Well, considering he's in the Lucasian Chair, I'd say that the University of Cambridge seems to think he's a good physicist. It at least puts him in the same company as Newton, Babbage, and Dirac, names that I recognize even as a non-physicist.
I'm from Japan, and I'm sometimes amazed at the attitudes of people back home in Japan. I was raised in California, among lots of different ethnicities, so it's not uncomfortable for me to be among foreigners, but to people raised in Japan, it's really different. Japan can feel like a really small town when dealing with outsiders sometimes.
The closest thing I can imagine to Japan's racial attitudes in the US is something like a totally white community in the midwest, in the '50s. It's not that they actively hate other races, it's just that they grow up in an environment where everyone's the same race, and there are entrenched cultural expectations of what being a 'proper' citizen is. This results in a culture where there's lots of apprehention about foreigners, because they're an 'unknown element' that could disrupt social norms.
This, combined with the techno-phillia that's been in Japan since the '50s, is what makes robots more acceptable.
Another might be that robots can be programmed, foreigners cannot. This might be an important distinction in a society where education is seen as an important social stabilizer. The fact is, it might be easier to program robots to be 'Japanese' than naturalize foreigners, who will not be accepted as 'Japanese', anyway. There are still thousands of ethnic Koreans who were born there and aren't citizens because they have Korean names, and Japan's national identity is based heavily on race. A robot doesn't really have a racial identity aside from what it is programmed to be, I would guess.
Anyways, what I am trying to say is that the reason Japan prefers robots to immigrants is that they can be a very cosmopolitan, modern and advanced place as far as technology and consumer culture goes, but they can also be like a rural backwater as far as outsiders go.
Pah! 'Silicon Heaven'? That is where all the wussy VB programmers and web designers go, to sit on their fat tushes and wallow in their unmanly cheese-snacks.
REAL programmers go to VAXhalla, to feast on freshly killed bear, drink ale, and prepare themselves for Redmondrok, the coming battle with the forces of Evil. They shall spend their days honing their skills in the brutal arts of C, assembly and COBOL, whose pain and toil shall make them even greaer warriors than before! Truly, the Gods shall sing their praises!!
And you want to go to some pansy-ass 'Silicon Heaven'? True warrior-programmers would not even think of such a thing!
No, I disagree. I think that one problem with the "many eyes find bugs" model as applied to wikipedia is that it's hard to prove a negative, especially if it's in a area of expertise that most people would not know much about. It helps if it's plausible, of course.
If I were to, say, come up with a fake article about a fake programming language called 'Bobby' that is a derivative of C, how would you know if it's false? Many programmers come up with their own languages, and there's no central reference for them, so there is no way to prove that there isn't such a thing. I could even claim that it's a NDA'd language used only inside a certain company's embedded projects, and I would have a plausible excuse for not having references.
How would one deal with that kind of hoax in wikipedia?
Speaking of which, does anyone know why they don't have heated can vending machines in the states? I've only seen the coffe machines where they pour coffee into a paper cup over here, never a hot can machine.
Are they common everywhere outside of the states, or is it just Japan?
And yeah, they do rock, esp. their canned coffee. We only recently started getting canned coffee in the states, and it's that overblack Starbucks kind...
And hey, cool name, just started reading True Names by coincidence:)
Hey Tynes, get a clue
on
Why We Fight
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Wow, that was the stupidest political rant I've read recently, which is pretty bad considering how many we see on Slashdot.
I especially love this part: "A friend of mine studied political science at Yale. In one class, the professor posted a game scenario: You are the newly empowered dictator of a third-world country. Your people face famine, plague, poverty and unrest. What policies would you enact to solve these problems? (Fans of Tropico, you know how this works.) My friend's solution? Death camps. Round up the sick, the lame, the infertile, the ignorant, the useless, the unproductive and execute them. --- The professor was overjoyed. Finally, a student saw the point of the exercise: making comprehensible what looks incomprehensible when viewed through the media, understanding how Papa Doc and Pol Pot and all their ilk come to power and why they make the decisions they do. --- My friend figured it out. He played the scenario and won. He saved the Kobayashi Maru. It should come as no surprise that he was a hardcore gamer."
