CRTs can be rejuvenated. There's a device that tv-repair shops use to blast off the crap from the inside of the back end of the CRT (heater, grids, etc). 90 percent of the time it works and you get another 5 years out of the CRT, but it all depends if it's worth blowing 60 bucks (what I used to charge) on an old monitor.
If it's a Sony, and it's BIG, it's probably worth it. Otherwise, recycle.
At work, I'm the local geek, so I get asked all sorts of bizarre Windows questions (today, one was about flashing icons on his desktop. I can only guess he's running at 16 colors) and it strikes me that Windows isn't easy EITHER for neophytes. Just as people bitch and whine about Linux being difficult, being a newbie these days with all the crap that's thrown at ya from Redmond in its newest version of "simplicity" has to be daunting.
Sure, Linux can be difficult for someone used to a Windows universe, but that's no excuse for not using it as a desktop. I've left Windows about 4 years ago (or is it 5 now? ) and it strikes me that the questions I field about Windows are similar to the ones I used to _ask_ about Linux.
Fortunately for the people who ask me Windows questions, I'm not a rabid Linux groupie. So I do try to answer questions as truthfully as I can (heh heh) but I do mention from time to time, though, that Linux superior in many respects and say I'll volunteer to convert a system, but so far I've no takers...yet. I think the reason is that not enough people have *seen* a real Linux desktop (though the ones I've shown have been impressed).
I only see improvements and more acceptance of Linux in general in the future. As more people actually see Linux in action, and get a chance to compare it to offerings from Redmond, I think that performance and usability issues will be answered.
In the winters, not only did I shovel our walk, but I went across the street and did theirs too.
It was *expected of me*, by my parents.
And I did it, gladly.
It was THE WAY THINGS ARE DONE.
Dare I do it now?
No.
If I did it now, and someone slipped on his/her walk, I'd be sued. Either that or I'd be arrested for tresspassing.
Whatever. The lawyers and the feds and the townie cops have fucked it up for all of us. There is no longer any room to breathe, to get to know your neighbors, to even say Hello. There was a time when neighbors looked out for each other (10 years ago! wow! that's a long time!), but everyone is a stranger now, and you should never talk to strangers.
To put it bluntly, I had to deal with the local Police Department, yesterday, because someone had broken into a neighbor of mine's apartment. After reading this article, I'll stay uninvolved from now on.
Hands down, I have to say it's SuSE. I've been with it since 6.0 and I've tried others in the meantime, and I always go *back* to whatever is current with SuSE. Why? It's probably the most *organized* distribution out there, plus it has the best documentation *bar none*. I tried Mandrake 7.2 and Debian. Talk about polar opposites, Mandrake was insanely easy to install, but chaotic once I started poking around in the guts (lots of "standard" stuff was just simply *missing*) and Debian, well, let's just say at the time the install was needlessly complicated for no reason whatsoever. (To be more specific, Debian pissed me off because I thought we had evolved since the first edition of Slackware, which was *simpler* to install than Debian. I was appalled at Debian's obfuscation of the install process. YMMV)
I installed SuSE 7.2 the other day, and it was well laid out and simple to install. It wasn't as automagic as Mandrake's install, but it's pretty close. I got Personal Edition this time around because I was looking for a more lightweight version that was better edited, and I'm pretty happy with it. They didn't leave out any of the essentials for a workstation, while making it lighter than the 7 cd/ 1 dvd Pro Edition.
Gawd, I sound like a commercial.
Anyway, that's my view. All flames will be printed out on TP and used to wipe my butt.
Oh, and one other thing...if any SuSE guys are out there, please PLEASE keep YaST2 as a separate program! In 7.2 the modules for it are integratable into KDE's Control Center. While this is more consistent and convenient, it screws with my ability to update KDE from source code.
No, I'm not going to use it for "production". It sits in my back room, for useful and useless projects.
And yes, I do like to go back in time sometimes and fire up an old game or two or three. I'm not putting down the nostalgia angle, but I do have an issue with calling these things ancient. They're really not that old. Most of the users on this weblog were around when the machines you speak of were introduced (avg 25 yr old geek was born in 1976, and was banging away at an apple IIe at the age of 9, or in my case, 15).
However, when you get into stuff that your grandparents used, it's a world away. The NAZIs were running rampant all over Europe, we had just been attacked almost exactly 2 months before by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, getting our wake-up call, television was a novelty for the wealthy and the geeks (ever see a mechanical tv?), Stalin was our *ally*, and a "computer" back then was a human being.
