I always said that if they want to encourage public transport they need to find a way to make it cheap for groups.
They just raised bus prices here in Springfield to $1.25. That's $2.50 round trip. At 20 mpg it doesn't matter if I'm by myself or in a group, driving anywhere in town is a hell of a lot cheaper than the bus, and a ten minute drive is an hour long bus ride.
Frank Zappa didn't see any difference between the moral panic (some of the stuff targeted is hilarious in hindsight) and explicit, outright censorship, but I think the PMRC were mostly harmless, even if they were batshit crazy.
The two that come to my mind had nothing to do with Zappa but were hilarious in themselves. One was "Under The Blade" (Twisted Sister?) and the other was "Suicide Solution" (Ozzie). They called these songs evil without even listening to them -- "Under the Blade" is about having surgery preformed in a hospital, "Suicide Solution" was an anti-drinking song.
I think it was just a lot of busywork for easily-offended baby boomers.
Hmmm, I haven't met many boomers who are easily offended, and I'm one. Go into any neighborhood bar on a weekday afternoon and see how easily offended the geezers are.
You may be mistaking distaste for offence. Neither rap nor opera offend me, but I hate them equally.
You're missing a couple of things. It isn't "one data point" but personal observation. Personal experience almost always trumps someone else's observations, even if the someone else is an expert in the field. The other is anger -- once you feel a person or company has ripped you off you're not likely to buy anything else from them.
My ten year old Sony TV is the last Sony ANYTHING I'll ever buy, after being bitten by XCP. I don't care how they change, I can never trust them again.
The 38% is the disturbing number. As a poster above said, teach all the creation stories -- but not in science class. Creationism belongs in philosophy class, not science.
Although I hate Flash with a passion (it crashes constantly in my Linux box, what a turd it is), it saves me $50 a month. Rather than pay for cable TV, I have a PC plugged into the TV set and get six local channels from antenna supplimented by hundreds on Hulu as well as all the networks on their own web sites.
And all the radio stations use it. Well, almost all... a local station (WCVS) uses Silverlight, so I only listen to them in the car. The local college station (WQNA, my favorite) has MP3 and AAC streams. But all the rest I listen to (can't do without KSHE's 7th Day program, and you can't pick them up here with an antenna) all use Flash.
I'm really looking forward to HTML5 taking over. I hate Flash, but I still need it. Kind of like some MS programs I have to use at work.
It's my understanding that your gasoline prices are so high because of taxes. I'd take high gasoline prices in a heartbeat if it meant I didn't have to buy health insurance. Too bad my fellow Americans all seem to disagree.
I agree that the Republicans are, in fact, the anti-science party. However, I don't believe Santorum is a "religious guy" unless you're talking about the worship of money. He's an MBA, a lawyer, and filthy rich. He wears Satan's leash, the necktie, symbol of wealth and power, the symbol of everything his so-called "faith" is about.
Pretend Christians ("wolves in sheep's clothing") like Santurum give Christianity a bad name. Coincidentally, that was the subject of Sunday's sermon at my church, "the practical atheist"; the person who calls himself Christian but doesn't follow any of Christ's teachings.
Jesus was a liberal. IMO "conservative Christian" is an oxymoron; "conservative" means "stingy" and "liberal" means "generous".
"It is as hard for a rich man to go to heaven as it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle" -- JC
He doesn't believe in God any more than you do. He just pretends to. I respect true athiests for their faith and courage, but have no respect whatever for athiests who pretend to love the god they don't really believe in.
I wore glasses (thick ones) for 45 years until medical technology came to my rescue. I'm not going back. Sunglasses, maybe, but a headsup display at all times with your email and such?
You know, there are some things that should not be invented and this is one of them. You think people talking on their phones while driving are dangerous, wait until they're wearing these glasses! It will be bad enough on the sidewalk with idiots paying attention to the HUD and not where they're going, running into you... better than driving with them, though.
What's worse It's a completely unnecessary device. Doesn't your phone beep when you get a message?
However, this will probably go over big with the hipsters. Kind of like the Segway was so popular. It does have one good feature -- nopbody wearing these will EVER get laid, so their genes will no longer pollute the pool. And the ones who wear them driving (and they will, you know they will) may kill themselves, but unfortunately take an innocent or two with them.
