Some states have laws that define statutory rape as having an age range limit -- e.g. you can have sex with a minor as long as you're no more than 2 years older than they are. So technically an adult and a minor can legally have consensual sex, but only if they're very close in age. This is to deal with the obvious problem of someone who's 17 yr 364 days old having sex with someone who's 18 yr 1 day old -- they're apart 2 days in age, it makes no sense that it would be illegal for them to have sex just because one's technically still a minor, so the law accounts for it. (For example, apparently Texas allows a 3-year age difference as long as the younger partner is 14+.)
My first instinct (and, it seems, the instinct of everyone here) is to decry this as lunacy -- of COURSE we work better with music! At least, I believe *I* do!
And I do. But I also am aware that without data to back it up, it's entirely possible that actual data would prove the manager right. I don't think it's at all likely, but it's just as baseless for us to claim that music helps us as it is for the manager to claim it hurts us. So I wonder if there's ever been any research.
For my part, I believe music helps me code, because it isolates me from outside distractions -- noise, etc. I've got all my MP3s in one playlist and usually I pick and album and just let it go; occasionally I'll find that it's been an hour and I've gotten a crapton of coding done, and I look at the playlist and I have no memory of hearing the album that just finished. It's like I go into a trance.
Of course, as the go-to guy for troubleshooting at my company, this rarely happens, because I get interrupted on average every 15 minutes or so by someone asking me to fix something, or look into something, or answer a question, or receive an urgent email or IM, etc. I probably should make a habit of closing Outlook for an hour and putting Pidgin on DND. If it really is urgent, you can walk over to my desk. Heh.
'The problem is some idea that christianity should be "fair and balanced", and that every view, from any source, is valid, or at least should be debated or considered. Bishops and priests should tell MORE people to STFU, if you ask me.' (after all, only someone trained in, say, Canon Law would be qualified to speak authoritatively on christianity, right?)
The problem with your analogy is that Christianity is entirely fictional, whereas science is a way of explaining natural phenomena. So anyone can be an authority on what they decide to call Christianity ("No, TRUE Christians perform rituals A, B, and C, not D, E, or F, like those heretics"), but you can't fool Mother Nature.
We do not (and should not) accept proclamations from scientists as truth because they hold a piece of paper or have three letters next to their name.
In the name of science, I demand to see the evidence that this kind of thing is happening more than it used to. Because that's what half the people in this thread are claiming. (Not you necessarily, but here's where I chose to reply.)
But, as for man CAUSING global warming - BULLSHIT!!! How many ice ages has the earth had now? And, how many interglacial periods?
Brilliant! I'm sure the thousands of climate scientists who say that mankind is contributing to global warming have never thought of this.~
Climate scientists are not claiming that mankind is the sole cause of global warming. The claim is that mankind's activities have caused an increase in the average temperature of the planet that would not have otherwise happened. Yes, the planet cools off and heats up on its own, it's just that mankind is helping it heat up orders of magnitude faster than it would naturally happen.
The earth didn't end with any of the ice ages, or during any of the interglacials.
Again, climate scientists are not making the claim that the world will end. For those scientists whose claims DO go beyond "mankind's activities are adding extra heat to the planet", the claim is usually "the extra heat is going to severely damage our ability to produce food, which may cause widespread starvation and wars, etc." None of them are saying the world is going to "end," whatever that means.
And please try to remember that ice ages took place on a scale of thousands of years. Human activity, so the claim goes, is causing temperature changes over the course of decades that used to take millennia.
You know, I despise Microsoft and Windows, but the assertion that paying $100 for an OS that you will use for hundreds of hours a year is a good value... makes a lot of sense. I sit in front of a computer for probably over three thousand hours a year; that's like 3 cents an hour.
Granted, we don't "use" an OS the same way we use, say, a video game or an application... nonetheless, the use we get out of it is considerable, and the price suddenly doesn't seem that bad to me. (Even $200 or $300 is still pretty cheap by that measure.)
Nonetheless, I'll be sticking with Ubuntu for my machines;-)
See, I see posts like yours and I wonder if we're reading the same site. In my experience the anti-MS crowd outnumbers the pro-MS crowd on Slashdot these days.
Is it just confirmation bias on both our parts, or maybe we browse at different thresholds? Weird...
