I suspect that this is just due to their data model of redundant machines. As with GMail, they can't guarentee deletion of the material in a time period less than thirty days, although it may actually be retained for much less.
There should have been emoticons or something similar to indicate that I was joking. IRL, I'd have rendered that in a bad hick accent and I probably ought to have done something like that here. *wry grin* The cause of flamewars, that sort of thing is.
That is a good point, but what about drugs that are so destructive that they can lead people to kill others?
More significantly, drugs are expensive enough that the best way to finance your habit is to hook another 5 people. So it's not just one person whose life is being ruined. That's not even getting into the costs it can have for family and friends in your downward spiral. I have a set of friends locally who recently adopted four children from a family who used drugs heavily around them. The kids exhibit developmental disabilities by the pound just from the environmental contamination they suffered.
and how many links did you shift-click on before you noticed you shouldn't be doing that mmmmm???
Who shift-clicks these days? I control-click or middle-click all my links. Extra tabs are a heck of a lot easier on the desktop than extra windows. You aren't one of those poncey IE users, are you?
Yeah, but then you'd have to deal with gorilla arm. Could you imagine spending 8 hours with your arms raised and moving within the area of your monitor? Besides which, I have my doubts that this kind of method would be any more beneficial than the current setup with mice and keyboards. The reason it works so well in movies is that they use CinemaOS, where hitting the space bar repeatedly lets you zoom in to a single pixel on a digital image, all passwords are "password", and "self destruct" is a command line option. Biggest problem with CinemaOS is that by default it renders in ugly neon-green 72-point font.
It also means you can't ask for clarification. So if I am using a metaphor that doesn't make sense to you or you take some meaning from that I don't intend, then you can't say "wait do you mean...?"... no i just keep going on my way, and if you took it wrong, then you might just keep taking it wrong.
And yet I don't remember any kind of an outcry in the days of letter writing, when this should have been just as much of a problem. I think another problem is the speed of the medium. Because you get the email within seconds of the send-button being clicked, it feels personal and IRL. Also, because the email is so easy and quick to write, the author may not properly think of the impact of their statements, rather just quickly jot something down and send it, figuring the near-instananeous transmission medium means the recipient can ask for clarification. Personally, I find it easier to correctly interpret (although again this may fall into the fallacy of me trying to self-judge) handwritten letters than I do E-Mail. *wry grin* I find it even harder to correctly interpret phone calls, oddly enough. I do better at looking for "tells" in how someone states their position in writing than I do trying to pick up on voice intonations. In person generally works Ok, though, where one can get the non-verbal cues.
Overall, for online work, I always double-check what I'm writing to try to avoid unintended meanings and I make liberal use of emoticons to indicate non-verbal cues that are missing. *shrug* What more can one do?
When they got home, they found that "air" meant it had...air. Not air-conditioning. The courts eventually found this legal because the sentence was literally true. It was too bad the person assumed "air" meant "air-conditioning", but that's too bad on the person.
Reminds me of some of those great scams like the potato bug killer.
Actually it's more like recording movies on HBO with your VCR.
Which was, incidentally, ruled entirely legal for personal use. ... for time-offset purposes only. The ruling was that you could record shows on your VCR for one later viewing, not a carte-blanche capability to record whatever you want and watch it as many times as you want.
But the meta-modding down of the memes by people like me gives a karma hit to the idi^Wperson who modded it up in the first place.
It all balances out.
I sometimes wonder how well it really does work out. I mean, outside of those who always metamoderate down redundants, how often do people really give dissenting opinions? I wouldn't be surprised if most of the data comes from people who just go down the list clicking agreeals (I suspect just leaving everything in the middle tells the system not to count your votes) to gain the increased moderation capacity without actually reading the comments they're metamoderating.
Personally, I metamoderate partly because I feel it adds some new feedback and partly because I get turned on to comments and discussions I hadn't noticed when they came in the first time.
This in fact was the reason I first doubted God. I don't believe that any crime justifies eternal torment. I certainly feel that anyone willing to commit a person to eternal damnation, whether God or just a sick and twisted mind, is completely evil.
