I see... you link to a piece written by none other than Thomas DiLorenzo (Professor of Economics at Loyola Maryland, I believe) who is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute.
I had something similar as a kid, but there were two colors of varying saturation. Grey (from black to white), and gold (from almost white to intensely saturated). The pieces were different shapes, though, so there was a puzzle aspect to it, though all the pieces were some number of squares in different configurations (like tetris pieces, but more shapes in different sizes of 1 to 10 or so squares).
It came with a few patterns to copy from (tiger, city landscape, I can't recall the others, since I never did them).
Unfortunately, there was no www at the time, so no website to submit pictures to for patterns. One of my brothers did make some nice pictures based on photographs.
The memory is a bit hazy, but I know the company that made it was asian (I remember there were pictograms and poorly translate English on the box).
Impossible. Anyone who had seen the image would be a gibbering heap of insanity, and unable to tell you the pattern. At best you could hope to get enough clues to figure out the pattern yourself... but if you assembled it, you'd either off yourself or also turn into a quivering mass of human flesh.
The key here is to get someone else to assemble the image... you'd find a likely mark (some kind of paranormal investigator, for instance) and then mislead him into thinking the image he's assembling will *stop* the summoning of Cthulhu. Drop enough clues in the right places, use decoys to mislead him of your true intentions, let him be an ignorant pawn in your great game. With luck and skill, you can get him to do the dirty work for you. And the irony of him contributing to the Great Awakening by striving against it is quite delicious.
At least, that's the way I'd do it. Your way is too direct, and not worthy of true evil genius.
Besides the fact that Jason Scott (the man behind textfiles.com) laughs in the face of frivolous legal threats, what in god's name makes you think the DMCA applies here?
The fact that the author of the original text zine owns the copyright on the material in the zine? And that Jason posted the copyrighted material on his website?
You can go ahead and call me a fucking idiot if you want, no skin off my back. But what in god's name makes you think the DMCA does NOT apply here? Seriously.
1. Are you still friends with the writer of the zine? Ask them to send a DMCA notice. Don't know if it would work, but may be worth a shot.
2. Drown out the old stuff. Develop an online presence that will bury the old stuff into obscurity. Register your real name as your user ID on all the sites you post on. Downside: prospective employers, etc, will think you spend all day on those sites.
Whenever I see or hear racial slurs, or comments I would consider inappropriate for public forums, they always seem to be spouted by those with the language comprehension of a 3rd to 9th grader.
FWIW, the mean language comprehension of the adult population probably falls within that range.
Yes, a lot of the foulness is perpetrated by kids... but never underestimate the power of online anonymity to turn an adult to lunacy more easily equated with teens.
In fact, I would say that we still are in respect to food (Cream Cheese => Neufchâtel; cheese, parmasean => parmigiano-reggiano; Hershey's chocolate => real milk chocolate; ).
At the risk of straying WAY off-topic...
US mass-market foods are definitely cheap knockoffs. "Cheap" is the operative word, not "knockoff":)
The small-market high-end foodstuffs in the US can compete with any country. In rural NJ, I can find a cheesemonger with 30 or 40 locally made artisan cheeses, some of which, IMO, are better than the "inspiration" cheeses they copy in style and production method. Beers? The US is at the leading edge globally. Wine? Well, if you like California fruit bombs, we've got 'em. We've also got excellent Pinot Noir out of Oregon and Washington. Meat? Fuhgeddaboudit. We get great meat if we're willing to pay for it.
I know I'm rambling a bit, but I don't think it's fair to make generalizations based on a comparison of mass-produced US foods with local high-end foreign foods.
* I live in a rural area close to two very major metro areas. What's available to me is likely far different from what's available to someone living in Indiana. YMMV, etc.
"I have difficulty seeing how this universe can be made to function effectively in the absence of some sort of regulatory regime to ensure transparency and fairness in situations where the Internet access providers themselves are providing their own content that directly competes with content from the external Internet."
I see only one way that we, as consumers of content, will get a good outcome from this. And it's a messy one... We'd need to be able to have multiple content providers simultaneously. They'll competing on their service on shared content, and on the unique content they provide. It would end up being like TV before cable... you had the big networks in VHF, and a few fringe stations in UHF.
I really don't think this is a feasible solution due to infrastructure requirements (unless the infrastructure is common), but I think it's the only way the [Internet access|Content providers] can be involved in fair competition that benefits the end-consumer.
Say Microsoft enters into an agreement with Comcast, and Comcast starts delaying packets for google searches. Fine... not much harm done, since I could "change channels" and use another ISP.
