Actually there is. If the first moderator mods a post as "troll" and five or six more (depending on your starting score) mod it "underrated", you have Score: +5, troll.
Well, to be fair, Britanica wasn't a replacement for a decent reference book by a good writer on any subject, either. It was and is a good encyclopedia, but you wouldn't want to cite it in an academic paper.
I wish I still had the one I read when I was 12 (yes, all 26 volumes). Of course, it would be WAY out of date. Back then a computer took up a whole building and was less powerful than your phone, there were nine planets, none of them around other stars, man was just venturing into space and we'd never sent anything past Earth orbit, a hell of a lot of history hadn't happened, a lot of scientific discoveries hadn't been made...
You know, for an encyclopedia, printing it on paper doesn't make much sense since we have the internet. I can see the sad headlines after Gutenberg: "Publisher does away with hand-printed bibles"
Well, personally, I have a lot stronger passwords on my own computers than on my employer's, and web sites besides email and slashdot? 111111 is fine for, say, logging in to read a newspaper, if I don't simply close the tab and read a newspaper that isn't so stupid instead.
How good a pasword I use depends on what I'm protecting. Some need no protection at all, and for those 12345 is good enough for me.
"Things just aren't as good as they once were". Unless you're 15 years old, that sentiment rings true for most aspects of our lives.
Actually, that's a middle aged thing. When I look back I see going to the outhouse when visiting my grandparents, having a TV dinner take half an hour to cook because there was no microwave oven, having three blurry, ghosty, black and white channels on the 19 inch TV set, no remote control, no VCR or DVR, no computers, no cell phones, no CrystaLens implants, young men (but not young women) being drafted to die horribly in a war halfway around the world, terribly polluted air and water, fear of nuclear holocaust with the USSR, being operated on with ether as an anesthetic (nasty stuff), cars that were lucky to last 5 years, used leaded gasoline and had no air bags, ABS, or even seat belts, let alone niceties like air conditioning and cruise control; most of us didn't even have AC in our houses... hell, son, the 21st century is a science fiction paradise compared to the 1960s. It was primitive as hell back then.
Yes, a few things are worse (copyright laws, DMCA, TSA, shrinking middle class and growing corporate power) but on the whole I have it better than I ever did.
It's not a fucking religious war here people, for God's sake we're supposed to be more intelligent and civil than the rest of the school, but we spend all our time in rant wars about god damn software we don't even use??
I think you'll find that most of us who hate MS hate it for its crappy software, which our employers force us to use and PC manufacturers force on us when we buy a new computer. I shouldn't have to pay for an OS I'm going to wipe once I get the computer home and yes, it makes me angry that I not only can't buy a PC with kubuntu preloaded, I can't even buy a naked PC. It's just plain wrong and it galls me to no end.
Google's stalking me doesn't make me too happy, either.
Now, if you want to talk holy war -- SONY!! May those disgusting bastards rot in hell. I can't understand why ANYONE who ever heard of XCP or OtherOS would trust those sons of bitches any farther than they could throw Sony's corporate HQ. Yes, I was a victim of XCP. I will never again be their victim and will throw a wild party the day they go out of business. MS annoys the hell out of me, but I hate Sony passionately.
Flash Gordon and Star Trek were fiction. We knew of no exoplanets in the 1930s and 1960s. The name wasn't thought up by marketers, it was coined by astronomers.
Likewise, the SF guys all call our star the "sun" while Alpha Proxima is simply a "star". Solar planets are unique in that they circle not a star, but the sun -- even though the sun is a star.
It's a lot more logical than planets vs dwarf planets.
Why would anyone on an interstellar voyaga want to dive into a gravity well ?
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In orbital mechanics and aerospace engineering, a gravitational slingshot, gravity assist maneuver, or swing-by is the use of the relative movement and gravity of a planet or other celestial body to alter the path and speed of a spacecraft, typically in order to save propellant, time, and expense. Gravity assistance can be used to accelerate, decelerate and/or re-direct the path of a spacecraft.
