There's nothing wrong with correcting someone's spelling or grammar. Doing it in a condescending way is, of course, going to create resentment, but I personally find it rather irritating when people claim that clear communication is not important. And you're right; this is a forum, but expressing yourself in ways that will make people think you're ignorant isn't likely to help get your point across.
apart from anything else, solar and wind power don't even work 24x7, and power storage is nowhere near advanced enough to compensate. So, those nice clean "renewable" plants still need a conventional power station as backup!
Nobody -- well, nobody sane -- is claiming that our best path is to immediately replace all fossil fuel-burning plants with renewables like wind, hydro, etc. I think the idea is to start building more renewables plants, and the energy they provide would mean that we can crank down the fossil fuel plants much of the time. We'd still need a more reliable, steady source of power for when the renewables weren't working (or at least until sufficiently super-duper energy storage technology gets cheap enough to efficiently bridge that gap). At least until then, the fossil fuel plants would remain.
Also realize that certain energy generation technologies are better suited to certain areas. We don't need to come up with one, single, "ideal" energy source.
We could burn ethanol and wood, both of which are renewable, but which also release CO2 when burned.
I've come to understand that a more or less equivalent amount of CO2 was removed from the atmosphere when that ethanol/wood was created (by plants growing). The CO2 released burning fossil fuels, by contrast, was not CO2 removed from the air -- it was carbon from food those animals ate, combined with oxygen they breathed. Maybe I'm mistaken, but that's what I currently understand about the situation.
Lazy; (n) Resistant to work or exertion
Therefore, writing a new software tool that reduces the amount of overall work a programmer has to do is a sign of laziness.
No; it's a sign of a desire to avoid unnecessary work. Being resistant to unnecessary or tedious work is not the same as being resistant to any work. The former is efficiency; the latter is laziness.
Uh... I have ZIP archives of DOOM and DOOM II on CD, and when I want to play them, I just unzip the files, run the installer, and start playing. There's nothing fundamentally different, here, and the game runs perfectly fine. I don't see what you're getting at. Sure, I'm not physically installing them off floppies... but so what? The game still installs and plays just fine.
Laziness in programmers is a virtue! Most new software tools are developed because a programmer somewhere was too lazy to keep doing things the same old way.
I'd call this misstating the truth, at best. New software tools are developed because programmers want to avoid doing tedious or repetetive work, not because they're "lazy." You're basically redefining "lazy" as "desiring efficiency." Just because someone who is lazy does less work, and someone who desires efficiency does less work, doesn't equate the two.
Games don't expire. But, without a lot of effort on my part, I can't just go and play Doom like I did in 1995. I need to go get a 486 or a P1 around 100Mhz in speed if I want to play Doom the way I did.
What are you talking about? I run DOOM and DOOM II just fine on my Athlon XP 1900+, on a GeForce4 Ti 4200. Why would you need a 486?
I think he meant that the innate qualities of the game don't expire. You don't need an actual physical Legend of Zelda cartridge and NES console to play the game, thanks to emulators.
I'm a little confused; where do you live that Ireland is the only land mass west of you, that means you're also not in Europe or the UK?
Our normally clear air is currently getting close to as poor as Los Angeles air.
Hey! There's a lot of places in the world with worse smog than we ever get.:) And in the past couple of decades, we've had some dramatic improvements in air quality, to the point where the Stage I air quality hazard alerts that used to be issued literally every other day in the 70s and 80s, now are issued maybe once or twice per year (and in several years of the past decade, have not been issued at all).
Your logic is underwhelming. This article doesn't prove that the sun's temperature increase is responsible for global warming, merely that it may be a contributing factor. The article even says:
"That does not mean industrial pollution has not been a significant factor, Willson cautioned."
Cop: I can put you in Queens on the night of the hijacking. Hockney: Really? I live in Queens. Did you put that together yourself, Einstein? Got a team of monkeys working around the clock on this?
-- The Usual Suspects
Re:The only thing war has ever done is...
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Terrorism must be funded, accomodated, encouraged, and allowed by people that have static entities such as buildings, bases, and large, identifiable units like military forces.
False. Terrorism can be funded this way, but it can also come from grass-roots movements -- a few individuals who band together secretly, and are funded secretly by sympathizers. Money that funds terrorism is usually transferred surreptitiously; so even if it is coming from "large, identifiable units" (like, say, a drug cartel), the very fact that that transaction is happening is secret. War isn't going to help with finding that out.