What if, upon revival, the survivors weren't "all there"? If the process works incompletely then we'd have the zombies we're looking for.
So the process is:
1. Put injured people in suspended animation 2. Extract soul (or whatever makes us non-zombies) 3. Reanimate the meatbags 4. ??? 5. Profit!
Sorry to re-use an old meme, but it applies. Some ideas for step 4:
-Sell souls to Satan -put meatbags to work in factories where manual dexterity is not needed -use army of meatbags to take over small island resort nations -use meatbags as shock troops -train meatbags to vote for the political party of your choice (more effective than mass marketing campaigns)
Thus, not everything fits comfortably within the narrow confines of a car analogy.
Heresy.
There is nothing that cannot be explained via use of a car analogy. There are no narrow confines... car analogies are infinite in their applicability.
I defy you to give me one example of a situation not analagous to something in a car, the car industry, or related behavior (of course, it would have to be a subject I'm familiar with in order for me to make an accurate car analogy).
I agree that for your speech class, that seems a little ridiculous... but there's a big difference between notes taken for personal/class use and a piece intended for publication.
The only thing I'd like to note about the required note format for speech class -- there may have been a reason for it other than "it makes it easy to read for the teacher". The teacher may have been using the format as a grading proxy for your understanding of the organization of the material, or for some other reason. When I tutored in high school and college, some of the students needed more than just subject matter tutoring... they needed to be shown how to take notes effectively. The format makes a big difference for a lot of students! You'd be surprised how much it can change their ability to understand the subject matter.
My experience with speech class in high school, however, was that the graded content was hard to quantify, but needed to be graded on some kind of defensible metric as per school policy (coupled with the fact that both instructors had prior issues with grading). Conforming to some ridiculous standard of note-taking would be one way of getting that into place...
The book demonstrates that the best public speakers are not simply people with fancy PowerPoint's rather they are excellent communicators with a strong message.
While other books focus and stress the importance of creating good PowerPoint's, Confessions shows...
An apostrophe is not used to signal "look out! here comes an 's'".
Sorry, but a book review is no place for grammatical errors. Furthermore, if you ever hope to get published in the wider world... making a generic term out of a trademarked name is a big no-no. They are not Powerpoints... they are Powerpoint presentations... I know you used the correct term in part of your review, why not in all of it?
I knw this isn't really a forum for critique of your writing style... but that blatant misuse of the apostrophe is glaring so brightly I had trouble reading the rest of your review.
Ronald Breaker, professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale stated that this would be equivalent to protein scientists finding a whole new class of enzymes.
Thanks. That enzyme analogy is really helpful to people in the bio research field.
But this is slashdot. We expect more from our analogists. Specifically, we expect a car analogy (no, a pizza analogy does not suffice).
Perhaps discovering this new class of RNA structures is like discovering a new type of fuel injection system, so we better optimize fuel-air mixture for power and efficiency. Perhaps it's like discovering a new type of rubber for our tires, for better traction and wear. Perhaps it's like discovering a new type of battery so we can all get cheap, quickly charging, long-range electrical cars.
But most likely it's not like any of those things, and we'll never really understand the implications of this discovery, because the people who really understand it didn't bother to give us the necessary car analogy.
"Civil disobedience" does not only mean breaking a law to protest the government. It works well against hostile corporations, too.
To nitpick, "civil" implies that it's to protest the law. Whether the target is the government or the corporations backing/being backed by the government doesn't really matter.
That said, effective civil disobedience requires more than just breaking the law. It requires bringing attention to your flouting of the law, and taking whatever punishment the system gives you, to demonstrate the injustice.
When you view your pirated copy, will you notify the authorities and ask them to arrest you? Will you *really* participate in civil disobedience, or will you just "stick it to the man" by breaking the law to benefit yourself?
rofl omg i been usin tech 4 a looooooong time since i wuz a kid now i read good but my boss tellz me not to send emails and memos nemore cuz no1 can read em lol!!!1
You laugh, but *I'm* the one stuck writing all the memos for admin, HR, and accounting... because out of those who speak English well, I'm the only damn person who can write.
Last week HR submitted a trouble ticket for me to write the invitation to the office holiday party... and I'm not even part of IT! The IT head printed out the ticket and brought it to my office. We laughed, but deep down inside, I wanted to cry.
What can you do with a printer like that? I hate to just throw it away.
Recycle it. Donate it to a worthy group. The Lupus Foundation (and others, I'm sure) will even come and pick it up (though, it's a bit of a white elehpant for them since the toner is so expensive).