I always resolved that by looking at the message of forgiveness in the Bible. I believe that God is willing to forgive us of any sin if we are truly sorry. (There is only one sin listed as unforgiveable in the Biblie, incidentally, blaspheming the Holy Spirit, and I sometimes wonder if the writer wasn't using hyperbole) Therefore, I believe that the only people who will wind up in Hell are those who choose to, those who are too filled with pride to repent, to accept God as God. And before you state that I'm condemning people for ignorance, I firmly believe that God, being a loving and just God, will give everyone a final chance to make their decision after they know the full truth. *shrug* It's not technically incompatible with anything said in the Bible and it helps me to sleep at night, knowing that people will have a chance to be forgiven, no matter what their sins.
Just dig into the cat box and chow away. Pretend they're tootsie rolls - that always helps. Mmmmmmm... tootsie rolls.
I have a co-worker who did the opposite number. He had a girlfriend whose cat tended to leave "gifts" on the carpet. One day he molded a Tootsie-Roll into the approximate shape of a piece of cat feces and dropped it on the carpet while they were there. He pointed it out to her and then stated something along the lines of, "Well, waste not, want not" and picked it up and ate it. They didn't date for much longer after that...
Of course, this is the same co-worker who, in college, would call up the sorority houses with a message along the lines of "This is Doctor Smith from the Health Office. I have some bad news for you. The test came up positive for VD. Please call me immediately."
The candidates that stayed and read manuals or tinkered with the equipment were usually hired.
I could see hiring the ones who read the manuals, but do you really want someone who's willing to mess with possibly mission-critical equipment on which they don't have training, and out of boredom?
Ours, we've shown them the full range of operations in the labs and then given them a few practical hardware and software problems. You know, simple things like factors that might be causing a bad signal in a piece of equipment, or reversing a string in a programming language of their choice.
*wry grin* And our lead engineer always starts off the interviews by asking their opinion on their programming skills. He expected to have to swim through a torrent of bullshit after asking that question, but bizarrely enough, a lot of CS majors have given the answer as "not great." I don't know whether it's honesty or false modesty in those cases.
Well, one of the possibilities, as referenced in my earlier post, would be some kind of chronal intertia. Much like how jumping straight up on Earth leaves you in the same position when you land, I could see it being possible that one would carry the inertia of movement while traveling through time. That would also account for the relative velocities of your body. *shrug* It's all theoretical in the end, of course.
Interesting.. I can't recall a single time where I've awoken/been awoken that hasn't been in the middle of a dream. IE, I (seem to) dream almost constantly. That could explain a lot.
Actually, that's supposedly just a side effect of how the cycles work. You actually have multiple 5-7 minute (I can't remember the actual figure, but it's a short period) periods of dreaming of which almost everybody only remembers the last one, if at all. Admittedly, sometimes you do get woken up in the middle (those dreams where you hear your alarm clock going off seem to fit in there), but I wonder how much of that is a person revising their dreams after the fact as they often do.
All this aside, as you said - it's virtually impossible to do for a long period of time. That is, unless the person doing it is a non-working agoraphobic who doesn't have to worry too much about conforming to the real worlds expectations that he'll go to certain places and do certain things at vertain times. Even if it was physically great for you (which I really doubt), the practical considerations alone would be enough to warrant not bothering with it for most people.
*shrug* I think that would depend on how much you're willing to make the world work to your schedule. Two half-hour naps in an 8-hour period pretty much corresponds to the federally mandated 30-minute unpaid break and two paid 15-minute breaks for employment in the US, so you'd just have to have a supervisor who was willing to let you juggle things around a little to make that side of it work. As for having to be certain places or do certain things at certain times, this sleep method involves periods of maybe a half an hour (20 minutes of sleep plus 10 for getting to sleep and waking at most). Are there really appointments in your life that can't be delayed or moved up by half an hour to make things work? If someone says, "meet me at 6" but you know that 6 is your time for napping, you arrange to meet them at 6:30 instead, and get your nap at the meeting place.
*shrug* Then again, I've never done this polyphasic thing before outside of my setup at college where I'd usually sleep about 4 hours at night and then catch a handful of 15 minute naps during the day.
I guess my point is, radio really is crap. Not just because we potential audience members are condescending, but because the radio stations are.
There are still good radio stations. You just have to listen to the ones that a) still have some presence in the local community and b) play older music. I don't have a nice "law" to refer to, but I hold with the quote from Stranger in a Strange Land about how the reason classical music is, well, classic, is that they've spent a hundred years getting rid of all of the crap. Just go back thirty years and you'd be amazed.