GM quality has dropped? IIRC the last GM vehicle I owned was a 1975 Pontiac LeMans. I put 300,000 miles on that sucker and its only repairs were a water pump and a clutch.
What problems are you having with your new Pontiac? I have a ten year old Chrysler (havn't had a GM in a long time) and all that's wrong with it is it needs struts, a tuneup, and a wheel alignment. I used to always like GM.
Ford, now... I've owned exactly one Ford in my life, a 1969 Mustang GT I bought in 1971. I spent more time under the hood of that damned thing than I did in the driver's seat. Swore off, haven't been back.
Exactly. Agressive species have a hard time fitting into the world's environments (which we puny humans now control), while the non-agressive species fit their environments well. Survival of the fittest is the best fit for an environment, not the biggest or strongest or fastest or smartest species, unless these traits make a species more fit for its environment.
Dumb luck plays a part in evolution, too. If the fastest gazelle gets its hoof caught in a hole while running from lions, he's lion lunch. If he's too young to have bred his genes are gone from the species' gene pool.
We don't advocate raping people in order to point out that they made a bad choice, or are screwed up at some point in their life.
You don't, and I don't, but how many comments have you seen on slashdot that say "throw 'em in 'pound them in the ass' prison?" Too many here do seem to condone rape.
I wonder if people will choose to have cataract surgery done even if they have no cataracts.
Actually, they already do. "Cataract surgery" is an amputation; your eye's lens is removed and replaced with an artificial one. The newest one can even focus, as it sits on struts inside the lens capsule. These will not only cure cataracts, but nearsightedness, farsightedness (even age-related), and astigmatism.
I wore thick glasses all my life until steroid eye drops gave me a cataract in my left eye. Now I wear no corrective lenses at all, not even reading glasses, and I'll be 60 in a couple of months.
If you have the cash you can get the surgery without having cataracts. It's painless (I had no discomfort at all and could read the clock on the wall of the recovery room) but it does kind of freak you out when they stick that needle in your eye.
I'd post something substantial, but the idiotic pro-piracy comments in this thread makes me realize that a lot of humanity only cares about doing whatever is in their own short-term personal interest and will masquerade their greed as 'logic and reason'
Long copyrights harm creativity more than none at all. Neither extreme is good.
You do realise that study after study shows the fallacy of the "nobody will pay if they can get it for free" stupidity, right? Music pirates spend more money on music than non-pirates. A book publisher did a study a couple of years ago to determine how much piracy was costing him and found to his surprise that as soon as his books hit the internet, there was a sales spike rather than a loss of sales.
Piracy sells media. The problem is, the publishers want to get paid for media-less content. Worse, they want to charge more for an MP3 collection than for a CD, more for a downloaded movie than a DVD, and more for an ebook than for one printed on paper that has manufacturing costs, distribution costs, warehousing costs, etc.
The only pirates are the publishers who steal the public domain from artists who NEED that public domain. Do like Doctorow does (he credits his status as a best seller to it) -- give the ebook away and sell the dead tree book. People like things to put on their shelves.
Also, if I want to read your crappy book or see your crappy movie or listen to your crappy CD I can check it out from the library, for FREE, and you're not gettinng a dime -- unless I like the work, in which case I'm liable to buy a copy of your next.
God, what fools are running things. No wonder the world's economy is in shambles.
That would still shaft the people who actually did the creating and leave the collected money to the publishers. Better yet is to simply make non-commercial use non-infringing. We're almost past the point of needing publishers at all.
The problem is, the internet does not always work in a straight line
I think the bigger problem is, the internet doesn't always work. Like when I unplug my router and modem because they interfere with my VCR when I'm digitizing a tape. I can still listen to my oggs and MP3s without the internet, even if Amarok won't feed me the lyrics.
An app that doesn't need internet access shouldn't have internet access. I see no reason why a PDF reader or an image program or a spreadsheet should require the internet.
I'm not. Jees, guys... art is like science and technology, in that everything new comes from the old. Shoulders of giants and all that. Imagine how technology would stagnate if patents lasted as long as copyrights? That's how music, literature, and film are stagnating now.
