Every culture used to do some weird/nasty/mean things at some point.
Exactly. We should only consider to be "taboo" those practices that are taboo across all cultures everywhere. Anything taboo that can be generalized is probably really worth avoiding, because if most every human is averse to it, it's likely to be bad for our survival. We should pay attention to our universal instincts.
I was in fourth grade when I first played with the Zork triology of text-adventure games on the C-64.
An innocent kid and budding geek, I tried feeding novel combinations of nouns and verbs to the primitive parser.
I tried "EAT LAMP"... got back "You can't eat the lamp." "EAT BREAD"... "That was delicious."... Etc.
I tried "EAT ME". I couldn't comprehend why my dad, who had just bought the game for me and was supervising over my shoulder, started laughing so hard.
Several years later I finally understood why he laughed even harder when the computer responded:
"Auto-cannibalism is not the answer."
You can mod this offtopic, but those 1983 game designers had a real sense of humor and subtly implemented it in 64KB.
I'm not sure how closely the Discovery Institute associates itself with ideacenter.org, but a cursory review of ideacenter.org gives me the impression that it's mostly a bunch of garbage. ideacenter.org gives readers guidance on suggestions as not to how not to incur scoldings from Darwinists who may not use the "common" or "non-technical" definitions. of the word "theory". Oh my.
The text at the link provided asserts that
When it comes to religious questions, the IDEA Center's staff and founders believe that compelling evidence shows that the universe was as a whole designed by a "superintellect" that was not natural.
They aren't interested in understanding nature. They're just trying to redefine science.
There are a thousand ways to collaborate scientifically using the Internet. Intelligent Design propenents need to immediately begin describing their ideas more concisely and subjecting them to peer review and public criticism. Without these, their wild speculation will remain subject to extreme ridicule among the educated and their movement will continue to be shunned and exposed as a political and anti-intellectual project, standing for everything science is not.
The continued silence from ID is not an encouraging sign for their "theory". But there is no shortage of new research that tests, supports, and expands upon the existing evolutionary framework. Evolutionary biology is the only theory which is making real progress with understanding nature.
Just like a prospective employer might not hire you if you can't explain to him what his favorite new buzzword "AJAX" means, and whether you can make it happen...
And I interpret your use of blah blah blah as derisive, but hey, it's 2 in the morning and this is a yet another pointless slashdot thread that no one else will read anyway...
"Buzzword" is just another buzzword. Language is a tool for communication, and if it's more effective and efficient to say "AJAX" to one person, while explaining in greater techincal detail your exact meaning to someone else, there's nothing wrong with that. If somebody says "I implemented my site with AJAX" you can just roll your eyes at him, and go "Oh, AJAX!?" and you'll both quickly understand your relative levels of expertise:)
I think it's a silly invented acronym too, but that doesn't preclude using it where it might be appropriate or convenient to represent the concept. AJAX has a specific meaning which even only slightly clueful people can immediately associate with their experience using sites like flickr, google maps, gmail, yahoo mail beta, etc. As a result, it's a useful term for communicating an idea and thus, part of the English language (at least, for many tech-savvy "Netizens" [which itself is a 15 year old buzzword]).
You realize that acronym was invented for an existing set of technologies by a company called Adaptive Path in order to sell conference passes?
I'm well aware of AJAX's origins (I keep an eye on Cyber Monday for the same reasons), and I agree that it may be sad that corporations are inventing some of our new words instead of a more organic pattern of evolution, but really, what's the difference, once it becomes widely used? The term was adopted despite its commercial origin, and when you say "AJAX", people who you might *expect* to know what you mean, actually *do* know what you mean. It may be a marketing gimmick, but its status as a commonly used term is now well-established (for now; this could change if people tire of it and abandon it).
If a better term for the concept of "AJAX" had arisen naturally, it would have been adopted first. So now who are we to argue with thousands of other geeks who know what "AJAX" means, but are neither aware of nor care about its origins -- much like any other word we use all the time?
Can we just lose the word "blogosphere?" Thanks. The English language thanks you in advance.
We speakers of English beg to differ with you. We continually invent and utter new words as symbolic representations of our ideas. Other people seem to be good at learning them. Thus they become part of the language. See "Google" or more recently, "AJAX".
When I need to implement rounding, I add.5 and then truncate. I believe (perhaps naively) that this is efficient because of the lack of branching.
--
POKE 53281,0 POKE 53280,0
not so much how many buttons, but whether they layout is useful
Exactly--and more importantly, whether the common functions (volume, channel, play/pause) are sensible and can be discerned by feel. Nothing worse than having to look away from the display down at the remote in your hand to twiddle the volume, something I tend to do almost constantly.