I remember 1976. It wasn't all that different from today.
I picked up some old tech last Saturday for 15 dollars at a yard sale.
It's a Singer 128-18 sewing machine assembled on February 11, 1942, shortly before Singer stopped making consumer sewing machines to contribute to the war effort.
(btw, I must say that 1942's version of "consumer level" is about the same as 2001's "industrial" level. It's got a cast-iron body and base.)
All of it works. Flawlessly. It even has the (now very delicate) owner's manual. How much repair did I have to do? I only cleaned it with spray cleaner, to get the nicotine off of it.
You want old tech? There ya go. It's even still useful after all these decades, too. Compare that to an old Altair, which is only fit for sitting in a display cabinet.
Just put this powder in the water with the rest of your clothes and it magically removes the organic and inorganic dirt! No more stinky clothes! No more stains!
Soap! Use some today!
...end cheezy music...
Seriously though, battling the organic dirt with bacteria is only solving half the problem. Where has the common sense gone?
I was using a cop-out like Fermat did when he wrote that line.
I knew I was right, but I didn't feel like working it out; neither did he.
Apropos, no? I propose a new html tag for "I Know I'm Right But It's Too Much Work To Prove", called the Fermat tag.
Do you think that he actually had a proof or do you think he was bluffing? Note, I'm not putting the guy down; I wish that I could, when I die, leave people scratching their heads as much as he did.
To expound for the people who are curious:
Fermat's Last Theorem states that x^n + y^n = z^n has no non-zero integer solutions for x, y and z when n > 2.
Well of course! You say. It's common sense!
Try proving it.
It took until 1993 (from when Fermat wrote his claim in 1630) for a brit named Andrew Wiles to nail it down.
Wiles' proof is still under scrutiny, as the last bit of the article says:
"No proof of the complexity of this can easily be guaranteed to be correct, so a very small doubt will remain for some time. However when Taylor lectured at the British Mathematical Colloquium in Edinburgh in April 1995 he gave the impression that no real doubts remained over Fermat's Last Theorem."
It's an interesting story, to say the least.
Re:Lay off the crack pipe - Was: Something Missing
on
Non-Wet Water
·
· Score: 1
YOU should lay off the crack pipe...
He's right. If you decrease the volume, the RATIO of surface area to volume goes UP.
<Fermat>
I have a proof for this, but it's too large to write in this margin.
</Fermat>
:-P
This has real world implications, especially for biology. A shrew has problems keeping its body temp up because it radiates too much heat for its body size (see ratio above) so it has to eat, practically continuously, to be able to expend the energy to merely *heat its body*.
Compare this to larger mammals which have less of a problem with temperature regulation.
When wvdial runs through its scripts, after it gets the nameserver, it will try to resolve www.suse.com (or.de, I forgot) and if it doesn't resolve it tells you that the nameserver is bakey (and says that it couldn't resolve SuSE).
Whether or not SuSE actually uses this data, I have no idea.
It's not in the documentation, but it's hardly hidden. You'd have to be blind not to see it scroll by on a bad setup or baked DNS.
It IS there, however. Anyone know anything else about this?
"Ask the cop on the corner; ask the cop in the store; ask the cop on the rooftop; ask the cop in the woodpile; ask the cop that's knock, knock, knockin' at your back door."
If you ask any ISP administrator what the single-most-popular activity is on the net, it's porn. Why? It's because _people like it_ in spite of what some holier-than-thou fascist academics/activists/whatever seem to think is somehow anti-woman, misogynistic, neanderthal behaviour.
Some people like it. Big woop. Live and let live. Why should a vocal minority have power over what a store/website sells? There's no victory here, except for the people who can't seem to untwist their undies. Their problem, though is that this won't satisfy their thirst to get everyone thinking in their little narrow myopic ways.
Some of the more educated female friends of mine happen to be big fans of "good porn". We trade "the good stuff, here, check it out". I find this give-and-take gives me a much deeper perspective on the female psyche than I would have if we had never done this.
The reason for porn's existence is that it's *human* to like sex. The absolutely horrid example set by the anal-retentive (Gotta love Freud) among us in society as to how we should treat our fellow human beings just floors me. People are brought up to think that sex is dirty, evil, whatever, only (if they're lucky) to find that it was all lies, all of it. All the guilt, heaped upon someone's soul for feeling *human* for no purpose at all except to satisfy someone else's twisted/perverted views on sex is enough to drive some people nuts (I've seen this first hand).