Terrorists can be large groups with known identities, even nations.
Yes, they can be... but they usually aren't, because being a terrorist doesn't work very well when everyone knows that you're a terrorist, and knows where you live. Terrorism is clandestine by nature; state-supported terrorism means that money, training, and equipment are given surreptitiously to those who perform the actual terrorist acts, so that the state can deny responsibility or knowledge for the actions. Governments that admit to terrorism get destroyed rather quickly.
Re:The only thing war has ever done is...
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someone needs to say "Yeah, well so is Saddam."
Why would someone say that, except to justify the invasion? My point was that the similarities between Saddam and Hitler, or Nazi Germany and modern Iraq, do not necessarily justify an invasion, by themselves. I also did not draw any conclusion on whether the invasion was justified. What infurates me is when people use a small, selective pool of all the available evidence to make a decision. "Saddam's regime is oppressive" -- which no one will argue -- "therefore we must invade." Or, for example, "There's not enough evidence for the existence of WMD, therefore we must not invade Iraq." It would be nice if it were that simple -- and most people want it to be, so they willfully ignore everything else.
except your seizing the chance to jump on a more or less pro-Bush comment and try and make your anti-Bush statement look more potent by 'disproving' me.
I neither said nor implied anything about Bush.
Re:Not a troll: How many civilians died last time?
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Assuming that a "regime change" is the optimal solution, a lot of people have a problem with the U.S. appointing itself the executor of that task, especially when it initially agreed to let the U.N. handle international disputes. The other half of the problem is that our stated reasons for invading Iraq have little to do with "Sadaam is a mean guy." They're more along the lines of, "Iraq is a threat to our national security because they have weapons of mass destruction. No, we can't show you any real proof -- just believe us, we have it." If the U.S. said that Sadaam was a brutal asshole, and should be brought down, we'd probably have a lot more support -- but that's not what we're doing.
The problem with that method, though, is what kind of precedent does it set? Where is the line drawn? Sure, Sadaam may be "obviously" evil, but how many deaths do you have to be responsible for before it's okay for the U.S. to come in and take you down? How about when the government, under Clinton, invaded the Branch Davidian compound in Waco? It was a complete debacle, and Clinton was at least indirectly responsible for it (being Reno's boss), but would Canada have been justified in invading the U.S. and killing Clinton because of it? Almost certainly not. So where do you draw the line? Once you start down that dark path, how long before every nation starts wondering when the U.S. will decide that their leader is a jerk, and needs to die?
Does this mean we shouldn't invade Iraq for that reason? Nope. It's a big, complicated, tangled web -- and anyone who thinks they know all the answers is arrogant. Including me.
Re:The only thing war has ever done is...
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How, exactly, would war affect terrorism? War is made against static entities: buildings, bases, and large, identifiable units like military forces. Terrorists work in small, fluid groups, and their identities are (ideally, in their eyes) kept secret. The only way to fight terrorism is either to enforce a totalitarian state, so that everyone is constantly monitored (which hardly seems like an improvement -- see 1984), or to remove the motivation of the terrorists to commit terror.
It would be nice if war could "lower [terrorism] to the point where no one gives a crap about it," but that's not the kind of thing war can do.
Re:The only thing war has ever done is...
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You left out, "Took over half of Europe."
So your point is, what? Because there's similarities between Hitler's Germany and Saddam's Iraq, therefore similar military action is justified?
How about the differences between them? Germany was a superpower when World War II began. They had a massive industrial base, and some of the most advanced military technology in the world. Iraq has neither of these things -- they may be more advanced than Germany was in 1938, but they are far less advanced than many other nations are now, in 2003. Iraq invaded one tiny, defenseless country, once, and was immediately kicked out. Germany invaded several countries and held them for several years, controlling most of Europe.
Does this mean that war therefore is or is not justified? Of course not; it's never that simple. But to throw a few similarities onto the field, as if that justifies something, is hardly acceptable.
The point is that war is incapable of making terrorism irrelevant in the same way that it (debatably) made Communism and Nazism irrelevant. Anyone can be a terrorist, and terrorist cells can be very fluid in nature; but it takes large, centralized, stable (or at least static) bureaucracy to have Communism or Nazism. There's something to attack, there: military bases, governmental buildings. With terrorism, they can establish new bases as fast as we can destroy them; and the identities of those who hold power are much more secret than they are in actual governments.