I realize that actually taking the time to read the article (ha ha! yeah right, this is SLASHDOT) would minimize your chance of a karma-whoring post, and even though I think Cuban is a douche, I do have to point out that he's just throwing the idea around in his usual poorly copy-edited blog post style, he's not saying he's actually going to do this.
I've been noticing a lot of these "NASA Calms 2012 Fears" articles in the last few days, enough that it makes it sound like there's more of a story here than I think there really is. The real question is, how many people are actually worried about this? I'm guessing that it's a tiny number, and probably what happened is, a statistical blip caused a few of the crazier ones to contact NASA. So then he posts on the blog about it, and for some reason a lot of places pick up the story.
You must be new here. We don't read the summaries, let alone the friendly articles. Hell, any day now I expect most/. readers will stop reading the headlines, too, and every article will be a homogeneous mishmash of vim vs. emacs arguments, libertarian propaganda, and goatse links.
Groovy, thanks for the link. I actually had forgotten about that.
Although I would wonder, if that SWF can access and delete any Flash cookie set by any site, wouldn't that mean ANY site could run such a SWF (and, in theory, access/delete any Flash cookies)? What a weird security policy.
Is this some kind of hit piece to try and convince people not to use Verizon instead of AT&T?
I've never had Verizon, but we got fed up with AT&T's generally crappy customer service, and how they lied to us for six weeks about getting internet installed at our new house, and how they kept adding random mysterious charges to our cellphone bill. We switched to T-Mobile and haven't looked back. T-Mobile hasn't fucked us over yet, but they ARE a giant corporation, so that'll probably happen eventually.
Not to pile onto the "Wal*Mart sucks" bandwagon, but read this and either you'll never shop at Wal*Mart again, or you already shop there and this article will only make you shop there more:
These Flash cookies are hidden from the user, and require special tools [fightidentitytheft.com] to remove.
Not to speak to any of your other points, but this isn't true. The Flash cookies are simply in your filesystem somewhere and can be deleted like any other files. (Where they are exactly depends on your browser and OS, but they're still just regular files.)
You can't delete them from within the browser without addons or plugins (in other words, the Flash plugin itself does not let you do this -- at least, not without manually setting the allowed disk space to 0 for every single website, which is impractical at best), but unless you consider bash or Windows Explorer to be "special tools," it's not exactly a heinous task.
I personally consider anything 28+ years old to be out of copyright. If you can't recoup your investment in creating a work after THREE DECADES, I think maybe you just suck.
(28 years = 14 + 14 extension, a la original copyright. The laws we have now with 90+ years of copyright are absurdly unjust and, I believe, unconstitutional -- even though they may be technically finite, they do NOT promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts.)
Well, arguably, the periods of time we saw the characters were when they were exhibiting their flaws most strongly (since that's the most dramatically interesting). The rest of the time, things were relatively normal; even Starbuck was just going about her business, not being totally insane, 95% of the time.
We just "happen" to see the parts where they're being all nutso:)
Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with people wanting to use Twitter for posting mental diarrhea, corporate promotion, what-I-ate-for-lunch, etc. If they want to, more power to them, and it doesn't get in my way so I don't care. I'm just trying to figure out what its modes of use are and how they can be made use of.
Re IRC, well, with IRC in particular, it's not as easy as using most mainstream IM systems (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc.), since with those, you just start the program and wham! You're online. No worrying about nick conflicts, finding a room, picking a server, etc. You've got a contact list, it shows you who's around, you don't have to pick a server or anything... This is an advantage for those systems, but then those systems are centrally-controlled and proprietary, and that's a disadvantage to a lot of people (including me). I've been wrestling lately with how we could conceivably combine the openness, transparency, and flexibility of XMPP systems with the reliability and simplicity of monolithic, centrally-controlled systems like AIM.
It's entirely possible that they're mutually exclusive; I think at best we might be able to replicate IRC, but smooth over some of the inconveniences. With XMPP (as I understand it, having only used it a little), you pick a server and have an account there, and the server takes care of tracking your contact lists, preferences, whitelists/blacklists, etc. XMPP servers can communicate with one another over a standard protocol (well, duh;-) ) so once you know someone's address, you can send them messages even if they're on a different server.
