spend. The great expense is the crucial factor which ensures that these media are controlled by giant corporations; and in turn, because they are controlled by these huge capitalist entities, the content tends to be censored, biased and homogenized. And besides the cost barrier that is so hard to hurdle, legally, these media are closed up tight as a drum. In my town there was a guy who broadcast his own program (some odious far-right rubbish, but as Voltaire (actually not him but someone else) famously said, etc., etc.) over the radio spectrum; one day the Feds came, confiscated all his transmitters, knocked down his antenna, and hauled him off to jail.
How much does it cost to have a web site? It costs the cost of a computer to compose upon - you can get an old but adequate computer for this purpose for as little as $350 - plus the cost of a connection to the internet, which at the most should be no more than $20 a month. (In addition to this you have to consider the cost of providing your site with content, but I'm going to assume that you write the content yourself, and the pleasure of self-expression compensates for the cost in your time and effort.) How much does it cost to host a web site on your own server? Again, for starters, that $350 computer will suffice, together with as little as $55 per month for a DSL line.
And thus far, it isn't generally illegal for you to broadcast your stuff over the Internet. Don't bet on it staying that way forever! Even as I type, a coalition of mass media heavies together with police state puritans currently strive with enormous effort and diabolical and shameless dishonesty ("Internet pr0n threatens to molest your children by remote control! News at eleven...") to seal off that loophole to low-budget public speech.
In the slashdot tradition of insisting upon the distinction (that no one else at all ever bothers to make) between "crackers" and "hackers," may I insist, in the cause of verbal precision, that we now also distinguish between "trolls" and "spammers"?
By the commonly accepted definition, a troll is someone looking to stir up a heated discussion by posting messages which aren't quite, ah, sincere. There may be, no there is, a certain degree of dishonesty in the composition of a traditional troll; however, the fact remains, if no one gets excited enough to respond, then the troll must be held a failure. Now isn't that the essence of a web log, to stimulate readers to participate? Isn't this the very reason why it is better to prowl slashdot than to sit and soak up TV? A successful troll on a weblog like this one is typically followed by many responses and rebuttals. And indeed, often what a troller has to say is often intellectually stimulating; on other occasions the substance of a troll is garbled, absurd rubbish, but at least it gets people to laugh, and while laughter may be officially verboten and verba non grata at the otherwise excellent Kuro5hin, I hope no one reading this here has a soul so dead that he decries the value of laughter. So at the very least, a troll has a certain definite value.
Conversely, a spammer is an odious fellow who overloads communication channels with innumerable copies of a message which no rational person has the slightest interest to read. The essence of spam is that it is something which emburdens you with the task of throwing it in the garbage.
osm is a troll, a damn good one. streetlawyer is a fucken troll. 80md is a troll, and so is Jon Ericson, and so is gnarphlager, and so is spiralx, and so, logging in from Chiapas, is Estanislao Martinez (andale! andale! arribe! viva Che!). The guy who penned this swell little piece of nuttiness is a troll. I'm sure if you peruse slashdot regularly you can think of other favorites of your own. Did you ever see any of these guys flood a thread with copy after copy of their works? No, you have not. These are funny guys, and their light and wacky humor is nothing but good news here in slashdot. I don't propose that we hand slashdot over to the true troll underground entirely, much as they'd probably like it, but I do say that slashdot can and should tolerate their eccentric literary troll art, in the reasonably small doses they supply.
But now compare these artists to beer mug man, or penis bird guy, or this fellow who has posted, out of the 141 comments here, 40 (as of my last count) pointless content-free comments titled "NOBODY" to this article. The basic difference is, their posts are all empty and all the same, i.e. boring, and they repeat and repeat and repeat themselves. That, fellow readers, is nothing more nor less than pure spam.
Please refrain from insulting osm by comparing his creative stuff with repetitive boring crap such as that. Hormel Spam(tm) is actually pretty tasty pan-fried with poached eggs and wheat bread toast - try it sometime - but weblog spam is naught but slop, fit only for the garbage pail.
...the "class warfare" you ramble on about. It doesn't exist in this country.
God in Heaven, are you ever wrong about that. The class war in the U.S.A. is alive and well. It's just that only one side is fighting, the other side, my side, is mostly standing around, numbly, dumbly staring mouth agape at the TV, taking the blows and not fighting back. That's what's wrong with this country, why we've gone down the tubes so bad these last couple of decades. The family at the median point of incomes in the U.S.A. works something like fifteen weeks more per year than in 1975 for the same amount of goods, meanwhile the top one percent of incomes has doubled their share of the national wealth, but you never noticed at all. It's because suckers like you refuse to pay any attention, that our enemies in the ongoing class war have made the devastating inroads that they have.
Why don't you tune in to the economic news in your daily newspaper? The Fed has been raising the prime rate for years now with the naked intent of running the unemployment rate up to what is to them a more comfortable figure. Sooner or later the recession they are so assiduously engineering is going to kick in, and then the shit's really going to hit the fan. Who will you blame then, "welfare queens"?