That's the most retarded economic/political idea I've read in a long, long, time. It would devastate that country and put it *back* several decades, as your state destroys the people who create your nation's wealth. One of the few things that Adam Smith and Marx would agree on is that a nation's wealth comes from the productivity of its workers - and no, having the government kill off the 'unproductive' would not help at all. High unemployment is a sign of poor utilization of labor, not of defects in the population.
How well off would the U.S. have been in WWII if they had 'liquidated' all the unemployed during the depression? And did you notice how many great scientists came to the U.S. fleeing death camps like his friend proposed, to avoid being labeled as 'unproductive to society'? Some of them helped build the A-bomb, I'm sure you've heard of that? Point is, governments who make judgements about who is 'useful' to society and tries to destory those who aren't usually harm their society itself.
Notice the examples he cites - Papa Doc and Pol Pot - are not known to have improved their countries at all. Even cursory knowledge of history would clue you in to that. This is why Poli Sci people should never be trusted with anything more important than a Sim city or civilization.
Congratulations, John "Dumbass" Tynes, you've managed to give gamers an even worse reputation than before - now we're not just mindless killers, we're closet fascists waiting to have our putsch, too.
Don't worry, I'm sure Eric Schmidt or Sergey Brin will just die for your sins and be resurrected. And their stock price will go way up, to heaven! Hooray!
The scary thing is, I can imagine "Googlism" becoming a real religion someday...
I should be working on my CS final now, but whatever...
Binary is the simplest number system that can be used, and any other number can be written using binary. So for most purposes, binary is preferable because the implementation is simpler and it is as capable as any other numeral system. However, it is possible to create computers that use higher base math.
I think the main difference is that in mechanical systems, it's easier to go with decimal since cogs and gears lend themselves to having ten digits instead of two.
I disagree. Postmodernists don't have much of a power base outside of college campuses, in fact I don't think I've ever had a run-in with a postmodernist outside of school, or had a postmodernist come to my door to convert me to their cause.
IDers, on the other hand, are everywhere. They're the ones in charge, and the ones who put their candidate in the White House. They run churches, companies, media outlets, and yes, schools. Compared to the vast numbers, wealth and influence of IDer's, postmodernists are like a garage band of middle schoolers trying to compete with a corporate-created boy band on a world tour. They're rank amatuers, because they are content to have their little fiefdom in academia, while IDers take over the world.
And it's not unreasonable for people outside of religion to assume that all religious people are IDers, since the most prominent attacks on evolution going back to Darwin's days have been from religious leaders. Also, atheists have been actively supporting evolution theory for some time. The religious-but-evolutionist crowd may be the majority, but they are a sadly silent one. The voice of religion has been hijacked by the IDers.
It's natural that atheists would assume all religious people are IDers, much like someone from Palestine might assume all Jews are out to get them - that's the only side they see of the other people.
You're the Hustler generation, who still want to retain some kind of pretention to importance and merit while doing worthless crap. They are the Goatse generation, who just don't give a rip whether you think it's art, important, or worth your time - it's going to get posted online, whether you like it or not.
You guys still seem to be of the opinion that putting something online should mean that thing has some kind of merit to it. This isn't really how it works anymore, people are using the web as more of a scratch-pad for scribbles and everyday stuff, it's a very casual medium nowadays.
The thinking behind the blog generation is "Let's just put everything online, and let Google sort them out." Stuff on Flickr or livejournal isn't on the level of National Geographic or New Yorker, and it's not supposed to be - it's just the casual happenings of daily life.
It's actually like David Brin's Transparent Society, except it's fueled by individual narratives instead of surveilance.
Face it, you (and I) might hate AOL, geocities, livejournal, or whatever for putting a lot of clueless people online, but in the history of the internet, those things are going to be seen as more important than Slashdot or kuro5hin precisely *because* they popularized the medium. I saw in one of your other posts that you don't like red staters and think they should stay off your precious internet. Well that's too bad, the internet isn't going to be restricted to people who you like, *everyone* is going to be online whether you like it or not - did you know Kim Il Jong has an email address, and there are internet cafes in Mogadishu?
The internet is becoming a reflection of the real world rather than geek culture, and I think that will be a good thing in the long run, even if it puts more idiots online.
