Good points, and I realized after I hit the send button that I was quoting from his reply to me not the original post, as you note. I also note that I was right.:-)
I have been involved in the talk.origins evolution/creation {newsgroup, flamewar, beating of dead equines} for ten years. There's a tone to the language of the True Believer (tm) that I guess I picked up on. I agree with you WRT pro-life or pro-choice that you will find religious people on both sides as well as atheists on both sides, although I suspect, without data, that there are fewer atheist pro-lifers. On the other hand, a fundamentalist believer is going to be pro-life creationist with very, very few exceptions.
> And here you exemplify the reason I find the reference offensive. To
you it is nothing more than a mass of tissue. To me it is a life. Not
just a life, but a human life. I'll spare you any religious arguments
behind it as they would be a waste of electrons from your viewpoint.
Actually, I have two daughters and am happily married to their mother. Your presumption that I regarded them in utero as a "mass of tissue" is offensive to me. You are making assumptions about me and my beliefs that are unwarranted and unsupported by anything that I have written. From a biological perspective, and I am a biologist, human embryos are parasitic on thier mother, as are all mammal embryos. That makes no value statement about their humanity or lack of it. It simply is a biological fact. Pregnancy and birth is a wonderful thing. It also takes a real physical toll on the mother. Understanding that, and understanding the real phisiology of what goes on as the baby grows is the key to good prenatal care and healthy babies and healthy mothers.
As to your assertion that medical researchers have a "disdain for human life", all I can say is that you obviously don't know any.
>>Many a pregnant woman has moments when her fetus seems like a little
parasite, all take, take, take.
>That seems to be the most offensive viewpoint I think a parent could
take towards their child. Surely they could have come up with a better
description? The rest of the article is pretty upbeat about mothers,
but starting the article off like that is really offensive.
Offensive to you only because of your insistence on moralizing a morally neutral phenomenon. In placental mammals, the fetus is parasitic on the mother. There's nothing offensive about that. It simply is the way it is. Your religious viewpoint is leading you to ascribe pejorative values to a biological term that has none.
>users were confused by using a network file share, but found the thumb drives intuitive.
I have noticed this around here. Most workstations have one network share mapped as g:\. It maps a different share for different people in different departments. For most users, it is impossible to explain the reality of that share. They can't understand that it is physically located in another building as a directory on a drive in another machine. If you remapped it as Q:\, they would twitch for days.
Thumb drives are instantly understandable as "really big floppy disks" or, as I think of them, really effective virus vectors.
>Typical liberal court. Thinking only of their legacy, never of the children.
Liberal court? What planet do you call home? There isn't a liberal on this court. The Warren Court was liberal. Justice Douglas was a liberal. The current US Supreme Court is a very conservative court. The so-called liberal justices are liberal only by comparisson to extreme reactionaries like Justice Scalia.
I've actually been thinking about this in relaiton to RTS games, which I enjoy, but it applies to all really. Games can be too complex to be fun. Now where that line lies will vary with the individual. It depends largely on how much time you have to devote to the game. I find Total Annihilation and Starcraft enjoyable and fun to play. I appreciate the depth of Age of Kings and other newer games, but I simply don't have the time to get past the learning phase.
When it was released, TA enjoyed great popularity, which declined as large numbers of somewhat inconsistently designed third-party units filled the game. How does one deal with an amphibious, flying Krogoth snuffler? TA has been enjoying a resurgence, largely confined to either the original unit set or the CC expansion set. Starcraft, which avoided that pitfal has remained popular and even has professional competition.
I admire AOK. I wish I had time to get to the point where I could concentrate on strategy instead of trying to remember which eight things I have to build to find out if I remembered the right combination to counter an attack of elite Jaguar warriors. It seems to me, that a good game has rules that are complex enough to be challenging, yet simple enough to be learned relatively quickly. It's fine to be fourteen and have hours and hours for gaming each day. If you have a full-time job and a family, your time is limited. I want something I can enjoy without devoting my life to it.