It's about power folks. It's about the power to make someone else feel like crap because they have human urges/desires. Once you can do that, you have power over other facets of their lives. It's the power to make a company do something completely opposite of what their real customers want, simply because it's not "politically correct". What a travesty.
See, I didn't say *all* english dubbing sucked, I said *much* of it does. It gives me weasel room here. But your points proved my initial statement that it's not the general trend for english dubs to be _good_.
Yes, there are some out there that are _excellent_, unfortunately sometimes it sounds like the US director has decided to get Joe Acting Student to do it on an internship level.
*sigh* Ah well. Unfortunately the Golden Age of Radio no longer exists, so there's no real demand for Voice Actors like there was (and back then it was _very_ respectable to be a voice actor). Maybe with anime getting more popular, there will be more demand for trained voice actors (and higher pay and more respect as a result).
What I'd like to see in the meantime is Firesign Theatre do at least a few dubs. It'd make them money and the dubs would be excellent and...uh...creative.:-)
"It's just this little chromium switch here. [click] Ahh, you people are SO superstitious!"
As for my previous rant about Christians, don't get me wrong, I've worked in a company that was owned/operated by a "Born Again Christian" family. Nobody forced their views on me, I was treated with respect, and I gave the respect right back.
It's the only job I ever had that when I had to leave (got transferred) I literally cried.
Contrast this to someone who I currently work with, when I was making a comment about the sulfur based cutting oil (I'm a machinist) being stinky and smelling like brimstone, my cow-orker said that I "better get used to it".
WTF. I mean, really.
There are Christians that do *get it* and there are some (some people would say the vast majority, but I won't go there) that look down their noses at anyone who's a non-believer.
Ok, I know, Don't Feed The Trolls, but this USian Fundie Craaaaap is just that, Crap.
The words "one nation under God" were NOT part of the Pledge of Allegiance until the Eisenhower Administration, and the "Fundamentalists" seem to be the ones spreading the misinformation that somehow this country was founded on their special brand of Christianity. (It wasn't. People like Franklin toured different churches, checking things out, and to top it off, Franklin was a certified Dirty Old Man...my hero)
I should also proudly add that my State (Rhode Island, soon to appear on a Quarter in your pocket) was founded by someone who had, er, _religious and political issues_ with the _powers that be_ in Boston.
Unless my history is bad, Ike wasn't a Founding Father (TM).
As far as sexuality goes. My country is so damn schizophrenic (The US) because of the Right Wing Nuts like Falwell et. al, who are products of bible-thumping-sex-scared-morons who forget that the reference to "fornication" in the Bible isn't about premarital sex, but a general reference to sex without love. The same goes for the misreading about Onan, and the misreading about why God nuked Sodom.
God's main reason to nuke Sodom was because the residents were "Rich With Bread" while they didn't give a tinker's damn about the poor, and Onan's bit was about disobeying God, not about masturbation. God sez *nothing* about masturbation in the Bible, and I defy any Bible reader to come up with anything that shows it in full context.
And as to fornication....sex within a marriage without love is more of a sin than sex with someone you love that isn't married to you.
To be married to someone who thinks that sex is only for procreation must be pure hell.
I pity your wife, if you have one.
Go read the Bible sometime without the Dark Glasses.
Anyhoo.
People should lighten up. Life is too short to get your shorts in a bunch about whether or not the Japanese believe in your special brand of God or not.
In the point of view of serious Christian Fundies, the non-believers will be tossed into the Lake of Fire at the end of Revelations. For God to just simply toss away the non-Christians sounds to me to be elitist and definitely un-Christian in attitude. There's a paradox here, and I think it's because that some people are missing the entire point of Christianity.
As for schools, the reason Johnny can't read has more to do with fuzzy-minded academics who write tomes on what new teaching method they've invented but not tested, but then get implemented because some brain damaged school committes/boards of education that can't tell their collective asses from their elbows. The Sexy New Methods get implemented while the Tried And True gets tossed, to the detriment of all.
It has nothing to do with whether or not Johnny can get whacked by the teacher with a 2*4 or be subject to institutionalized prayer. The latter is a *bogus* issue in the first place because Johnny can pray *any time, anywhere, even silently, because God Hears All, doesn't He?*
OB anime:
I have a question, why does so much english dubbing Suck So Much? I mean, some of the translation in Ghost in the Shell sounded so stilted it made me cringe. It was a cool movie, but I think I would have rather bought the Japanese version with subtitles instead.