The "assist" is provided by the motion (orbital angular momentum) of the gravitating body as it pulls on the spacecraft.[1] The technique was first proposed as a mid-course manoeuvre in 1961, and used by interplanetary probes from Mariner 10 onwards, including the two Voyager probes' notable fly-bys of Jupiter and Saturn.
A tax credit is a subsidy. Just ask any of the AM talk show hosts about the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Lease payments are NOT taxes by any stretch of the imagination, and are actually a form of subsidy themselves. The oil companies would have to pay a private person far more than they pay the gov.
I am all for removing government tax breaks, but remove EVERYONE's tax breaks
Why would I shoo away the volunteer firefighters when they come to fight the fire?
Because your taxes paid for the equipment. You don't need government, remember?
that would be the big corporations that were empowered by the USDA regulations that got rid of the small local butcher
USDA regs didn't get rid of the local butcher, the big corporations ability to undercut the local butcher's prices did, just as WalMart pretty much did away with other local busineses.
No, my friend, those regulations are in place to make it harder for small vendors to compete with the multinational corporations.
His point is that prohibition does not work, never has worked, cannot work, and is an example of prohibition causing what it's supposed to prevent. One of the prohibitionist mantras is "think of the children!" but if heroin were legal for adults it would be much harder for kids to get hold of.
What are these scary consequences to society of legalizing heroin? All I see is hand waving "it will be bad!!!!"...how? The laws aren't keeping it from a single person who wants it.
IF that is the case WhyTF does everyone want to point guns at each other?
Considering that all three religions are supposed to follow the laws Moses brought, one would expect that none of them would ever point a gun at each other. But people are easily manipulated, and men who lust for power have a way of convincing people that purple is really yellow and red is really green.
Same reason the Catholics fought the Protestants in Ireland for hundreds of years -- greedy powerful men who pretend to be pious grabbing at everything they can get.
You think tobacco and alcohol are the two most deadly and addictive drugs in existence???? Ever heard of heroin? Crystal meth?
I've known reformed junkies, not one of them quit cigarettes.
Can you imagine the effect on society if you could buy heroin the way you can buy cigarettes?
Yes, it would be cheap enough that they wouldn't have to break into my house and steal my shit to support their damned habits. Anybody that would take meth or heroin is already addicted to it. The laws against it don't reduce the supply at all, they only make it expensive.
They said the same thing about alcohol legalization in the 1920s that you say about the illegal drugs today. But when prohibition was lifted, the problems prohibition caused, which are exactly the same probems today's prohibition causes, all went away.
Here's a little history from a book that was required reading in an undergrad class I took in the '70s. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Well, your being in Europe makes quite a difference. In the US we just throw the poor to the wolves and say it's their own fault the corporates aren't hiring.
I'm a Christian too. Why bring religion in this? I made the false assumption that you were an American "conservative". They act as if we actually have a safety net and people don't have to work, and without exception they're bible thumping hypocrites who give you and me a bad name.
Ron Paul for one, Dennis Kucinich for another; these two guys (feel free to disagree with either on certain issues; RP certainly has a few wacky or at least unrealistic ideas) appear to be completely honest and uncorrupted by big corporations,
I can forgive the youngsters who can't know how bad the envrionment was before the EPA, but any politician Paul's age who wants to dismantle that agency is surely a corporate puppet. And that's not the only stand he holds that shows where his true values lie.
Because Congress would have overridden a veto, which would have made Nixon look REALLY bad (the environment was in terrible condition and people were fed up with industry fouling the air and water) while signing it made him look less like a cheap political hack and more like a statesman.
And now we have idiot youngsters (led by rich geezers who won't be bothered by pollution) wanting to abolish the EPA. Fools, all.
If it weren't for his stand on the environment I could vote for Paul. But he's old enough to remember how horrible things were before the EPA, which makes his anti-EPA horseshit all the more reprehensible. He's not a libertarian, he's a corporatist (as are all the "Big L" libertarians).