This isn't intended to start a "That game sucks" flamewar. There is a legitimate market for extremely complex games, if they are well designed. I think, however, that there is a much larger market for well designed games that challenge your mind's strategic sense rather than just your ability to learn and memorize rules. After all, chess has lasted a good ling time with only six different pieces and pretty simple rules.
>Last I checked I didn't hear anything about it having any thrusters.
Where did you check? Most stories with any depth at all covered this. Yes, it does have thrusters. See Scaled Composites for all the details you might want.
And let's all guess which AV product will integrate best with SP2's Security Center. I can see the messages now, "Security Center cannot verify the status of your McAfee antivirus software. Your computer may be vulnerable to takeover by hostile or satanic forces." If this is displayed every 15 minutes on every copy of XP Home, how many copies of their AV software do you think they'll sell?
>you've got 2 potential e-harmony dates, and your fridge won't shut up about your lousy tv dinner diet
"Dave, this is Hal your Microsoft Appliance Command and Control System. About this e-harmony date you've got... I've been talking to her refrigerator, and we see a potential problem after doing a contents comparisson. After checking with the other appliances in her building, we think you would have have more fun going out with a woman named Wanda from the eighth floor. Please pick her up at 7:00."
> I highly recommend that you pick up Jon Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven"
I'll second that recommendation. This is a fascinating and frightening book. Next time you read about abuse of the marriage process in India, know that things are just as bad or worse in the Great Basin. I, too, am apalled that there is such a lack of outrage.
Is what lets an all white jury acquit Klansmen accused of lynching a black man. It is what lets a jury acquit a man who killed his wife because she slept with the mailman. The United States (which I assume you are talking about) is a nation of laws. No one is above them. There are ways of dealing with unjust laws, and I have lived long enough to know that they work, if sometimes more slowly than we would like.
Jury nullification is the same brand of wingnut "political thinking" that gives us the John Birch Society and Posse Commitatus. Jury nullification is a violation of the oath you swear as a juror. If you want to know how to deal with unjust laws, read Martin Luther King or H. D. Thoreau or even Eldridge Cleaver for the more aggressively oriented. One common thread is that you put yourself personally on the line, and you are prepared to accept the consequences of your actions. Jury nullification does not improve the laws or the rule of law, it subverts it.
>so I can play Far Cry, Half Life 2, etc. without worrying about pain.
I'm thinking that by the time you can control the game with brain waves, the game will send your brain pain signals when you get shot. No need to check a visual for your damage count, you'll feel it.
>Plus, downloading to your HD isn't the only thing you can do with a network. You can stream live lectures to people's rooms, use a network application server to allow students to access large server programs, VNC from the helpdesk with no choppiness, etc.
And those are only the legitimate uses. These are college dorms, here. I can think of any number of non-academic uses for that much bandwidth. Gaming, live video... With thousands of bright and sometimes bored minds at work, I'm sure that they'll come up with any number of things to piss off the administration.
>leave it unlocked and someone will come along and remove the radio
They'll leave the radio, because it's a POS they can't sell, but they'll take your airbag, your seats, rims, your dog, and the herb in the glove box, and then key your paint just so you know where it's at.
The author is saying, in effect, "I think I have a proof here. Have at it." His esteemed colleagues, including jealous backstabbers, hacks who have failed at the same problem, and a relatively small number of really first rate mathemeticians will try to show he is wrong. Consensus will emerge one way or another. The editors are, I'm sure, simply offerring the collective genius of/. a change to join the fray.
Slashdot Mirror
>And the average age of the news presenters is, what, 13?
Age, possibly; IQ, certainly. You lose brain cells just watching them. Mind you, the occasional plunging neckline has eye candy value.who don't have their own MP3 player and/or laptop will probably appreciate this.