What's wrong with liking "My Humps" in the shower? Would that make me bad?
I dunno... a lot of religious groups would say so. Used to be they'd say it'd make you go blind and insane too.
The real problem of time travel, besides actually creating it, is that time travel is either going to require some kind of convenient inertia, or it will require us to travel in space as well as in time. The Earth is spinning at a particular speed and is orbitting the sun at a certain speed which is moving through the galaxy and a particular speed which is itself moving at a certain speed... It could get ugly.
The closest I ever got to adknowledgement of this in sci-fi was actually in a book on wizards, High Wizardry by Diane Duane IIRC, where the magician attempting a teleport had to create a program to map all of the velocities so that she could teleport to the right planet surface.
Imagine a funny foot crushing your head. Forever
on
No Time Travel, Sorry
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· Score: 1
And helpfully enough, it's ilustrating how the writer is trying to crush Einstein's theories. Nice.
The same goes for any other crime as well. If you do something bad, then expect to be punished for it, and don't whine if you can't use your homophobia as a defense afterwards. It's not a thought crime unless it actually did not have a physical component; and evaluating the motive of a murderer etc. and adjusting the sentence accordingly is something that's been done forever, anyway, without anyone ever crying "thought crime".
I suspect is point is more that a "hate crime" can net you more punishment than the act would have been in not perpetrated against a minority. Should it matter if I egg my neighbour's house because he's a Spaniard rather than because he's a jerk? Your bigotry should not be a defense against your crimes, but neither should it be considered to make the case more severe.
Oh no! I knew I would one day be confused with him! That or the graphic artist, or the insurance salesman... ^_^ Myself, I'm the third down on the list as of the last time I looked. Or, alternately, follow the link listed for my username. Oddly enough, I've been mistaken for a priest several times IRL, but I'm really not sure why. Apparently I just "look like a priest" as the people involved have said. Either I'm sporting a halo or it's that lack of focus on this world in my eyes.
As for priests telling such jokes, I find that priests are often the worst offenders there. I think it's partly to relieve the pressure of celibacy and partly because they're constantly being told such jokes. I personally don't see it as wrong. Such jokes don't exactly incite lust in others and it's just one more example of subjects we joke about because we're afraid of it. Same as the jokes about war, death, and religion.
So this guy buys a black-market penile enhancer, and gets it in economy size. Reading the jar, he sees that the intended dosage is 2 pills and will last for a month. He decides to take a larger dosage; in short, he gulps the whole jar of pills. The next day, he's talking with a friend and mentions the drug.
"Yeah, I kind of took too many and it's had... side effects."
"Oh, how so?"
"Well, you see that girl on the hill way over there?" *ZZIP* *WHIRR* *PLUNK* "Got 'er!"
Obviously, the joke works better as physical comedy, but eh...
I'm not worried, I don't drink out of the toilet.
Ah, so you always place the lid down before flushing? The water particles sprayed out of the commode when flushed can travel several feet. Try putting blue food coloring in the commode and flushing it, and seeing how much area gets covered. Water glasses, toothbrushes...
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that this is just due to their data model of redundant machines. As with GMail, they can't guarentee deletion of the material in a time period less than thirty days, although it may actually be retained for much less.
I grew up in L.A., and (no joke!) I have 18 words for smog.
... and I'm sure most of them can't be used in polite company, eh?
There should have been emoticons or something similar to indicate that I was joking. IRL, I'd have rendered that in a bad hick accent and I probably ought to have done something like that here. *wry grin* The cause of flamewars, that sort of thing is.
That is a good point, but what about drugs that are so destructive that they can lead people to kill others?
More significantly, drugs are expensive enough that the best way to finance your habit is to hook another 5 people. So it's not just one person whose life is being ruined. That's not even getting into the costs it can have for family and friends in your downward spiral. I have a set of friends locally who recently adopted four children from a family who used drugs heavily around them. The kids exhibit developmental disabilities by the pound just from the environmental contamination they suffered.
and how many links did you shift-click on before you noticed you shouldn't be doing that mmmmm???
Who shift-clicks these days? I control-click or middle-click all my links. Extra tabs are a heck of a lot easier on the desktop than extra windows. You aren't one of those poncey IE users, are you?
