So I take it you're going to have a proactive surgery to remove your prostate? After all, prostate cancer is one of the biggest killers of men in North America, and nobody really needs it... it just gives your sperm an advantage (just like your foreskin).
While you're at it, why not permanently remove all hair from your body, as a way to reduce the formation of cysts? You could also remove all your teeth, as we don't need to masticate our food these days, we've got machines that can do that for us. Removal of teeth will reduce gum disease, thereby possibly reducing arterial and coronary illnesses.
Sure, there's reason to remove parts of the body, but the appendix has a useful purpose, as does the gall bladder, the prostate, the teeth and the foreskin. Pre-emptively removing something from someone else that can't be put back seems a bit extreme when lifestyle choices (yes, even the ones you make for your children) have a much larger effect on health.
I think they misunderstood what space we are talking about in cyberspace.
Cyberspace: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the cybership FreeEnterprise.
So will the JPL be replaced with a CPL? Are we in a new CyberSpace Race? Are people going to start manufacturing stockpiles of intercontinental cybernetic missives?
At least holodecks and replicators actually exist in cyberspace....
Speaking of golf, I wish this requirement would get car manufacturers to implement golf ball surfacing on their vehicles. Of course, as the actual tests to measure MPG involve a car at rest, surfacing updates are likely not going to become standard.
When I was a kid I wanted to learn to ride my bike with no hands, but was too scared of crashing and getting hurt to actually try it. One night I was dreaming about riding my bike, realized I was dreaming, and decided to try it with no hands. The next day I got up, went out, and rode with no hands. I was simply visualizing what I wanted to do, just like an athlete preparing for a competition visualizes their actions ahead of time to prepare. The fact that I was asleep was basically not relevant, other than I was able to visualize the detail much more vividly.
When I was a kid I wanted to be able to fly, but couldn't figure out how to do it. One night I was dreaming about riding my bike, realized I was dreaming, and decided to try making my bike fly. Unfortunately, the technique didn't work when I woke up the next day.
Moral of the story: lucid dreaming is great for visualizing what you want to do and for seeing things in great detail -- it however is not limited by the laws of physics, and logic is sometimes suspended. As such, you can "learn" things while dreaming, but what you learn may not be all that applicable to real life.
Most hospital visits are not performed when you are unconscious or in serious condition. Get a little cut and in addition to the waiting it might take an hour to sew up and bandage. You absolutely do have uses for your cell phone. Not only for the boredom but to phone your friends/work to reschedule and such.
...and this is exactly why ER is so backlogged in Canadian hospitals.
If you get a little cut, don't bog down the ER triage system even further -- it's not an emergency. Go to a local clinic and they'll do just as good a job sewing you up. Plus, they often let you use your cellphone in the lobby.
If it's enough of an emergency to go to the hospital, you should call someone to help you before/after. That person can be in charge of making your calls as well. If you have no friends and need to/can make a call, use a payphone.
If you're in the hospital as a patient, you likely aren't needing your cellphone (although the waiting room can addmittedly get boring). If you're in as a visitor, just step outside -- most hospitals have "phone bays" outside the main building where people can send and receive calls.
I don't think they'll reduce the restrictions much, if at all. If it were truly a case about interference and radio waves, then why do they have phones on the planes, tv's built into every head rest, and large tv's in front of the isles? All of those electronics are just fine to use whenever because you have to pay for them. If they start letting us use all of our own stuff up there then that'll be less profit.
There are multiple issues here. First off, the issue is about crowd control. THEY control all the on-board electronics, and can turn them off at whim. This way, they can always ensure they have the attention of passengers, and can disable any malfunctioning electronics equipment.
Second, they have phones on the planes that are air-to-land or air-to-satellite linked, through a single antenna. The phone systems are shielded. Compare this to cellular phones, which ramp up signal strength depending on how far they are from the nearest cell. Plus, cell phones aren't meant to be used at those speeds; during takeoff and landing, the plane is close to the ground, but moving fast -- meaning constant hop from cell to cell, requiring signal boost from both the towers and the phones, potentially interrupting navigational equipment (the disruption would be just as much from the ground cells as from the phones).
This brings us to the third point: flight attendants are not EM experts, nor can they identify every electronic gadget made in the past 20 years at a glance. Much easier to have a blanket ban on devices than to have to figure out what sort of radio each device has inside, and what sort of potential EM output the device has.
So, the FAA has approved a few airline-controlled methods of communication and entertainment, and banned everything else.