As though we don't have any third choice besides a.) giving up industrialization altogether and moving back into the caves, or b.) turning the entire planet into one big plantation where the massas in the big white houses with the columns out front are fictional "persons" called corporations, and the rest of us get the choice only between being a house n*gger or a field n*gger.
Clinton is no liberal, not at least by the modern definition. The original definition was "a laissez-faire guy," someone who wants to hand the entire nation to capitalists on a silver platter. Maybe he qualifies for that.
AFDC, NAFTA, MAI, the "War on Drugs". That the original poster described Clinton as a liberal just proves that he believes what he is told by lying morons such as Limbaugh, to the exclusion of the evidence of his own two eyes.
Yeah, sure, biotech is full of wonderful wholesome potential. So was atomic energy.
Now let's look at what these things are used for in the real world. That is, if you don't mind referring, now and again, to the real world, just for a break for variety's sake from the glowing-monitor Metaverse of free-floating theory. But if you do mind, please skip what follows, as it is sure to distress you.
Atomic energy - remember atomic energy? - was supposed to make electricty too cheap to meter, to irrigate the Sahara, and in general to usher mankind into a new era of prosperity and contentment. But in reality, the very first application of it was to smash and/or incinerate about one hundred and fifty thousand defenseless civilians to bloody pulp. Later in its career, atomic energy was used to politically terrorize half the globe, and as a side-benefit, in a mere half-century it has heaped up upon the face of the earth vast volumes of pervasive high-intensity pollutants, which to this day no one knows how to safely store for decades much less hundreds of millennia, that will require something in excess of twenty times the length of recorded history to subside in toxicity to where they are no longer an acute threat to the continuation of mammalian life.
Biotech is supposed to make it possible to grow crops in the Sahara, and to cure all known diseases, and in general to usher mankind into a new era of prosperity and contentment. So let's take a look at the very first two commercial products of this wonderful transgenic technology which the Monsanto Corporation has brought to the marketplace. The first is something called "Roundup-ready" soybeans. These soybeans have been modified so that factory farmers can hose down their soybean fields with hitherto unusable quantities of another Monsanto product, a toxic herbicide called "Roundup," in order to kill off all the weeds. Without the "Roundup-ready" gene, the quantities of the herbicide "Roundup" that are employed would render the field as sterile as a patch in the middle of the Sea of Tranquillity, but the artificial gene makes the customized soybeans immune to this toxin. If you're planning on eating these crops, I hope you too are immune to that "Roundup" herbicide. Not that you'd know, however, because the chemical companies have lobbied our legislators so vendors of this Frankenfood are not required to inform you that that package you plucked off the store shelf contains a product not of nature but of the lab.
If you think that's sinister, contemplate the second commercial application of biotech. It's called "Terminator" . It has precisely one purpose: to render food crops sterile. See, ever since the days of the Sumerian Empire and even before, humans practicing agriculture have saved a certain amount of year X's harvest as seed for year X+1's planting. But Monsanto sells seed to farmers in eighty-plus countries, and, insanely, Monsanto claims that one hundred percent of the genotype of these seeds they sell ("developed," in the main, by nature and evolution across geological eras of time) is all Monsanto's "intellectual property". Well, just like any other greed-crazed industrial megalith, Monsanto is pathologically protective of its "intellectual property" and the profits which flow therefrom.
Suppose I am a farmer in, say, India, and I buy a load of Monsanto-brand seeds and plant a crop. When I harvest my crop, as farmers have done since prehistoric times, I save a portion of the grain for next year's seed crop. Now I don't need to go back to Monsanto and buy more, right? Which God forbid! Why, that would be like allowing a heroin addict to grow his own poppies. Where's the big profit for the drug lords there? The only difference being, of course, one can kick heroin addiction, but who can kick the eating habit?
So to prevent the catastrophe of a Fortune 500 corportation losing any potential profits, the genetic engineers at Monsanto inject a special gene - the "Terminator" gene - into the seeds I bought, so that they are fertile in the first generation but totally infertile in the second.
That's pretty bad in itself, my farm becoming helplessly addicted to purchasing Monsanto's seeds, but it gets worse. You're an adult, you know about the birds and the bees, right? Even plants have sex, dreamy plant-like sex, and sex means they trade their genes back and forth. So when the pollen from "Terminator" treated food crops drifts over the fence into my neighbor's field, his crops can end up infected with the diabolical "Terminator" gene. Now his next year's crop comes up OK at first but suddenly it all drops dead after about eleven weeks. Gee, won't he be happy! Now imagine this effect taking place en masse all across a continent. It would take the psychotic sensibility of PKD's "Null-O" to dispassionately contemplate the vast and unprecedented human catastrophe that would occur if, say, one year a third of the Asian rice crop were accidentally wiped out by the uncontrollable dissemination of this destructive gene.
