... none of the NYC snobs know about the pine barrens or the sourlands or the turkey farms, orchards, Amish markets, etc... I'm a lot closer to a tractor dealership than I am to a refinery.
It is possible to make money without making a mess of someone else's life. Some people and businesses offer goods and services of enough perceived value that others will part with their money for them. Some of these customer types make poorer choices, and end up spending their money without having a strategy to replace or grow it.
Do you have a solution to this problem, other than deciding that certain people need to have their choices made for them, 'for their own good'?
N.B. I am not arguing against a 'social safety net', just against the concept that any unequal income distribution is inherently unjust. In most cases the cure for this pseudo-problem is worse than the disease.
You mean they're planning to cross-breed whales with cows so they can continue hunting them on land? Chasing them across the rolling hills of Kyushu in wheeled whaling boats, sending the Laser Tank Division to keep them from attacking Tokyo after they accidentally get irradiated, harpooning them on the slopes of Mount Fuji as they moo forlornly through their blowholes...
I would seriously buy this game... can you code? Partners?
Agreed, cows and whales sounds ridiculous. But my first reaction was - I'm sure "Japan" has published more than 43 research papers in 18 years; how did they pick these?? And a quick check of TFA reveals:
A review of the controversial scientific research conducted by Japan and its whalers has uncovered...
Aha! So it's not just the Ploxmire awards, it's a review of the specious "research" the whalers conduct in order to continue hunting whales. These crucial words were left out of the summary, and makes it seem even more ridiculous. Makes much more sense now, and explains why whales are involved, and they won't bother with sloths and sea sponges. It's sort of a more gruesome version of Canadian lottery quizzes.
If 'unfettered access' is a literal quote from their advertising, I think you could make a strong case that even throttling violates their commitment. After all, real fetters don't immobilize you, they just slow you down...
I'm perfectly willing to concede that you have expertise on this subject. Since you complain that
the quality of Wikipedia is only as good as the effort that editors make to understand a subject and edit appropriately.
why don't you become an editor and help it along? It's not hard at all. When talking about Wikipedia editors, there is no "them". Rather than telling Slashdot that Wikipedia could be better, you could be... making Wikipedia better. If you put in appropriate footnotes and a clear explanation, especially once today's media frenzy dies down, you'll be lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness. [Full disclosure, and odd coincidence: a while back, I made a minor edit for clarity to the article on "peculiar velocity". The article is still a stub -- feel free to check it out and improve it. ]
I can easily understand that talking about 'how thick the galaxy is' is a lot like the 'is Pluto a planet' dispute -- it's just shorthand for more complex issues that you could elucidate. For example -- you could provide a brief paragraph describing the controversy, and how different elements lead to different measures of a galaxy's thickness, and give those measures. You'd be, you know, educating. If you both care enough and know enough about a subject to be bothered by the Wikipedia article, that's a sign you should be improving it.
But the same people (presumably) have also rushed off to edit Wikipedia! (I see a half dozen edits this morning, to add in the "new" thickness.) That's the part that I find incredible. And people really take Wikipedia seriously?
You're right. God forbid some stupid fucking amateurs should be so passionately interested in your field that they would do something so counterproductive to your ivory-tower efforts as... editing a Wikipedia article. It's not like they're part of the public that becomes more or less willing support funding for NSF or NASA grants, for instance. You should be able to get by on royal patronage just fine, without being troubled by the noise generated by hoi polloi.
They did, actually. I was tracking some of the fun while it was live; the extent of the vulnerability was allowing access to the news archive -- so setting up a full mirror wasn't (yet) possible. After the real archive was deleted, though, somebody figured out enough field names to submit a link titled "get free warez here" or somesuch, and it linked to TPB.
I think the question that the original poster raised is best expressed as, "can someone give a description of this 'gas cloud' in terms of average units of mass per units of volume?" And perhaps adding in "what is the total volume of this cloud, if we consider the boundary of the cloud as the zone where local mass-per-unit-volume descends to 10% of average mass-per-unit-volume?" While your point may be technically correct, talking about a temperature of millions of degrees C for such a sparse cloud would mislead exactly the same people you're feeling superior towards, and they'll assume it's some sort of intergalactic lava flow.