Personally, I've always wondered why they seem to allow paperbacks, magazines and newspapers during takeoff and landing, even though they tell people to stow all their loose belongings.
So uninstall all plugins, etc. and only run pure Java apps. To go one better, only run them in a sandbox (a VM should do the trick). That way, you can still copy/paste the output and even share the files back, but as you aren't doing anything in that sandbox other than running that Java app, that instance of Java won't be exploited. You don't even need to upgrade for new features/security fixes!
Exactly! The only thing I ever need it for in a desktop environment is for apps use it, not for web pages.
The real problem, as I see it, would be for all those smartphones out there that use java for everything
iOS doesn't do Java, so all those sites out there that want to support iOS devices have to have an alternative. Because of this, Java Applets and J2ME sites always have a usable alternative these days.
It's all in how you phrase your responses; I almost always have karma overload, and yet I do the odd bit of trolling, and tend to disagree with people when I actually disagree.
There's a difference between bowing to the popular view and alienating those who hold the view.
You make a lot of very good points, but waste them by making a lot of unsubstantiated accusations in the same posts. When you then make a few bad poitns and make unsubstantiated accusations in the same posts, people flag you as a troll, and will treat you as such even when you say something valid using the same tone.
People don't like being called idiots, and they don't like those they admire being called idiots. If you instead follow the socratic method, ask more questions, question people's logic instead of their humanity, you'll find you get +5 instead of -1.
Has someone written a "How to have karma without being a whore" FAQ? If not, they should.
You would think they would realize now, almost 15 years into this cat-and-mouse game that their offensives are futile, burn goodwill with their customers, and make them look like an angry old man who wants the kids off his lawn.
I think the appropriate metaphor in this place is the angry old man who wants the kids to stop picking the apples off his tree that dangle over the fence. The kids aren't on his lawn, they're on public access space that he thinks he owns because he's made exclusive use of it for so many years.
The first game of this series could be called Patents & Copyright -- play as the RIAA and your grandmother.
And this just made me think of another comparison: debate club. Works pretty much the same way as an RPG, but without the dice, and a moderator instead of a DM.
You're right: you could explain it as a courtroom if you really wanted to...
Of course, in a courtroom, the Judge is an external arbiter, the jury is the dice, and you have two DMs (prosecution and defense) and two teams.
Could make for an interesting RPG setup actually... one person to record the transcript, one person to interpret the rules, a group to find on "fact" (or just use the dice), and two teams, each with at least one strategist and one tank.
Indeed... I used to write scenarios and dungeon maps for friends and got a kick out of watching how they dealt with the tricky bits. Of course, knowing what was coming before they got there helped.
These days, when most gamers hear RPG, they're thinking something you get at a dropsite in an FPS, not something where you use a Dx20.... unless you prefix it with MMo.
Maybe calling an RPG a Theater Sport and giving more thought to the acting and costuming would help people understand it. I think the days of "RPGs promote Satanism" are well and truly dead; it's just that most people associate RPGs with EverQuest and WoW, or Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon, rather than the original Choose Your Own Adventure style activity.
Hmm... maybe that's the tie in: CYOA where the story's a bit more open-ended, and you have more degrees of chance (weighted by dice instead of just binary like situational decisions).
Anyone else ever been in a situation where you knew you were right, had the evidence mostly on your side, and give up?
Yup. I've been in that situation many times myself, as have most other married men.
There's more to winning than being right and being able to prove it. You still have to live with everyone else afterwards.
In this case, Lance decided that dragging this fight on wasn't worth it for him going forward -- that could be because he was guilty, it could be because he'd rather do something else with his life and the stigma of doping doesn't weigh as heavily on his life as having to constantly fight these people and be in the negative limelight. Or, more likely, he was doping with something that isn't yet illegal, but would be as soon as they found out what he was doing. Under this argument, there are probably lots of others using similar techniques who are still considered "clean", and he'd be taking one for the team.
But any of these arguments are possible. Condemning him because he doesn't behave the same way as you is a slippery slope to fascism.
It makes me wonder: with all the shenanigans that go on in professional sport: why not have two tracks? Track 1 is the people who test negative, and track 2 is everyone else. The "everyone else" group still gets their times listed, they just don't qualify for the awards -- and they have a mark next to their name saying what they tested positive for.
With this type of open reporting, some people would still choose to ruin their lives and do exceptionally well at sport, but everyone else would be able to see the effects of this action, as well as how much advantage they gained (or didn't) from their doping.