My zd8000 MCE laptop remote control is about as bad as it gets, so it's just collecting dust.
There is nothing wrong with encouraging abortion. I know all you FSM-freaks out there will lend some support to this alternative religion (the Church of Euthanasia). I mean, abortion is one of the Four Pillars, which were written down, indeed first conceived, when Bobby Henderson was still in diapers.
And yes, I did RTFA and the new growth medium may be a helpful contribution to this area of research, although I think it might be better to grow the new tissues within the recipient host body, if that is possible. This is already being done with certain (bone/muscle?) tissues IIRC, but not yet with stem cells.
I could say the same about your sig and username in some perverted mathematical sense, I suppose.
The sig is an obscure reference to a very old album.
The post was just me being silly at 3:00 am:)
In the end, we'll all lay the blame for the illegal filesharing and slasher kitty pr0n downloads upon the crazy lady with 9 cats and DSL who lives on the corner with her weird goth grandkids.
In other words, these RIAA scare tactics are meaningless, futile attempts to intimidate their [former] customer base in a world with ubiquitous free wireless internet access.
there is no form of energy that we can extract from nature that doesn't alter in some way (large or small) the natural energy flows and balance in nature.
I wish humans would finally discard the idea that we are somehow not "natural". We are a part of nature. Every single thing we do, from burning coal to manufacturing PCBs to smashing atoms to thinking up completely new ways to manipulate matter and energy, is natural.
The only question is, how much value do we attach to the state of our environment before "we" came along (whatever "we" means).
My NASA contact informs me that on Pluto you can download the GPL'd source to Vista, while watching streaming OGG video of Sergey and Brin torturing the baby penguins...
I "pirate" movies and music and television shows in order to better choose which ones to go see in the theatre, and which ones to buy... My dollars are being guided to better purchases by Adam Smith's inevitable, invisible hand.
I'd happily download torrents of my favorite shows which happened to include commercials. I might fast forward through them, or go to the bathroom while they're playing, but I might do that anyway if they were on TV.
For media companies, this is a wake-up call that's getting louder and louder. Get with the program, or go out of business. You choose.
You have at your disposal, at your beck and call, a community of geeks with lots of expertise in every technical discipline, who can debunk false claims by industry pundits, help to educate their peers, and share valuable information with the larger community. This is an incredibly valuable and useful resource that can contribute to improvements on the Internet and the technological revolution in which we are all participating.
If you're going to put us to use to make some money with ads, at least pay some fucking attention to us and our wishes.
Real anarchists might as well start wearing fursuits. Then they'll never see it coming when Snuffleupagus waddles up during a parade and detonates in the middle of Sesame Street.
God, I'm getting misanthropic and cynical. SOmebody kill me...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'm trolling within my own thread. What purpose would that serve? The moderators are on crack.
Exactly. We should only consider to be "taboo" those practices that are taboo across all cultures everywhere. Anything taboo that can be generalized is probably really worth avoiding, because if most every human is averse to it, it's likely to be bad for our survival. We should pay attention to our universal instincts.
How touching. Karma is meaningless here, when you can be denied mod points forever simply because you criticized the editors.
An innocent kid and budding geek, I tried feeding novel combinations of nouns and verbs to the primitive parser.
I tried "EAT LAMP"... got back "You can't eat the lamp." "EAT BREAD"... "That was delicious."... Etc.
I tried "EAT ME". I couldn't comprehend why my dad, who had just bought the game for me and was supervising over my shoulder, started laughing so hard.
Several years later I finally understood why he laughed even harder when the computer responded:
"Auto-cannibalism is not the answer."
You can mod this offtopic, but those 1983 game designers had a real sense of humor and subtly implemented it in 64KB.
So we can blame the unthinking machines and the corporations that use them for our own cultural and racial bigotry. Nice.
I'm not sure how closely the Discovery Institute associates itself with ideacenter.org, but a cursory review of ideacenter.org gives me the impression that it's mostly a bunch of garbage. ideacenter.org gives readers guidance on suggestions as not to how not to incur scoldings from Darwinists who may not use the "common" or "non-technical" definitions. of the word "theory". Oh my.
Let's play Who's the troll?!
They aren't interested in understanding nature. They're just trying to redefine science.
There are a thousand ways to collaborate scientifically using the Internet. Intelligent Design propenents need to immediately begin describing their ideas more concisely and subjecting them to peer review and public criticism. Without these, their wild speculation will remain subject to extreme ridicule among the educated and their movement will continue to be shunned and exposed as a political and anti-intellectual project, standing for everything science is not.