It's actually a lot like the email system, except optimized for realtime communications rather than long-form messages. I've been toying with the idea of chucking other protocols and just using an XMPP account (probably on jabber.org -- that's another issue, with so many XMPP servers to choose from, you gotta pick a reliable one, or risk losing access/your contact list/etc.)
Tangentially, that's something that should be mandatory for XMPP servers: easy exporting of data and settings, so that I can backup my contact list and settings somewhere else, in case jabber.org melts. Then I could just upload it back to jabber.org when it revives, or send it to some other server if I decide to move house.
I've been trying to find a legitimate use for Twitter, for myself... haven't, so far. I'm 31 and I don't really need up-to-the-minute information on what any company or celebrity is doing, so there's no need for me to follow any companies or celebrities. That leaves me with friends (and not many of my friends post on Twitter frequently) and the only legitimate use I've found so far: breaking news alerts. I follow cnnbrk and bbcbreaking, and get mobile alerts, so whenever cnnbrk posts some breaking news, I hear about it PDQ (like, when Rio got the 2016 Olympics, or when Ted Kennedy died), which is what I want -- to know when major world events have just happened. (Then, if it looks like something I care about, I can go look for more data elsewhere. I just hate being in the dark about major events.)
Mostly I want those alerts sent to my phone because even if I'm not in front of a computer, I still want to know when something major happens. I may not follow up on it, but I hate those (admittedly rare) occasions when I'm offline for 4-5 hours and I come back and find out that something major happened while I was gone. cnnbrk and bbcbreaking both update very rarely (maybe 3-4 times per day, if it's a really busy day), so I'm not getting constantly interrupted.
So that leaves what my friends post. Some of it is Twitter-shitter drivel, but some of it is links to interesting things (random funny videos, Thinkgeek products, etc.). However I'm not sure that the links-to-interesting-things category is really best served by Twitter, partly because every URL ends up bit.ly'd, which of course means I have to click on it to see what it is, instead of being able to get info by looking at the URL (yeah, sometimes I don't want to get Rickrolled or goatse'd again). A lot of those links end up getting posted on Facebook, or linked in chat, or something. Even Facebook is a bit heavy-duty for just sharing links-to-cool-things, though, among a pool of friends...
Aside from the news-feed thing, I'm probably going to give up on Twitter eventually, as there's just not much there that interests me. (The occasional "entertainment" twitstream, like Shit My Dad Says, is simply yet another form of entertainment feed, but posted directly on Twitter instead of somewhere else, and I can just subscribe to that with Google Reader.)
Neither, I haven't dealt with a domain in more than a year that didn't either automatically redirect foo.com to www.foo.com, or had the web server running on the foo.com host itself. I frankly don't know why anyone uses protocol-specific subdomains at all any more. Either ftp.foo.com and www.foo.com are the same machine or they aren't. If they are, then there's no reason to have the subdomains because the machine is already listening on ports 21 and 80. If they aren't the same machine, then at best only the ftp host needs a subdomain, because everyone expects foo.com to serve port 80.
(However, 'web' is faster to type because I can use three fingers to do it almost simultaneously, but 'www' has to be hit by the same finger three times.;-) )
If SF on TV actually reflected on how our humanity itself would become unrecognizable in the wake of technological change, then fans wouldn't have easy heroes to identify with.
Hence, Battlestar Galactica. There wasn't a character on that show (except maybe Billy -- oh no, not Billy!) who was immune to the petty jealousies and wayward pride that all humans evince from time to time. All the main characters went off the rails at some point (some, like Starbuck, way more than others). Even Adama went batshit a few times. Major characters were driven to treason, mutiny, murder, suicide, genocide. It was a pretty bleak show, but it did always hold out the hope that people could get past their failings and accomplish something good.
SF on TV is fundamentally hamstrung by the fact that it's expensive to produce, and the more expensive something is, the more likely that there's people around who are risk-averse, and will try to quash anything that is challenging. This doesn't mean we can't have good SF on TV, but it does make it difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently he sent this notice from prison, where he's serving a 54-year sentence (44 for rape, 10 for witness tampering).
Right, so what he should really be worried about is his reputation.