They benefit the public by keeping the lawyers occupied. Unlike many other areas of IP law (such as copyright), most patent law takes place outside the courtroom, and involves large corporations with lots of money.
Why is it that we only hear about people's political views and these 'star' politicians on slashdot in the run-up to an election? The political atmosphere is significantly different to what we see on here in the aftermath of an election, when people stop smearing character and start talking about how the politicians are affecting technology....
The answer is obvious: he needs to write and record 30 songs himself, and hand the copyrights over to the RIAA members involved in this suit. Payment in kind is an age-honoured tradition.
If they still require decal damages (that's 10x), then he needs to create 300 3-minute songs. He could probably rap the legal proceedings to get the required 900 minutes of audio.
The plastics in the printers have a pretty low melt point, so that they can do their job.
However, if you build the part, cast a mold around it, and then use some stronger material in the mold (molten metal, fiberglass, tougher plastic, cellophane, etc) then that should work.
For that matter, if 2 inches of duct tape is tough enough to build a cannon, building this in a layered manner with wire mesh embedded should be enough to produce something that would withstand the pressures at least for single fire (after which the shape would be too deformed).
Step 1: notice these guys are following you Step 2: ensure they continue to follow you as you go purchase camping equipment and foodstuffs on your credit card Step 3: ensure they're still following you as you go withdraw enough cash to feed you for a week Step 4: purchase a disposable phone (on your credit card) and mail it to somewhere out in the boondocks, with the return address somewhere else in the boondocks. Prior to mailing it, call it with Google Voice and leave it in a connected state. Drop it in the mail right before pickup. Step 5: Log into facebook and change your status to "going camping" Step 6: In the middle of the night following all this, turn on all your lights in your house, make a bunch of noise on the back porch Step 7: turn off all lights and retire to the basement with your camping equipment. Step 8: if the phone you bought was a smartphone, remote-connect into it and release status updates and tweets from it. Make the connection look like you're trying to connect to your home computer, not the other way around. Step 9: see who turns up and tosses your house:) Step 10: Sell story (to movie producers, tabloids, government agents, etc.) Step 11: Profit!
Slashdot Mirror
So I take it you're going to have a proactive surgery to remove your prostate? After all, prostate cancer is one of the biggest killers of men in North America, and nobody really needs it... it just gives your sperm an advantage (just like your foreskin).
While you're at it, why not permanently remove all hair from your body, as a way to reduce the formation of cysts? You could also remove all your teeth, as we don't need to masticate our food these days, we've got machines that can do that for us. Removal of teeth will reduce gum disease, thereby possibly reducing arterial and coronary illnesses.
Sure, there's reason to remove parts of the body, but the appendix has a useful purpose, as does the gall bladder, the prostate, the teeth and the foreskin. Pre-emptively removing something from someone else that can't be put back seems a bit extreme when lifestyle choices (yes, even the ones you make for your children) have a much larger effect on health.
Right, and we should not have premarital sex, don't drink alcohol and don't eat pork, beef or shellfish.
Or mushrooms... don't forget mushrooms.
I think they misunderstood what space we are talking about in cyberspace.
Cyberspace: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the cybership FreeEnterprise.
So will the JPL be replaced with a CPL? Are we in a new CyberSpace Race? Are people going to start manufacturing stockpiles of intercontinental cybernetic missives?
At least holodecks and replicators actually exist in cyberspace....
Speaking of golf, I wish this requirement would get car manufacturers to implement golf ball surfacing on their vehicles. Of course, as the actual tests to measure MPG involve a car at rest, surfacing updates are likely not going to become standard.
When I was a kid I wanted to learn to ride my bike with no hands, but was too scared of crashing and getting hurt to actually try it. One night I was dreaming about riding my bike, realized I was dreaming, and decided to try it with no hands. The next day I got up, went out, and rode with no hands. I was simply visualizing what I wanted to do, just like an athlete preparing for a competition visualizes their actions ahead of time to prepare. The fact that I was asleep was basically not relevant, other than I was able to visualize the detail much more vividly.
When I was a kid I wanted to be able to fly, but couldn't figure out how to do it. One night I was dreaming about riding my bike, realized I was dreaming, and decided to try making my bike fly. Unfortunately, the technique didn't work when I woke up the next day.
Moral of the story: lucid dreaming is great for visualizing what you want to do and for seeing things in great detail -- it however is not limited by the laws of physics, and logic is sometimes suspended. As such, you can "learn" things while dreaming, but what you learn may not be all that applicable to real life.