The continued silence from ID is not an encouraging sign for their "theory". But there is no shortage of new research that tests, supports, and expands upon the existing evolutionary framework. Evolutionary biology is the only theory which is making real progress with understanding nature.
So I take it you don't want to come work for us on our Web 2.0 project? It's been fun, g'night...
And I interpret your use of blah blah blah as derisive, but hey, it's 2 in the morning and this is a yet another pointless slashdot thread that no one else will read anyway...
"Buzzword" is just another buzzword. Language is a tool for communication, and if it's more effective and efficient to say "AJAX" to one person, while explaining in greater techincal detail your exact meaning to someone else, there's nothing wrong with that. If somebody says "I implemented my site with AJAX" you can just roll your eyes at him, and go "Oh, AJAX!?" and you'll both quickly understand your relative levels of expertise :)
I think it's a silly invented acronym too, but that doesn't preclude using it where it might be appropriate or convenient to represent the concept. AJAX has a specific meaning which even only slightly clueful people can immediately associate with their experience using sites like flickr, google maps, gmail, yahoo mail beta, etc. As a result, it's a useful term for communicating an idea and thus, part of the English language (at least, for many tech-savvy "Netizens" [which itself is a 15 year old buzzword]).
I'm well aware of AJAX's origins (I keep an eye on Cyber Monday for the same reasons), and I agree that it may be sad that corporations are inventing some of our new words instead of a more organic pattern of evolution, but really, what's the difference, once it becomes widely used? The term was adopted despite its commercial origin, and when you say "AJAX", people who you might *expect* to know what you mean, actually *do* know what you mean. It may be a marketing gimmick, but its status as a commonly used term is now well-established (for now; this could change if people tire of it and abandon it).
If a better term for the concept of "AJAX" had arisen naturally, it would have been adopted first. So now who are we to argue with thousands of other geeks who know what "AJAX" means, but are neither aware of nor care about its origins -- much like any other word we use all the time?
We speakers of English beg to differ with you. We continually invent and utter new words as symbolic representations of our ideas. Other people seem to be good at learning them. Thus they become part of the language. See "Google" or more recently, "AJAX".
The 6510 wasn't THAT slow.
Exactly--and more importantly, whether the common functions (volume, channel, play/pause) are sensible and can be discerned by feel. Nothing worse than having to look away from the display down at the remote in your hand to twiddle the volume, something I tend to do almost constantly.
My zd8000 MCE laptop remote control is about as bad as it gets, so it's just collecting dust.
And yes, I did RTFA and the new growth medium may be a helpful contribution to this area of research, although I think it might be better to grow the new tissues within the recipient host body, if that is possible. This is already being done with certain (bone/muscle?) tissues IIRC, but not yet with stem cells.
The sig is an obscure reference to a very old album. The post was just me being silly at 3:00 am :)
In the end, we'll all lay the blame for the illegal filesharing and slasher kitty pr0n downloads upon the crazy lady with 9 cats and DSL who lives on the corner with her weird goth grandkids.
In other words, these RIAA scare tactics are meaningless, futile attempts to intimidate their [former] customer base in a world with ubiquitous free wireless internet access.
I wish humans would finally discard the idea that we are somehow not "natural". We are a part of nature. Every single thing we do, from burning coal to manufacturing PCBs to smashing atoms to thinking up completely new ways to manipulate matter and energy, is natural.
The only question is, how much value do we attach to the state of our environment before "we" came along (whatever "we" means).
My NASA contact informs me that on Pluto you can download the GPL'd source to Vista, while watching streaming OGG video of Sergey and Brin torturing the baby penguins...
Yes, and you appear to be the ultimate ladies' man yourself, Mr. PimpDaddy7.
I'd happily download torrents of my favorite shows which happened to include commercials. I might fast forward through them, or go to the bathroom while they're playing, but I might do that anyway if they were on TV.
For media companies, this is a wake-up call that's getting louder and louder. Get with the program, or go out of business. You choose.
Good thing he's a lawyer...
John Horgan?! No way! He's not like that at all. Yeah. Read The End of Science . John Horgan is a grumpy, jealous, cynical agitator.
Hey Slashdot Editors -
You have at your disposal, at your beck and call, a community of geeks with lots of expertise in every technical discipline, who can debunk false claims by industry pundits, help to educate their peers, and share valuable information with the larger community. This is an incredibly valuable and useful resource that can contribute to improvements on the Internet and the technological revolution in which we are all participating.
If you're going to put us to use to make some money with ads, at least pay some fucking attention to us and our wishes.
God, I'm getting misanthropic and cynical. SOmebody kill me...