Some states have laws that define statutory rape as having an age range limit -- e.g. you can have sex with a minor as long as you're no more than 2 years older than they are. So technically an adult and a minor can legally have consensual sex, but only if they're very close in age. This is to deal with the obvious problem of someone who's 17 yr 364 days old having sex with someone who's 18 yr 1 day old -- they're apart 2 days in age, it makes no sense that it would be illegal for them to have sex just because one's technically still a minor, so the law accounts for it. (For example, apparently Texas allows a 3-year age difference as long as the younger partner is 14+.)
Yeah, because perpetual copyright wasn't enough for these greedy fucktards.
My first instinct (and, it seems, the instinct of everyone here) is to decry this as lunacy -- of COURSE we work better with music! At least, I believe *I* do!
And I do. But I also am aware that without data to back it up, it's entirely possible that actual data would prove the manager right. I don't think it's at all likely, but it's just as baseless for us to claim that music helps us as it is for the manager to claim it hurts us. So I wonder if there's ever been any research.
For my part, I believe music helps me code, because it isolates me from outside distractions -- noise, etc. I've got all my MP3s in one playlist and usually I pick and album and just let it go; occasionally I'll find that it's been an hour and I've gotten a crapton of coding done, and I look at the playlist and I have no memory of hearing the album that just finished. It's like I go into a trance.
Of course, as the go-to guy for troubleshooting at my company, this rarely happens, because I get interrupted on average every 15 minutes or so by someone asking me to fix something, or look into something, or answer a question, or receive an urgent email or IM, etc. I probably should make a habit of closing Outlook for an hour and putting Pidgin on DND. If it really is urgent, you can walk over to my desk. Heh.
'The problem is some idea that christianity should be "fair and balanced", and that every view, from any source, is valid, or at least should be debated or considered. Bishops and priests should tell MORE people to STFU, if you ask me.' (after all, only someone trained in, say, Canon Law would be qualified to speak authoritatively on christianity, right?)
The problem with your analogy is that Christianity is entirely fictional, whereas science is a way of explaining natural phenomena. So anyone can be an authority on what they decide to call Christianity ("No, TRUE Christians perform rituals A, B, and C, not D, E, or F, like those heretics"), but you can't fool Mother Nature.
We do not (and should not) accept proclamations from scientists as truth because they hold a piece of paper or have three letters next to their name.
In the name of science, I demand to see the evidence that this kind of thing is happening more than it used to. Because that's what half the people in this thread are claiming. (Not you necessarily, but here's where I chose to reply.)
But, as for man CAUSING global warming - BULLSHIT!!! How many ice ages has the earth had now? And, how many interglacial periods?
Brilliant! I'm sure the thousands of climate scientists who say that mankind is contributing to global warming have never thought of this.~
Climate scientists are not claiming that mankind is the sole cause of global warming. The claim is that mankind's activities have caused an increase in the average temperature of the planet that would not have otherwise happened. Yes, the planet cools off and heats up on its own, it's just that mankind is helping it heat up orders of magnitude faster than it would naturally happen.
The earth didn't end with any of the ice ages, or during any of the interglacials.
Again, climate scientists are not making the claim that the world will end. For those scientists whose claims DO go beyond "mankind's activities are adding extra heat to the planet", the claim is usually "the extra heat is going to severely damage our ability to produce food, which may cause widespread starvation and wars, etc." None of them are saying the world is going to "end," whatever that means.
And please try to remember that ice ages took place on a scale of thousands of years. Human activity, so the claim goes, is causing temperature changes over the course of decades that used to take millennia.
Are you implying that people still *print* things in this day and age? Weird, who needs a printer when you have a Kindle and a smartphone? ;-)
You know, I despise Microsoft and Windows, but the assertion that paying $100 for an OS that you will use for hundreds of hours a year is a good value... makes a lot of sense. I sit in front of a computer for probably over three thousand hours a year; that's like 3 cents an hour.
Granted, we don't "use" an OS the same way we use, say, a video game or an application... nonetheless, the use we get out of it is considerable, and the price suddenly doesn't seem that bad to me. (Even $200 or $300 is still pretty cheap by that measure.)
Nonetheless, I'll be sticking with Ubuntu for my machines ;-)
See, I see posts like yours and I wonder if we're reading the same site. In my experience the anti-MS crowd outnumbers the pro-MS crowd on Slashdot these days.