Take it apart and make a sculpture from the parts. Take it apart and see if it will blend. Take the blended parts and stuff them into small balls of ground raw meat to feed to the neighbors dog that won't stay off your property.
Put it on freecycle.org.
I have a collection of 5-6 working printers in my garage. Someday I'm going to build a sculpture from them, if my wife doesn't make me give them away so we can store some useless junk instead (tongue fully in cheek).
I wish there was some way to counter act that but nothing seems readily apparent to me.
Well, it only helps if many people do it, but you can change the order in which comments are displayed. Sometimes I view chronologically without threads, sometimes chronologically with threads. Sometimes I'll pick another format for the hell of it.
I read at -1, raw and uncut.
Anyway, it's long been known that threadjacking is great for karma whores... most people who've been on slashdot for a while know that the best discussion is normally buried deep... When I'm really interested in a story I pretty much ignore the highly moderated comments (usually they have nothing to say I haven't read before a thousand times on slashdot) and the posts near the top.
Holy crap, the "I disagree and I don't wanna listen" mods are out in force today with the troll mods.
Here's to hoping that particular mod never gets points again... mine expired just a couple hours ago, or I'd counter the troll mod on your post and on other responses pointing out the idiocy of nweaver's post.
that way you know it goes directly to the project you wish to receive it and they can do with it what they wish.
Which you can do with this also.
You can specify which org the cash will go to, and 100% of the donation is given to that org.
This is just a gimmick to encourage people to donate. Donate directly, if you like. Donate via Alex's charity. Whatever floats your boat -- but if you want to support F/OSS, then donate time, code, or money (the F/OSS equivalent to ass, grass, or cash).
It's really easy in the UK to get someone to publicly say sorry due to the lible laws. If you are sued for lible you have to prove that your statements are true. It's much cheaper to just apologise than go to court even if the truth is on your side.
I thought that in the UK, truth is not an absolute defense to libel (unlike in the US, where you can say or write anything you want if it is true). My understanding is that not only must the statement be true, but it also must not be written in an attempt to deceive or mislead.
That said, this apology is probably part of the outcome of an offer to make amends which Microsoft has accepted. UK law provides specific instructions for offers to make amends, accepting those offers, etc... this allows the issue to be resolved without getting the courts involved.
I can't imagine the DA would refuse to prosecute for slavery.
Are you kidding? What does a prosecutor have to gain from prosecuting CoS for slavery? A little publicity for prosecuting on hearsay? You think he'll get warrants to investigate the tight-as-a-witches-bum CoS? Likely to backfire.
What do they have to lose? Credibility? Their career? Personal safety?
Slashdot Mirror
I see... you link to a piece written by none other than Thomas DiLorenzo (Professor of Economics at Loyola Maryland, I believe) who is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute.
This is the same Thomas DiLorenzo that published a book critical of Lincoln that was rife with misquotes, mis-attributed quotes, and misleading anecdote use?
The same Thomas DiLorenzo that accepted funds (not just accepted -- billed them for it!) from RJR (tobacco company) to write a book called Cancerscam: the diversion of federal cancer funds to politics?
I wouldn't trust that author farther than I could throw him. He writes dishonestly to advance an agenda and to enrich himself.
I had something similar as a kid, but there were two colors of varying saturation. Grey (from black to white), and gold (from almost white to intensely saturated). The pieces were different shapes, though, so there was a puzzle aspect to it, though all the pieces were some number of squares in different configurations (like tetris pieces, but more shapes in different sizes of 1 to 10 or so squares).
It came with a few patterns to copy from (tiger, city landscape, I can't recall the others, since I never did them).
Unfortunately, there was no www at the time, so no website to submit pictures to for patterns. One of my brothers did make some nice pictures based on photographs.
The memory is a bit hazy, but I know the company that made it was asian (I remember there were pictograms and poorly translate English on the box).
I know, I know -- cool story bro.
Impossible. Anyone who had seen the image would be a gibbering heap of insanity, and unable to tell you the pattern. At best you could hope to get enough clues to figure out the pattern yourself... but if you assembled it, you'd either off yourself or also turn into a quivering mass of human flesh.
The key here is to get someone else to assemble the image... you'd find a likely mark (some kind of paranormal investigator, for instance) and then mislead him into thinking the image he's assembling will *stop* the summoning of Cthulhu. Drop enough clues in the right places, use decoys to mislead him of your true intentions, let him be an ignorant pawn in your great game. With luck and skill, you can get him to do the dirty work for you. And the irony of him contributing to the Great Awakening by striving against it is quite delicious.