OK, those are the very first two applications of biotech out of Monsanto. Have I made my point yet? Sure, biotech is full of promise. But biotech is not being employed by civic-minded scientists with benevolent goals. Today biotech is owned and operated by capitalist corporations, despite the fact that the entire scientific foundation upon which it rests, and half of the innovations, are the direct product of research paid for by the taxpayers in general - just like with the Internet, the taxpayer pays for the basic research, then after it becomes commercially viable corporations patent all the good parts and stuff the profits in their pockets. And as everyone knows, everything that capitalism touches it turns to shit.
In theory, biotech may have potential for good results, but so long as it is employed solely to deepen the wealth gap between the investing class and the rest of us, I am convinced that it will only yield evil results.
OK, here's the Poynter Institute bolting a metal frame onto a browser-user's head and monitoring his every eye motion. Don't you suppose that all that intensive surveillance might just possibly have some small effect on the user's behavior? Like, all alone, without the head gear, what could be more natural than if he might have headed on over to playboy.com to spend a few minutes or even hours grazing among the bitmaps and multimedia.
Now imagine that this same browsing subject has a birdcage studded with electronic doodads bolted around his skull, and a variety of all-too-serious sociologists peering over his shoulder. I'd guess that under those circumstances our lab rat will spend a good deal more time perusing something serious and scholarly like that lighthouse for the investment class the New York Times, or even our own grave and stately slashdot.
Surely, JSM, you will have permitted me to hate Herr Hitler way back at the original publication date of Mein Kampf rather than withholding judgment until he began to transform those lurid thoughts of his into concrete actions.
(Don't you dare give me that "Godwin's law" crap. I won't put up with it; it censors out discussion of mid-twentieth-century history and politics unconditionally.)
At any rate, the true reason "geeks" hate "suits" is because whenever unopposed, "suits" eventually start to insist that the "geeks" must dress themselves in "suit-wear," to be specific, neckties. And neckties are evil. They strangle your respiration, they appreciably choke off the vital circulation of arterial blood to the oxygen-hungry brain, and insensibly but surely they misalign one's delicate neck vertebrae. You all legal hotshots and rich execs can afford weekly therapy at chiropractors or massage parlors, but the rest of us, if we do not vigorously resist the abomination of neckties, eventually end up hopping crawling and limping like Igor, decerebrated to the tragic point where all we are capable of is watching TV.
A fate worse than death, I tell you! Burn those neckties, burn them all! If the "suits" refuse to take theirs off, no matter, burn them as well! You tight-squeezed and breathless ladies are welcome to throw off your garments of oppression and fling your brassieres into the bonfire as well.
Yours WD "hack in the nude" K - WKiernan@concentric.net
I don't understand why developers who feel secure releasing binaries are always so anxious to accompany the binaries with source. The assumption seems to be, "If I ship the source, some nasty bootlegger will come along and copy my stuff." But obviously it is considerably easier, rather than copying the source and recompiling it, to simply copy the binaries, or even to make a perfect duplicate of the entire install CD.
Look at Microsoft; they do not copy protect their software. Technically speaking you can duplicate, for example, the Office 97 CD. Has Microsoft gone broke? Hardly! They're the richest software vendors on the planet, but the only thing that prevents them from going broke is the respect end-users have for the terms of the EULA, or their fear of liability should they get caught, or whatever.
If a simple EULA is good enough to make Microsoft as rich as they are, why isn't it good enough for you? Simply draw up a license that says "you, the end-user, are only allowed to install as many copies of [your product] as you have acquired paid licenses therefore" and put it on the sleeve of the disc with the binaries and source. Yes, it doesn't protect you from a determined bootlegger, but then neither does withholding the source code - that bootlegger will simply copy the binaries, which are all that ninety-nine percent of users want anyway. If you're still upset over the possibility of a handful of illegal copies, then the only realistic solution is to close your code and ship your product with a parallel port lock or something like that - and even that will probably be cracked by some warez d00ds somewhere.
The beer guy has completely worn out his thing (hey, I like ASCII art and I like beer but it's plain worn out, OK?). But to say that osm "doesn't say anything at all" is so howlingly wrong that I wonder you can get it out your mouth. The clear fact, indeed the very thing that makes him a redeyed menace to his neighbors near and far, is that osm is downright logorrhaeic.
I know this for sure personally because he lives in the same town as me, and his wife Amy is friends with my wife, she's told her about his obsessive wordification. "He just goes on and on," Amy says, "I think it's cute," (she would, they're newlyweds) "but sometimes I wonder if maybe Warren does have a screw or two loose."
Now, now, let's not get all serious and start blathering off about the First Amendment. 'Cause it can't possibly be happening for real. Let's talk instead about literary art.
Go read some of osm's light short fiction, this for example, and then after I dare you to tell me straightfaced that a mind so disorganized as this could ever in any way deliberately inflict meaningful, effective damage against anything bigger, meaner, or better armored than a clothes-moth.
