Roland, Roland, Roland
Keep them words a-rollin
Keep them coming, Roland Piquepaille!
Don't care 'bout useful topics
He's blogging in the tropics
Though he's got the brain of a snail.
Slashdot, Slashdot, Slashdot
Taking third-rate castoffs
ZDNet's not that great anyway
Picking stupid stories
That Roland's been a-whoring
Sending precious traffic his way
Mod them up! Troll them out! Argue Loud!
Screw about! Back to work! You're a jerk, Roland!
I try to keep perspective, That Slashdot is elective
But then I come on back anyway.
Most ordinary PC users might be able to install some Linux distro or another. That's not even the issue. Why should they? More than that, I believe that ordinary PC users don't know anything about Linux other than it exists. Sure, it's great, it can do anything a PC can do only free, but there's no really good reason to switch if their computers are working right now.
A non-geek friend of mine just bought a new laptop. We (me and another geek) were sitting around helping her install the latest windows updates, and talking about how she should try Linux, since both of us used it regularly on our personal computers. Finally she asked us, "Do I need Linux?" and both of us realized that neither of us wanted to be Linux admins for her so we said no. There was no real benefit to her switching, and quite a few drawbacks since she likes to keep current on Flash cartoons and movies.
So she knew about Linux before we talked to her, but she didn't really know why she'd need it. There was no motivating factor to switch. If a person isn't motivated to do it themself, few people will really want to do it for them. It would get annoying pretty fast, all those phone calls when wifi or email stops working mysteriously, or they can't watch some movie clip.
No it isn't. The fact that they were all working in the same building only points to a correlative factor between the building and the incidence of cancer. Could be something in the ventilation system. Could be rat poison in the coffee machine on the top floor. There is absolutely nothing about this situation that definitively links cancer to mobile phone tower radiation.
I agree. Looks like most people responding to your comment seem to think that centralized computing is inevitable. We used to have centralized computing, with dumb terminals. We stopped doing that because we liked the idea of having our own computer in our own office under our own control. Why would that ever change back again? I predict that for connective applications like email, information, and other communications functions we certainly will use centralized servers, but for just about everything else we'll continue to keep our computers and software in our own offices. Nobody really wants a dumb terminal again.
This is a great idea! But wait, I have an improvement: when you get off work, instead of biting the bullet and taking the hour-long commute home, just STAY IN YOUR PARKING SPACE. Don't leave. Listen to your iPod until you feel sleepy, and then sleep in your car the whole night! That way you save 1.5 hours in commute time per day. And no rush hour!
Re:Almost 200 comments and nobody's said it yet?
on
An Alternate Human
·
· Score: 1
How about, "In Soviet Russia, your genes design you?"
NASA's been simulating a black hole for years now. For example, engineers warn management that the shuttle could explode, the managers absorb this information irrevocably (thus destroying everything but its mass) and occasionally emit X-rays.
"I won't buy a philips product if it enforces viewing of ads...This is why I DO NOT have Tivo and do NOT watch much TV."
This is precisely why I have Tivo. I haven't seen a single TV commercial since I got it. The unforeseeable consequence was that now I don't know when new movies are coming out. I hadn't realized how much I depended on TV commercials to find that out.
One nice thing since commercial skipping started is that advertisements have gotten a lot more interesting. Some poster up above there joked about patenting a method to force people to watch the superbowl instead of just fast-forwarding to the commercials; this means that commercials have risen to the level of entertainment instead of just being ham-fisted attempts to clobber people into buying something. Too bad all commercials aren't entertaining, I might just watch them.
The Debian parking spots are way better (fewer potholes, repainted more often) than the Fedora spots. And I'll never pay for one of those Mandriva spots, not when there's so many people parked in the free Debian area. No, sir.
Companies don't collectively spend billions of dollars a year on marketing because it doesn't work -- to misappropriate a real estate quote, the three things that matter are Marketing, Marketing, and Marketing. If Lenovo's market share is falling, it's because they're mismanaging their marketing plan and relying too much on market share momentum.
Great. Now I've over-used the word market and it's lost all meaning to me. Market. Market. Market. What a funny-sounding word. Market.
Mostly the extra pages are there for me to refine my search. If I don't know much about what I'm searching for, I'll often pick up clues and new keywords in the search results. I use those to refine my search.
Epilepsy is most certainly NOT a 'sudden bought of order in the brain.' It is a wave of DISORDER, of randomly-firing neurons. I don't think it's accurate to say that our brains and bodies are chaotic systems, but even so, chaotic system != disordered system. If there were no order in our bodies, why would we pump blood, or contract muscles, replicate cells, or react to stimuli? Ordered signals aren't bad for us -- quite the opposite, ordered signals are required for life.
Then I apologize and admire your subtlety. My reaction is still valid for the modding, however--your post was modded insightful, not funny. Regardless of how you intended the tone, the mods apparently didn't get it. Either that, or THEY are so insightful that they wanted to give you the karma instead of a funny mod:)
At any rate, I don't think society is dumbing down. We've always been pretty dumb for being so smart. The smart people might be getting smarter as a whole, but I believe the ratio of smart to dumb probably doesn't change much.