Sorry about the hostility, but I couldn't help but notice that for a site you claim to not give a shit about, you seem to spend a lot of time talking about myspace - ten posts today on the topic. I'm starting to get the feeling that you're just bitter because the internet is being taken over by 'lusers' and isn't the technical geek playground it once was. Are you really any different from the teenage 'punks' who spend hours online posting about how much they hate Avril Lavine, and how they liked their favorite band until they 'sold out'?
If you really don't care about myspace, why did you spend 5 hours on a saturday posting comments on Slashdot about it?
Usenet and other more appropriate and useful places. Oh my gawd, the Apocalypse is upon us!
Seriously, though, get a grip, old-timer. I had never even heard of myspace until I overheard college kids talking about it, and I still have not bothered to go there. Just not my kind of place.
That said, I think you are taking this waaay too personally. I mean, why are you bothering to post some rant about a site you don't even go to, and then lambast others for wasting their time writing useless stuff? It seems to me that you are doing exactly the same thing, wasting bandwidth just to get your opinions across to people who don't even know you, on a 'news for nerds' site, no less.
Just because the myspace/livejournal crowd doesn't tickle your interest is no reason to flame them, they are after all just seeking the same things that we are - a community of like-minded people to chat with. Who cares if their lives aren't profound? Are Slashdotters any different?
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail.
You will find that a lot of the phrases used in B5 are allusions to something or other, either historical or literary. "Peace in our time", for example.
Ahahaha, I can see it now... some kid will be watching saturday morning cartoons, and then Gabe and Tycho will be on, and be like, "This channel lacks wang. Let's go to Cartoon Network."
"Mommy, what's 'wang'?"
And soon thereafter, he develops an unnatural aversion to fruit juices...
Um, no that is incorrect - McCarthy's actions were within his constitutional powers, which makes it all the more scarier.
The constitution provides for immunity from libel and slander suits for anything said in congress, which McCarthy abused by accusing various people of being communists during hearings. This often ruined their lives. Since most of the people McCarthy accused were not actually communists, they could have sued him for libel if he had not had the congressional immunity.
Since the hearings were invesetigating alleged communist or Soviet infiltration of the State Dept. and other agencies, it was clearly constitutional, even if it was abused.
One has to remember that much of the damage from McCarthyism, like the blacklistings, refusal to employ people, or simple shunning, were carried out by private citizens who were whipped into a hysteria. The constitution cannot stop the people from tearing their society apart with fear, unfortunately.
The design did not go all the way to the floor, both troughs were about the same height off the floor(maybe about knee high), and they both had jets of water pouring into them, so I couldn't tell which one was the urinal. They were of slightly different designs, though, so I assume one was for peeing and the other was for washing.
To answer your other question,yes, I live in the US, but I am from Japan and have been to western Europe(Fr, UK, Swiss, Be, Ne), and I have never seen a wall urinal like that in those countries. In the US, the Seattle ferry is the only time I've encountered it. Not elsewhere on the west coast(CA, OR, WA, NV), in the south(TN, AR, MS, AL), or the gulf states(LA, FL).
In Europe/Japan/US, we always have individual urinals, either going all the way to the floor or raised up. Sometimes they have little dividers between them. I think the reason for individual urinals is that it gives guys a specific place to pee, and they don't have to think too hard about how far to stand from someone. I've noticed in the US, guys don't like having another guy standing next to them while they pee, so they go to the furthest urinal from the guy already there... that is, if they don't just go in the stalls. So they might be a little uncomfortable peeing next to guys with nothing standing between them or keeping them at one spot.
Wall urinals do sound practical, though. Are they the only kind in Australia?
I know you're kidding, but I thinik I've done that before, at least inadvertantly.
I was on the ferry that connects Seattle with some big island or something(yeah, can you tell I was a tourist?), and I went to pee. When I got in the men's room, I was greeted by a sight I'd never beheld before: instead of individual urinals, they had a big long trough that ran the length of the bathroom. Which was rather ingenous and clever, I thought. But one problem - there were *two* troughs of different designs, one apparently to pee in, the other to wash your hand in. They both had water squirting into them from above, so you could wash your hand in either one - but which?!
I hesitated, and watched what the other men did - but apparently they were also tourists, and they waffled for a while trying to figure out which one was the urinal. After a while, my bladder was starting to get the better of me, so I just decided to pee in the one that was further from the door and washed in the one that was closer. I still don't know if I peed in the right one.
