"Unfortunately many people are unwilling or unable to do that. Lacking this ability is not limited to computers and operating systems. I would consider it common sense-apparently it isn't so common:)"
I have been training an apprentice machinist of late...
"Ya don't learn nuthin' if ya don't break nuthin'"
Or in normal english "If you do everything only one way, you don't know how to recover from the wrong way or learn a better way."
Or as what I tell my co-workers (as I am the "known geek") "The only reason why I know so much about computers is because that's how much I broke stuff"
"Perhaps because U.S. standard units make no sense what so ever"
Actually they do. They're simply fractional instead of decimal. What's so hard about that?
Where the hell did you think we got 5280 feet as a mile? On the face of it, it looks like an entirely random number. It's not random. It's 80 chains. 1 Surveyor's chain = 4 rods. 1 rod = 16.5 feet.
" I still (growing up in the US) don't know all of the handy conversions for the units "
An inch is 25.4 mm. Exactly. Since a CC of water = 1 gram, you can do all sorts of things. If you have a chart of Specific Gravity for materials, you can do even more. 1 ounce = appx 28 grams.
"I think the only reason the U.S. supports it's units is out of shear egotism, the only reason we do it is to be different."
No, it's because there are a lot of us that need to do this every day and it's more of a pain to abandon english units than to keep them.
One day you will need to buy land, and looking at the deed, you will thank me for explaining to you exactly what a chain is.
When I tried to cancel my ebay account, which had no pending sales/buys in it at all, it took from early August of 2005 to October 2005 of acting like an ass to get them to cancel my account. I tried everything, including terms-of-service violations in public to get them to pay attention. I even sent email messages consisting of 1MB (or was it two or three?) each of "Cancel My Account!" It's amazing how much you can cut and paste into an ebay feedback dialog (I found out, because when they reply the quote the whole thing). And even when they finally got around to me, they sent me an email saying that it would take a few more weeks. Just how difficult is it to delete an empty account?
Why did I want it cancelled? Fraud. Obvious out-and-out fraud that I wasn't the victim of, but saw happening, and when it was brought to their attention the silence was deafening. Ebay's utter lack of even basic business honesty really offends me. Microsoft looks like a shining paragon of righteousness standing next to them. Even thinking of it now, more than a year later, a pit of anger is forming in my gut.
I can only think of one reason why they make it so difficult to delete accounts: that it inflates the user base fraudulently. Inactive accounts count as "members" and they make it that difficult to cancel hoping that the user just gives up, which is probably what happens most of the time. It really was insane how much effort I had to put into getting an empty account nuked.
Ebay, as a result, is on my list as "Not Recommended"
You bought a cheap, pretend mountain bike. A toy. Suitable for riding short distances on the bike path, or getting you into the Darwin Awards list, should you actually attempt to ride it down a mountainside.
If you want a mountain bike, that you can actually, well, ride down a mountain you need something more durable.
If you know how to ride, that will get you down the mountain without disintegrating or killing you. Please note that this is actually designed so you can ride a steep slope, that the geometry is entirely unsuitable (and painful) for riding on a bike path or even as an off-road cross-country bike on level ground.
Cue 80's band.... (The Creatures was the best music ever to come out of Siouxie and the Banshees)
PLUTO DRIVE (The Creatures)
Let's go to Pluto, the atmosphere's clear We'll be really cool there, with nothing to fear Let's go to Pluto, it's cold and it's damp Where children are heroes, death is high camp
I want to see Pluto, I want to have fun I want to turn blue under an alien sun Oh let me see Pluto, it seems such a gas With oceans of methane and petrified grass
CHORUS: Let's go to Pluto Let's live on the dot See the bad moon rising In a lunacy knot
Come on let's do Pluto, it's really not far An unleaded dream drive to the prettiest star I want to see Pluto, but maybe I'll wait 'Til the world turns to meet its plutonium fate
The days will be long here, the years will be more Let's go to Pluto, like we did before
CHORUS: Let's go to Pluto Let's live on the dot See the bad moon rising In a lunacy knot.
It was very well made, seams matched, with an eye to detail, with excellent quality components. There is shitty leather and then there is top-notch. This was "sleep in it" leather. I have seen "cheap" and this was not.
I have a Chinese made indicator micrometer, good to 50 millionths of an inch. The only thing that surpasses it, really, is my Etalon (Swiss) at over 800 dollars, US (one lives on the bench, the other is for setup). There is absolutely nothing wrong with it, and gives consistent readings time and time again.
The Chinese are no longer making just "cheap" knockoff products. It's the same thing that happened with machine tools in Japan from the 1970's to 80's (which brought the death of Brown&Sharpe), which was my point.
