Great that he switched. Not just for his own sake - the F/OSS movement definitely needs more, and better UI designers. Getting more people like him into the Project should really be our top priority.
That's available from various extensions. (Of course!)
Chalk me up too for the blank new tab thing. When I make a new tab, that's to start a new thread of thought, a new point from which is start browsing, or whatever. A blank screen is faster, and just feels more comfortable.
I find the Go menu occassionally useful - if I don't have Sessionsaver installed, and so can't use the SnapBack feature, it's the only thing that lets me get back a closed tab.
There was an UK television series on paintball. Crossfire, I believe, it was called. That's or some silly thing like Xrossfire, or Xfire, or something.
It was fairly good. Essentially teams of people going up against a number of scenarios. (mostly 'get to X, do Y and escape to Z', but also VIP missions, and stuff like that) Teams acquired points during their missions, and spent it on resurrecting fallen team members or buying extra equipment. (like shields, grenades, and rapid fire paint guns) The top ranking team got a prize.
It was fairly good. But only caught a niche interest, I guess.
On the other hand, there is lots of literature showing the connection between violent media and individual aggression, and the link from that to negative effects on society seems obvious.
Just because something seems obvious doesn't make it true. Individual agression is of benefit to society, because agression comes in any forms. It can be argued that goal orientated, competitive agression which is what is usually involved in games, and sports in general makes us better, more productive individuals. There is also the catharsis effect.
The violent media/violence link has been extensively studied, and has been fully inconclusive. That's no basis on which to build large restrictions on personal liberty, and to give the say on what's bad and what's not to an unenlightened few.
There is no such thing as a neuron for fantasy, or a neuron for opponent, me killing him, or whatever. The brain does not work by connecting a set of indivisible concepts. You schema which would let fantasy spill over from reality isn't supported by evidence - an infinity of other structures of thought are possible.
For example, a player may simply associate 'agression' with 'socialisation'. Or 'opponent' with 'appropiate reaction'. Or even 'enemy' with 'click mouse on his face repeated whilst pressing the D key to side strafe'. The question of separating fantasy from reality is a question of how these things are structured. Your approach would lead us to ban chess because it leads to megalomania.
Really, the guy is a freaking liability. The only things he can say now is worthless flamebait, and he hasn't made a positive contribution to F/OSS for an age. If he takes the Microsoft job, he might get Microsoft to understand free software a bit better, or he might just drive a few microsoft guys insane. We can't lose!
The thing is, I don't get why the 'area the size of UK' thing has any meaning at all to the response times. The area affected (as opposed to the population affected) would only be a factor if they are having trouble finding survivors, or if they are trying to spread out aid evenly over the entire area, putting NO low on the priority list, or if we were having trouble traversing the distance.
From my standpoint, that appears silly. Everyone agrees that there was no difficulty finding survivors. And anyone can see that trying to spread aid evenly is a silly and misguided idea. The fact that other smaller isolated communities may be in trouble, and scattered troublespots may need to be located shouldn't stop you from first rescuing what you can and sending aid within hours to the number one spot you know would need it. To use the Iraq analogy again, just because it's a big area doesn't mean we need to wait a week to bomb Baghdad.
As for traversing the distance, well I can go the length of the UK in 8 hours by car. They have planes and helicopters. Go figure.
It's obvious that the real bottleneck in the response isn't the area affected, but simple bureaucracy and incompetency. The area affected and intensity of the damage has just made that failure more obvious this time.
Why do we give computerese like "instance" to lay people? I can think of a few more meaningful messages than that off the top of my head that would let her proceed with confidence.
That's the intended behaviour. Computers need to show users who's boss!
Iraq is almost twice the size of the UK. And thousands of miles away...
Besides, we don't need to drop water on all of Lousiana - just New Orleans. The City's area is about 1/500th the area of the UK, and 1/1000th the area of Iraq, and not all of that is flooded.
But let's not get in the way of a good metaphor, eh?