Exactly. I'd mod you up, except you're responding in my thread.
Most hospital visits are not performed when you are unconscious or in serious condition. Get a little cut and in addition to the waiting it might take an hour to sew up and bandage. You absolutely do have uses for your cell phone. Not only for the boredom but to phone your friends/work to reschedule and such.
...and this is exactly why ER is so backlogged in Canadian hospitals.
If you get a little cut, don't bog down the ER triage system even further -- it's not an emergency. Go to a local clinic and they'll do just as good a job sewing you up. Plus, they often let you use your cellphone in the lobby.
If it's enough of an emergency to go to the hospital, you should call someone to help you before/after. That person can be in charge of making your calls as well.
If you have no friends and need to/can make a call, use a payphone.
If you're in the hospital as a patient, you likely aren't needing your cellphone (although the waiting room can addmittedly get boring). If you're in as a visitor, just step outside -- most hospitals have "phone bays" outside the main building where people can send and receive calls.
I don't think they'll reduce the restrictions much, if at all. If it were truly a case about interference and radio waves, then why do they have phones on the planes, tv's built into every head rest, and large tv's in front of the isles? All of those electronics are just fine to use whenever because you have to pay for them. If they start letting us use all of our own stuff up there then that'll be less profit.
There are multiple issues here. First off, the issue is about crowd control. THEY control all the on-board electronics, and can turn them off at whim. This way, they can always ensure they have the attention of passengers, and can disable any malfunctioning electronics equipment.
Second, they have phones on the planes that are air-to-land or air-to-satellite linked, through a single antenna. The phone systems are shielded. Compare this to cellular phones, which ramp up signal strength depending on how far they are from the nearest cell. Plus, cell phones aren't meant to be used at those speeds; during takeoff and landing, the plane is close to the ground, but moving fast -- meaning constant hop from cell to cell, requiring signal boost from both the towers and the phones, potentially interrupting navigational equipment (the disruption would be just as much from the ground cells as from the phones).
This brings us to the third point: flight attendants are not EM experts, nor can they identify every electronic gadget made in the past 20 years at a glance. Much easier to have a blanket ban on devices than to have to figure out what sort of radio each device has inside, and what sort of potential EM output the device has.
So, the FAA has approved a few airline-controlled methods of communication and entertainment, and banned everything else.
Personally, I've always wondered why they seem to allow paperbacks, magazines and newspapers during takeoff and landing, even though they tell people to stow all their loose belongings.
So uninstall all plugins, etc. and only run pure Java apps. To go one better, only run them in a sandbox (a VM should do the trick). That way, you can still copy/paste the output and even share the files back, but as you aren't doing anything in that sandbox other than running that Java app, that instance of Java won't be exploited. You don't even need to upgrade for new features/security fixes!
Exactly! The only thing I ever need it for in a desktop environment is for apps use it, not for web pages.
The real problem, as I see it, would be for all those smartphones out there that use java for everything
iOS doesn't do Java, so all those sites out there that want to support iOS devices have to have an alternative. Because of this, Java Applets and J2ME sites always have a usable alternative these days.
It's all in how you phrase your responses; I almost always have karma overload, and yet I do the odd bit of trolling, and tend to disagree with people when I actually disagree.
There's a difference between bowing to the popular view and alienating those who hold the view.
You make a lot of very good points, but waste them by making a lot of unsubstantiated accusations in the same posts. When you then make a few bad poitns and make unsubstantiated accusations in the same posts, people flag you as a troll, and will treat you as such even when you say something valid using the same tone.
People don't like being called idiots, and they don't like those they admire being called idiots. If you instead follow the socratic method, ask more questions, question people's logic instead of their humanity, you'll find you get +5 instead of -1.
Has someone written a "How to have karma without being a whore" FAQ? If not, they should.
HP is Nokia; Dell is RIM.
You would think they would realize now, almost 15 years into this cat-and-mouse game that their offensives are futile, burn goodwill with their customers, and make them look like an angry old man who wants the kids off his lawn.
I think the appropriate metaphor in this place is the angry old man who wants the kids to stop picking the apples off his tree that dangle over the fence. The kids aren't on his lawn, they're on public access space that he thinks he owns because he's made exclusive use of it for so many years.
That said, the apples are still his.
The first game of this series could be called Patents & Copyright -- play as the RIAA and your grandmother.
And this just made me think of another comparison: debate club. Works pretty much the same way as an RPG, but without the dice, and a moderator instead of a DM.
You're right: you could explain it as a courtroom if you really wanted to...