"I've got bad news for you... Firefox doesn't pass it either. (Go on, try it.) We're expecting to get Acid2 support in Firefox 3."
D'oh.
I could have _sworn_ that stock FF was noted to have passed. Oh well.
No, I don't use FF. I use Konq, Safari, and Opera, and have tested only them on Acid2 myself. Whenever I'm using FF or IE, I'm on someone else's computer.
I must have heard from something last April related to this:
"The stats at www.w3schools.com are not representative of what most people are using, they represent what Web developers and other technically inclined people are using. Think about who visits www.w3schools.com."
So post stats from somewhere else. At least I left a reference, as opposed to the parent which didn't leave a reference.
And here's a question, how many bots ID themselves as IE?
Which one of those doesn't pass the Acid2? Only IE. 40 percent of the world uses a browser that supports standards enough to render Acid2, and IE's numbers have declined while the rest have only gained.
"You could argue for better firefox support, but as much as we love linux, I suppose they have no obligation to make it work for something that is that small minority among desktop users."
If you scroll down to the OS stats:
XP: 71.6 Win2K 13.6 Win98 2.6 WinNT.3 W2k3 1.7 Linux 3.2 Mac 3.3
But then it's not about "supporting linux" it's about using _standard_ codecs and standard files. Wmv is "Windows Only" and not a standard where other codecs are actual standards and are cross platform as a _result_ of being standards.
But hey, you're here to troll for Microsoft instead of contribute any facts to the discussion.
By the way, even though it has the least market share, Opera kicks all other browsers.
I am allergic to tree, grass, and ragweed pollen. As a kid, spring, summer, and fall, gave me sometimes life-threatening asthma attacks.
To top it off, I also have developed a shellfish allergy. Allergic to soybeans? Can't tell if it's from GM soybeans or regular soybeans? Soy tastes like poo, IMO. And soy allergies are more common than you think, especially for pasty-faced europeans like me. Imagine if you were allergic to your favorite food. Speaking as someone who used to dig his own quahogs, enjoy a nice clam chowder (red, white, and clear), clamcakes, and stuffies, (now I want a stuffie, holding it hot in my hand and scooping the delicious blend of spices, breadcrumbs, celery, onions, quahog, and butter out of the shell with a fork...mmmmm) I cannot eat any of those things which I grew up on, nor anything contaminated with scallops, clams, quahogs, or other delicious bottom-dwelling mollusks. Else I might be sick to my stomach for an entire afternoon (at last experience, succumbing to temptation), or worse, have an ambulance called (and I don't want to find out).
Bacon wrapped scallops on the menu? They're there just to torture me, aren't they?
And I consider myself fortunate. Food can be tricky for those with a nut allergy, especially any kind of prepared food. Has that chili been thickened with peanut butter? Who the hell knows, but stuff like that has killed people outright. And let's just say that the celiac disease sufferers don't have it good either. At least soy isn't as prevalent as wheat.
So spoken as a fellow allergy sufferer, allergies are an outstanding example of "shit happens." Allergies are so entirely random, that they frustrate specialists in the field to no end. And yes it sucks, but I, like you, buck up and live on.
-- BMO
Stuffie recipe, a basic one without the portuguese chourico:
I wonder what the strange ritual with the "soak in water with corn meal" deal is. IMO, ignore that, scrub the shells with a good stiff brush and steam the little guys open, then go on with the recipe. A vegetable steamer basket is handy for steaming clams/quahogs.
"Cloned humans may be different to "normal" humans. "
How?
If a cloned human is essentially an identical twin, then how is stigmatizing a clone any different than stigmatizing an identical twin?
"If you cut me, do I not bleed?"
I find it highly offensive that people can be written off as sub-human even before the concept of cloning itself made it into the public psyche. I also find it offensive that people are complacent about it.
Your follow-on strikes me as complacency. "But what I think doesn't matter." Correct me if I'm misreading the context.:-P
"or to add to that...since when is it cheaper to clone and animal for food than to just raise one?"
It's easier to clone a Prize Winning cow than it is to breed the cow and try to get another Prize Winner, and since the technology is getting easier to use, I don't doubt that this will start happening.
But to see the drawbacks, investigate the issues underlying banana farming as to what reducing the gene pool can do in an extreme case.
It is complex, but not on the FDA's end. It's complex in the economics, but whether a steak or glass of milk comes from a herds of identical steers and cows doesn't make a hill of beans difference in food safety.
"While I don't disagree, just thinking about that really worries me. And now it will be in the back of my mind as I read posts, worrying me even more in many cases."
Well, you should be worried.
