I have a difficulty watching "live" tv since getting mine about 6 months ago, and it's mainly due to the fact that during your recordings you can "30-second" skip through the commercials.
I don't watch live TV at all. I've found that simply slurping an entire show, by which I mean every single season, off bittorrent really improves the quality of teh expierience. Despite the reduced quality, nothing quite beats watching the first four seasons of SG-1 over three weeks. It's a million times better than waiting a wekk for each episode, because now you can actually follow the intricate plot details. I actually like the show now.
I have friend who can multitask perfectly. He can drive car perfectly and at the same time keeping an eye on FM and talking to his friend on cell. If person *can* multitask - then why not?
Because you're already multitasking whilst driving normally. You're required to control the car, watch the road, wathc other traffic, plot your course, anticipate traffic, obey signs, etc, etc, etc...
And secondly, no one can multitask. There are simply people who can very poorly perform many tasks at once.
Absolutely! In all seriousness, I think it should be completely illegal to leave a child on their own in the back seat. Is having someone sit in the back seat to watch them really too much to ask?
I've seen three year olds break out of restraints and jump up and down in the back seat while two adults sit in the front seat and do nothing about it except the usual "sit down" [or else]" routine.
In any case, it's very unfair to a child to take them on a long, boring trip where they are obliged to do the one thing they hate, namely, sitting still, all alone. I've seen parent dump a two month old into the back seat whilst they sit up in front and then wonder why the child is howling.
Personally, I think cars are some kind of advanced intelligence sapping device.
Tell me how this is message that requires to be protected by free speech.
We cannot so loghtly decide what is covered by free speech and what is not. Once certain things are excluded as being "irrelivant", we've ceased to have free speech and instead have conditional free speech, or "free speech zones" if you will.
The question isn't why something should fall under free speech protections, but rather why something shouldn't. For something not to, a very, very compelling reason should be offered, and there are very, very few things to which the free speech law does not apply. For example, NAMBLA is a legal organisation.
It is difficult to justify why NAMBLA should remain legal, yet a site discussing fashion, a topic millions of americans are avidly interested in, should not.
People instantly can tell the amount of work and detail that have gone into OS X when they sit down and use it even for the first time. It is time Linux desktop programmers go their shit together.
Neg. The Gnome UI teams for one have been shamelessly parrotting OSX for quite some time. Even going so far as to add the ridiculous extra panel at the top of the screen. The end result is a disaster as innovation is stifleed and an incompatable UI is bolted onto what was a very stable and usable interface.
Very little new UI has come out of Linux since OSX became "chique". I really wish people would wake up to this.
Unless the package manager in Ubuntu does some really cool things that Fedora's stock yum frontends can't do (install, remove, groups, dependencies...), how can it beat really beat the shit out of anything?
Well, considering that Fedora's stock yum frontends can't do anything at this current time, that shouldn't be a problem.
Yum is an ongoing disaster. Inferior to apt in every single facet of its conception and design. It can't even do dist upgrades. It's also a huge resource hog. Up2date regularly hangs and crashes, so it would be easy for any apt frontend to surpass all this.
I've used Fedora since FC2 and I have to say that my biggest complaint throughout has been the woeful package management system. Quite frankly, just using plain rpms is often faster than trying to coax yum to work. If fact, the workaround for a lack of a dist-upgrade option is to use rpms.
Like a stubborn mule, Fedora won't let go of yum, lest they use apt and become "another debian os". Consequently, Fedora is a great distro, with a lousy package management system. It's a real achilles heel on an otherwise great workstation OS.
Look what happened when General Tito died, and all of that pent-up hatred was released.
But when he was alive, that hatred was put to better use.
Clearly, what is needed is a managed, consistent system of repression, that can leverage the synergy of that hate. Do away with wasteful two minute hates, and simply get people to work harder than their neighbours by offering life to he winner!
I know a picture is worth a thousand words, but is it really speech?