When someone comes up with a Social Libertarian party I'll be the first one to sign up.
There are a lot of "conservatives" at slashdot who think everywhere but Texas is socialist. Hell, there are slashdotters who would have called Mussolini a commie.
You could leave one library tape (oh, go on, ET) on a shelf next to a Maxell E180 with the same movie, guess which one will be still watchable in ten, fifteen, twenty years?
I have a LOT of VHS that's well over 20, and audio cassettes that are pushing 50. Few of the VCR tapes show any wear (except the ones that were "eaten" by faulty players). Only the cheapest audio cassettes show any damage at all. Yes, I, too am digitizing my collections.
I'd be willing to bet that 50 year old cassette will still work long after the CD is unreadable.
Do people with joint pain go to the doctor, or do they just assume it is part of aging and put up with it (or worse, self medicate)?
I have arthritis, and have had it since I was a teenager. When I was in the USAF they prescribed a whole lot of drugs, none of which did any more good than aspirin and quite a few which harmed me. To this day, the only other drug that's at all effective is naproxin sodium, which was developed long after I was in the service.
There is one other drug that helps arthritis symptoms -- marijuana. Do I bother seeing a doctor about my arthritis? Hell no, it's a dangerous waste of my money that will do no good and possibly a lot of harm. There isn't anything they can do about it.
Is constantly feeling sad normal, or is there something wrong that can be fixed?
After my ex-wife deserted me and our family I was prescribed Paxil. After that experience all I'll say is if you're just sad, stay away from the damned doctor. Nobody should be on any SSRIs unless they're already suicidal. That is some very nasty shit.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually there is. If the first moderator mods a post as "troll" and five or six more (depending on your starting score) mod it "underrated", you have Score: +5, troll.
Well, to be fair, Britanica wasn't a replacement for a decent reference book by a good writer on any subject, either. It was and is a good encyclopedia, but you wouldn't want to cite it in an academic paper.
I wish I still had the one I read when I was 12 (yes, all 26 volumes). Of course, it would be WAY out of date. Back then a computer took up a whole building and was less powerful than your phone, there were nine planets, none of them around other stars, man was just venturing into space and we'd never sent anything past Earth orbit, a hell of a lot of history hadn't happened, a lot of scientific discoveries hadn't been made...
You know, for an encyclopedia, printing it on paper doesn't make much sense since we have the internet. I can see the sad headlines after Gutenberg: "Publisher does away with hand-printed bibles"
Well, personally, I have a lot stronger passwords on my own computers than on my employer's, and web sites besides email and slashdot? 111111 is fine for, say, logging in to read a newspaper, if I don't simply close the tab and read a newspaper that isn't so stupid instead.
How good a pasword I use depends on what I'm protecting. Some need no protection at all, and for those 12345 is good enough for me.
"Things just aren't as good as they once were". Unless you're 15 years old, that sentiment rings true for most aspects of our lives.
Actually, that's a middle aged thing. When I look back I see going to the outhouse when visiting my grandparents, having a TV dinner take half an hour to cook because there was no microwave oven, having three blurry, ghosty, black and white channels on the 19 inch TV set, no remote control, no VCR or DVR, no computers, no cell phones, no CrystaLens implants, young men (but not young women) being drafted to die horribly in a war halfway around the world, terribly polluted air and water, fear of nuclear holocaust with the USSR, being operated on with ether as an anesthetic (nasty stuff), cars that were lucky to last 5 years, used leaded gasoline and had no air bags, ABS, or even seat belts, let alone niceties like air conditioning and cruise control; most of us didn't even have AC in our houses... hell, son, the 21st century is a science fiction paradise compared to the 1960s. It was primitive as hell back then.
Yes, a few things are worse (copyright laws, DMCA, TSA, shrinking middle class and growing corporate power) but on the whole I have it better than I ever did.
It's not a fucking religious war here people, for God's sake we're supposed to be more intelligent and civil than the rest of the school, but we spend all our time in rant wars about god damn software we don't even use??