10 bux for an entire season of games, guaranteed, is not bad, I guess.
However, MLB can go suck eggs. As a used and abused New England Sports Fan (Redsox, Bruins, Celtics, and Patriots). From the scandalous machinations between certain owners and their home states/cities (redsox, patriots) and the insane ticket prices (all of the above) and the outrageous salaries paid to people who do NOT deserve them (see ticket prices), they can all just _blow me_
Seriously. I don't think I'm alone in being completely alienated from pro sports. I'd rather go down to the local highschool, college, or *sand lot softball field* than even listen to a Redsox game on the radio. You know what? It's far more fun than dealing with the madness of trying to get a decent seat at Fenway, or the boredom of listening to a game on the radio.
Seriously.
Couple this with the utter lack of sportsmanship among the pro players these days, and you'll have to drag me, kicking and screaming, to get me to go to a Game.
So yeah, if you really really need to listen to the games, even if they're blacked out, 9.95 for the whole season isn't all that bad, considering how much it costs to subscribe to ESPN or something. But I'm one of those guys who has been turned off so much by the behaviour of the players and the owners that even 10 bux a year is too much for something that churns my stomach.
No, this instrument will not see Earth sized extrasolar planets. Read the article.
This has been thought of before, and not even this past century, but only recently (past 20 years) has the tech been there to actually DO this. The optics and the placement of them, esp in the delay line, has to be quite precise. We're dealing with fractions of wavelengths here.
Basically it works like this: You have two telescopes, and the two light beams are brought together accurately so that they create interference fringes (hence the name interferometer). The interference fringes tell you about the light at a specific spot in the sky, in a very narrow angle (well, a REALLY REALLY narrow angle). From this, maps can be made of spots on very active stars, etc. (None of this is seen directly). Effectively, what you get is the same resolution of a theoretical mirror that's the same diameter of your baseline. You just don't get the light grabbing ablity of that theoretical mirror.
Dim light is the bane of interferometry. In an ideal world with ideal funding, interferometers would be nuked in favor of full sized optics kilometers across, but who's going to foot the bill?
The longer the baseline, the narrower the angle you can see, hence more resolution. Keck is a good start, but the baseline is way too narrow for what people are speculating on this weblog. Maybe someday when someone finds the funding, we'll have a space based interferometer with big mirrors and a few thousand klicks in between for a baseline.
Since when are ads supposed to be guaranteed to work? They're a gamble, and the net has become the biggest casino outside of Monte Carlo. Make them bigger you say...yeah, and piss off your potential customers? Go right ahead If ads get that large, I'll start being more religious about assigning the ad servers I come across to 127.0.0.1 in my/etc/hosts file.
That way, I won't see them *at all* and you can take your advertising, fold it up until it's all sharp corners, and stick it where it hurts most.
What strikes me as frightening is that in my discussions with various joe-sixpacks at work, that they would consider clones as somehow less-than-human.
Some of them are even Christian.
I'm sorry, but this attitude scares the living daylights out of me that *just because of his or her conception* that he or she can be considered non-human. This is the first step in considering such people as *expendable*. Consider what happened in WWII on both sides. Look at a Bugs Bunny cartoon from that era, vis-a-vis the "Yellow Peril" or at German propaganda concerning the Jews.
It's all a point of view that I hope I never EVER hold.
We are all here as human beings to get along as best we can. To say that some of us are not worthy of that is well....non-Christian and definitely anti-human on a grand scale.
The New England Wireless and Steam Museum is Rhode Island's Best Kept Secret when it comes to old technology. The 1907 Massie Station is the _oldest existing wireless station in the world_.
If you're a machinist or engineer or radio junkie, The tune-ups and steam-ups are not to be missed.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I grew up with cows.
They're *female*.
Why, on God's Green Earth does the Gateway Cow have a *male voice*?
CRTs can be rejuvenated. There's a device that tv-repair shops use to blast off the crap from the inside of the back end of the CRT (heater, grids, etc). 90 percent of the time it works and you get another 5 years out of the CRT, but it all depends if it's worth blowing 60 bucks (what I used to charge) on an old monitor.
If it's a Sony, and it's BIG, it's probably worth it. Otherwise, recycle.
And if you ACTUALLY DO have a copy of said OS, it is perfectly legal, even if it's not installed.