Wheee, I love it when geeks spout off on economics, it allows me to get modded up by correcting them:) I am not a lawyer, but I did take a college economics course, where they covered basic laws governing the market.
1. They have nowhere near a monopoly in the game market. So no, there is no oversight, nor should there be. Actually, it is against antitrust law to take a monopoly in one field and use it as an unfair advantage in others. One example you might be familiar with is how AT&T gave away UNIX, because competing in the computer field would have been illegal because they were a phone monopoly. After their breakup, they started charging money. I'll leave the issue of whether MS is a real monopoly aside, but suffice to say that you do not have to be the sole player in a field to break antitrust law.
2. If this is "dumping" then you should jump up and down about gas stations (gas is often sold at or near cost), Coke and Pepsi (with a true monopoly, fountain drinks are sold at or below cost), all cell phone companies (my cell phones were all free), etc. It has been a while since I checked, but IIRC, selling at or below cost is okay if you're doing it to benefit your company directly in some way. It is illegal when you do it for the purpose of hurting your competitors. That is, you can't do something where you know you will kill your company if you keep doing it but you're hoping your competitors will die from trying to match your prices or be priced out of the market. In your examples, the service providers pay for your phones because they can make money off the service, and entice new customers with phones. Gas is sold at least at cost to the station, as far as I can tell. It would not suprise me if gas stations make their money off of their mini-stores nowadays, though. I have never heard of fountain drinks being sold at cost, I have always heard they have ridiculous markup. Are you talking about as sold by the stores to you, or as sold to the stores by Coke/Pepsi?
3. They're not competing on quality? I don't exactly have $400 burning a hole in my pocket that I have to spend on a game machine. Considering that the XBox 360 is the most expensive console out there right now, there is absolutely no dumping going on. True, the above statements should not be taken to mean that I think MS is dumping the 360, just that the PP's arguments are not correct economically or legally. AFAIK, the DOJ is not even looking into whether MS is doing anything illegal with the 360.
That reminds me of an actual debate people had about ballistic gel.
There are people who say that shooting ballistic gel isn't a good approximation of shooting a human, because it doesn't have bone, or muscle or tendons. Those would tend to lessen the blast effects of a bullet going through a human, supposedly. Do you think ballistics gel is a good simulation of shooting humans?
Also, there are so many anecdotes and theories about which gun or caliber is 'more powerful', with no emperical testing (for obvious reasons). Do you think you'll ever devote a show to 'gun myths', specifically over which calibers are more powerful?
Parent is correct, go look up Richard Steele, who heads something called Open Source Solutions (oss.net), and basically advocates that the U.S. spend a lot more time monitoring 'open source' info, instead of spending billions to get spy satellite imagery that tells us nothing about intent.
Interestingly, he has given some speeches at hacker conventions, such as at H2k2 and the Fifth HOPE. You can download his speeches if you follow the links.
I believe the press also uses the term "open source" to refer to a public statement.
It's pretty funny to see Slashdot types get upset over people "stealing" their terms, when those terms are actually older than their use of them... Do they realize that outside of Slashdot, terms like "developer" or "editor" mean totally different things from how we use them?
It may be hard to believe, but the president of my former Linux Users Group actually met his girlfriend on Yahoo personals. She's cute and quite geeky, and worked in the corrections field with mental patients so she knew how to deal with crazy geeks:)
I figure if it can work for him, there must be hope for the rest of us:)
Yeah, but imagine dating the kind of people that frequent Slashdot?
"Re: Date tonight (Score: 2, Informative) Oh my gawd, DO NOT date this person, date turned out to be a Goatse link:( My butt still hurts... Other than that, nice date, pleasant chatting over good dinner."
"Re: Date tonight (Score: 1) Hi, my name is tubgurl, I am intrigued by the report and I would like to arrainge a date..."
Slashdot Mirror
Well, considering he's in the Lucasian Chair, I'd say that the University of Cambridge seems to think he's a good physicist. It at least puts him in the same company as Newton, Babbage, and Dirac, names that I recognize even as a non-physicist.
I'm from Japan, and I'm sometimes amazed at the attitudes of people back home in Japan. I was raised in California, among lots of different ethnicities, so it's not uncomfortable for me to be among foreigners, but to people raised in Japan, it's really different. Japan can feel like a really small town when dealing with outsiders sometimes.