If anything, I believe modern evolutionary pressure (the last three hundred years) is producing more of the genes from people who have poor family planning skills and just cannot grasp or accept birth control. I fear what this pattern may produce in 20,000 years where people with less cognitive skills have 3-4 times more children than those with more cognitive skills. That and the other pressure for religious fanatics to have more children than those who take rational views of the world. Those with deep intellect could be forced to create a "Zardoz" society to protect themselves.
There are so many things wrong with this. First, just because people have poor family planning skills or don't use birth control DOES NOT mean those genes will be more successful. More babies != survival. Second, you can't extrapolate this out 20,000 years to your 13-year-old's apocalyptic future where dumb and religious people are taking over the planet and "those with deep intellect" realize the error of their birth controlling, family planning ways too late. If 'deep intellect' provides enough of a survival benefit, then it will survive. If it's more beneficial to be 'less cognitive' or a 'religious fanatic' then those traits will survive. I don't appreciate you conflating dumb and religious either.
You are a bigot. You think you have 'deep intellect' and that people are dumb because they believe different things from you (religion, birth control, family planning) and that these people should not breed.
For the record, I am an atheist who supports abortion and birth control. I just don't think that people who believe otherwise are necessarily dumb and shouldn't breed. I hope that whatever genes (if any) code for enlightened thinking survive, but if they do not then they are worthless from a survival standpoint. Then enlightenment deserves to disappear. If anything your post should have been modded funny, but I don't think you were trying to be. If you were, I apologize and admire your subtlety.
The problem as I understand it is not so much that some ice is melting, but that the volume of melting ice is such that it makes huge shelves of Antarctic ice unstable; when one of these breaks off, it floats off to warmer climates, where it melts considerably faster.
Not that I'm building an Ark or anything, but the problem really is pretty serious for anybody living on a coast. Which is where people tend to live.
In Minnesota it wouldn't be hard. Just split the Twin Cities area like a pie with the pieces extending out into the farmlands. Seriously, Minneapolis is like a giant blue doughnut hole in the middle of a huge red suburban wasteland. If the GOP could figure out a way to keep the urban folks from voting, they'd win every electoral vote in Minnesota.
Though in this case if you have two versions of the file, one with a watermark and one without, why not just delete the watermarked version and copy the one without it?
Slashdot Mirror
Roland, Roland, Roland
Keep them words a-rollin
Keep them coming, Roland Piquepaille!
Don't care 'bout useful topics
He's blogging in the tropics
Though he's got the brain of a snail.
Slashdot, Slashdot, Slashdot
Taking third-rate castoffs
ZDNet's not that great anyway
Picking stupid stories
That Roland's been a-whoring
Sending precious traffic his way
Mod them up! Troll them out! Argue Loud!
Screw about! Back to work! You're a jerk, Roland!
I try to keep perspective, That Slashdot is elective
But then I come on back anyway.
Most ordinary PC users might be able to install some Linux distro or another. That's not even the issue. Why should they? More than that, I believe that ordinary PC users don't know anything about Linux other than it exists. Sure, it's great, it can do anything a PC can do only free, but there's no really good reason to switch if their computers are working right now.
A non-geek friend of mine just bought a new laptop. We (me and another geek) were sitting around helping her install the latest windows updates, and talking about how she should try Linux, since both of us used it regularly on our personal computers. Finally she asked us, "Do I need Linux?" and both of us realized that neither of us wanted to be Linux admins for her so we said no. There was no real benefit to her switching, and quite a few drawbacks since she likes to keep current on Flash cartoons and movies.
So she knew about Linux before we talked to her, but she didn't really know why she'd need it. There was no motivating factor to switch. If a person isn't motivated to do it themself, few people will really want to do it for them. It would get annoying pretty fast, all those phone calls when wifi or email stops working mysteriously, or they can't watch some movie clip.
No it isn't. The fact that they were all working in the same building only points to a correlative factor between the building and the incidence of cancer. Could be something in the ventilation system. Could be rat poison in the coffee machine on the top floor. There is absolutely nothing about this situation that definitively links cancer to mobile phone tower radiation.
Just another reason we need the irony mark.
;) [/sarcasm]
Yeah, right*.
The point is, your ex no longer has a girlfriend. So, not currently true.
I agree. Looks like most people responding to your comment seem to think that centralized computing is inevitable. We used to have centralized computing, with dumb terminals. We stopped doing that because we liked the idea of having our own computer in our own office under our own control. Why would that ever change back again? I predict that for connective applications like email, information, and other communications functions we certainly will use centralized servers, but for just about everything else we'll continue to keep our computers and software in our own offices. Nobody really wants a dumb terminal again.
that's "Thankfully, English DOESN'T have none."
This is a great idea! But wait, I have an improvement: when you get off work, instead of biting the bullet and taking the hour-long commute home, just STAY IN YOUR PARKING SPACE. Don't leave. Listen to your iPod until you feel sleepy, and then sleep in your car the whole night! That way you save 1.5 hours in commute time per day. And no rush hour!