Right. Because the best way to deal with a disaster situation is to have all on hand personel spend their time searching through people's bags to check if they contain food or other items. Maybe we should set up a X-ray machine or something? A few neat orderly queues for inspection? Though I suppose some people might enjoy conducting strip searches for weapons, (I guess we expect people to wade through literal sh*t to get to invasively probed...) this might not be the best way to save people.
Estimates put it at 12%. Currently, the greenhouse effect warms the earth by 33 C, so tripling the contribution from CO2 leads to, as a naive estimate, an 8 C increase in temperature, globally. Which would be disasterous.
And it gets worse, since we are also increasing the amount of methane out there, which is a more powerful greenhouse good. And then, we add on the effect of water vapour, which acts as an amplifier...
I wonder about that... The real solution to the free speech problem isn't censorship, but to keep track of reputation. If people knew that what they say would matter, and that saying stupid things will mean fewer listeners, then we would solve many problems.
Give every poster an ID. Log all messages from each ID, and allow others to invest their own reputation in people and donate points. In short, a reputation market. Of course, there will be karma whores, and stuff like that...
Wouldn't such an initiative contribute to the amount of space junk up there?
With more, smaller satellites, there is more chance of failures on each individual one, and less incentive to build in quality to stop these becoming another space hazard. The satellites also become harder to track, making collisions more likely...
Has a study been done of the safety implications, here?
A greasemonkey userscript does something like that. Another turns hyperlinks into google redirects. Quite evidently, some people do want google to succeed, and slashdot is probably a locus of such people.
Can't say I hold that view myself, but I guess the reasoning is that if Google apparently dominates over the internet advertising industry, it may convince other more irritating advertisers to adopt Google's business model - i.e. less obtrusive, and more user friendly ads. Generally less of the evilness. I guess others support google for its simple existence as an opposition to certain Borg-like companies with their own search engines....
And Crichton is not a climatologist. He's an anthropologist. A degree in anthropology doesn't exactly equip you to make assessments about computer climate models, does it?
Slashdot Mirror
Great that he switched. Not just for his own sake - the F/OSS movement definitely needs more, and better UI designers. Getting more people like him into the Project should really be our top priority.
"I sue it and it works very well."
Ah, the mysteries of life. Do you sue it because it works very well, or do you sue it and make it work very well?
That's available from various extensions. (Of course!)
Chalk me up too for the blank new tab thing. When I make a new tab, that's to start a new thread of thought, a new point from which is start browsing, or whatever. A blank screen is faster, and just feels more comfortable.
I find the Go menu occassionally useful - if I don't have Sessionsaver installed, and so can't use the SnapBack feature, it's the only thing that lets me get back a closed tab.
You can always use Sessionsaver.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/SessionSaver
There was an UK television series on paintball. Crossfire, I believe, it was called. That's or some silly thing like Xrossfire, or Xfire, or something.
It was fairly good. Essentially teams of people going up against a number of scenarios. (mostly 'get to X, do Y and escape to Z', but also VIP missions, and stuff like that) Teams acquired points during their missions, and spent it on resurrecting fallen team members or buying extra equipment. (like shields, grenades, and rapid fire paint guns) The top ranking team got a prize.
It was fairly good. But only caught a niche interest, I guess.
Just because something seems obvious doesn't make it true. Individual agression is of benefit to society, because agression comes in any forms. It can be argued that goal orientated, competitive agression which is what is usually involved in games, and sports in general makes us better, more productive individuals. There is also the catharsis effect.
The violent media/violence link has been extensively studied, and has been fully inconclusive. That's no basis on which to build large restrictions on personal liberty, and to give the say on what's bad and what's not to an unenlightened few.
Got a bright idea? Maybe we should just glue the user to the computer.
MOD -1, Simplistic
There is no such thing as a neuron for fantasy, or a neuron for opponent, me killing him, or whatever. The brain does not work by connecting a set of indivisible concepts. You schema which would let fantasy spill over from reality isn't supported by evidence - an infinity of other structures of thought are possible.
For example, a player may simply associate 'agression' with 'socialisation'. Or 'opponent' with 'appropiate reaction'. Or even 'enemy' with 'click mouse on his face repeated whilst pressing the D key to side strafe'. The question of separating fantasy from reality is a question of how these things are structured. Your approach would lead us to ban chess because it leads to megalomania.