You would have it so only the rich could write. Copyright is way too long as it is.
But recoil is proportional to involved masses: that's why the bullet goes out at high speed while you just notice a bump in your elbow
You've never fired anything more powerful than a.22, have you? You have to keep a shotgun stock tight against your shoulder when firing or you'll have a hell of a bruise and your arm isn't going to work well for a while. Fire a 20 guage in space and the recoil is going to send you backwards pretty damned fast.
It doesn't take much thrust to move a weightless object in a vaccuum. Oh, and it doesn't need oxygen; the oxidant is in the gunpowder. Don;t believe me? Light a cherry bomb, throw it in the toilet, and flush it. Not much oxygen in the sewer pipe.
Slashdot Mirror
GM had no money, still has no money, will always get bailed out "too big to fail", and will always be bought by "True" Americans
Bullshit.
I always said that if they want to encourage public transport they need to find a way to make it cheap for groups.
They just raised bus prices here in Springfield to $1.25. That's $2.50 round trip. At 20 mpg it doesn't matter if I'm by myself or in a group, driving anywhere in town is a hell of a lot cheaper than the bus, and a ten minute drive is an hour long bus ride.
Wow, thank you for that. I'll check it out tonight.
Frank Zappa didn't see any difference between the moral panic (some of the stuff targeted is hilarious in hindsight) and explicit, outright censorship, but I think the PMRC were mostly harmless, even if they were batshit crazy.
The two that come to my mind had nothing to do with Zappa but were hilarious in themselves. One was "Under The Blade" (Twisted Sister?) and the other was "Suicide Solution" (Ozzie). They called these songs evil without even listening to them -- "Under the Blade" is about having surgery preformed in a hospital, "Suicide Solution" was an anti-drinking song.
I think it was just a lot of busywork for easily-offended baby boomers.
Hmmm, I haven't met many boomers who are easily offended, and I'm one. Go into any neighborhood bar on a weekday afternoon and see how easily offended the geezers are.
You may be mistaking distaste for offence. Neither rap nor opera offend me, but I hate them equally.
You're missing a couple of things. It isn't "one data point" but personal observation. Personal experience almost always trumps someone else's observations, even if the someone else is an expert in the field. The other is anger -- once you feel a person or company has ripped you off you're not likely to buy anything else from them.
My ten year old Sony TV is the last Sony ANYTHING I'll ever buy, after being bitten by XCP. I don't care how they change, I can never trust them again.
The 38% is the disturbing number. As a poster above said, teach all the creation stories -- but not in science class. Creationism belongs in philosophy class, not science.
Although I hate Flash with a passion (it crashes constantly in my Linux box, what a turd it is), it saves me $50 a month. Rather than pay for cable TV, I have a PC plugged into the TV set and get six local channels from antenna supplimented by hundreds on Hulu as well as all the networks on their own web sites.
And all the radio stations use it. Well, almost all... a local station (WCVS) uses Silverlight, so I only listen to them in the car. The local college station (WQNA, my favorite) has MP3 and AAC streams. But all the rest I listen to (can't do without KSHE's 7th Day program, and you can't pick them up here with an antenna) all use Flash.
I'm really looking forward to HTML5 taking over. I hate Flash, but I still need it. Kind of like some MS programs I have to use at work.
It's my understanding that your gasoline prices are so high because of taxes. I'd take high gasoline prices in a heartbeat if it meant I didn't have to buy health insurance. Too bad my fellow Americans all seem to disagree.
I agree that the Republicans are, in fact, the anti-science party. However, I don't believe Santorum is a "religious guy" unless you're talking about the worship of money. He's an MBA, a lawyer, and filthy rich. He wears Satan's leash, the necktie, symbol of wealth and power, the symbol of everything his so-called "faith" is about.
Pretend Christians ("wolves in sheep's clothing") like Santurum give Christianity a bad name. Coincidentally, that was the subject of Sunday's sermon at my church, "the practical atheist"; the person who calls himself Christian but doesn't follow any of Christ's teachings.
Jesus was a liberal. IMO "conservative Christian" is an oxymoron; "conservative" means "stingy" and "liberal" means "generous".