A fan, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
...every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the earth or slinks through the slimy seas has genitalia... - our auteur
Slashdot Mirror
> The stories are, despite what was said by Taco,
> hardly original. They feature disposable,
> simplified plot structures and generalized characters
> that fit extremely shallow archetypes.
The stories, such as I've seen (my younger daughter really loves this amine/manga stuff, so I've seen a few videotapes and read a lot of comic books) are typically lame kid's fluff, some of it boring the the point of making me actively angry. If I've got to hear see or read another cliched magic-laden story about "demonic possesion" or another battle in a high-ceilinged hall where one of these damn goons throws glowing balls at the other, and they go "boom" and the other guy falls on his ass and slides a while, then he gets up and does it back, back and forth, ding-dong ad infinitum, any more of that I'm going to howl like a dog. But I'm kind of allergic to most of the stuff the mass entertainment media extrude anyway.
But the style of that anime, the graphics and the timing, is so new-n-different, it has so little respect for the stylistic customs and traditional metaphors of U.S. animated cinema, that it's practically revolutionary, it threatens to break down the value of Hollywood's fixed aesthetic assets, so I dig anime. From a distance, that is.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
It would be nice if you would actually read the books you "quote" and thus get the details right. Three-quarters the brain mass, indeed. Not that Bell Curve isn't quite the load of crap, but you even managed to misquote the bogus numbers out of that, and in this case your two wrongs don't happen to cancel each other out and make a "right."
Besides, even if races differ in any qualities beyond the superficial ones, individuals obviously differ far more widely than races. Or maybe you think that for some, any, reasonable definition of "intelligence," your white ass has got more of it than, say, Miles Davis or Toni Morrison. What I'm trying to say here is, you damned racists are full of shit.
Why I'm wasting my breath lecturing a troll is another question, one I can't really sensibly answer.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
: What you ought to be teaching is, how do we-
: Yes, Little Jackie, it has to be.
: You're stuck, Kindly Dad, you've got a worn gear-tooth.
: Yes, Little Jackie, it has to be.
So as though the NYT weren't enough, Thomas Friedman has a /. account now! But the Polish working class want their pensions and health care system back! youse dirty capitalist &^%$#.
Yours red Willy - WKiernan@concentric.net
Good God this is wonderful! Is it stable? I take back the negative things I said elsewhere about Palms. In fact, I think I'll go shopping and check out some prices. Now if I can only find a Palm-compatible PDA which accepts compact flash memory cards, so I can store a decent amount of data in there... Thank you for posting this!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Guess HP's gone downhill. I ran my HP41 over with a Chevy Suburban (yeah it was lying in soft sand, but still, a Suburban) and a while later dropped it in eighteen inches of water and it still is running, fifteen-plus years after I bought it.
I sure hope the HP48GX is made of stronger stuff than that 49 the top poster was complaining about, because I take it in the field daily to do land surveying, and we surveyors just destroy equipment, it comes with the territory. On the other hand, if it breaks it's not all that bad, because unlike my old 41, that 48GX is the company's property, not my own personal purchase.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Well, I can and do program my HP48GX right from the keyboard. (I wrote a simple little program just this morning while in the field.) And I have a LISP interpreter and also a copy of Turbo C v.2.0 (which I bought back in 1989!) on my HP200LX. Can you write any program at all for use on a Palm Pilot, no matter how trivial, on the Palm Pilot itself? Can you write a program for Windows CE on a Windows CE machine? No, you need a cross-compiler or something like that (and a damn costly one too) running on another real computer. Yeah, wow, a Palm Pilot or a WinCE PDA have processors that can run circles around the 80186 in my HP200LX, but you can't program it on itself, so as far as I am concerned my HP200LX still blows away any PDA currently shipping.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Jesus H. Kee-rist, that's just the thing you need here in the year-2000 United States of Amerika, our new police state. Absolutely perfect to get your ass shot.
Someday I should tell you about the day a lady copy pulled a gun on me because she saw I had a ninety-glass in a case hanging from my belt.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> > Actually, you can make the Windows BSOD other colors.
> True to form for Microsoft. They can't make the
> system stable, but they can make it crash in the
> color of your choice.
And then to make it truly Microsoftesque, they don't document this "feature" anywhere either; you have to illegally reverse-engineer it on your own to figure it out.
Yours WD "burnt-out" K - WKiernan@concentric.net
No kidding! When I was younger, up to about ten years ago, I got the same effect off caffeine as everyone else - it helped me stay awake and made me a bit jittery. But for the last three or four years I've had an odd reaction, which I am curious to know if anyone else shares.
First thing in the morning I always drink one cup of coffee, and it clears away the cobwebs. (For all I know that could be the effect of the sugar - I sweeten my coffee with honey at home.) But then any time in the day after that, whenever I drink a cup of coffee, rather than getting me all tensed up, it has the paradoxical effect of making me want to put my head down on my desk and take a nap. So where I used to dose myself with coffee to stay alert at work, now that technique doesn't work at all anymore.