Is it just confirmation bias on both our parts, or maybe we browse at different thresholds? Weird...
I think a better title for this article would be "World of Warcraft Beats Man".
I realize that actually taking the time to read the article (ha ha! yeah right, this is SLASHDOT) would minimize your chance of a karma-whoring post, and even though I think Cuban is a douche, I do have to point out that he's just throwing the idea around in his usual poorly copy-edited blog post style, he's not saying he's actually going to do this.
I've been noticing a lot of these "NASA Calms 2012 Fears" articles in the last few days, enough that it makes it sound like there's more of a story here than I think there really is. The real question is, how many people are actually worried about this? I'm guessing that it's a tiny number, and probably what happened is, a statistical blip caused a few of the crazier ones to contact NASA. So then he posts on the blog about it, and for some reason a lot of places pick up the story.
You could try reading the summary next time.
You must be new here. We don't read the summaries, let alone the friendly articles. Hell, any day now I expect most /. readers will stop reading the headlines, too, and every article will be a homogeneous mishmash of vim vs. emacs arguments, libertarian propaganda, and goatse links.
Not that I have a problem with this, mind you.
Groovy, thanks for the link. I actually had forgotten about that.
Although I would wonder, if that SWF can access and delete any Flash cookie set by any site, wouldn't that mean ANY site could run such a SWF (and, in theory, access/delete any Flash cookies)? What a weird security policy.
Is this some kind of hit piece to try and convince people not to use Verizon instead of AT&T?
I've never had Verizon, but we got fed up with AT&T's generally crappy customer service, and how they lied to us for six weeks about getting internet installed at our new house, and how they kept adding random mysterious charges to our cellphone bill. We switched to T-Mobile and haven't looked back. T-Mobile hasn't fucked us over yet, but they ARE a giant corporation, so that'll probably happen eventually.
Not to pile onto the "Wal*Mart sucks" bandwagon, but read this and either you'll never shop at Wal*Mart again, or you already shop there and this article will only make you shop there more:
http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/11/07/16449
These Flash cookies are hidden from the user, and require special tools [fightidentitytheft.com] to remove.
Not to speak to any of your other points, but this isn't true. The Flash cookies are simply in your filesystem somewhere and can be deleted like any other files. (Where they are exactly depends on your browser and OS, but they're still just regular files.)
You can't delete them from within the browser without addons or plugins (in other words, the Flash plugin itself does not let you do this -- at least, not without manually setting the allowed disk space to 0 for every single website, which is impractical at best), but unless you consider bash or Windows Explorer to be "special tools," it's not exactly a heinous task.
I personally consider anything 28+ years old to be out of copyright. If you can't recoup your investment in creating a work after THREE DECADES, I think maybe you just suck.
(28 years = 14 + 14 extension, a la original copyright. The laws we have now with 90+ years of copyright are absurdly unjust and, I believe, unconstitutional -- even though they may be technically finite, they do NOT promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts.)
Well, arguably, the periods of time we saw the characters were when they were exhibiting their flaws most strongly (since that's the most dramatically interesting). The rest of the time, things were relatively normal; even Starbuck was just going about her business, not being totally insane, 95% of the time.
We just "happen" to see the parts where they're being all nutso :)
Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with people wanting to use Twitter for posting mental diarrhea, corporate promotion, what-I-ate-for-lunch, etc. If they want to, more power to them, and it doesn't get in my way so I don't care. I'm just trying to figure out what its modes of use are and how they can be made use of.
Re IRC, well, with IRC in particular, it's not as easy as using most mainstream IM systems (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc.), since with those, you just start the program and wham! You're online. No worrying about nick conflicts, finding a room, picking a server, etc. You've got a contact list, it shows you who's around, you don't have to pick a server or anything... This is an advantage for those systems, but then those systems are centrally-controlled and proprietary, and that's a disadvantage to a lot of people (including me). I've been wrestling lately with how we could conceivably combine the openness, transparency, and flexibility of XMPP systems with the reliability and simplicity of monolithic, centrally-controlled systems like AIM.