Yeah, but then you'd have to deal with gorilla arm. Could you imagine spending 8 hours with your arms raised and moving within the area of your monitor? Besides which, I have my doubts that this kind of method would be any more beneficial than the current setup with mice and keyboards. The reason it works so well in movies is that they use CinemaOS, where hitting the space bar repeatedly lets you zoom in to a single pixel on a digital image, all passwords are "password", and "self destruct" is a command line option. Biggest problem with CinemaOS is that by default it renders in ugly neon-green 72-point font.
Appendix?
And yet I don't remember any kind of an outcry in the days of letter writing, when this should have been just as much of a problem. I think another problem is the speed of the medium. Because you get the email within seconds of the send-button being clicked, it feels personal and IRL. Also, because the email is so easy and quick to write, the author may not properly think of the impact of their statements, rather just quickly jot something down and send it, figuring the near-instananeous transmission medium means the recipient can ask for clarification. Personally, I find it easier to correctly interpret (although again this may fall into the fallacy of me trying to self-judge) handwritten letters than I do E-Mail. *wry grin* I find it even harder to correctly interpret phone calls, oddly enough. I do better at looking for "tells" in how someone states their position in writing than I do trying to pick up on voice intonations. In person generally works Ok, though, where one can get the non-verbal cues.
Overall, for online work, I always double-check what I'm writing to try to avoid unintended meanings and I make liberal use of emoticons to indicate non-verbal cues that are missing. *shrug* What more can one do?
When they got home, they found that "air" meant it had...air. Not air-conditioning. The courts eventually found this legal because the sentence was literally true. It was too bad the person assumed "air" meant "air-conditioning", but that's too bad on the person.
Reminds me of some of those great scams like the potato bug killer.
Actually it's more like recording movies on HBO with your VCR.
... for time-offset purposes only. The ruling was that you could record shows on your VCR for one later viewing, not a carte-blanche capability to record whatever you want and watch it as many times as you want.
Which was, incidentally, ruled entirely legal for personal use.
It all balances out.
I sometimes wonder how well it really does work out. I mean, outside of those who always metamoderate down redundants, how often do people really give dissenting opinions? I wouldn't be surprised if most of the data comes from people who just go down the list clicking agreeals (I suspect just leaving everything in the middle tells the system not to count your votes) to gain the increased moderation capacity without actually reading the comments they're metamoderating.
Personally, I metamoderate partly because I feel it adds some new feedback and partly because I get turned on to comments and discussions I hadn't noticed when they came in the first time.
This in fact was the reason I first doubted God. I don't believe that any crime justifies eternal torment. I certainly feel that anyone willing to commit a person to eternal damnation, whether God or just a sick and twisted mind, is completely evil.
I always resolved that by looking at the message of forgiveness in the Bible. I believe that God is willing to forgive us of any sin if we are truly sorry. (There is only one sin listed as unforgiveable in the Biblie, incidentally, blaspheming the Holy Spirit, and I sometimes wonder if the writer wasn't using hyperbole) Therefore, I believe that the only people who will wind up in Hell are those who choose to, those who are too filled with pride to repent, to accept God as God. And before you state that I'm condemning people for ignorance, I firmly believe that God, being a loving and just God, will give everyone a final chance to make their decision after they know the full truth. *shrug* It's not technically incompatible with anything said in the Bible and it helps me to sleep at night, knowing that people will have a chance to be forgiven, no matter what their sins.
I have a co-worker who did the opposite number. He had a girlfriend whose cat tended to leave "gifts" on the carpet. One day he molded a Tootsie-Roll into the approximate shape of a piece of cat feces and dropped it on the carpet while they were there. He pointed it out to her and then stated something along the lines of, "Well, waste not, want not" and picked it up and ate it. They didn't date for much longer after that...
Of course, this is the same co-worker who, in college, would call up the sorority houses with a message along the lines of "This is Doctor Smith from the Health Office. I have some bad news for you. The test came up positive for VD. Please call me immediately."
I could see hiring the ones who read the manuals, but do you really want someone who's willing to mess with possibly mission-critical equipment on which they don't have training, and out of boredom?
Ours, we've shown them the full range of operations in the labs and then given them a few practical hardware and software problems. You know, simple things like factors that might be causing a bad signal in a piece of equipment, or reversing a string in a programming language of their choice.