In the days before widespread literacy, and in any place in the world where illiteracy might still be common, images are virtually the only mass medium form of free speech available. Satirical cartoon have and will remain a key method of critisism and protest against governments and individuals.
Is child porn really as rampant and great a concern as they make it out to be?
Not by a long shot. Child porn is a gross violation of the rights of the child being used to make it. The violation continues through the continued proliferation of the materials.
Is it rampant? No one knows. For all we know, there could simply be a pool of say, 1000, images that are simply being recycled via digital copying over and over. No one has any hard data on this. We know nothing, yet laws are being drafted, essentially on the basis of rhetoric.
Is it that big of a concern? Well, for the person directly involved, it may become the biggest concern in their entire lives, and possibly the biggest concern in the lives of their loved ones too. They are still being violated in a very real sense. Depending on the circumstances, some might be able to cope with this others might not.
Is it that big of a concern for the rest of society? Well, yes. I am personally offended that people's rights are violated in this way. Those responsible deserve to face justice and the judgement of their peers under the law. Like all sex crimes, everyone can agree something needs to be done.
But should everyone elses rights be violated in order to "do something"? Will this even work? Should more people suffer because of what has been done to the victims? I, and most Slashdotters, realise that we should have our rights forsaken or violated in response to the violation of others. Rather, we should use the law as it surrently stands to both protect people and bring the guilty to justice. It is up to the task.
I would like to think victims of sex abuse would agree with my sentiment that the rights of everyone shouldn't have to be lost or violated in response the the violation of the rights of the victims. But I don't know that this is the case. I would like to hear the opinions of an actual victim of either child sex abuse or child pornography, on all of this. What do the people for whom these laws are suppossedly made for actually think about them?
In all this, I don't think I've ever even heard the voice of the victim. Even once.
Most people drink to get drunk... wow... maybe in high school or college, but that's a decided minority of the population.
Not sure where you come from pal, but in my current local area meat-network, going out and getting completely smashed is the accepted norm.
As a tee-totaler, this is a source of much personal difficulty. Going out involves a fair level of psychological trauma. You see, drunk people can sense those who are sober around them. When inebriated enough, they gravitate towards their coherant companions and then... proceed to talk to them.
This in itself might not be too bad, were it not for the fact that when drunk, people hava habit of being suddenly honest. Very, very honest. It's like their dying, and are passing on their most secret thoughts, opinions and hopes to you. I've heard more things in public houses after hours than most priests have heard in confession.
Of course, they all forget everything by the next day. Leaving me, alone in all the world, privy to truths that can never, ever again be revealed. I feel like an intelligence agent, except without the oaths and pay.
I work it differently. I scan the results, and try and gauge which are worth visiting from the blurbs. On average, I only go into about 20-30% of links returned. It works well most of the time
This is helpful for the kind of esoteric, but specific searches I do a lot of the time. Often, when little is forthcoming, I sometimes find what I was looking for in the 20th+ page of search results, on the 4th+ search, but I can manage it about twenty minutes.
This works out well if you're searching for things like "plane wave spectrum representation" and are looking for detailed papers relevant to a paticular field.
I am amazed by how much fuzz anything related to sexuality is generating.
Sex is bad. Really bad.
Sex is liberating, fulfilling, satisfiying, entertaining, immersive. It binds people closer, makes them contented, sometimes even makes them think about the world and their place in it. Worst of all it's free.
Imagine a world where people were all OK with sex.... How would we sell them anything?!!?
Bear with me for a minute. We're not in the fifties anymore. Glasses aren't 5cm bottlecaps anymore. Glasses are now light, flexible, sturdy, efficient and a danm sight cheaper than any contact lens on the market.
Is there really still such a problem with wearing glasses in this day and age? Grown geeks will walk around in public with thinkgeek apparell, pdas, glowsticks, sweatpants and gameboys. But not glasses because.... why?
Best Buy are at fault here no matter what. At fault meaning; they screwed up.