I think you'll find that most of us who hate MS hate it for its crappy software, which our employers force us to use and PC manufacturers force on us when we buy a new computer. I shouldn't have to pay for an OS I'm going to wipe once I get the computer home and yes, it makes me angry that I not only can't buy a PC with kubuntu preloaded, I can't even buy a naked PC. It's just plain wrong and it galls me to no end.
Google's stalking me doesn't make me too happy, either.
Now, if you want to talk holy war -- SONY!! May those disgusting bastards rot in hell. I can't understand why ANYONE who ever heard of XCP or OtherOS would trust those sons of bitches any farther than they could throw Sony's corporate HQ. Yes, I was a victim of XCP. I will never again be their victim and will throw a wild party the day they go out of business. MS annoys the hell out of me, but I hate Sony passionately.
ONLY 50%??? When half of a population gets eye damage you have some serious problems. I doubt even welders have that great of a risk.
Only if you misread it and cherry pick the parts you want, and none of the rest of your tribe are literate.
It isn't even a triangle, unless you consider a triangle drawn by someone with the shakes a "triangle".
I guess I shoudn't have RTFA but I had to see the triangle... and didn't.
I can swear I could do this since 1994 when I played Doom
As well as articles saying "console gaming is dying" and a few years later "PC gaming is dying."
Flash Gordon and Star Trek were fiction. We knew of no exoplanets in the 1930s and 1960s. The name wasn't thought up by marketers, it was coined by astronomers.
Likewise, the SF guys all call our star the "sun" while Alpha Proxima is simply a "star". Solar planets are unique in that they circle not a star, but the sun -- even though the sun is a star.
It's a lot more logical than planets vs dwarf planets.
Why would anyone on an interstellar voyaga want to dive into a gravity well ?
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In orbital mechanics and aerospace engineering, a gravitational slingshot, gravity assist maneuver, or swing-by is the use of the relative movement and gravity of a planet or other celestial body to alter the path and speed of a spacecraft, typically in order to save propellant, time, and expense. Gravity assistance can be used to accelerate, decelerate and/or re-direct the path of a spacecraft.
The "assist" is provided by the motion (orbital angular momentum) of the gravitating body as it pulls on the spacecraft.[1] The technique was first proposed as a mid-course manoeuvre in 1961, and used by interplanetary probes from Mariner 10 onwards, including the two Voyager probes' notable fly-bys of Jupiter and Saturn.
Or just add a space between the Bs.
The Hob Bit.
"If you give your IP to scumbags, you may loose all rigths to it."
Best pun I've seen all day.
A tax credit is a subsidy. Just ask any of the AM talk show hosts about the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Lease payments are NOT taxes by any stretch of the imagination, and are actually a form of subsidy themselves. The oil companies would have to pay a private person far more than they pay the gov.
I am all for removing government tax breaks, but remove EVERYONE's tax breaks
I agree completely.
Why would I shoo away the volunteer firefighters when they come to fight the fire?
Because your taxes paid for the equipment. You don't need government, remember?
that would be the big corporations that were empowered by the USDA regulations that got rid of the small local butcher
USDA regs didn't get rid of the local butcher, the big corporations ability to undercut the local butcher's prices did, just as WalMart pretty much did away with other local busineses.
No, my friend, those regulations are in place to make it harder for small vendors to compete with the multinational corporations.
Name one.
His point is that prohibition does not work, never has worked, cannot work, and is an example of prohibition causing what it's supposed to prevent. One of the prohibitionist mantras is "think of the children!" but if heroin were legal for adults it would be much harder for kids to get hold of.
What are these scary consequences to society of legalizing heroin? All I see is hand waving "it will be bad!!!!"...how? The laws aren't keeping it from a single person who wants it.
IF that is the case WhyTF does everyone want to point guns at each other?