And where some people, after having drunk a cup of coffee late at night, find it difficult to go to sleep soon afterwards, for me, if it's late, a cup of coffee sends me right off to dreamland. For me, caffeine is a more effective sleep-inducer than an alcoholic drink. A while back I had to drive home from one of my company's branch offices at 3:00 AM and I made the mistake of drinking a cup of coffee from a vending machine at a rest stop en route. I was tired but OK until then, but immediately after drinking the coffee I started drifting off while driving and being awakened by the vibration from running over the reflectors on the lane stripe - if I hadn't given up and pulled over to the side of the road for a quick nap in the driver's seat, I think I'd have wrecked my car.
Am I the only one who experiences this effect?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
A is 44.1 kHz / 16 bit. B is a lossy 128 kbps MP3. If I really want to hear the music, I'll pick A.
1. To play in your car? I really want a car mp3 player.
2. To "hear the music" you don't need high fidelity reproduction but an active imagination.
At least I think so, but I'm old. Once upon a time before computers I owned a high-tech stereo system, the hottest piece of electronic gadgetry I had. It read sound data off my collection of engraved 12"-radius vinyl discs, ones I had worn flat with diamond needles, achieving way less reproduction accuracy than you get nowadays out of a $49 K-Mart boom box. The cover art on my discs was infinitely (Ok, four times) better but all in all despite my costly and superb walnut-cased speakers the overall fidelity was inferior. Here's the point: in no way whatsoever was what I heard inferior to the technically-better-reproduced stuff youse punks listen to today.
By the way, probably more than half of the albums I bought back then, probably two thirds, I'd heard first on a cassette I got from a pal. A bootleg, a Lars-go-piss-yourself-in-fear illegal copy, dig? I wouldn't have ever bought the vinyl if I hadn't ripped off the cassette, you know what I mean? And then the record co.s wouldn't have ever sold that particular copy, hey Lars how hard can this be to grasp? Me and all my friends too. Oddly enough the record companies didn't go broke way back then. Jack Valenti is a moron.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
What has any of this pessimistic metaphysics of yours to do with the specific case we're discussing, where the reporter is probably going to get away with stiff-arming the police because there's a well-known precedent where reporters, priests too, enjoy the right to keep their interview subjects anonymous? As far as him being booted by Forbes, what else would you expect of Forbes, editorial nobility?
Nothing new. In spite of the trendy internet tie-in (gaaad how we usians adore novelties, we've fabricated a whole terror filled mythology about a leaky damn computer network) there's nothing new or novel about this, any more than whenever the first guy knocks off a Pick-Kwik with an atomic laser cannon, a crime is merely another crime.
This has been a first rate troll, too. A massy, philosophical one. I really enjoyed reading it.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I greatly admire the work of Linus Torvalds and the rest of the Linux kernel hackers in all but one area - they refuse to come over to my house and mow my lawn and wash my car. I mean, a free, high-quality OS isn't enough; they should also come here and do everything else on this mile-long shopping list of things I'd like someone else to do for free. Since they don't, I guess they suck.
If you want someone to fight for your so-called "right" to wave guns around like the heroic lead characters in some moronic TV detective show, isn't that what the NRA and that complete jackass Charlton Heston are collecting all those membership dues for? Why in God's name should the ACLU be obliged to get involved in all that gun rubbish? The ACLU does the first amendment, and that's plenty.
Isn't it enough that the ACLU has stood almost perfectly alone for nearly a century in defending your first amendment rights against fierce, unremitting opposition - those constitutional free-speech rights without which you gun nuts wouldn't even have the opportunity to openly complain about government restrictions to your gun usage? Evidently not. No, every time I turn around I've got to read some damned gun nut whining about how, in addition to their enormous, primary task of preserving free speech which they achieve almost single-handedly, the ACLU fails to also support their pathological and revolting gun hobby.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Not when the state executes the wrong guy, who was convicted on fabricated evidence, and who petitioned the state to allow him to prove hids innocence by DNA testing, which the state refused to allow in the name of so-called "closure". That's an incentive for the real killer to commit more murders.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Suppose all your favorite web sites get bought out, one after another, by the big vanilla corporate conglomerates. Suppose these conglomerates debase the content of these sites so that they serve corporate profits rather than your interests. Will they not cease to be your favorites? Won't you go looking elsewhere for something more congenial to your tastes? Sure you will. The difference between old media like radio and the Internet is, when none of the local stations any longer play the music you want to hear, you simply can't start up a new station featuring material more to your tastes. Whereas, fifteen minutes after Microsoft buys out slashdot and changes all the content to what they call "pro-innovation" stuff, a hundred disgusted ex-readers will fire up their own weblogs to fill the gap.