They based their diagnostics business on a licenced piece of proprietary software that can be, and was, withdrawn completely at the discretion of its owner. "What's that? Business needs it? Well pony up then. It's a free market. Take it or leave it."
Such is the fate of any business that relies on an outside party for its most critical infrastructure. If private companies smell weakness, they'll go for the jugular, or at least for as much as they can gouge without putting themselves at risk. If you want to avoid this fate, either use FOSS software, or commission your own.
If you're too FOSS adverse or too broke to do this, then you can either drop the whole idea, or just take the risk. But if that horse hair strand snaps, don't expect the rest of us to be too sympathetic.
Think of it. It would have never happened if Q didn't hard convinced Picard to close that transtemporal abnormality.
Q didn't convince Picard to do anything. Weren't you paying attention!! FSM Save us!!!
Q simply enabled Picard to "create" the temporal anomaly, via the time jumping. It was Picard himself who figured out how to close it.
The only mystery here is why the anomaly appeared later on in the final timeline, even though it was shrinking as time moved forward. However, it's clear that the FSM intelligently designed it to be this way to help the plotline. After all, inverse temporal anomaly inferral is just a theory. The enterprises and even the cube if it was there, could never have stopped the anomaly if the FSM and his pirate starship hadn't intervened.
You can't prove they weren't there. Teach the controversy!
I'm not sure whether its been beaten out of kids by their brainless parents, or whether they were born that way, but a large proportion of the current adult population really can't think analytically at all.
It may be that they just can't. Thinking analytically may just be an evolutionary trait that is emerging, or possibly immersing, in human society. People who can think rationally and live without mental crutches may simply be like left handed people. Few, and only just tolerated.
Faith is important to people. Having faith makes a lot of them happy. Having faith allows a lot more of them to at least endure. So why walk into the buzzsaw of facts repeatedly?
s/faith/alcohol/g s/walk into the buzzsaw of facts/drink and drive/
s/?/ Man has the potential to be more stupid than any other animal/
So then he trotted out the old "if you're not doing anything wrong what do you have to worry about" chestnut.
I often wonder about the mentality of people who say things like this. Do they simply think that they will be somehow immune from the effects of an all knowing government? Do they just not care? Do they even understand?
Perhaps it's simply gross naivity. The government is "good", ergo, to oppose the government is "bad". You're not "bad" are you?
Quite frankly, I don't see why McKinnon is going to the trouble of bringing up Guantanamo at all. The very fact that he might go to prision in the US is evidence that his human rights are in clear danger.
You're right about one thing though: C++ is a fucking blight. It's used because "it's the standard, it's fast, and you can hire developers". To which the obvious answer is: none of the above matters if you can't use it to deliver the goods! And you can't.
Yes you can. The "goods" just have to be in the form of telephone exchange server software.
Ever watch HK films? Product placements all over the damn place, and I could not care less.
I care. It forever cheapens the show, as you now know the plot has been comprimised for the sake of product placement.
On top of this. It's inefficient. For example. Moco-Coco pays the makers of say, the OC, to have all the characters drink the vile brew on screen every episode. The writers have to adjust their scripts to accommidate this.
Now lets say Moco-Coco goes out of business, later on down the road. Now who pays for the shows distribution? If you had gone for a simple "Drink Moco-Coco" logo in the bottom right hand corner once every ten minutes, you could now replace that with a "Mega-Choco" one now that Moco-Coco have gone bust.
Of course, the logical conclusion of this route is a rolling tickertape of ads across the bottom of the screen, turning users back to higher quality illegal downloads.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a difficulty watching "live" tv since getting mine about 6 months ago, and it's mainly due to the fact that during your recordings you can "30-second" skip through the commercials.
I don't watch live TV at all. I've found that simply slurping an entire show, by which I mean every single season, off bittorrent really improves the quality of teh expierience. Despite the reduced quality, nothing quite beats watching the first four seasons of SG-1 over three weeks. It's a million times better than waiting a wekk for each episode, because now you can actually follow the intricate plot details. I actually like the show now.