*wry grin* And our lead engineer always starts off the interviews by asking their opinion on their programming skills. He expected to have to swim through a torrent of bullshit after asking that question, but bizarrely enough, a lot of CS majors have given the answer as "not great." I don't know whether it's honesty or false modesty in those cases.
Well, one of the possibilities, as referenced in my earlier post, would be some kind of chronal intertia. Much like how jumping straight up on Earth leaves you in the same position when you land, I could see it being possible that one would carry the inertia of movement while traveling through time. That would also account for the relative velocities of your body. *shrug* It's all theoretical in the end, of course.
Interesting.. I can't recall a single time where I've awoken/been awoken that hasn't been in the middle of a dream. IE, I (seem to) dream almost constantly. That could explain a lot.
Actually, that's supposedly just a side effect of how the cycles work. You actually have multiple 5-7 minute (I can't remember the actual figure, but it's a short period) periods of dreaming of which almost everybody only remembers the last one, if at all. Admittedly, sometimes you do get woken up in the middle (those dreams where you hear your alarm clock going off seem to fit in there), but I wonder how much of that is a person revising their dreams after the fact as they often do.
*shrug* I think that would depend on how much you're willing to make the world work to your schedule. Two half-hour naps in an 8-hour period pretty much corresponds to the federally mandated 30-minute unpaid break and two paid 15-minute breaks for employment in the US, so you'd just have to have a supervisor who was willing to let you juggle things around a little to make that side of it work. As for having to be certain places or do certain things at certain times, this sleep method involves periods of maybe a half an hour (20 minutes of sleep plus 10 for getting to sleep and waking at most). Are there really appointments in your life that can't be delayed or moved up by half an hour to make things work? If someone says, "meet me at 6" but you know that 6 is your time for napping, you arrange to meet them at 6:30 instead, and get your nap at the meeting place.
*shrug* Then again, I've never done this polyphasic thing before outside of my setup at college where I'd usually sleep about 4 hours at night and then catch a handful of 15 minute naps during the day.
I guess my point is, radio really is crap. Not just because we potential audience members are condescending, but because the radio stations are.
There are still good radio stations. You just have to listen to the ones that a) still have some presence in the local community and b) play older music. I don't have a nice "law" to refer to, but I hold with the quote from Stranger in a Strange Land about how the reason classical music is, well, classic, is that they've spent a hundred years getting rid of all of the crap. Just go back thirty years and you'd be amazed.
What's wrong with liking "My Humps" in the shower? Would that make me bad?
I dunno... a lot of religious groups would say so. Used to be they'd say it'd make you go blind and insane too.
The closest I ever got to adknowledgement of this in sci-fi was actually in a book on wizards, High Wizardry by Diane Duane IIRC, where the magician attempting a teleport had to create a program to map all of the velocities so that she could teleport to the right planet surface.
And helpfully enough, it's ilustrating how the writer is trying to crush Einstein's theories. Nice.
The same goes for any other crime as well. If you do something bad, then expect to be punished for it, and don't whine if you can't use your homophobia as a defense afterwards. It's not a thought crime unless it actually did not have a physical component; and evaluating the motive of a murderer etc. and adjusting the sentence accordingly is something that's been done forever, anyway, without anyone ever crying "thought crime".
I suspect is point is more that a "hate crime" can net you more punishment than the act would have been in not perpetrated against a minority. Should it matter if I egg my neighbour's house because he's a Spaniard rather than because he's a jerk? Your bigotry should not be a defense against your crimes, but neither should it be considered to make the case more severe.
As for priests telling such jokes, I find that priests are often the worst offenders there. I think it's partly to relieve the pressure of celibacy and partly because they're constantly being told such jokes. I personally don't see it as wrong. Such jokes don't exactly incite lust in others and it's just one more example of subjects we joke about because we're afraid of it. Same as the jokes about war, death, and religion.
"Yeah, I kind of took too many and it's had... side effects."
"Oh, how so?"
"Well, you see that girl on the hill way over there?" *ZZIP* *WHIRR* *PLUNK* "Got 'er!"
Obviously, the joke works better as physical comedy, but eh...
I'm not worried, I don't drink out of the toilet.
Ah, so you always place the lid down before flushing? The water particles sprayed out of the commode when flushed can travel several feet. Try putting blue food coloring in the commode and flushing it, and seeing how much area gets covered. Water glasses, toothbrushes...