Really, the guy is a freaking liability. The only things he can say now is worthless flamebait, and he hasn't made a positive contribution to F/OSS for an age. If he takes the Microsoft job, he might get Microsoft to understand free software a bit better, or he might just drive a few microsoft guys insane. We can't lose!
From my standpoint, that appears silly. Everyone agrees that there was no difficulty finding survivors. And anyone can see that trying to spread aid evenly is a silly and misguided idea. The fact that other smaller isolated communities may be in trouble, and scattered troublespots may need to be located shouldn't stop you from first rescuing what you can and sending aid within hours to the number one spot you know would need it. To use the Iraq analogy again, just because it's a big area doesn't mean we need to wait a week to bomb Baghdad.
As for traversing the distance, well I can go the length of the UK in 8 hours by car. They have planes and helicopters. Go figure.
It's obvious that the real bottleneck in the response isn't the area affected, but simple bureaucracy and incompetency. The area affected and intensity of the damage has just made that failure more obvious this time.
That's the intended behaviour. Computers need to show users who's boss!
Iraq is almost twice the size of the UK. And thousands of miles away...
Besides, we don't need to drop water on all of Lousiana - just New Orleans. The City's area is about 1/500th the area of the UK, and 1/1000th the area of Iraq, and not all of that is flooded.
But let's not get in the way of a good metaphor, eh?
Is this where we upload the virus onto the alien mothership?
Right. Because the best way to deal with a disaster situation is to have all on hand personel spend their time searching through people's bags to check if they contain food or other items. Maybe we should set up a X-ray machine or something? A few neat orderly queues for inspection? Though I suppose some people might enjoy conducting strip searches for weapons, (I guess we expect people to wade through literal sh*t to get to invasively probed...) this might not be the best way to save people.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=142#more-14 2
Estimates put it at 12%. Currently, the greenhouse effect warms the earth by 33 C, so tripling the contribution from CO2 leads to, as a naive estimate, an 8 C increase in temperature, globally. Which would be disasterous.
And it gets worse, since we are also increasing the amount of methane out there, which is a more powerful greenhouse good. And then, we add on the effect of water vapour, which acts as an amplifier...
Again, and again, we must remember: Stopping global warming isn't about saving the world. It's about saving ourselves.
If you think you don't need to hide stuff from a wife, time to actually get one.
Maybe we can use spam emails v!@gra eafsdfjuas
Oh wait.
I wonder about that... The real solution to the free speech problem isn't censorship, but to keep track of reputation. If people knew that what they say would matter, and that saying stupid things will mean fewer listeners, then we would solve many problems.
Give every poster an ID. Log all messages from each ID, and allow others to invest their own reputation in people and donate points. In short, a reputation market. Of course, there will be karma whores, and stuff like that...
Wouldn't such an initiative contribute to the amount of space junk up there? With more, smaller satellites, there is more chance of failures on each individual one, and less incentive to build in quality to stop these becoming another space hazard. The satellites also become harder to track, making collisions more likely... Has a study been done of the safety implications, here?
Don't like Bush? Emigrate.
Unhappy about global warming? Go live on the moon.
You are assuming that consumers have a free choice between DRM and non-DRM. That isn't true, and so we need to fight DRM directly.
A greasemonkey userscript does something like that. Another turns hyperlinks into google redirects. Quite evidently, some people do want google to succeed, and slashdot is probably a locus of such people.
Can't say I hold that view myself, but I guess the reasoning is that if Google apparently dominates over the internet advertising industry, it may convince other more irritating advertisers to adopt Google's business model - i.e. less obtrusive, and more user friendly ads. Generally less of the evilness. I guess others support google for its simple existence as an opposition to certain Borg-like companies with their own search engines....
That is fucking beautiful, man.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74
A detailed rebuttal.
And Crichton is not a climatologist. He's an anthropologist. A degree in anthropology doesn't exactly equip you to make assessments about computer climate models, does it?