Good points, and I realized after I hit the send button that I was quoting from his reply to me not the original post, as you note. I also note that I was right. :-)
I have been involved in the talk.origins evolution/creation {newsgroup, flamewar, beating of dead equines} for ten years. There's a tone to the language of the True Believer (tm) that I guess I picked up on. I agree with you WRT pro-life or pro-choice that you will find religious people on both sides as well as atheists on both sides, although I suspect, without data, that there are fewer atheist pro-lifers. On the other hand, a fundamentalist believer is going to be pro-life creationist with very, very few exceptions.
>is it called Highskool in German?
Gymnasium> And here you exemplify the reason I find the reference offensive. To you it is nothing more than a mass of tissue. To me it is a life. Not just a life, but a human life. I'll spare you any religious arguments behind it as they would be a waste of electrons from your viewpoint.
Actually, I have two daughters and am happily married to their mother. Your presumption that I regarded them in utero as a "mass of tissue" is offensive to me. You are making assumptions about me and my beliefs that are unwarranted and unsupported by anything that I have written. From a biological perspective, and I am a biologist, human embryos are parasitic on thier mother, as are all mammal embryos. That makes no value statement about their humanity or lack of it. It simply is a biological fact. Pregnancy and birth is a wonderful thing. It also takes a real physical toll on the mother. Understanding that, and understanding the real phisiology of what goes on as the baby grows is the key to good prenatal care and healthy babies and healthy mothers.As to your assertion that medical researchers have a "disdain for human life", all I can say is that you obviously don't know any.
>>Many a pregnant woman has moments when her fetus seems like a little parasite, all take, take, take.
Offensive to you only because of your insistence on moralizing a morally neutral phenomenon. In placental mammals, the fetus is parasitic on the mother. There's nothing offensive about that. It simply is the way it is. Your religious viewpoint is leading you to ascribe pejorative values to a biological term that has none.>That seems to be the most offensive viewpoint I think a parent could take towards their child. Surely they could have come up with a better description? The rest of the article is pretty upbeat about mothers, but starting the article off like that is really offensive.
>users were confused by using a network file share, but found the thumb drives intuitive.
I have noticed this around here. Most workstations have one network share mapped as g:\. It maps a different share for different people in different departments. For most users, it is impossible to explain the reality of that share. They can't understand that it is physically located in another building as a directory on a drive in another machine. If you remapped it as Q:\, they would twitch for days.Thumb drives are instantly understandable as "really big floppy disks" or, as I think of them, really effective virus vectors.
do we take the bodies to collect?
>What problem does this solve?
Your desktop is insufficiently cool.>Typical liberal court. Thinking only of their legacy, never of the children.
Liberal court? What planet do you call home? There isn't a liberal on this court. The Warren Court was liberal. Justice Douglas was a liberal. The current US Supreme Court is a very conservative court. The so-called liberal justices are liberal only by comparisson to extreme reactionaries like Justice Scalia.Here's the actual decision in .pdf at the US Supreme Court.
I've actually been thinking about this in relaiton to RTS games, which I enjoy, but it applies to all really. Games can be too complex to be fun. Now where that line lies will vary with the individual. It depends largely on how much time you have to devote to the game. I find Total Annihilation and Starcraft enjoyable and fun to play. I appreciate the depth of Age of Kings and other newer games, but I simply don't have the time to get past the learning phase.
When it was released, TA enjoyed great popularity, which declined as large numbers of somewhat inconsistently designed third-party units filled the game. How does one deal with an amphibious, flying Krogoth snuffler? TA has been enjoying a resurgence, largely confined to either the original unit set or the CC expansion set. Starcraft, which avoided that pitfal has remained popular and even has professional competition.
I admire AOK. I wish I had time to get to the point where I could concentrate on strategy instead of trying to remember which eight things I have to build to find out if I remembered the right combination to counter an attack of elite Jaguar warriors. It seems to me, that a good game has rules that are complex enough to be challenging, yet simple enough to be learned relatively quickly. It's fine to be fourteen and have hours and hours for gaming each day. If you have a full-time job and a family, your time is limited. I want something I can enjoy without devoting my life to it.