1. They are more pointed than pens, and thus more likely to puncture things that shouldn't be punctured.
2. They create dust, which is a no-no on space missions. Wood pencils (obviously) from sharpening. Mechanical pencils are prone to have their leads break off, and float about. More to the point, the operating mechanism of both kinds of pencil is to rub off graphite dust onto paper. Some of this dust may be released by smudging.
Remember that graphite, and thus graphite dust, is conductive. Do you want to take the risk of conductive graphite dust causing a component to short out?
Why do you want NASA missions to fail???? ( oblig bit o funny )
As my nick should make clear, I'm in NJ -- which I believe would be classified as pro-choice. But I'm not a one-issue voter on this, and my point was less about the impact of a Paul presidency on abortion rights in my area than it was about how we need to be careful about pigeonholing Paul according the traditional left-right, Dem-Rep dualities. Although he's 'passionately pro-life', he doesn't call for a national ban (as most Rep pro-lifers would); he's consistent with his constitutionalist principles.
I find the statements here hard to square with 'politically pro-choice'. I would say he's personally pro-life, politically pro-state's-rights. He would end all federal funding for abortion (e.g. military hospitals, etc.), and would work to reverse Roe v. Wade by essentially making it a state-level issue. The closest he comes to being pro-choice, apparently, is that he is not advocating a nationwide abortion ban via federal law.
Again, his states-rights reading of the constitution leads him to a unique position. I'm borderline pro-choice, but I have to respect his position as consistent with his principles, and preferable to those which would ban abortion outright, nationwide.
I have no joke here, I just like contemplating the zen koan that is "IP over VoIP". IPVoIP? An obvious next step suggests itself... where will it end? (... reminds me of the time I tried to get Wine running in cygwin...)
any history book will show that those are clearly British packs
Considering it was before the 1707 Act of Union (or whatever that treaty was that "united" England and Scotland),
they may have been English packs (probably rugby hooligans) but they were not British packs.
Could we please agree to at least use the correct term for them: Pax Britannia ?
Well, that's a good start: you accepting you are not an expert in the field but pretending to judge something that of course experts reviewed. It is nice that people like you think on this problem and possible flaws, though. Of course nobody is changing the well stablished definition of a Turing machine. But it is accepted even by the experts that there is no clear definition on universality. You should follow all the FOM posts and not only those that you think are better to critic others.[...]
3. Snarky "no one outside our company understands how revolutionary all this is" attitude? Check.
Yep, you're a perfect Wolfram employee -- you've got the self-aggrandizing persecution complex down pat. Make sure you don't say anything that hasn't been pre-approved by the Generalissimo, though, so you don't get sued. Only one guy working there gets to name a whole new branch of science after himself, you know.
Oh yea, I'm sure if they pulled out and started blocking windows update for all of Europe, it would just be HILARIOUS wouldn't it? Storm would actually hit that 50 Million mark!
I can't believe this... two offtopic mods, one coming 36 hours after it was posted...
See, guys, it was a joke... rather than saying "first post" as the first post, or near it, it was a very, very, late "first post" posting, but because all the characters are in the first column, and TFA was about changing the time coordinate to a space coordinate, it was a new way to get a "first post"... sort of a prank-the-meme concept.
If there's a mod reading this, and you halfway see my point, please mod the parent "funny" just to partially restore my faith in humanity...
Slashdot Mirror
Ssshhh, don't tell them!
... none of the NYC snobs know about the pine barrens or the sourlands or the turkey farms, orchards, Amish markets, etc... I'm a lot closer to a tractor dealership than I am to a refinery.
It is possible to make money without making a mess of someone else's life. Some people and businesses offer goods and services of enough perceived value that others will part with their money for them. Some of these customer types make poorer choices, and end up spending their money without having a strategy to replace or grow it.
Do you have a solution to this problem, other than deciding that certain people need to have their choices made for them, 'for their own good'?
N.B. I am not arguing against a 'social safety net', just against the concept that any unequal income distribution is inherently unjust. In most cases the cure for this pseudo-problem is worse than the disease.
If they actually use "UNG's Not GNU" as a slogan, Stallman could sue them for trademark infringement ...
If 'unfettered access' is a literal quote from their advertising, I think you could make a strong case that even throttling violates their commitment. After all, real fetters don't immobilize you, they just slow you down...