How about, "In Soviet Russia, your genes design you?"
NASA's been simulating a black hole for years now. For example, engineers warn management that the shuttle could explode, the managers absorb this information irrevocably (thus destroying everything but its mass) and occasionally emit X-rays.
"I won't buy a philips product if it enforces viewing of ads...This is why I DO NOT have Tivo and do NOT watch much TV."
This is precisely why I have Tivo. I haven't seen a single TV commercial since I got it. The unforeseeable consequence was that now I don't know when new movies are coming out. I hadn't realized how much I depended on TV commercials to find that out.
One nice thing since commercial skipping started is that advertisements have gotten a lot more interesting. Some poster up above there joked about patenting a method to force people to watch the superbowl instead of just fast-forwarding to the commercials; this means that commercials have risen to the level of entertainment instead of just being ham-fisted attempts to clobber people into buying something. Too bad all commercials aren't entertaining, I might just watch them.
The Debian parking spots are way better (fewer potholes, repainted more often) than the Fedora spots. And I'll never pay for one of those Mandriva spots, not when there's so many people parked in the free Debian area. No, sir.
Companies don't collectively spend billions of dollars a year on marketing because it doesn't work -- to misappropriate a real estate quote, the three things that matter are Marketing, Marketing, and Marketing. If Lenovo's market share is falling, it's because they're mismanaging their marketing plan and relying too much on market share momentum.
Great. Now I've over-used the word market and it's lost all meaning to me. Market. Market. Market. What a funny-sounding word. Market.
Mostly the extra pages are there for me to refine my search. If I don't know much about what I'm searching for, I'll often pick up clues and new keywords in the search results. I use those to refine my search.
Probably already got their brains eaten. That will tend to make you slow.
Epilepsy is most certainly NOT a 'sudden bought of order in the brain.' It is a wave of DISORDER, of randomly-firing neurons. I don't think it's accurate to say that our brains and bodies are chaotic systems, but even so, chaotic system != disordered system. If there were no order in our bodies, why would we pump blood, or contract muscles, replicate cells, or react to stimuli? Ordered signals aren't bad for us -- quite the opposite, ordered signals are required for life.
Then I apologize and admire your subtlety. My reaction is still valid for the modding, however--your post was modded insightful, not funny. Regardless of how you intended the tone, the mods apparently didn't get it. Either that, or THEY are so insightful that they wanted to give you the karma instead of a funny mod :)
At any rate, I don't think society is dumbing down. We've always been pretty dumb for being so smart. The smart people might be getting smarter as a whole, but I believe the ratio of smart to dumb probably doesn't change much.
If anything, I believe modern evolutionary pressure (the last three hundred years) is producing more of the genes from people who have poor family planning skills and just cannot grasp or accept birth control. I fear what this pattern may produce in 20,000 years where people with less cognitive skills have 3-4 times more children than those with more cognitive skills. That and the other pressure for religious fanatics to have more children than those who take rational views of the world. Those with deep intellect could be forced to create a "Zardoz" society to protect themselves.
There are so many things wrong with this. First, just because people have poor family planning skills or don't use birth control DOES NOT mean those genes will be more successful. More babies != survival. Second, you can't extrapolate this out 20,000 years to your 13-year-old's apocalyptic future where dumb and religious people are taking over the planet and "those with deep intellect" realize the error of their birth controlling, family planning ways too late. If 'deep intellect' provides enough of a survival benefit, then it will survive. If it's more beneficial to be 'less cognitive' or a 'religious fanatic' then those traits will survive. I don't appreciate you conflating dumb and religious either.
You are a bigot. You think you have 'deep intellect' and that people are dumb because they believe different things from you (religion, birth control, family planning) and that these people should not breed.
For the record, I am an atheist who supports abortion and birth control. I just don't think that people who believe otherwise are necessarily dumb and shouldn't breed. I hope that whatever genes (if any) code for enlightened thinking survive, but if they do not then they are worthless from a survival standpoint. Then enlightenment deserves to disappear. If anything your post should have been modded funny, but I don't think you were trying to be. If you were, I apologize and admire your subtlety.
The problem as I understand it is not so much that some ice is melting, but that the volume of melting ice is such that it makes huge shelves of Antarctic ice unstable; when one of these breaks off, it floats off to warmer climates, where it melts considerably faster. Not that I'm building an Ark or anything, but the problem really is pretty serious for anybody living on a coast. Which is where people tend to live.
You play the straight man very well :)
DUPE! Bush ordered the NSA to help out with domestic law enforcement over two years ago.
In Minnesota it wouldn't be hard. Just split the Twin Cities area like a pie with the pieces extending out into the farmlands. Seriously, Minneapolis is like a giant blue doughnut hole in the middle of a huge red suburban wasteland. If the GOP could figure out a way to keep the urban folks from voting, they'd win every electoral vote in Minnesota.
What I want to know is, will I be able to run OS X86 on it?
Though in this case if you have two versions of the file, one with a watermark and one without, why not just delete the watermarked version and copy the one without it?
3. When was the last time World of Warcraft stopped working? Oh, wait...