The big difference is the cost of the technology. Once again everything boils down to dollars and cents. How much does it cost to make a TV show or a radio show? Far, far more than I will ever be willing or able to spend. The great expense is the crucial factor which ensures that these media are controlled by giant corporations; and in turn, because they are controlled by these huge capitalist entities, the content tends to be censored, biased and homogenized. And besides the cost barrier that is so hard to hurdle, legally, these media are closed up tight as a drum. In my town there was a guy who broadcast his own program (some odious far-right rubbish, but as Voltaire (actually not him but someone else) famously said, etc., etc.) over the radio spectrum; one day the Feds came, confiscated all his transmitters, knocked down his antenna, and hauled him off to jail.
How much does it cost to have a web site? It costs the cost of a computer to compose upon - you can get an old but adequate computer for this purpose for as little as $350 - plus the cost of a connection to the internet, which at the most should be no more than $20 a month. (In addition to this you have to consider the cost of providing your site with content, but I'm going to assume that you write the content yourself, and the pleasure of self-expression compensates for the cost in your time and effort.) How much does it cost to host a web site on your own server? Again, for starters, that $350 computer will suffice, together with as little as $55 per month for a DSL line.
And thus far, it isn't generally illegal for you to broadcast your stuff over the Internet. Don't bet on it staying that way forever! Even as I type, a coalition of mass media heavies together with police state puritans currently strive with enormous effort and diabolical and shameless dishonesty ("Internet pr0n threatens to molest your children by remote control! News at eleven...") to seal off that loophole to low-budget public speech.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
In the slashdot tradition of insisting upon the distinction (that no one else at all ever bothers to make) between "crackers" and "hackers," may I insist, in the cause of verbal precision, that we now also distinguish between "trolls" and "spammers"?
By the commonly accepted definition, a troll is someone looking to stir up a heated discussion by posting messages which aren't quite, ah, sincere. There may be, no there is, a certain degree of dishonesty in the composition of a traditional troll; however, the fact remains, if no one gets excited enough to respond, then the troll must be held a failure. Now isn't that the essence of a web log, to stimulate readers to participate? Isn't this the very reason why it is better to prowl slashdot than to sit and soak up TV? A successful troll on a weblog like this one is typically followed by many responses and rebuttals. And indeed, often what a troller has to say is often intellectually stimulating; on other occasions the substance of a troll is garbled, absurd rubbish, but at least it gets people to laugh, and while laughter may be officially verboten and verba non grata at the otherwise excellent Kuro5hin, I hope no one reading this here has a soul so dead that he decries the value of laughter. So at the very least, a troll has a certain definite value.
Conversely, a spammer is an odious fellow who overloads communication channels with innumerable copies of a message which no rational person has the slightest interest to read. The essence of spam is that it is something which emburdens you with the task of throwing it in the garbage.
osm is a troll, a damn good one. streetlawyer is a fucken troll. 80md is a troll, and so is Jon Ericson, and so is gnarphlager, and so is spiralx, and so, logging in from Chiapas, is Estanislao Martinez (andale! andale! arribe! viva Che!). The guy who penned this swell little piece of nuttiness is a troll. I'm sure if you peruse slashdot regularly you can think of other favorites of your own. Did you ever see any of these guys flood a thread with copy after copy of their works? No, you have not. These are funny guys, and their light and wacky humor is nothing but good news here in slashdot. I don't propose that we hand slashdot over to the true troll underground entirely, much as they'd probably like it, but I do say that slashdot can and should tolerate their eccentric literary troll art, in the reasonably small doses they supply.
But now compare these artists to beer mug man, or penis bird guy, or this fellow who has posted, out of the 141 comments here, 40 (as of my last count) pointless content-free comments titled "NOBODY" to this article. The basic difference is, their posts are all empty and all the same, i.e. boring, and they repeat and repeat and repeat themselves. That, fellow readers, is nothing more nor less than pure spam.
Please refrain from insulting osm by comparing his creative stuff with repetitive boring crap such as that. Hormel Spam(tm) is actually pretty tasty pan-fried with poached eggs and wheat bread toast - try it sometime - but weblog spam is naught but slop, fit only for the garbage pail.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
God in Heaven, are you ever wrong about that. The class war in the U.S.A. is alive and well. It's just that only one side is fighting, the other side, my side, is mostly standing around, numbly, dumbly staring mouth agape at the TV, taking the blows and not fighting back. That's what's wrong with this country, why we've gone down the tubes so bad these last couple of decades. The family at the median point of incomes in the U.S.A. works something like fifteen weeks more per year than in 1975 for the same amount of goods, meanwhile the top one percent of incomes has doubled their share of the national wealth, but you never noticed at all. It's because suckers like you refuse to pay any attention, that our enemies in the ongoing class war have made the devastating inroads that they have.