I can easily understand that talking about 'how thick the galaxy is' is a lot like the 'is Pluto a planet' dispute -- it's just shorthand for more complex issues that you could elucidate. For example -- you could provide a brief paragraph describing the controversy, and how different elements lead to different measures of a galaxy's thickness, and give those measures. You'd be, you know, educating. If you both care enough and know enough about a subject to be bothered by the Wikipedia article, that's a sign you should be improving it.
It would be rather embarrassing if we lose a battle because our guy BSODs.
They did, actually. I was tracking some of the fun while it was live; the extent of the vulnerability was allowing access to the news archive -- so setting up a full mirror wasn't (yet) possible. After the real archive was deleted, though, somebody figured out enough field names to submit a link titled "get free warez here" or somesuch, and it linked to TPB.
Oh, I so want to be a "Lexical Engineer"!
I think the question that the original poster raised is best expressed as, "can someone give a description of this 'gas cloud' in terms of average units of mass per units of volume?" And perhaps adding in "what is the total volume of this cloud, if we consider the boundary of the cloud as the zone where local mass-per-unit-volume descends to 10% of average mass-per-unit-volume?" While your point may be technically correct, talking about a temperature of millions of degrees C for such a sparse cloud would mislead exactly the same people you're feeling superior towards, and they'll assume it's some sort of intergalactic lava flow.
You forget, you are posting to Slashdot. For many of us, operating systems are all three of those things.
Pencils are dangerous in space.
1. They are more pointed than pens, and thus more likely to puncture things that shouldn't be punctured.
2. They create dust, which is a no-no on space missions. Wood pencils (obviously) from sharpening. Mechanical pencils are prone to have their leads break off, and float about. More to the point, the operating mechanism of both kinds of pencil is to rub off graphite dust onto paper. Some of this dust may be released by smudging.
Remember that graphite, and thus graphite dust, is conductive. Do you want to take the risk of conductive graphite dust causing a component to short out?
Why do you want NASA missions to fail???? ( oblig bit o funny )
As my nick should make clear, I'm in NJ -- which I believe would be classified as pro-choice. But I'm not a one-issue voter on this, and my point was less about the impact of a Paul presidency on abortion rights in my area than it was about how we need to be careful about pigeonholing Paul according the traditional left-right, Dem-Rep dualities. Although he's 'passionately pro-life', he doesn't call for a national ban (as most Rep pro-lifers would); he's consistent with his constitutionalist principles.
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/issues/life-and-liberty/.
I find the statements here hard to square with 'politically pro-choice'. I would say he's personally pro-life, politically pro-state's-rights. He would end all federal funding for abortion (e.g. military hospitals, etc.), and would work to reverse Roe v. Wade by essentially making it a state-level issue. The closest he comes to being pro-choice, apparently, is that he is not advocating a nationwide abortion ban via federal law.
Again, his states-rights reading of the constitution leads him to a unique position. I'm borderline pro-choice, but I have to respect his position as consistent with his principles, and preferable to those which would ban abortion outright, nationwide.
I have no joke here, I just like contemplating the zen koan that is "IP over VoIP". IPVoIP? An obvious next step suggests itself... where will it end? (... reminds me of the time I tried to get Wine running in cygwin...)
A grateful nation thanks you.
1. Brand-new user posting only to this thread? Check.
2. Username derived from the name of a famous mathematician? check.
3. Snarky "no one outside our company understands how revolutionary all this is" attitude? Check.
Yep, you're a perfect Wolfram employee -- you've got the self-aggrandizing persecution complex down pat. Make sure you don't say anything that hasn't been pre-approved by the Generalissimo, though, so you don't get sued. Only one guy working there gets to name a whole new branch of science after himself, you know.
I can't believe this ... two offtopic mods, one coming 36 hours after it was posted...
... rather than saying "first post" as the first post, or near it, it was a very, very, late "first post" posting, but because all the characters are in the first column, and TFA was about changing the time coordinate to a space coordinate, it was a new way to get a "first post"... sort of a prank-the-meme concept.
See, guys, it was a joke
If there's a mod reading this, and you halfway see my point, please mod the parent "funny" just to partially restore my faith in humanity...
Thanks.