At least, that's the way I'd do it. Your way is too direct, and not worthy of true evil genius.
The fact that the author of the original text zine owns the copyright on the material in the zine? And that Jason posted the copyrighted material on his website?
You can go ahead and call me a fucking idiot if you want, no skin off my back. But what in god's name makes you think the DMCA does NOT apply here? Seriously.
Some thoughts:
1. Are you still friends with the writer of the zine? Ask them to send a DMCA notice. Don't know if it would work, but may be worth a shot.
2. Drown out the old stuff. Develop an online presence that will bury the old stuff into obscurity. Register your real name as your user ID on all the sites you post on. Downside: prospective employers, etc, will think you spend all day on those sites.
3. Change your name.
Sorry if this is of no help.
FWIW, the mean language comprehension of the adult population probably falls within that range.
Yes, a lot of the foulness is perpetrated by kids... but never underestimate the power of online anonymity to turn an adult to lunacy more easily equated with teens.
At the risk of straying WAY off-topic...
:)
US mass-market foods are definitely cheap knockoffs. "Cheap" is the operative word, not "knockoff"
The small-market high-end foodstuffs in the US can compete with any country. In rural NJ, I can find a cheesemonger with 30 or 40 locally made artisan cheeses, some of which, IMO, are better than the "inspiration" cheeses they copy in style and production method. Beers? The US is at the leading edge globally. Wine? Well, if you like California fruit bombs, we've got 'em. We've also got excellent Pinot Noir out of Oregon and Washington. Meat? Fuhgeddaboudit. We get great meat if we're willing to pay for it.
I know I'm rambling a bit, but I don't think it's fair to make generalizations based on a comparison of mass-produced US foods with local high-end foreign foods.
* I live in a rural area close to two very major metro areas. What's available to me is likely far different from what's available to someone living in Indiana. YMMV, etc.
I see only one way that we, as consumers of content, will get a good outcome from this. And it's a messy one... We'd need to be able to have multiple content providers simultaneously. They'll competing on their service on shared content, and on the unique content they provide. It would end up being like TV before cable... you had the big networks in VHF, and a few fringe stations in UHF.
I really don't think this is a feasible solution due to infrastructure requirements (unless the infrastructure is common), but I think it's the only way the [Internet access|Content providers] can be involved in fair competition that benefits the end-consumer.
Say Microsoft enters into an agreement with Comcast, and Comcast starts delaying packets for google searches. Fine... not much harm done, since I could "change channels" and use another ISP.
Well, it depends if it works as intended.
What if, upon revival, the survivors weren't "all there"? If the process works incompletely then we'd have the zombies we're looking for.
So the process is:
1. Put injured people in suspended animation
2. Extract soul (or whatever makes us non-zombies)
3. Reanimate the meatbags
4. ???
5. Profit!
Sorry to re-use an old meme, but it applies. Some ideas for step 4:
-Sell souls to Satan
-put meatbags to work in factories where manual dexterity is not needed
-use army of meatbags to take over small island resort nations
-use meatbags as shock troops
-train meatbags to vote for the political party of your choice (more effective than mass marketing campaigns)
Heresy.
There is nothing that cannot be explained via use of a car analogy. There are no narrow confines... car analogies are infinite in their applicability.
I defy you to give me one example of a situation not analagous to something in a car, the car industry, or related behavior (of course, it would have to be a subject I'm familiar with in order for me to make an accurate car analogy).
I agree that for your speech class, that seems a little ridiculous... but there's a big difference between notes taken for personal/class use and a piece intended for publication.
The only thing I'd like to note about the required note format for speech class -- there may have been a reason for it other than "it makes it easy to read for the teacher". The teacher may have been using the format as a grading proxy for your understanding of the organization of the material, or for some other reason. When I tutored in high school and college, some of the students needed more than just subject matter tutoring... they needed to be shown how to take notes effectively. The format makes a big difference for a lot of students! You'd be surprised how much it can change their ability to understand the subject matter.
My experience with speech class in high school, however, was that the graded content was hard to quantify, but needed to be graded on some kind of defensible metric as per school policy (coupled with the fact that both instructors had prior issues with grading). Conforming to some ridiculous standard of note-taking would be one way of getting that into place...
Point taken. But there's some kind of internet law about that...
Well, that was basically the point of my post... glad it sunk in.
An apostrophe is not used to signal "look out! here comes an 's'".