War, by its very nature, cannot defeat terrorism -- not unless you kill every person on Earth.
Re:The only thing war has ever done is...
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The point still stands -- war didn't defeat Communism. (Actually, nothing defeated Communism; it's still around.) However Communism isn't the bogeyman that it was in the 50s; a lot more people now realize that it's just a different economic system, not ravening hordes of Russkies thirsting after our precious bodily fluids... or something.
Your point is that spending lots of money on military power, but not actually using it, led to the downfall of the USSR... which is not even remotely the same as "War defeated Communism." The Cold War was not a shooting war, which is the kind of war under discussion.
UCLA uses a 9-digit unique ID that's assigned to you when either you apply or are accepted, I don't remember which. It's not based on your SSN and in fact has nothing to do with it. My wife just went back to UCLA for grad school seven years after finishing undergrad, and she's still using the same ID number she was using then. Faculty and staff are also assigned IDs.
All UCLA students, faculty, and staff are issued photo ID cards with the number and their name printed on it. Remembering it isn't a big deal, since you always have it with you. Some form of unique identifier is, effectively, necessary for administration tasks at a university, but it certainly doesn't need to be your SSN. A different random 9-digit number will serve just as well.
I think it does matter. Not that Linux has to "win" for some abstract pride-based reason; but rather, Microsoft's immense power within the industry allows them to abuse society and retard the progress of computing. Microsoft needs to lose some of that power, and if that happens because Linux takes much of its market share, then so be it.
In other words, it doesn't matter who wins (Linux, BSD, whoever), as long as it's not a single corporation (or even a few; oligopolies are not much better than monopolies).
Hindenberg. Doesn't matter what actually happened, the helium industry spun it so well, that it's embeded in peoples minds that hydrogen is unsafe.
Yeah, but it used to be "embedded" in people's minds that a computer took up most of a large room, and had to have several scientists constantly tending it. It used to be "embedded" that Japan made crappy, second-rate electronics. Things change; it takes time, for sure, but hey, it happens.
I wasn't aware that Netscape had typeahead find, built-in popup blocking, tabbed browsing... or quite a lot of other features "before Microsoft killed it." Do those things not qualify as innovation?
it's easier just to run a real copy of windows and IE.
Thanks, but I'd rather not support Microsoft in any way if I can avoid it. I don't trust them, and I don't want to encourage them. I'm willing to put up with some minor inconveniences in order to avoid MS. I know that not everyone is, but this is my stand.
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing wrong with correcting someone's spelling or grammar. Doing it in a condescending way is, of course, going to create resentment, but I personally find it rather irritating when people claim that clear communication is not important. And you're right; this is a forum, but expressing yourself in ways that will make people think you're ignorant isn't likely to help get your point across.
Also realize that certain energy generation technologies are better suited to certain areas. We don't need to come up with one, single, "ideal" energy source.
Uh... I have ZIP archives of DOOM and DOOM II on CD, and when I want to play them, I just unzip the files, run the installer, and start playing. There's nothing fundamentally different, here, and the game runs perfectly fine. I don't see what you're getting at. Sure, I'm not physically installing them off floppies... but so what? The game still installs and plays just fine.
I think he meant that the innate qualities of the game don't expire. You don't need an actual physical Legend of Zelda cartridge and NES console to play the game, thanks to emulators.
Your logic is underwhelming. This article doesn't prove that the sun's temperature increase is responsible for global warming, merely that it may be a contributing factor. The article even says:
"That does not mean industrial pollution has not been a significant factor, Willson cautioned."
Perhaps the original line... :)
Cop: I can put you in Queens on the night of the hijacking.
Hockney: Really? I live in Queens. Did you put that together yourself, Einstein? Got a team of monkeys working around the clock on this?
-- The Usual Suspects
Assuming that a "regime change" is the optimal solution, a lot of people have a problem with the U.S. appointing itself the executor of that task, especially when it initially agreed to let the U.N. handle international disputes. The other half of the problem is that our stated reasons for invading Iraq have little to do with "Sadaam is a mean guy." They're more along the lines of, "Iraq is a threat to our national security because they have weapons of mass destruction. No, we can't show you any real proof -- just believe us, we have it." If the U.S. said that Sadaam was a brutal asshole, and should be brought down, we'd probably have a lot more support -- but that's not what we're doing.