The last time that people thought other people were "less than human" we had a world war.
The solution would be to have a library of embryos and clone the embryos directly instead of waiting for them to grow up and clone from the grown-up sheep/cow/etc.
That's all well and good, but the subject is whether meat and milk from cloned animals is safe to eat.
Bananas are basically all clones of each other. I don't see people abstaining from bananas.
""Well fuck me, we've just completely fucked up" 10 years later when they find out Cow #2947492 was infact carrying an extremely rare defect which can be passed onto humans and thanks to cloning 10,000 people have this defect."
Well, fuck me for asking, but how does cow-DNA wind up in human-DNA through a steak or glass of milk?
You're creating bad science fiction, here. Please contact George Lucas for a movie deal.
You seem to be reading more into what I've written than what I wrote.:-P
The differences are not genetic differences. Please note that I can tell the difference between a "Jessica and Andrea" a pair of identical twins that I know, and I have not stated that identical twins are identical in every way.
Jessica is an amateur boxer. Andrea is the quiet one.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hey Rocky! Watch me crash a plane."
You're being snarky but...
That's why they make simulators. You made a valid point. You shouldn't have posted as AC.
--
BMO
"Unfortunately many people are unwilling or unable to do that. Lacking this ability is not limited to computers and operating systems. I would consider it common sense-apparently it isn't so common :)"
I have been training an apprentice machinist of late...
"Ya don't learn nuthin' if ya don't break nuthin'"
Or in normal english "If you do everything only one way, you don't know how to recover from the wrong way or learn a better way."
Or as what I tell my co-workers (as I am the "known geek") "The only reason why I know so much about computers is because that's how much I broke stuff"
--
BMO
"Perhaps because U.S. standard units make no sense what so ever"
Actually they do. They're simply fractional instead of decimal. What's so hard about that?
Where the hell did you think we got 5280 feet as a mile? On the face of it, it looks like an entirely random number. It's not random. It's 80 chains. 1 Surveyor's chain = 4 rods. 1 rod = 16.5 feet.
" I still (growing up in the US) don't know all of the handy conversions for the units "
An inch is 25.4 mm. Exactly. Since a CC of water = 1 gram, you can do all sorts of things. If you have a chart of Specific Gravity for materials, you can do even more. 1 ounce = appx 28 grams.
"I think the only reason the U.S. supports it's units is out of shear egotism, the only reason we do it is to be different."
No, it's because there are a lot of us that need to do this every day and it's more of a pain to abandon english units than to keep them.
One day you will need to buy land, and looking at the deed, you will thank me for explaining to you exactly what a chain is.
--
BMO
"I feel a great disturbanc in the Force, as if billions of microbes cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced"
--
BMO
When I tried to cancel my ebay account, which had no pending sales/buys in it at all, it took from early August of 2005 to October 2005 of acting like an ass to get them to cancel my account. I tried everything, including terms-of-service violations in public to get them to pay attention. I even sent email messages consisting of 1MB (or was it two or three?) each of "Cancel My Account!" It's amazing how much you can cut and paste into an ebay feedback dialog (I found out, because when they reply the quote the whole thing). And even when they finally got around to me, they sent me an email saying that it would take a few more weeks. Just how difficult is it to delete an empty account?
Why did I want it cancelled? Fraud. Obvious out-and-out fraud that I wasn't the victim of, but saw happening, and when it was brought to their attention the silence was deafening. Ebay's utter lack of even basic business honesty really offends me. Microsoft looks like a shining paragon of righteousness standing next to them. Even thinking of it now, more than a year later, a pit of anger is forming in my gut.
I can only think of one reason why they make it so difficult to delete accounts: that it inflates the user base fraudulently. Inactive accounts count as "members" and they make it that difficult to cancel hoping that the user just gives up, which is probably what happens most of the time. It really was insane how much effort I had to put into getting an empty account nuked.
Ebay, as a result, is on my list as "Not Recommended"
--
BMO
Oh crap, after I posted that I saw that the PSA video was posted here dozens of times. Mod me down.
Do not leave water standing about.
TYVM.
--
BMO
"Working link? :p"
7 3966581583&q=Cicarelli
Here's the video in question...I think.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-55034987
--
BMO
"So...what was it that I bought??"
d ex.html
You bought a cheap, pretend mountain bike. A toy. Suitable for riding short distances on the bike path, or getting you into the Darwin Awards list, should you actually attempt to ride it down a mountainside.