Of course, in a courtroom, the Judge is an external arbiter, the jury is the dice, and you have two DMs (prosecution and defense) and two teams.
Could make for an interesting RPG setup actually... one person to record the transcript, one person to interpret the rules, a group to find on "fact" (or just use the dice), and two teams, each with at least one strategist and one tank.
Indeed... I used to write scenarios and dungeon maps for friends and got a kick out of watching how they dealt with the tricky bits. Of course, knowing what was coming before they got there helped.
These days, when most gamers hear RPG, they're thinking something you get at a dropsite in an FPS, not something where you use a Dx20.... unless you prefix it with MMo.
Maybe calling an RPG a Theater Sport and giving more thought to the acting and costuming would help people understand it. I think the days of "RPGs promote Satanism" are well and truly dead; it's just that most people associate RPGs with EverQuest and WoW, or Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon, rather than the original Choose Your Own Adventure style activity.
Hmm... maybe that's the tie in: CYOA where the story's a bit more open-ended, and you have more degrees of chance (weighted by dice instead of just binary like situational decisions).
Anyone else ever been in a situation where you knew you were right, had the evidence mostly on your side, and give up?
Yup. I've been in that situation many times myself, as have most other married men.
There's more to winning than being right and being able to prove it. You still have to live with everyone else afterwards.
In this case, Lance decided that dragging this fight on wasn't worth it for him going forward -- that could be because he was guilty, it could be because he'd rather do something else with his life and the stigma of doping doesn't weigh as heavily on his life as having to constantly fight these people and be in the negative limelight. Or, more likely, he was doping with something that isn't yet illegal, but would be as soon as they found out what he was doing. Under this argument, there are probably lots of others using similar techniques who are still considered "clean", and he'd be taking one for the team.
But any of these arguments are possible. Condemning him because he doesn't behave the same way as you is a slippery slope to fascism.
It makes me wonder: with all the shenanigans that go on in professional sport: why not have two tracks? Track 1 is the people who test negative, and track 2 is everyone else. The "everyone else" group still gets their times listed, they just don't qualify for the awards -- and they have a mark next to their name saying what they tested positive for.
With this type of open reporting, some people would still choose to ruin their lives and do exceptionally well at sport, but everyone else would be able to see the effects of this action, as well as how much advantage they gained (or didn't) from their doping.
They benefit the public by keeping the lawyers occupied. Unlike many other areas of IP law (such as copyright), most patent law takes place outside the courtroom, and involves large corporations with lots of money.
Why is it that we only hear about people's political views and these 'star' politicians on slashdot in the run-up to an election? The political atmosphere is significantly different to what we see on here in the aftermath of an election, when people stop smearing character and start talking about how the politicians are affecting technology....
The answer is obvious: he needs to write and record 30 songs himself, and hand the copyrights over to the RIAA members involved in this suit. Payment in kind is an age-honoured tradition.
If they still require decal damages (that's 10x), then he needs to create 300 3-minute songs. He could probably rap the legal proceedings to get the required 900 minutes of audio.
The plastics in the printers have a pretty low melt point, so that they can do their job.
However, if you build the part, cast a mold around it, and then use some stronger material in the mold (molten metal, fiberglass, tougher plastic, cellophane, etc) then that should work.
For that matter, if 2 inches of duct tape is tough enough to build a cannon, building this in a layered manner with wire mesh embedded should be enough to produce something that would withstand the pressures at least for single fire (after which the shape would be too deformed).
Indeed.
Step 1: notice these guys are following you :)
Step 2: ensure they continue to follow you as you go purchase camping equipment and foodstuffs on your credit card
Step 3: ensure they're still following you as you go withdraw enough cash to feed you for a week
Step 4: purchase a disposable phone (on your credit card) and mail it to somewhere out in the boondocks, with the return address somewhere else in the boondocks. Prior to mailing it, call it with Google Voice and leave it in a connected state. Drop it in the mail right before pickup.
Step 5: Log into facebook and change your status to "going camping"
Step 6: In the middle of the night following all this, turn on all your lights in your house, make a bunch of noise on the back porch
Step 7: turn off all lights and retire to the basement with your camping equipment.
Step 8: if the phone you bought was a smartphone, remote-connect into it and release status updates and tweets from it. Make the connection look like you're trying to connect to your home computer, not the other way around.
Step 9: see who turns up and tosses your house
Step 10: Sell story (to movie producers, tabloids, government agents, etc.)
Step 11: Profit!