Sorry, but a book review is no place for grammatical errors. Furthermore, if you ever hope to get published in the wider world... making a generic term out of a trademarked name is a big no-no. They are not Powerpoints... they are Powerpoint presentations... I know you used the correct term in part of your review, why not in all of it?
I knw this isn't really a forum for critique of your writing style... but that blatant misuse of the apostrophe is glaring so brightly I had trouble reading the rest of your review.
Thanks. That enzyme analogy is really helpful to people in the bio research field.
But this is slashdot. We expect more from our analogists. Specifically, we expect a car analogy (no, a pizza analogy does not suffice).
Perhaps discovering this new class of RNA structures is like discovering a new type of fuel injection system, so we better optimize fuel-air mixture for power and efficiency. Perhaps it's like discovering a new type of rubber for our tires, for better traction and wear. Perhaps it's like discovering a new type of battery so we can all get cheap, quickly charging, long-range electrical cars.
But most likely it's not like any of those things, and we'll never really understand the implications of this discovery, because the people who really understand it didn't bother to give us the necessary car analogy.
Bastards.
To nitpick, "civil" implies that it's to protest the law. Whether the target is the government or the corporations backing/being backed by the government doesn't really matter.
That said, effective civil disobedience requires more than just breaking the law. It requires bringing attention to your flouting of the law, and taking whatever punishment the system gives you, to demonstrate the injustice.
When you view your pirated copy, will you notify the authorities and ask them to arrest you? Will you *really* participate in civil disobedience, or will you just "stick it to the man" by breaking the law to benefit yourself?
You laugh, but *I'm* the one stuck writing all the memos for admin, HR, and accounting... because out of those who speak English well, I'm the only damn person who can write.
Last week HR submitted a trouble ticket for me to write the invitation to the office holiday party... and I'm not even part of IT! The IT head printed out the ticket and brought it to my office. We laughed, but deep down inside, I wanted to cry.
Recycle it. Donate it to a worthy group. The Lupus Foundation (and others, I'm sure) will even come and pick it up (though, it's a bit of a white elehpant for them since the toner is so expensive).
Take it apart and make a sculpture from the parts. Take it apart and see if it will blend. Take the blended parts and stuff them into small balls of ground raw meat to feed to the neighbors dog that won't stay off your property.
Put it on freecycle.org.
I have a collection of 5-6 working printers in my garage. Someday I'm going to build a sculpture from them, if my wife doesn't make me give them away so we can store some useless junk instead (tongue fully in cheek).
Well, it only helps if many people do it, but you can change the order in which comments are displayed. Sometimes I view chronologically without threads, sometimes chronologically with threads. Sometimes I'll pick another format for the hell of it.
I read at -1, raw and uncut.
Anyway, it's long been known that threadjacking is great for karma whores... most people who've been on slashdot for a while know that the best discussion is normally buried deep... When I'm really interested in a story I pretty much ignore the highly moderated comments (usually they have nothing to say I haven't read before a thousand times on slashdot) and the posts near the top.
Holy crap, the "I disagree and I don't wanna listen" mods are out in force today with the troll mods.
Here's to hoping that particular mod never gets points again... mine expired just a couple hours ago, or I'd counter the troll mod on your post and on other responses pointing out the idiocy of nweaver's post.
Which you can do with this also.
You can specify which org the cash will go to, and 100% of the donation is given to that org.
This is just a gimmick to encourage people to donate. Donate directly, if you like. Donate via Alex's charity. Whatever floats your boat -- but if you want to support F/OSS, then donate time, code, or money (the F/OSS equivalent to ass, grass, or cash).
I thought that in the UK, truth is not an absolute defense to libel (unlike in the US, where you can say or write anything you want if it is true). My understanding is that not only must the statement be true, but it also must not be written in an attempt to deceive or mislead.
That said, this apology is probably part of the outcome of an offer to make amends which Microsoft has accepted. UK law provides specific instructions for offers to make amends, accepting those offers, etc... this allows the issue to be resolved without getting the courts involved.
Are you kidding? What does a prosecutor have to gain from prosecuting CoS for slavery? A little publicity for prosecuting on hearsay? You think he'll get warrants to investigate the tight-as-a-witches-bum CoS? Likely to backfire.
What do they have to lose? Credibility? Their career? Personal safety?
You do know that Red Alastor anagrams to "Retard Also", right?
It also anagrams to "Trades Oral".
That's unfortunate... though perhaps now you could join the ranks of those with 1337 status?
OTOH, maybe you were referring to TEAT status, in which case... your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.