This isn't intended to start a "That game sucks" flamewar. There is a legitimate market for extremely complex games, if they are well designed. I think, however, that there is a much larger market for well designed games that challenge your mind's strategic sense rather than just your ability to learn and memorize rules. After all, chess has lasted a good ling time with only six different pieces and pretty simple rules.
>Last I checked I didn't hear anything about it having any thrusters.
Where did you check? Most stories with any depth at all covered this. Yes, it does have thrusters. See Scaled Composites for all the details you might want.And let's all guess which AV product will integrate best with SP2's Security Center. I can see the messages now, "Security Center cannot verify the status of your McAfee antivirus software. Your computer may be vulnerable to takeover by hostile or satanic forces." If this is displayed every 15 minutes on every copy of XP Home, how many copies of their AV software do you think they'll sell?
>you've got 2 potential e-harmony dates, and your fridge won't shut up about your lousy tv dinner diet
"Dave, this is Hal your Microsoft Appliance Command and Control System. About this e-harmony date you've got... I've been talking to her refrigerator, and we see a potential problem after doing a contents comparisson. After checking with the other appliances in her building, we think you would have have more fun going out with a woman named Wanda from the eighth floor. Please pick her up at 7:00."> I highly recommend that you pick up Jon Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven"
I'll second that recommendation. This is a fascinating and frightening book. Next time you read about abuse of the marriage process in India, know that things are just as bad or worse in the Great Basin. I, too, am apalled that there is such a lack of outrage.Is what lets an all white jury acquit Klansmen accused of lynching a black man. It is what lets a jury acquit a man who killed his wife because she slept with the mailman. The United States (which I assume you are talking about) is a nation of laws. No one is above them. There are ways of dealing with unjust laws, and I have lived long enough to know that they work, if sometimes more slowly than we would like.
Jury nullification is the same brand of wingnut "political thinking" that gives us the John Birch Society and Posse Commitatus. Jury nullification is a violation of the oath you swear as a juror. If you want to know how to deal with unjust laws, read Martin Luther King or H. D. Thoreau or even Eldridge Cleaver for the more aggressively oriented. One common thread is that you put yourself personally on the line, and you are prepared to accept the consequences of your actions. Jury nullification does not improve the laws or the rule of law, it subverts it.
>so I can play Far Cry, Half Life 2, etc. without worrying about pain.
I'm thinking that by the time you can control the game with brain waves, the game will send your brain pain signals when you get shot. No need to check a visual for your damage count, you'll feel it.posted on slashdot . Scale up the Big Trak a touch, and you're in it.
However, none of this will be visible from Western North America where I live, you insensitive clod. :-(
>Plus, downloading to your HD isn't the only thing you can do with a network. You can stream live lectures to people's rooms, use a network application server to allow students to access large server programs, VNC from the helpdesk with no choppiness, etc.
And those are only the legitimate uses. These are college dorms, here. I can think of any number of non-academic uses for that much bandwidth. Gaming, live video... With thousands of bright and sometimes bored minds at work, I'm sure that they'll come up with any number of things to piss off the administration.>leave it unlocked and someone will come along and remove the radio
They'll leave the radio, because it's a POS they can't sell, but they'll take your airbag, your seats, rims, your dog, and the herb in the glove box, and then key your paint just so you know where it's at.>A nice sized group of us here at work recently picked up City of Heroes, and started playing together.
No way could I get away with that at work.The author is saying, in effect, "I think I have a proof here. Have at it." His esteemed colleagues, including jealous backstabbers, hacks who have failed at the same problem, and a relatively small number of really first rate mathemeticians will try to show he is wrong. Consensus will emerge one way or another. The editors are, I'm sure, simply offerring the collective genius of /. a change to join the fray.