Just because Windows isn't installed doesn't mean you can't run WMP8 legally.
Simple.
At work, I'm the local geek, so I get asked all sorts of bizarre Windows questions (today, one was about flashing icons on his desktop. I can only guess he's running at 16 colors) and it strikes me that Windows isn't easy EITHER for neophytes. Just as people bitch and whine about Linux being difficult, being a newbie these days with all the crap that's thrown at ya from Redmond in its newest version of "simplicity" has to be daunting.
Sure, Linux can be difficult for someone used to a Windows universe, but that's no excuse for not using it as a desktop. I've left Windows about 4 years ago (or is it 5 now? ) and it strikes me that the questions I field about Windows are similar to the ones I used to _ask_ about Linux.
Fortunately for the people who ask me Windows questions, I'm not a rabid Linux groupie. So I do try to answer questions as truthfully as I can (heh heh) but I do mention from time to time, though, that Linux superior in many respects and say I'll volunteer to convert a system, but so far I've no takers...yet. I think the reason is that not enough people have *seen* a real Linux desktop (though the ones I've shown have been impressed).
I only see improvements and more acceptance of Linux in general in the future. As more people actually see Linux in action, and get a chance to compare it to offerings from Redmond, I think that performance and usability issues will be answered.
--
BMO
You know, I was brought up to be Helpful(TM)
In the winters, not only did I shovel our walk, but I went across the street and did theirs too.
It was *expected of me*, by my parents.
And I did it, gladly.
It was THE WAY THINGS ARE DONE.
Dare I do it now?
No.
If I did it now, and someone slipped on his/her walk, I'd be sued. Either that or I'd be arrested for tresspassing.
Whatever. The lawyers and the feds and the townie cops have fucked it up for all of us. There is no longer any room to breathe, to get to know your neighbors, to even say Hello. There was a time when neighbors looked out for each other (10 years ago! wow! that's a long time!), but everyone is a stranger now, and you should never talk to strangers.
(or tell them of web holes)
Have a nice day!
--
BMO
...will no longer look out for his neighbors.
To put it bluntly, I had to deal with the local Police Department, yesterday, because someone had broken into a neighbor of mine's apartment. After reading this article, I'll stay uninvolved from now on.
Thank you, FBI, for making my life simpler.
Hands down, I have to say it's SuSE. I've been with it since 6.0 and I've tried others in the meantime, and I always go *back* to whatever is current with SuSE. Why? It's probably the most *organized* distribution out there, plus it has the best documentation *bar none*. I tried Mandrake 7.2 and Debian. Talk about polar opposites, Mandrake was insanely easy to install, but chaotic once I started poking around in the guts (lots of "standard" stuff was just simply *missing*) and Debian, well, let's just say at the time the install was needlessly complicated for no reason whatsoever. (To be more specific, Debian pissed me off because I thought we had evolved since the first edition of Slackware, which was *simpler* to install than Debian. I was appalled at Debian's obfuscation of the install process. YMMV)
I installed SuSE 7.2 the other day, and it was well laid out and simple to install. It wasn't as automagic as Mandrake's install, but it's pretty close. I got Personal Edition this time around because I was looking for a more lightweight version that was better edited, and I'm pretty happy with it. They didn't leave out any of the essentials for a workstation, while making it lighter than the 7 cd/ 1 dvd Pro Edition.
Gawd, I sound like a commercial.
Anyway, that's my view. All flames will be printed out on TP and used to wipe my butt.
Oh, and one other thing...if any SuSE guys are out there, please PLEASE keep YaST2 as a separate program! In 7.2 the modules for it are integratable into KDE's Control Center. While this is more consistent and convenient, it screws with my ability to update KDE from source code.
No, I'm not going to use it for "production". It sits in my back room, for useful and useless projects.
And yes, I do like to go back in time sometimes and fire up an old game or two or three. I'm not putting down the nostalgia angle, but I do have an issue with calling these things ancient. They're really not that old. Most of the users on this weblog were around when the machines you speak of were introduced (avg 25 yr old geek was born in 1976, and was banging away at an apple IIe at the age of 9, or in my case, 15).
However, when you get into stuff that your grandparents used, it's a world away. The NAZIs were running rampant all over Europe, we had just been attacked almost exactly 2 months before by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, getting our wake-up call, television was a novelty for the wealthy and the geeks (ever see a mechanical tv?), Stalin was our *ally*, and a "computer" back then was a human being.