It's entirely possible that they're mutually exclusive; I think at best we might be able to replicate IRC, but smooth over some of the inconveniences. With XMPP (as I understand it, having only used it a little), you pick a server and have an account there, and the server takes care of tracking your contact lists, preferences, whitelists/blacklists, etc. XMPP servers can communicate with one another over a standard protocol (well, duh ;-) ) so once you know someone's address, you can send them messages even if they're on a different server.
It's actually a lot like the email system, except optimized for realtime communications rather than long-form messages. I've been toying with the idea of chucking other protocols and just using an XMPP account (probably on jabber.org -- that's another issue, with so many XMPP servers to choose from, you gotta pick a reliable one, or risk losing access/your contact list/etc.)
Tangentially, that's something that should be mandatory for XMPP servers: easy exporting of data and settings, so that I can backup my contact list and settings somewhere else, in case jabber.org melts. Then I could just upload it back to jabber.org when it revives, or send it to some other server if I decide to move house.
Rambling:
I've been trying to find a legitimate use for Twitter, for myself... haven't, so far. I'm 31 and I don't really need up-to-the-minute information on what any company or celebrity is doing, so there's no need for me to follow any companies or celebrities. That leaves me with friends (and not many of my friends post on Twitter frequently) and the only legitimate use I've found so far: breaking news alerts. I follow cnnbrk and bbcbreaking, and get mobile alerts, so whenever cnnbrk posts some breaking news, I hear about it PDQ (like, when Rio got the 2016 Olympics, or when Ted Kennedy died), which is what I want -- to know when major world events have just happened. (Then, if it looks like something I care about, I can go look for more data elsewhere. I just hate being in the dark about major events.)
Mostly I want those alerts sent to my phone because even if I'm not in front of a computer, I still want to know when something major happens. I may not follow up on it, but I hate those (admittedly rare) occasions when I'm offline for 4-5 hours and I come back and find out that something major happened while I was gone. cnnbrk and bbcbreaking both update very rarely (maybe 3-4 times per day, if it's a really busy day), so I'm not getting constantly interrupted.
So that leaves what my friends post. Some of it is Twitter-shitter drivel, but some of it is links to interesting things (random funny videos, Thinkgeek products, etc.). However I'm not sure that the links-to-interesting-things category is really best served by Twitter, partly because every URL ends up bit.ly'd, which of course means I have to click on it to see what it is, instead of being able to get info by looking at the URL (yeah, sometimes I don't want to get Rickrolled or goatse'd again). A lot of those links end up getting posted on Facebook, or linked in chat, or something. Even Facebook is a bit heavy-duty for just sharing links-to-cool-things, though, among a pool of friends...
Aside from the news-feed thing, I'm probably going to give up on Twitter eventually, as there's just not much there that interests me. (The occasional "entertainment" twitstream, like Shit My Dad Says, is simply yet another form of entertainment feed, but posted directly on Twitter instead of somewhere else, and I can just subscribe to that with Google Reader.)
Neither, I haven't dealt with a domain in more than a year that didn't either automatically redirect foo.com to www.foo.com, or had the web server running on the foo.com host itself. I frankly don't know why anyone uses protocol-specific subdomains at all any more. Either ftp.foo.com and www.foo.com are the same machine or they aren't. If they are, then there's no reason to have the subdomains because the machine is already listening on ports 21 and 80. If they aren't the same machine, then at best only the ftp host needs a subdomain, because everyone expects foo.com to serve port 80.
(However, 'web' is faster to type because I can use three fingers to do it almost simultaneously, but 'www' has to be hit by the same finger three times. ;-) )
Hence, Battlestar Galactica. There wasn't a character on that show (except maybe Billy -- oh no, not Billy!) who was immune to the petty jealousies and wayward pride that all humans evince from time to time. All the main characters went off the rails at some point (some, like Starbuck, way more than others). Even Adama went batshit a few times. Major characters were driven to treason, mutiny, murder, suicide, genocide. It was a pretty bleak show, but it did always hold out the hope that people could get past their failings and accomplish something good.
SF on TV is fundamentally hamstrung by the fact that it's expensive to produce, and the more expensive something is, the more likely that there's people around who are risk-averse, and will try to quash anything that is challenging. This doesn't mean we can't have good SF on TV, but it does make it difficult.
Is there a term for the fallacy of believing that we as a society can only deal with one problem at a time? How about Rambo's Fallacy?