Why don't you tune in to the economic news in your daily newspaper? The Fed has been raising the prime rate for years now with the naked intent of running the unemployment rate up to what is to them a more comfortable figure. Sooner or later the recession they are so assiduously engineering is going to kick in, and then the shit's really going to hit the fan. Who will you blame then, "welfare queens"?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
As though we don't have any third choice besides a.) giving up industrialization altogether and moving back into the caves, or b.) turning the entire planet into one big plantation where the massas in the big white houses with the columns out front are fictional "persons" called corporations, and the rest of us get the choice only between being a house n*gger or a field n*gger.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Clinton is no liberal, not at least by the modern definition. The original definition was "a laissez-faire guy," someone who wants to hand the entire nation to capitalists on a silver platter. Maybe he qualifies for that.
AFDC, NAFTA, MAI, the "War on Drugs". That the original poster described Clinton as a liberal just proves that he believes what he is told by lying morons such as Limbaugh, to the exclusion of the evidence of his own two eyes.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Yeah, sure, biotech is full of wonderful wholesome potential. So was atomic energy.
Now let's look at what these things are used for in the real world. That is, if you don't mind referring, now and again, to the real world, just for a break for variety's sake from the glowing-monitor Metaverse of free-floating theory. But if you do mind, please skip what follows, as it is sure to distress you.
Atomic energy - remember atomic energy? - was supposed to make electricty too cheap to meter, to irrigate the Sahara, and in general to usher mankind into a new era of prosperity and contentment. But in reality, the very first application of it was to smash and/or incinerate about one hundred and fifty thousand defenseless civilians to bloody pulp. Later in its career, atomic energy was used to politically terrorize half the globe, and as a side-benefit, in a mere half-century it has heaped up upon the face of the earth vast volumes of pervasive high-intensity pollutants, which to this day no one knows how to safely store for decades much less hundreds of millennia, that will require something in excess of twenty times the length of recorded history to subside in toxicity to where they are no longer an acute threat to the continuation of mammalian life.
Biotech is supposed to make it possible to grow crops in the Sahara, and to cure all known diseases, and in general to usher mankind into a new era of prosperity and contentment. So let's take a look at the very first two commercial products of this wonderful transgenic technology which the Monsanto Corporation has brought to the marketplace. The first is something called "Roundup-ready" soybeans. These soybeans have been modified so that factory farmers can hose down their soybean fields with hitherto unusable quantities of another Monsanto product, a toxic herbicide called "Roundup," in order to kill off all the weeds. Without the "Roundup-ready" gene, the quantities of the herbicide "Roundup" that are employed would render the field as sterile as a patch in the middle of the Sea of Tranquillity, but the artificial gene makes the customized soybeans immune to this toxin. If you're planning on eating these crops, I hope you too are immune to that "Roundup" herbicide. Not that you'd know, however, because the chemical companies have lobbied our legislators so vendors of this Frankenfood are not required to inform you that that package you plucked off the store shelf contains a product not of nature but of the lab.
If you think that's sinister, contemplate the second commercial application of biotech. It's called "Terminator" . It has precisely one purpose: to render food crops sterile. See, ever since the days of the Sumerian Empire and even before, humans practicing agriculture have saved a certain amount of year X's harvest as seed for year X+1's planting. But Monsanto sells seed to farmers in eighty-plus countries, and, insanely, Monsanto claims that one hundred percent of the genotype of these seeds they sell ("developed," in the main, by nature and evolution across geological eras of time) is all Monsanto's "intellectual property". Well, just like any other greed-crazed industrial megalith, Monsanto is pathologically protective of its "intellectual property" and the profits which flow therefrom.
Suppose I am a farmer in, say, India, and I buy a load of Monsanto-brand seeds and plant a crop. When I harvest my crop, as farmers have done since prehistoric times, I save a portion of the grain for next year's seed crop. Now I don't need to go back to Monsanto and buy more, right? Which God forbid! Why, that would be like allowing a heroin addict to grow his own poppies. Where's the big profit for the drug lords there? The only difference being, of course, one can kick heroin addiction, but who can kick the eating habit?
So to prevent the catastrophe of a Fortune 500 corportation losing any potential profits, the genetic engineers at Monsanto inject a special gene - the "Terminator" gene - into the seeds I bought, so that they are fertile in the first generation but totally infertile in the second.
That's pretty bad in itself, my farm becoming helplessly addicted to purchasing Monsanto's seeds, but it gets worse. You're an adult, you know about the birds and the bees, right? Even plants have sex, dreamy plant-like sex, and sex means they trade their genes back and forth. So when the pollen from "Terminator" treated food crops drifts over the fence into my neighbor's field, his crops can end up infected with the diabolical "Terminator" gene. Now his next year's crop comes up OK at first but suddenly it all drops dead after about eleven weeks. Gee, won't he be happy! Now imagine this effect taking place en masse all across a continent. It would take the psychotic sensibility of PKD's "Null-O" to dispassionately contemplate the vast and unprecedented human catastrophe that would occur if, say, one year a third of the Asian rice crop were accidentally wiped out by the uncontrollable dissemination of this destructive gene.