The problem with that method, though, is what kind of precedent does it set? Where is the line drawn? Sure, Sadaam may be "obviously" evil, but how many deaths do you have to be responsible for before it's okay for the U.S. to come in and take you down? How about when the government, under Clinton, invaded the Branch Davidian compound in Waco? It was a complete debacle, and Clinton was at least indirectly responsible for it (being Reno's boss), but would Canada have been justified in invading the U.S. and killing Clinton because of it? Almost certainly not. So where do you draw the line? Once you start down that dark path, how long before every nation starts wondering when the U.S. will decide that their leader is a jerk, and needs to die?
Does this mean we shouldn't invade Iraq for that reason? Nope. It's a big, complicated, tangled web -- and anyone who thinks they know all the answers is arrogant. Including me.
How, exactly, would war affect terrorism? War is made against static entities: buildings, bases, and large, identifiable units like military forces. Terrorists work in small, fluid groups, and their identities are (ideally, in their eyes) kept secret. The only way to fight terrorism is either to enforce a totalitarian state, so that everyone is constantly monitored (which hardly seems like an improvement -- see 1984), or to remove the motivation of the terrorists to commit terror.
It would be nice if war could "lower [terrorism] to the point where no one gives a crap about it," but that's not the kind of thing war can do.
You left out, "Took over half of Europe."
So your point is, what? Because there's similarities between Hitler's Germany and Saddam's Iraq, therefore similar military action is justified?
How about the differences between them? Germany was a superpower when World War II began. They had a massive industrial base, and some of the most advanced military technology in the world. Iraq has neither of these things -- they may be more advanced than Germany was in 1938, but they are far less advanced than many other nations are now, in 2003. Iraq invaded one tiny, defenseless country, once, and was immediately kicked out. Germany invaded several countries and held them for several years, controlling most of Europe.
Does this mean that war therefore is or is not justified? Of course not; it's never that simple. But to throw a few similarities onto the field, as if that justifies something, is hardly acceptable.
The point is that war is incapable of making terrorism irrelevant in the same way that it (debatably) made Communism and Nazism irrelevant. Anyone can be a terrorist, and terrorist cells can be very fluid in nature; but it takes large, centralized, stable (or at least static) bureaucracy to have Communism or Nazism. There's something to attack, there: military bases, governmental buildings. With terrorism, they can establish new bases as fast as we can destroy them; and the identities of those who hold power are much more secret than they are in actual governments.
War, by its very nature, cannot defeat terrorism -- not unless you kill every person on Earth.
The point still stands -- war didn't defeat Communism. (Actually, nothing defeated Communism; it's still around.) However Communism isn't the bogeyman that it was in the 50s; a lot more people now realize that it's just a different economic system, not ravening hordes of Russkies thirsting after our precious bodily fluids... or something.
Your point is that spending lots of money on military power, but not actually using it, led to the downfall of the USSR... which is not even remotely the same as "War defeated Communism." The Cold War was not a shooting war, which is the kind of war under discussion.
UCLA uses a 9-digit unique ID that's assigned to you when either you apply or are accepted, I don't remember which. It's not based on your SSN and in fact has nothing to do with it. My wife just went back to UCLA for grad school seven years after finishing undergrad, and she's still using the same ID number she was using then. Faculty and staff are also assigned IDs.
All UCLA students, faculty, and staff are issued photo ID cards with the number and their name printed on it. Remembering it isn't a big deal, since you always have it with you. Some form of unique identifier is, effectively, necessary for administration tasks at a university, but it certainly doesn't need to be your SSN. A different random 9-digit number will serve just as well.
I think it does matter. Not that Linux has to "win" for some abstract pride-based reason; but rather, Microsoft's immense power within the industry allows them to abuse society and retard the progress of computing. Microsoft needs to lose some of that power, and if that happens because Linux takes much of its market share, then so be it.
In other words, it doesn't matter who wins (Linux, BSD, whoever), as long as it's not a single corporation (or even a few; oligopolies are not much better than monopolies).
Wouldn't an intelligent gun know better than to go around shooting people? :)
Why you... you... ANIMAL! Driving an SUV at a time like this!
What? Oh, yes, drugs, piracy, bad, blah blah blah. *mutter*Damn SUV drivers*mutter*