The closest thing I can imagine to Japan's racial attitudes in the US is something like a totally white community in the midwest, in the '50s. It's not that they actively hate other races, it's just that they grow up in an environment where everyone's the same race, and there are entrenched cultural expectations of what being a 'proper' citizen is. This results in a culture where there's lots of apprehention about foreigners, because they're an 'unknown element' that could disrupt social norms.
This, combined with the techno-phillia that's been in Japan since the '50s, is what makes robots more acceptable.
Another might be that robots can be programmed, foreigners cannot. This might be an important distinction in a society where education is seen as an important social stabilizer. The fact is, it might be easier to program robots to be 'Japanese' than naturalize foreigners, who will not be accepted as 'Japanese', anyway. There are still thousands of ethnic Koreans who were born there and aren't citizens because they have Korean names, and Japan's national identity is based heavily on race. A robot doesn't really have a racial identity aside from what it is programmed to be, I would guess.
Anyways, what I am trying to say is that the reason Japan prefers robots to immigrants is that they can be a very cosmopolitan, modern and advanced place as far as technology and consumer culture goes, but they can also be like a rural backwater as far as outsiders go.
Pah! 'Silicon Heaven'? That is where all the wussy VB programmers and web designers go, to sit on their fat tushes and wallow in their unmanly cheese-snacks.
REAL programmers go to VAXhalla, to feast on freshly killed bear, drink ale, and prepare themselves for Redmondrok, the coming battle with the forces of Evil. They shall spend their days honing their skills in the brutal arts of C, assembly and COBOL, whose pain and toil shall make them even greaer warriors than before! Truly, the Gods shall sing their praises!!
And you want to go to some pansy-ass 'Silicon Heaven'? True warrior-programmers would not even think of such a thing!
For a moment I read that as "Jurrasic Park 360 stock moves slowly". Holy shit, Spielberg and Chrichton can really crank them out, eh?
Maybe they should replace the '6' with a 'D', it might sell more units.
This might be the first console to be beaten at launch by something two generations behind.
Of course they don't like it - it's big, fat, white and noisy, just like most Americans.
Hey, at least it doesn't run Windows.
No, I disagree. I think that one problem with the "many eyes find bugs" model as applied to wikipedia is that it's hard to prove a negative, especially if it's in a area of expertise that most people would not know much about. It helps if it's plausible, of course.
If I were to, say, come up with a fake article about a fake programming language called 'Bobby' that is a derivative of C, how would you know if it's false? Many programmers come up with their own languages, and there's no central reference for them, so there is no way to prove that there isn't such a thing. I could even claim that it's a NDA'd language used only inside a certain company's embedded projects, and I would have a plausible excuse for not having references.
How would one deal with that kind of hoax in wikipedia?
The sad thing is, that would be an improvement, as I've yet to notice BB or SM make a dupe post or obvious grammar error.
Speaking of which, does anyone know why they don't have heated can vending machines in the states? I've only seen the coffe machines where they pour coffee into a paper cup over here, never a hot can machine.
:)
Are they common everywhere outside of the states, or is it just Japan?
And yeah, they do rock, esp. their canned coffee. We only recently started getting canned coffee in the states, and it's that overblack Starbucks kind...
And hey, cool name, just started reading True Names by coincidence
Wow, that was the stupidest political rant I've read recently, which is pretty bad considering how many we see on Slashdot.
I especially love this part: "A friend of mine studied political science at Yale. In one class, the professor posted a game scenario: You are the newly empowered dictator of a third-world country. Your people face famine, plague, poverty and unrest. What policies would you enact to solve these problems? (Fans of Tropico, you know how this works.) My friend's solution? Death camps. Round up the sick, the lame, the infertile, the ignorant, the useless, the unproductive and execute them.
---
The professor was overjoyed. Finally, a student saw the point of the exercise: making comprehensible what looks incomprehensible when viewed through the media, understanding how Papa Doc and Pol Pot and all their ilk come to power and why they make the decisions they do.
---
My friend figured it out. He played the scenario and won. He saved the Kobayashi Maru. It should come as no surprise that he was a hardcore gamer."
That's the most retarded economic/political idea I've read in a long, long, time. It would devastate that country and put it *back* several decades, as your state destroys the people who create your nation's wealth. One of the few things that Adam Smith and Marx would agree on is that a nation's wealth comes from the productivity of its workers - and no, having the government kill off the 'unproductive' would not help at all. High unemployment is a sign of poor utilization of labor, not of defects in the population.