I remember 1976. It wasn't all that different from today.
Oh geez, I mean really....
20 years old is _ancient_?
I picked up some old tech last Saturday for 15 dollars at a yard sale.
It's a Singer 128-18 sewing machine assembled on February 11, 1942, shortly before Singer stopped making consumer sewing machines to contribute to the war effort.
(btw, I must say that 1942's version of "consumer level" is about the same as 2001's "industrial" level. It's got a cast-iron body and base.)
All of it works. Flawlessly. It even has the (now very delicate) owner's manual. How much repair did I have to do? I only cleaned it with spray cleaner, to get the nicotine off of it.
You want old tech? There ya go. It's even still useful after all these decades, too. Compare that to an old Altair, which is only fit for sitting in a display cabinet.
Dick Cheney: SOMEONE SET UP US THE WORM!
George Bush: MAIN SCREEN TURN ON!
George Bush: IT'S YOU!!
Li Peng: YOU HAVE NO CHANCE. MAKE YOUR TIME.
Li Peng: HAHAHAHAHA
_This_ is what IBM should have used against MS, way back when we were getting nuns talking about "this internet thing"
I hope IBM's billion dollars isn't going to be used for nuns again, seriously.
..start cheezy music...
Just put this powder in the water with the rest of your clothes and it magically removes the organic and inorganic dirt! No more stinky clothes! No more stains!
Soap! Use some today!
...end cheezy music...
Seriously though, battling the organic dirt with bacteria is only solving half the problem. Where has the common sense gone?
I knew I was right, but I didn't feel like working it out; neither did he.
Apropos, no? I propose a new html tag for "I Know I'm Right But It's Too Much Work To Prove", called the Fermat tag.
Do you think that he actually had a proof or do you think he was bluffing? Note, I'm not putting the guy down; I wish that I could, when I die, leave people scratching their heads as much as he did.
To expound for the people who are curious:
Fermat's Last Theorem states that x^n + y^n = z^n has no non-zero integer solutions for x, y and z when n > 2.
Well of course! You say. It's common sense!
Try proving it.
It took until 1993 (from when Fermat wrote his claim in 1630) for a brit named Andrew Wiles to nail it down.
http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Hi stTopics/Fermat's_last_theorem.html
Wiles' proof is still under scrutiny, as the last bit of the article says:
It's an interesting story, to say the least.
YOU should lay off the crack pipe...
He's right. If you decrease the volume, the RATIO of surface area to volume goes UP.
<Fermat>
I have a proof for this, but it's too large to write in this margin.
</Fermat>
:-P
This has real world implications, especially for biology. A shrew has problems keeping its body temp up because it radiates too much heat for its body size (see ratio above) so it has to eat, practically continuously, to be able to expend the energy to merely *heat its body*.
Compare this to larger mammals which have less of a problem with temperature regulation.
She asks for either $5800 ($500 for breach of contract, $300 as compensation for her inconvenience & $5000 for punitive damages)
Which, in US Dollars, is about equal to a cup of coffee and a bagel.
SuSE already does this.
.de, I forgot) and if it doesn't resolve it tells you that the nameserver is bakey (and says that it couldn't resolve SuSE).
When wvdial runs through its scripts, after it gets the nameserver, it will try to resolve www.suse.com (or
Whether or not SuSE actually uses this data, I have no idea.
It's not in the documentation, but it's hardly hidden. You'd have to be blind not to see it scroll by on a bad setup or baked DNS.
It IS there, however. Anyone know anything else about this?
"Ask the cop on the corner; ask the cop in the store; ask the cop on the rooftop; ask the cop in the woodpile; ask the cop that's knock, knock, knockin' at your back door."
*knock knock*
Go ahead, ask him!
-Firesign Theatre
*sigh*
If you ask any ISP administrator what the single-most-popular activity is on the net, it's porn. Why? It's because _people like it_ in spite of what some holier-than-thou fascist academics/activists/whatever seem to think is somehow anti-woman, misogynistic, neanderthal behaviour.
Some people like it. Big woop. Live and let live. Why should a vocal minority have power over what a store/website sells? There's no victory here, except for the people who can't seem to untwist their undies. Their problem, though is that this won't satisfy their thirst to get everyone thinking in their little narrow myopic ways.
Some of the more educated female friends of mine happen to be big fans of "good porn". We trade "the good stuff, here, check it out". I find this give-and-take gives me a much deeper perspective on the female psyche than I would have if we had never done this.