If you want a mountain bike, that you can actually, well, ride down a mountain you need something more durable.
http://www.konaworld.com/bikes/2k7/STABSUPREME/in
If you know how to ride, that will get you down the mountain without disintegrating or killing you. Please note that this is actually designed so you can ride a steep slope, that the geometry is entirely unsuitable (and painful) for riding on a bike path or even as an off-road cross-country bike on level ground.
--
BMO
Cue 80's band.... (The Creatures was the best music ever to come out of Siouxie and the Banshees)
PLUTO DRIVE (The Creatures)
Let's go to Pluto, the atmosphere's clear
We'll be really cool there, with nothing to fear
Let's go to Pluto, it's cold and it's damp
Where children are heroes, death is high camp
I want to see Pluto, I want to have fun
I want to turn blue under an alien sun
Oh let me see Pluto, it seems such a gas
With oceans of methane and petrified grass
CHORUS:
Let's go to Pluto
Let's live on the dot
See the bad moon rising
In a lunacy knot
Come on let's do Pluto, it's really not far
An unleaded dream drive to the prettiest star
I want to see Pluto, but maybe I'll wait
'Til the world turns to meet its plutonium fate
The days will be long here, the years will be more
Let's go to Pluto, like we did before
CHORUS:
Let's go to Pluto
Let's live on the dot
See the bad moon rising
In a lunacy knot.
etc.
This is a late comment, but I have to reply:
The leather jacket was not cheap.
It was very well made, seams matched, with an eye to detail, with excellent quality components. There is shitty leather and then there is top-notch. This was "sleep in it" leather. I have seen "cheap" and this was not.
I have a Chinese made indicator micrometer, good to 50 millionths of an inch. The only thing that surpasses it, really, is my Etalon (Swiss) at over 800 dollars, US (one lives on the bench, the other is for setup). There is absolutely nothing wrong with it, and gives consistent readings time and time again.
The Chinese are no longer making just "cheap" knockoff products. It's the same thing that happened with machine tools in Japan from the 1970's to 80's (which brought the death of Brown&Sharpe), which was my point.
--
BMO
"Right then. So you say that they only sell stuff made in China. But so do all of the other places where I can actually afford to shop."
And that Andrew Marc leather jacket is made in China, and it costs $400 _on sale_ (this past weekend) at Nordstrom.
It's no longer just the "cheap stuff" being made in China.
--
BMO
"I've got bad news for you... Firefox doesn't pass it either. (Go on, try it.) We're expecting to get Acid2 support in Firefox 3."
D'oh.
I could have _sworn_ that stock FF was noted to have passed. Oh well.
No, I don't use FF. I use Konq, Safari, and Opera, and have tested only them on Acid2 myself. Whenever I'm using FF or IE, I'm on someone else's computer.
I must have heard from something last April related to this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbaron/126886608/
Ok, so mod me down. Bastards.
The good news is that the FF builds _do_ pass. According to wikipedia, anyway.
--
BMO
"I hate to be the spoil sport but this island is not new at all. It was discovered on August 12th."
:-P
Well, for some of us, Surtsey is a new island, still.
--
BMO
"The stats at www.w3schools.com are not representative of what most people are using, they represent what Web developers and other technically inclined people are using. Think about who visits www.w3schools.com."
y =the_traffic_generator
So post stats from somewhere else. At least I left a reference, as opposed to the parent which didn't leave a reference.
And here's a question, how many bots ID themselves as IE?
http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme?entr
--
BMO
Yeah?
Where did you get your numbers?
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.
Aggregate IE: 59.9
Firefox: 29.9
Mozilla: 2.5
Netscape 7/8
Opera 1.5
Which one of those doesn't pass the Acid2? Only IE. 40 percent of the world uses a browser that supports standards enough to render Acid2, and IE's numbers have declined while the rest have only gained.
"You could argue for better firefox support, but as much as we love linux, I suppose they have no obligation to make it work for something that is that small minority among desktop users."
If you scroll down to the OS stats:
XP: 71.6
Win2K 13.6
Win98 2.6
WinNT
W2k3 1.7
Linux 3.2
Mac 3.3
But then it's not about "supporting linux" it's about using _standard_ codecs and standard files. Wmv is "Windows Only" and not a standard where other codecs are actual standards and are cross platform as a _result_ of being standards.
But hey, you're here to troll for Microsoft instead of contribute any facts to the discussion.
By the way, even though it has the least market share, Opera kicks all other browsers.
--
BMO
What about allergies?
7 80
I am allergic to tree, grass, and ragweed pollen. As a kid, spring, summer, and fall, gave me sometimes life-threatening asthma attacks.