I have friend who can multitask perfectly. He can drive car perfectly and at the same time keeping an eye on FM and talking to his friend on cell. If person *can* multitask - then why not?
Because you're already multitasking whilst driving normally. You're required to control the car, watch the road, wathc other traffic, plot your course, anticipate traffic, obey signs, etc, etc, etc...
And secondly, no one can multitask. There are simply people who can very poorly perform many tasks at once.
Absolutely! In all seriousness, I think it should be completely illegal to leave a child on their own in the back seat. Is having someone sit in the back seat to watch them really too much to ask?
I've seen three year olds break out of restraints and jump up and down in the back seat while two adults sit in the front seat and do nothing about it except the usual "sit down" [or else]" routine.
In any case, it's very unfair to a child to take them on a long, boring trip where they are obliged to do the one thing they hate, namely, sitting still, all alone. I've seen parent dump a two month old into the back seat whilst they sit up in front and then wonder why the child is howling.
Personally, I think cars are some kind of advanced intelligence sapping device.
Tell me how this is message that requires to be protected by free speech.
We cannot so loghtly decide what is covered by free speech and what is not. Once certain things are excluded as being "irrelivant", we've ceased to have free speech and instead have conditional free speech, or "free speech zones" if you will.
The question isn't why something should fall under free speech protections, but rather why something shouldn't. For something not to, a very, very compelling reason should be offered, and there are very, very few things to which the free speech law does not apply. For example, NAMBLA is a legal organisation.
It is difficult to justify why NAMBLA should remain legal, yet a site discussing fashion, a topic millions of americans are avidly interested in, should not.
People instantly can tell the amount of work and detail that have gone into OS X when they sit down and use it even for the first time. It is time Linux desktop programmers go their shit together.
Neg. The Gnome UI teams for one have been shamelessly parrotting OSX for quite some time. Even going so far as to add the ridiculous extra panel at the top of the screen. The end result is a disaster as innovation is stifleed and an incompatable UI is bolted onto what was a very stable and usable interface.
Very little new UI has come out of Linux since OSX became "chique". I really wish people would wake up to this.
Unless the package manager in Ubuntu does some really cool things that Fedora's stock yum frontends can't do (install, remove, groups, dependencies...), how can it beat really beat the shit out of anything?
Well, considering that Fedora's stock yum frontends can't do anything at this current time, that shouldn't be a problem.
Yum is an ongoing disaster. Inferior to apt in every single facet of its conception and design. It can't even do dist upgrades. It's also a huge resource hog. Up2date regularly hangs and crashes, so it would be easy for any apt frontend to surpass all this.
I've used Fedora since FC2 and I have to say that my biggest complaint throughout has been the woeful package management system. Quite frankly, just using plain rpms is often faster than trying to coax yum to work. If fact, the workaround for a lack of a dist-upgrade option is to use rpms.
Like a stubborn mule, Fedora won't let go of yum, lest they use apt and become "another debian os". Consequently, Fedora is a great distro, with a lousy package management system. It's a real achilles heel on an otherwise great workstation OS.
Look what happened when General Tito died, and all of that pent-up hatred was released.
But when he was alive, that hatred was put to better use.
Clearly, what is needed is a managed, consistent system of repression, that can leverage the synergy of that hate. Do away with wasteful two minute hates, and simply get people to work harder than their neighbours by offering life to he winner!
I know a picture is worth a thousand words, but is it really speech?
In the days before widespread literacy, and in any place in the world where illiteracy might still be common, images are virtually the only mass medium form of free speech available. Satirical cartoon have and will remain a key method of critisism and protest against governments and individuals.
with a mantle orgasm the earth is really going to move
"Mommy, where do earthquakes come from?"
"Well, when two tectonic plates love each other very much...."
"Quiet Woman!! That's Just A Theory!! Son, it's time you learned all about Intelligent Drift."