The reason for porn's existence is that it's *human* to like sex. The absolutely horrid example set by the anal-retentive (Gotta love Freud) among us in society as to how we should treat our fellow human beings just floors me. People are brought up to think that sex is dirty, evil, whatever, only (if they're lucky) to find that it was all lies, all of it. All the guilt, heaped upon someone's soul for feeling *human* for no purpose at all except to satisfy someone else's twisted/perverted views on sex is enough to drive some people nuts (I've seen this first hand).
It's about power folks. It's about the power to make someone else feel like crap because they have human urges/desires. Once you can do that, you have power over other facets of their lives. It's the power to make a company do something completely opposite of what their real customers want, simply because it's not "politically correct". What a travesty.
--
BMO
See, I didn't say *all* english dubbing sucked, I said *much* of it does. It gives me weasel room here. But your points proved my initial statement that it's not the general trend for english dubs to be _good_.
:-)
Yes, there are some out there that are _excellent_, unfortunately sometimes it sounds like the US director has decided to get Joe Acting Student to do it on an internship level.
*sigh* Ah well. Unfortunately the Golden Age of Radio no longer exists, so there's no real demand for Voice Actors like there was (and back then it was _very_ respectable to be a voice actor). Maybe with anime getting more popular, there will be more demand for trained voice actors (and higher pay and more respect as a result).
What I'd like to see in the meantime is Firesign Theatre do at least a few dubs. It'd make them money and the dubs would be excellent and...uh...creative.
"It's just this little chromium switch here. [click] Ahh, you people are SO superstitious!"
As for my previous rant about Christians, don't get me wrong, I've worked in a company that was owned/operated by a "Born Again Christian" family. Nobody forced their views on me, I was treated with respect, and I gave the respect right back.
It's the only job I ever had that when I had to leave (got transferred) I literally cried.
Contrast this to someone who I currently work with, when I was making a comment about the sulfur based cutting oil (I'm a machinist) being stinky and smelling like brimstone, my cow-orker said that I "better get used to it".
WTF. I mean, really.
There are Christians that do *get it* and there are some (some people would say the vast majority, but I won't go there) that look down their noses at anyone who's a non-believer.
Whatever. I have been chased away.
--
Boyle M. Owl
*argh*
Ok, I know, Don't Feed The Trolls, but this USian Fundie Craaaaap is just that, Crap.
The words "one nation under God" were NOT part of the Pledge of Allegiance until the Eisenhower Administration, and the "Fundamentalists" seem to be the ones spreading the misinformation that somehow this country was founded on their special brand of Christianity. (It wasn't. People like Franklin toured different churches, checking things out, and to top it off, Franklin was a certified Dirty Old Man...my hero)
I should also proudly add that my State (Rhode Island, soon to appear on a Quarter in your pocket) was founded by someone who had, er, _religious and political issues_ with the _powers that be_ in Boston.
Unless my history is bad, Ike wasn't a Founding Father (TM).
As far as sexuality goes. My country is so damn schizophrenic (The US) because of the Right Wing Nuts like Falwell et. al, who are products of bible-thumping-sex-scared-morons who forget that the reference to "fornication" in the Bible isn't about premarital sex, but a general reference to sex without love. The same goes for the misreading about Onan, and the misreading about why God nuked Sodom.
God's main reason to nuke Sodom was because the residents were "Rich With Bread" while they didn't give a tinker's damn about the poor, and Onan's bit was about disobeying God, not about masturbation. God sez *nothing* about masturbation in the Bible, and I defy any Bible reader to come up with anything that shows it in full context.
And as to fornication....sex within a marriage without love is more of a sin than sex with someone you love that isn't married to you.
To be married to someone who thinks that sex is only for procreation must be pure hell.
I pity your wife, if you have one.
Go read the Bible sometime without the Dark Glasses.
Anyhoo.
People should lighten up. Life is too short to get your shorts in a bunch about whether or not the Japanese believe in your special brand of God or not.
In the point of view of serious Christian Fundies, the non-believers will be tossed into the Lake of Fire at the end of Revelations. For God to just simply toss away the non-Christians sounds to me to be elitist and definitely un-Christian in attitude. There's a paradox here, and I think it's because that some people are missing the entire point of Christianity.
As for schools, the reason Johnny can't read has more to do with fuzzy-minded academics who write tomes on what new teaching method they've invented but not tested, but then get implemented because some brain damaged school committes/boards of education that can't tell their collective asses from their elbows. The Sexy New Methods get implemented while the Tried And True gets tossed, to the detriment of all.