OK, those are the very first two applications of biotech out of Monsanto. Have I made my point yet? Sure, biotech is full of promise. But biotech is not being employed by civic-minded scientists with benevolent goals. Today biotech is owned and operated by capitalist corporations, despite the fact that the entire scientific foundation upon which it rests, and half of the innovations, are the direct product of research paid for by the taxpayers in general - just like with the Internet, the taxpayer pays for the basic research, then after it becomes commercially viable corporations patent all the good parts and stuff the profits in their pockets. And as everyone knows, everything that capitalism touches it turns to shit.
In theory, biotech may have potential for good results, but so long as it is employed solely to deepen the wealth gap between the investing class and the rest of us, I am convinced that it will only yield evil results.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
OK, here's the Poynter Institute bolting a metal frame onto a browser-user's head and monitoring his every eye motion. Don't you suppose that all that intensive surveillance might just possibly have some small effect on the user's behavior? Like, all alone, without the head gear, what could be more natural than if he might have headed on over to playboy.com to spend a few minutes or even hours grazing among the bitmaps and multimedia.
Now imagine that this same browsing subject has a birdcage studded with electronic doodads bolted around his skull, and a variety of all-too-serious sociologists peering over his shoulder. I'd guess that under those circumstances our lab rat will spend a good deal more time perusing something serious and scholarly like that lighthouse for the investment class the New York Times, or even our own grave and stately slashdot.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Surely, JSM, you will have permitted me to hate Herr Hitler way back at the original publication date of Mein Kampf rather than withholding judgment until he began to transform those lurid thoughts of his into concrete actions.
(Don't you dare give me that "Godwin's law" crap. I won't put up with it; it censors out discussion of mid-twentieth-century history and politics unconditionally.)
At any rate, the true reason "geeks" hate "suits" is because whenever unopposed, "suits" eventually start to insist that the "geeks" must dress themselves in "suit-wear," to be specific, neckties. And neckties are evil. They strangle your respiration, they appreciably choke off the vital circulation of arterial blood to the oxygen-hungry brain, and insensibly but surely they misalign one's delicate neck vertebrae. You all legal hotshots and rich execs can afford weekly therapy at chiropractors or massage parlors, but the rest of us, if we do not vigorously resist the abomination of neckties, eventually end up hopping crawling and limping like Igor, decerebrated to the tragic point where all we are capable of is watching TV.
A fate worse than death, I tell you! Burn those neckties, burn them all! If the "suits" refuse to take theirs off, no matter, burn them as well! You tight-squeezed and breathless ladies are welcome to throw off your garments of oppression and fling your brassieres into the bonfire as well.
Yours WD "hack in the nude" K - WKiernan@concentric.net
I don't understand why developers who feel secure releasing binaries are always so anxious to accompany the binaries with source. The assumption seems to be, "If I ship the source, some nasty bootlegger will come along and copy my stuff." But obviously it is considerably easier, rather than copying the source and recompiling it, to simply copy the binaries, or even to make a perfect duplicate of the entire install CD.
Look at Microsoft; they do not copy protect their software. Technically speaking you can duplicate, for example, the Office 97 CD. Has Microsoft gone broke? Hardly! They're the richest software vendors on the planet, but the only thing that prevents them from going broke is the respect end-users have for the terms of the EULA, or their fear of liability should they get caught, or whatever.
If a simple EULA is good enough to make Microsoft as rich as they are, why isn't it good enough for you? Simply draw up a license that says "you, the end-user, are only allowed to install as many copies of [your product] as you have acquired paid licenses therefore" and put it on the sleeve of the disc with the binaries and source. Yes, it doesn't protect you from a determined bootlegger, but then neither does withholding the source code - that bootlegger will simply copy the binaries, which are all that ninety-nine percent of users want anyway. If you're still upset over the possibility of a handful of illegal copies, then the only realistic solution is to close your code and ship your product with a parallel port lock or something like that - and even that will probably be cracked by some warez d00ds somewhere.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
The beer guy has completely worn out his thing (hey, I like ASCII art and I like beer but it's plain worn out, OK?). But to say that osm "doesn't say anything at all" is so howlingly wrong that I wonder you can get it out your mouth. The clear fact, indeed the very thing that makes him a redeyed menace to his neighbors near and far, is that osm is downright logorrhaeic.
I know this for sure personally because he lives in the same town as me, and his wife Amy is friends with my wife, she's told her about his obsessive wordification. "He just goes on and on," Amy says, "I think it's cute," (she would, they're newlyweds) "but sometimes I wonder if maybe Warren does have a screw or two loose."
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Christ that thesis is choice! Damn you, I hurt myself laughing!
How happy you must be at home. You must love your charming and creative "wife" deeply.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Now, now, let's not get all serious and start blathering off about the First Amendment. 'Cause it can't possibly be happening for real. Let's talk instead about literary art.
Go read some of osm's light short fiction, this for example, and then after I dare you to tell me straightfaced that a mind so disorganized as this could ever in any way deliberately inflict meaningful, effective damage against anything bigger, meaner, or better armored than a clothes-moth.
A fan, WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net