Is child porn really as rampant and great a concern as they make it out to be?
Not by a long shot. Child porn is a gross violation of the rights of the child being used to make it. The violation continues through the continued proliferation of the materials.
Is it rampant? No one knows. For all we know, there could simply be a pool of say, 1000, images that are simply being recycled via digital copying over and over. No one has any hard data on this. We know nothing, yet laws are being drafted, essentially on the basis of rhetoric.
Is it that big of a concern? Well, for the person directly involved, it may become the biggest concern in their entire lives, and possibly the biggest concern in the lives of their loved ones too. They are still being violated in a very real sense. Depending on the circumstances, some might be able to cope with this others might not.
Is it that big of a concern for the rest of society? Well, yes. I am personally offended that people's rights are violated in this way. Those responsible deserve to face justice and the judgement of their peers under the law. Like all sex crimes, everyone can agree something needs to be done.
But should everyone elses rights be violated in order to "do something"? Will this even work? Should more people suffer because of what has been done to the victims? I, and most Slashdotters, realise that we should have our rights forsaken or violated in response to the violation of others. Rather, we should use the law as it surrently stands to both protect people and bring the guilty to justice. It is up to the task.
I would like to think victims of sex abuse would agree with my sentiment that the rights of everyone shouldn't have to be lost or violated in response the the violation of the rights of the victims. But I don't know that this is the case. I would like to hear the opinions of an actual victim of either child sex abuse or child pornography, on all of this. What do the people for whom these laws are suppossedly made for actually think about them?
In all this, I don't think I've ever even heard the voice of the victim. Even once.
If there is anyone in this world that has the willpower to stand against Islam, it's going to be the Chinese.
Wow. People will grasp at any argument, no matter how ridiculous, to keep Americans onside of the China Slave Labour Racket.
Most people drink to get drunk... wow... maybe in high school or college, but that's a decided minority of the population.
Not sure where you come from pal, but in my current local area meat-network, going out and getting completely smashed is the accepted norm.
As a tee-totaler, this is a source of much personal difficulty. Going out involves a fair level of psychological trauma. You see, drunk people can sense those who are sober around them. When inebriated enough, they gravitate towards their coherant companions and then... proceed to talk to them.
This in itself might not be too bad, were it not for the fact that when drunk, people hava habit of being suddenly honest. Very, very honest. It's like their dying, and are passing on their most secret thoughts, opinions and hopes to you. I've heard more things in public houses after hours than most priests have heard in confession.
Of course, they all forget everything by the next day. Leaving me, alone in all the world, privy to truths that can never, ever again be revealed. I feel like an intelligence agent, except without the oaths and pay.
I work it differently. I scan the results, and try and gauge which are worth visiting from the blurbs. On average, I only go into about 20-30% of links returned. It works well most of the time
This is helpful for the kind of esoteric, but specific searches I do a lot of the time. Often, when little is forthcoming, I sometimes find what I was looking for in the 20th+ page of search results, on the 4th+ search, but I can manage it about twenty minutes.
This works out well if you're searching for things like "plane wave spectrum representation" and are looking for detailed papers relevant to a paticular field.
here is a general rule of thumb: Anyone can take offence at Anything Anyone says or does.
I object to those capitalisations! Those were not proper nouns! I find that offensive!
I am amazed by how much fuzz anything related to sexuality is generating.
Sex is bad. Really bad.
Sex is liberating, fulfilling, satisfiying, entertaining, immersive. It binds people closer, makes them contented, sometimes even makes them think about the world and their place in it. Worst of all it's free.
Imagine a world where people were all OK with sex.... How would we sell them anything?!!?
What exactly is wrong with glasses?
Bear with me for a minute. We're not in the fifties anymore. Glasses aren't 5cm bottlecaps anymore. Glasses are now light, flexible, sturdy, efficient and a danm sight cheaper than any contact lens on the market.