How well off would the U.S. have been in WWII if they had 'liquidated' all the unemployed during the depression? And did you notice how many great scientists came to the U.S. fleeing death camps like his friend proposed, to avoid being labeled as 'unproductive to society'? Some of them helped build the A-bomb, I'm sure you've heard of that? Point is, governments who make judgements about who is 'useful' to society and tries to destory those who aren't usually harm their society itself.
Notice the examples he cites - Papa Doc and Pol Pot - are not known to have improved their countries at all. Even cursory knowledge of history would clue you in to that. This is why Poli Sci people should never be trusted with anything more important than a Sim city or civilization.
Congratulations, John "Dumbass" Tynes, you've managed to give gamers an even worse reputation than before - now we're not just mindless killers, we're closet fascists waiting to have our putsch, too.
Don't worry, I'm sure Eric Schmidt or Sergey Brin will just die for your sins and be resurrected. And their stock price will go way up, to heaven! Hooray!
The scary thing is, I can imagine "Googlism" becoming a real religion someday...
You mean, a tiny brontosaurus with shiny, glowing buttocks mooning the camera?
Yes, now I've seen everything.
I should be working on my CS final now, but whatever...
Binary is the simplest number system that can be used, and any other number can be written using binary. So for most purposes, binary is preferable because the implementation is simpler and it is as capable as any other numeral system. However, it is possible to create computers that use higher base math.
You are assuming that computers have to use electronic logic gates, which they do not. Charles Babbage's Analytical engine and Difference engine used decimal notation, apparently, as did Pascal's calculator.
I think the main difference is that in mechanical systems, it's easier to go with decimal since cogs and gears lend themselves to having ten digits instead of two.
I disagree. Postmodernists don't have much of a power base outside of college campuses, in fact I don't think I've ever had a run-in with a postmodernist outside of school, or had a postmodernist come to my door to convert me to their cause.
IDers, on the other hand, are everywhere. They're the ones in charge, and the ones who put their candidate in the White House. They run churches, companies, media outlets, and yes, schools. Compared to the vast numbers, wealth and influence of IDer's, postmodernists are like a garage band of middle schoolers trying to compete with a corporate-created boy band on a world tour. They're rank amatuers, because they are content to have their little fiefdom in academia, while IDers take over the world.
And it's not unreasonable for people outside of religion to assume that all religious people are IDers, since the most prominent attacks on evolution going back to Darwin's days have been from religious leaders. Also, atheists have been actively supporting evolution theory for some time. The religious-but-evolutionist crowd may be the majority, but they are a sadly silent one. The voice of religion has been hijacked by the IDers.
It's natural that atheists would assume all religious people are IDers, much like someone from Palestine might assume all Jews are out to get them - that's the only side they see of the other people.
You know what? Fuck you guys.
You're the Hustler generation, who still want to retain some kind of pretention to importance and merit while doing worthless crap. They are the Goatse generation, who just don't give a rip whether you think it's art, important, or worth your time - it's going to get posted online, whether you like it or not.
You guys still seem to be of the opinion that putting something online should mean that thing has some kind of merit to it. This isn't really how it works anymore, people are using the web as more of a scratch-pad for scribbles and everyday stuff, it's a very casual medium nowadays.
The thinking behind the blog generation is "Let's just put everything online, and let Google sort them out." Stuff on Flickr or livejournal isn't on the level of National Geographic or New Yorker, and it's not supposed to be - it's just the casual happenings of daily life.
It's actually like David Brin's Transparent Society, except it's fueled by individual narratives instead of surveilance.
Face it, you (and I) might hate AOL, geocities, livejournal, or whatever for putting a lot of clueless people online, but in the history of the internet, those things are going to be seen as more important than Slashdot or kuro5hin precisely *because* they popularized the medium. I saw in one of your other posts that you don't like red staters and think they should stay off your precious internet. Well that's too bad, the internet isn't going to be restricted to people who you like, *everyone* is going to be online whether you like it or not - did you know Kim Il Jong has an email address, and there are internet cafes in Mogadishu?
The internet is becoming a reflection of the real world rather than geek culture, and I think that will be a good thing in the long run, even if it puts more idiots online.