It has nothing to do with whether or not Johnny can get whacked by the teacher with a 2*4 or be subject to institutionalized prayer. The latter is a *bogus* issue in the first place because Johnny can pray *any time, anywhere, even silently, because God Hears All, doesn't He?*
OB anime:
I have a question, why does so much english dubbing Suck So Much? I mean, some of the translation in Ghost in the Shell sounded so stilted it made me cringe. It was a cool movie, but I think I would have rather bought the Japanese version with subtitles instead.
:-/
10 bux for an entire season of games, guaranteed, is not bad, I guess.
However, MLB can go suck eggs. As a used and abused New England Sports Fan (Redsox, Bruins, Celtics, and Patriots). From the scandalous machinations between certain owners and their home states/cities (redsox, patriots) and the insane ticket prices (all of the above) and the outrageous salaries paid to people who do NOT deserve them (see ticket prices), they can all just _blow me_
Seriously. I don't think I'm alone in being completely alienated from pro sports. I'd rather go down to the local highschool, college, or *sand lot softball field* than even listen to a Redsox game on the radio. You know what? It's far more fun than dealing with the madness of trying to get a decent seat at Fenway, or the boredom of listening to a game on the radio.
Seriously.
Couple this with the utter lack of sportsmanship among the pro players these days, and you'll have to drag me, kicking and screaming, to get me to go to a Game.
So yeah, if you really really need to listen to the games, even if they're blacked out, 9.95 for the whole season isn't all that bad, considering how much it costs to subscribe to ESPN or something. But I'm one of those guys who has been turned off so much by the behaviour of the players and the owners that even 10 bux a year is too much for something that churns my stomach.
IANAPA (I am not a professional astronomer)
No, this instrument will not see Earth sized extrasolar planets. Read the article.
This has been thought of before, and not even this past century, but only recently (past 20 years) has the tech been there to actually DO this. The optics and the placement of them, esp in the delay line, has to be quite precise. We're dealing with fractions of wavelengths here.
Basically it works like this: You have two telescopes, and the two light beams are brought together accurately so that they create interference fringes (hence the name interferometer). The interference fringes tell you about the light at a specific spot in the sky, in a very narrow angle (well, a REALLY REALLY narrow angle). From this, maps can be made of spots on very active stars, etc. (None of this is seen directly). Effectively, what you get is the same resolution of a theoretical mirror that's the same diameter of your baseline. You just don't get the light grabbing ablity of that theoretical mirror.
Dim light is the bane of interferometry. In an ideal world with ideal funding, interferometers would be nuked in favor of full sized optics kilometers across, but who's going to foot the bill?
The longer the baseline, the narrower the angle you can see, hence more resolution. Keck is a good start, but the baseline is way too narrow for what people are speculating on this weblog. Maybe someday when someone finds the funding, we'll have a space based interferometer with big mirrors and a few thousand klicks in between for a baseline.
Since when are ads supposed to be guaranteed to work? They're a gamble, and the net has become the biggest casino outside of Monte Carlo. Make them bigger you say...yeah, and piss off your potential customers? Go right ahead If ads get that large, I'll start being more religious about assigning the ad servers I come across to 127.0.0.1 in my /etc/hosts file.
That way, I won't see them *at all* and you can take your advertising, fold it up until it's all sharp corners, and stick it where it hurts most.
What strikes me as frightening is that in my discussions with various joe-sixpacks at work, that they would consider clones as somehow less-than-human.
Some of them are even Christian.
I'm sorry, but this attitude scares the living daylights out of me that *just because of his or her conception* that he or she can be considered non-human. This is the first step in considering such people as *expendable*. Consider what happened in WWII on both sides. Look at a Bugs Bunny cartoon from that era, vis-a-vis the "Yellow Peril" or at German propaganda concerning the Jews.
It's all a point of view that I hope I never EVER hold.
We are all here as human beings to get along as best we can. To say that some of us are not worthy of that is well....non-Christian and definitely anti-human on a grand scale.
For a true Geek Experience, go HERE:
http://users.ids.net/~newsm/
The New England Wireless and Steam Museum is Rhode Island's Best Kept Secret when it comes to old technology. The 1907 Massie Station is the _oldest existing wireless station in the world_.
If you're a machinist or engineer or radio junkie, The tune-ups and steam-ups are not to be missed.