Is there really still such a problem with wearing glasses in this day and age? Grown geeks will walk around in public with thinkgeek apparell, pdas, glowsticks, sweatpants and gameboys. But not glasses because.... why?
Is it really the contacts you need?
Best Buy are at fault here no matter what. At fault meaning; they screwed up.
They based their diagnostics business on a licenced piece of proprietary software that can be, and was, withdrawn completely at the discretion of its owner. "What's that? Business needs it? Well pony up then. It's a free market. Take it or leave it."
Such is the fate of any business that relies on an outside party for its most critical infrastructure. If private companies smell weakness, they'll go for the jugular, or at least for as much as they can gouge without putting themselves at risk. If you want to avoid this fate, either use FOSS software, or commission your own.
If you're too FOSS adverse or too broke to do this, then you can either drop the whole idea, or just take the risk. But if that horse hair strand snaps, don't expect the rest of us to be too sympathetic.
Think of it. It would have never happened if Q didn't hard convinced Picard to close that transtemporal abnormality.
Q didn't convince Picard to do anything. Weren't you paying attention!! FSM Save us!!!
Q simply enabled Picard to "create" the temporal anomaly, via the time jumping. It was Picard himself who figured out how to close it.
The only mystery here is why the anomaly appeared later on in the final timeline, even though it was shrinking as time moved forward. However, it's clear that the FSM intelligently designed it to be this way to help the plotline. After all, inverse temporal anomaly inferral is just a theory. The enterprises and even the cube if it was there, could never have stopped the anomaly if the FSM and his pirate starship hadn't intervened.
You can't prove they weren't there. Teach the controversy!
I'm not sure whether its been beaten out of kids by their brainless parents, or whether they were born that way, but a large proportion of the current adult population really can't think analytically at all.
It may be that they just can't. Thinking analytically may just be an evolutionary trait that is emerging, or possibly immersing, in human society. People who can think rationally and live without mental crutches may simply be like left handed people. Few, and only just tolerated.
Faith is important to people. Having faith makes a lot of them happy. Having faith allows a lot more of them to at least endure. So why walk into the buzzsaw of facts repeatedly?
s/faith/alcohol/g
s/walk into the buzzsaw of facts/drink and drive/
s/?/ Man has the potential to be more stupid than any other animal/
So then he trotted out the old "if you're not doing anything wrong what do you have to worry about" chestnut.
I often wonder about the mentality of people who say things like this. Do they simply think that they will be somehow immune from the effects of an all knowing government? Do they just not care? Do they even understand?
Perhaps it's simply gross naivity. The government is "good", ergo, to oppose the government is "bad". You're not "bad" are you?
10. Profit!!!
Guantanamo isn't one of the worst prisons in the world. It's one of the worst AMERICAN prisons in the world.
Not by a long shot.
Quite frankly, I don't see why McKinnon is going to the trouble of bringing up Guantanamo at all. The very fact that he might go to prision in the US is evidence that his human rights are in clear danger.
You're right about one thing though: C++ is a fucking blight. It's used because "it's the standard, it's fast, and you can hire developers". To which the obvious answer is: none of the above matters if you can't use it to deliver the goods! And you can't.
Yes you can. The "goods" just have to be in the form of telephone exchange server software.
Ever watch HK films? Product placements all over the damn place, and I could not care less.
I care. It forever cheapens the show, as you now know the plot has been comprimised for the sake of product placement.
On top of this. It's inefficient. For example. Moco-Coco pays the makers of say, the OC, to have all the characters drink the vile brew on screen every episode. The writers have to adjust their scripts to accommidate this.
Now lets say Moco-Coco goes out of business, later on down the road. Now who pays for the shows distribution? If you had gone for a simple "Drink Moco-Coco" logo in the bottom right hand corner once every ten minutes, you could now replace that with a "Mega-Choco" one now that Moco-Coco have gone bust.
Of course, the logical conclusion of this route is a rolling tickertape of ads across the bottom of the screen, turning users back to higher quality illegal downloads.