Sorry about the hostility, but I couldn't help but notice that for a site you claim to not give a shit about, you seem to spend a lot of time talking about myspace - ten posts today on the topic. I'm starting to get the feeling that you're just bitter because the internet is being taken over by 'lusers' and isn't the technical geek playground it once was. Are you really any different from the teenage 'punks' who spend hours online posting about how much they hate Avril Lavine, and how they liked their favorite band until they 'sold out'?
If you really don't care about myspace, why did you spend 5 hours on a saturday posting comments on Slashdot about it?
Usenet and other more appropriate and useful places.
Oh my gawd, the Apocalypse is upon us!
Seriously, though, get a grip, old-timer. I had never even heard of myspace until I overheard college kids talking about it, and I still have not bothered to go there. Just not my kind of place.
That said, I think you are taking this waaay too personally. I mean, why are you bothering to post some rant about a site you don't even go to, and then lambast others for wasting their time writing useless stuff? It seems to me that you are doing exactly the same thing, wasting bandwidth just to get your opinions across to people who don't even know you, on a 'news for nerds' site, no less.
Just because the myspace/livejournal crowd doesn't tickle your interest is no reason to flame them, they are after all just seeking the same things that we are - a community of like-minded people to chat with. Who cares if their lives aren't profound? Are Slashdotters any different?
Haha, I actually found that when I put my iPod in my breast pocket, it looks like I'm tweaking my nipple when I scroll the volume...
:)
One can only imagine what kinds of rude gestures this will lead to
(and no, I am not a girl, but feel free to imagine that I am...)
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail.
Abraham Lincoln, December 1, 1862
You will find that a lot of the phrases used in B5 are allusions to something or other, either historical or literary. "Peace in our time", for example.
Ahahaha, I can see it now... some kid will be watching saturday morning cartoons, and then Gabe and Tycho will be on, and be like, "This channel lacks wang. Let's go to Cartoon Network."
"Mommy, what's 'wang'?"
And soon thereafter, he develops an unnatural aversion to fruit juices...
Um, no that is incorrect - McCarthy's actions were within his constitutional powers, which makes it all the more scarier.
The constitution provides for immunity from libel and slander suits for anything said in congress, which McCarthy abused by accusing various people of being communists during hearings. This often ruined their lives. Since most of the people McCarthy accused were not actually communists, they could have sued him for libel if he had not had the congressional immunity.
Since the hearings were invesetigating alleged communist or Soviet infiltration of the State Dept. and other agencies, it was clearly constitutional, even if it was abused.
One has to remember that much of the damage from McCarthyism, like the blacklistings, refusal to employ people, or simple shunning, were carried out by private citizens who were whipped into a hysteria. The constitution cannot stop the people from tearing their society apart with fear, unfortunately.
The design did not go all the way to the floor, both troughs were about the same height off the floor(maybe about knee high), and they both had jets of water pouring into them, so I couldn't tell which one was the urinal. They were of slightly different designs, though, so I assume one was for peeing and the other was for washing.
To answer your other question,yes, I live in the US, but I am from Japan and have been to western Europe(Fr, UK, Swiss, Be, Ne), and I have never seen a wall urinal like that in those countries. In the US, the Seattle ferry is the only time I've encountered it. Not elsewhere on the west coast(CA, OR, WA, NV), in the south(TN, AR, MS, AL), or the gulf states(LA, FL).
In Europe/Japan/US, we always have individual urinals, either going all the way to the floor or raised up. Sometimes they have little dividers between them. I think the reason for individual urinals is that it gives guys a specific place to pee, and they don't have to think too hard about how far to stand from someone. I've noticed in the US, guys don't like having another guy standing next to them while they pee, so they go to the furthest urinal from the guy already there... that is, if they don't just go in the stalls. So they might be a little uncomfortable peeing next to guys with nothing standing between them or keeping them at one spot.
Wall urinals do sound practical, though. Are they the only kind in Australia?
I know you're kidding, but I thinik I've done that before, at least inadvertantly.
I was on the ferry that connects Seattle with some big island or something(yeah, can you tell I was a tourist?), and I went to pee. When I got in the men's room, I was greeted by a sight I'd never beheld before: instead of individual urinals, they had a big long trough that ran the length of the bathroom. Which was rather ingenous and clever, I thought. But one problem - there were *two* troughs of different designs, one apparently to pee in, the other to wash your hand in. They both had water squirting into them from above, so you could wash your hand in either one - but which?!