To top it off, I also have developed a shellfish allergy. Allergic to soybeans? Can't tell if it's from GM soybeans or regular soybeans? Soy tastes like poo, IMO. And soy allergies are more common than you think, especially for pasty-faced europeans like me. Imagine if you were allergic to your favorite food. Speaking as someone who used to dig his own quahogs, enjoy a nice clam chowder (red, white, and clear), clamcakes, and stuffies, (now I want a stuffie, holding it hot in my hand and scooping the delicious blend of spices, breadcrumbs, celery, onions, quahog, and butter out of the shell with a fork...mmmmm) I cannot eat any of those things which I grew up on, nor anything contaminated with scallops, clams, quahogs, or other delicious bottom-dwelling mollusks. Else I might be sick to my stomach for an entire afternoon (at last experience, succumbing to temptation), or worse, have an ambulance called (and I don't want to find out).
Bacon wrapped scallops on the menu? They're there just to torture me, aren't they?
And I consider myself fortunate. Food can be tricky for those with a nut allergy, especially any kind of prepared food. Has that chili been thickened with peanut butter? Who the hell knows, but stuff like that has killed people outright. And let's just say that the celiac disease sufferers don't have it good either. At least soy isn't as prevalent as wheat.
So spoken as a fellow allergy sufferer, allergies are an outstanding example of "shit happens." Allergies are so entirely random, that they frustrate specialists in the field to no end. And yes it sucks, but I, like you, buck up and live on.
--
BMO
Stuffie recipe, a basic one without the portuguese chourico:
http://fooddownunder.com/cgi-bin/recipe.cgi?r=249
I wonder what the strange ritual with the "soak in water with corn meal" deal is. IMO, ignore that, scrub the shells with a good stiff brush and steam the little guys open, then go on with the recipe. A vegetable steamer basket is handy for steaming clams/quahogs.
In my other reply to this, I gave you the benefit of the doubt, but after reading this, I'm frightened to find out what's in your freezer.
--
BMO
"I really don't want to know..."
http://www.answers.com/topic/animal-husbandry
It's your own fault for having a dirty mind.
--
BMO
But you said:
:-P
"Cloned humans may be different to "normal" humans. "
How?
If a cloned human is essentially an identical twin, then how is stigmatizing a clone any different than stigmatizing an identical twin?
"If you cut me, do I not bleed?"
I find it highly offensive that people can be written off as sub-human even before the concept of cloning itself made it into the public psyche. I also find it offensive that people are complacent about it.
Your follow-on strikes me as complacency. "But what I think doesn't matter." Correct me if I'm misreading the context.
*shrug*
--
BMO
"Cloned humans may be different to "normal" humans. They'd be stigmatised for a start."
They would?
Would you stigmatize an identical twin or an in-vitro fertilized human?
Once groups of similar thinking people start in that direction they slide down the slippery slope into determining who "deserves" to live or die.
Down that path lies madness, and genocide.
--
BMO
"or to add to that...since when is it cheaper to clone and animal for food than to just raise one?"
It's easier to clone a Prize Winning cow than it is to breed the cow and try to get another Prize Winner, and since the technology is getting easier to use, I don't doubt that this will start happening.
But to see the drawbacks, investigate the issues underlying banana farming as to what reducing the gene pool can do in an extreme case.
It is complex, but not on the FDA's end. It's complex in the economics, but whether a steak or glass of milk comes from a herds of identical steers and cows doesn't make a hill of beans difference in food safety.
--
BMO
"While I don't disagree, just thinking about that really worries me. And now it will be in the back of my mind as I read posts, worrying me even more in many cases."
Well, you should be worried.
The last time that people thought other people were "less than human" we had a world war.
--
BMO
"It isn't anywhere near as simple as that."
The solution would be to have a library of embryos and clone the embryos directly instead of waiting for them to grow up and clone from the grown-up sheep/cow/etc.
--
BMO
That's all well and good, but the subject is whether meat and milk from cloned animals is safe to eat.
Bananas are basically all clones of each other. I don't see people abstaining from bananas.
""Well fuck me, we've just completely fucked up" 10 years later when they find out Cow #2947492 was infact carrying an extremely rare defect which can be passed onto humans and thanks to cloning 10,000 people have this defect."
Well, fuck me for asking, but how does cow-DNA wind up in human-DNA through a steak or glass of milk?
You're creating bad science fiction, here. Please contact George Lucas for a movie deal.
--
BMO
You seem to be reading more into what I've written than what I wrote. :-P
The differences are not genetic differences. Please note that I can tell the difference between a "Jessica and Andrea" a pair of identical twins that I know, and I have not stated that identical twins are identical in every way.
Jessica is an amateur boxer.
Andrea is the quiet one.
Both are exceedingly pretty.
--
BMO