Considering that all three religions are supposed to follow the laws Moses brought, one would expect that none of them would ever point a gun at each other. But people are easily manipulated, and men who lust for power have a way of convincing people that purple is really yellow and red is really green.
Same reason the Catholics fought the Protestants in Ireland for hundreds of years -- greedy powerful men who pretend to be pious grabbing at everything they can get.
You think tobacco and alcohol are the two most deadly and addictive drugs in existence???? Ever heard of heroin? Crystal meth?
I've known reformed junkies, not one of them quit cigarettes.
Can you imagine the effect on society if you could buy heroin the way you can buy cigarettes?
Yes, it would be cheap enough that they wouldn't have to break into my house and steal my shit to support their damned habits. Anybody that would take meth or heroin is already addicted to it. The laws against it don't reduce the supply at all, they only make it expensive.
They said the same thing about alcohol legalization in the 1920s that you say about the illegal drugs today. But when prohibition was lifted, the problems prohibition caused, which are exactly the same probems today's prohibition causes, all went away.
Here's a little history from a book that was required reading in an undergrad class I took in the '70s. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Well, your being in Europe makes quite a difference. In the US we just throw the poor to the wolves and say it's their own fault the corporates aren't hiring.
I'm a Christian too. Why bring religion in this?
I made the false assumption that you were an American "conservative". They act as if we actually have a safety net and people don't have to work, and without exception they're bible thumping hypocrites who give you and me a bad name.
Ron Paul for one, Dennis Kucinich for another; these two guys (feel free to disagree with either on certain issues; RP certainly has a few wacky or at least unrealistic ideas) appear to be completely honest and uncorrupted by big corporations,
I can forgive the youngsters who can't know how bad the envrionment was before the EPA, but any politician Paul's age who wants to dismantle that agency is surely a corporate puppet. And that's not the only stand he holds that shows where his true values lie.
Because Congress would have overridden a veto, which would have made Nixon look REALLY bad (the environment was in terrible condition and people were fed up with industry fouling the air and water) while signing it made him look less like a cheap political hack and more like a statesman.
And now we have idiot youngsters (led by rich geezers who won't be bothered by pollution) wanting to abolish the EPA. Fools, all.
If it weren't for his stand on the environment I could vote for Paul. But he's old enough to remember how horrible things were before the EPA, which makes his anti-EPA horseshit all the more reprehensible. He's not a libertarian, he's a corporatist (as are all the "Big L" libertarians).
When someone comes up with a Social Libertarian party I'll be the first one to sign up.
You didn't know?
There are a lot of "conservatives" at slashdot who think everywhere but Texas is socialist. Hell, there are slashdotters who would have called Mussolini a commie.
You could leave one library tape (oh, go on, ET) on a shelf next to a Maxell E180 with the same movie, guess which one will be still watchable in ten, fifteen, twenty years?
I have a LOT of VHS that's well over 20, and audio cassettes that are pushing 50. Few of the VCR tapes show any wear (except the ones that were "eaten" by faulty players). Only the cheapest audio cassettes show any damage at all. Yes, I, too am digitizing my collections.
I'd be willing to bet that 50 year old cassette will still work long after the CD is unreadable.
Do people with joint pain go to the doctor, or do they just assume it is part of aging and put up with it (or worse, self medicate)?
I have arthritis, and have had it since I was a teenager. When I was in the USAF they prescribed a whole lot of drugs, none of which did any more good than aspirin and quite a few which harmed me. To this day, the only other drug that's at all effective is naproxin sodium, which was developed long after I was in the service.
There is one other drug that helps arthritis symptoms -- marijuana. Do I bother seeing a doctor about my arthritis? Hell no, it's a dangerous waste of my money that will do no good and possibly a lot of harm. There isn't anything they can do about it.
Is constantly feeling sad normal, or is there something wrong that can be fixed?
After my ex-wife deserted me and our family I was prescribed Paxil. After that experience all I'll say is if you're just sad, stay away from the damned doctor. Nobody should be on any SSRIs unless they're already suicidal. That is some very nasty shit.