I hesitated, and watched what the other men did - but apparently they were also tourists, and they waffled for a while trying to figure out which one was the urinal. After a while, my bladder was starting to get the better of me, so I just decided to pee in the one that was further from the door and washed in the one that was closer. I still don't know if I peed in the right one.
Wheee, I love it when geeks spout off on economics, it allows me to get modded up by correcting them :) I am not a lawyer, but I did take a college economics course, where they covered basic laws governing the market.
1. They have nowhere near a monopoly in the game market. So no, there is no oversight, nor should there be.
Actually, it is against antitrust law to take a monopoly in one field and use it as an unfair advantage in others. One example you might be familiar with is how AT&T gave away UNIX, because competing in the computer field would have been illegal because they were a phone monopoly. After their breakup, they started charging money. I'll leave the issue of whether MS is a real monopoly aside, but suffice to say that you do not have to be the sole player in a field to break antitrust law.
2. If this is "dumping" then you should jump up and down about gas stations (gas is often sold at or near cost), Coke and Pepsi (with a true monopoly, fountain drinks are sold at or below cost), all cell phone companies (my cell phones were all free), etc.
It has been a while since I checked, but IIRC, selling at or below cost is okay if you're doing it to benefit your company directly in some way. It is illegal when you do it for the purpose of hurting your competitors. That is, you can't do something where you know you will kill your company if you keep doing it but you're hoping your competitors will die from trying to match your prices or be priced out of the market. In your examples, the service providers pay for your phones because they can make money off the service, and entice new customers with phones. Gas is sold at least at cost to the station, as far as I can tell. It would not suprise me if gas stations make their money off of their mini-stores nowadays, though. I have never heard of fountain drinks being sold at cost, I have always heard they have ridiculous markup. Are you talking about as sold by the stores to you, or as sold to the stores by Coke/Pepsi?
3. They're not competing on quality? I don't exactly have $400 burning a hole in my pocket that I have to spend on a game machine. Considering that the XBox 360 is the most expensive console out there right now, there is absolutely no dumping going on.
True, the above statements should not be taken to mean that I think MS is dumping the 360, just that the PP's arguments are not correct economically or legally. AFAIK, the DOJ is not even looking into whether MS is doing anything illegal with the 360.
That reminds me of an actual debate people had about ballistic gel.
There are people who say that shooting ballistic gel isn't a good approximation of shooting a human, because it doesn't have bone, or muscle or tendons. Those would tend to lessen the blast effects of a bullet going through a human, supposedly. Do you think ballistics gel is a good simulation of shooting humans?
Also, there are so many anecdotes and theories about which gun or caliber is 'more powerful', with no emperical testing (for obvious reasons). Do you think you'll ever devote a show to 'gun myths', specifically over which calibers are more powerful?
Parent is correct, go look up Richard Steele, who heads something called Open Source Solutions (oss.net), and basically advocates that the U.S. spend a lot more time monitoring 'open source' info, instead of spending billions to get spy satellite imagery that tells us nothing about intent.
Interestingly, he has given some speeches at hacker conventions, such as at H2k2 and the Fifth HOPE. You can download his speeches if you follow the links.
I believe the press also uses the term "open source" to refer to a public statement.
It's pretty funny to see Slashdot types get upset over people "stealing" their terms, when those terms are actually older than their use of them... Do they realize that outside of Slashdot, terms like "developer" or "editor" mean totally different things from how we use them?
It may be hard to believe, but the president of my former Linux Users Group actually met his girlfriend on Yahoo personals. She's cute and quite geeky, and worked in the corrections field with mental patients so she knew how to deal with crazy geeks :)
:)
I figure if it can work for him, there must be hope for the rest of us
Yeah, but imagine dating the kind of people that frequent Slashdot?
:( My butt still hurts...
"Re: Date tonight (Score: 2, Informative)
Oh my gawd, DO NOT date this person, date turned out to be a Goatse link
Other than that, nice date, pleasant chatting over good dinner."
"Re: Date tonight (Score: 1)
Hi, my name is tubgurl, I am intrigued by the report and I would like to arrainge a date..."