"It is as hard for a rich man to go to heaven as it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle" -- JC
He doesn't believe in God any more than you do. He just pretends to. I respect true athiests for their faith and courage, but have no respect whatever for athiests who pretend to love the god they don't really believe in.
It is pretty obvious that the state government is dysfunctional to the level of Greece.
You think California's bad, try Illinois. At least it's better than when Ryan and Blago ran things.
The odd thing is, the state highways which are federally funded, are also in terrible shape.
The feds don't fully fund anything, the state has to match a certain part of it.
I wore glasses (thick ones) for 45 years until medical technology came to my rescue. I'm not going back. Sunglasses, maybe, but a headsup display at all times with your email and such?
You know, there are some things that should not be invented and this is one of them. You think people talking on their phones while driving are dangerous, wait until they're wearing these glasses! It will be bad enough on the sidewalk with idiots paying attention to the HUD and not where they're going, running into you... better than driving with them, though.
What's worse It's a completely unnecessary device. Doesn't your phone beep when you get a message?
However, this will probably go over big with the hipsters. Kind of like the Segway was so popular. It does have one good feature -- nopbody wearing these will EVER get laid, so their genes will no longer pollute the pool. And the ones who wear them driving (and they will, you know they will) may kill themselves, but unfortunately take an innocent or two with them.
GM quality has dropped? IIRC the last GM vehicle I owned was a 1975 Pontiac LeMans. I put 300,000 miles on that sucker and its only repairs were a water pump and a clutch.
What problems are you having with your new Pontiac? I have a ten year old Chrysler (havn't had a GM in a long time) and all that's wrong with it is it needs struts, a tuneup, and a wheel alignment. I used to always like GM.
Ford, now... I've owned exactly one Ford in my life, a 1969 Mustang GT I bought in 1971. I spent more time under the hood of that damned thing than I did in the driver's seat. Swore off, haven't been back.
Oddly, I find Heinlein's politics rather shaky, but I've always loved his fiction. That quote was from one of his short stories.
Same with Asimov, he's actually my all-time favorite author, despite the fact that he was a die-hard athiest.
Well, so am I and so did I. The school taught me very little after I learned to read. After that I'd already read it.
It's never too late to learn, and you only need a library, or the internet, to do it.
Exactly. Agressive species have a hard time fitting into the world's environments (which we puny humans now control), while the non-agressive species fit their environments well. Survival of the fittest is the best fit for an environment, not the biggest or strongest or fastest or smartest species, unless these traits make a species more fit for its environment.
Dumb luck plays a part in evolution, too. If the fastest gazelle gets its hoof caught in a hole while running from lions, he's lion lunch. If he's too young to have bred his genes are gone from the species' gene pool.
"Pop out" the slug? You've never fired a gun, have you?
Oh God, Lumpy. Africa isn't a country. It's a continent with a whole lot of countries.
*sigh* kids...
We don't advocate raping people in order to point out that they made a bad choice, or are screwed up at some point in their life.
You don't, and I don't, but how many comments have you seen on slashdot that say "throw 'em in 'pound them in the ass' prison?" Too many here do seem to condone rape.
I wonder if people will choose to have cataract surgery done even if they have no cataracts.
Actually, they already do. "Cataract surgery" is an amputation; your eye's lens is removed and replaced with an artificial one. The newest one can even focus, as it sits on struts inside the lens capsule. These will not only cure cataracts, but nearsightedness, farsightedness (even age-related), and astigmatism.
I wore thick glasses all my life until steroid eye drops gave me a cataract in my left eye. Now I wear no corrective lenses at all, not even reading glasses, and I'll be 60 in a couple of months.
If you have the cash you can get the surgery without having cataracts. It's painless (I had no discomfort at all and could read the clock on the wall of the recovery room) but it does kind of freak you out when they stick that needle in your eye.
I'd post something substantial, but the idiotic pro-piracy comments in this thread makes me realize that a lot of humanity only cares about doing whatever is in their own short-term personal interest and will masquerade their greed as 'logic and reason'
Long copyrights harm creativity more than none at all. Neither extreme is good.
You do realise that study after study shows the fallacy of the "nobody will pay if they can get it for free" stupidity, right? Music pirates spend more money on music than non-pirates. A book publisher did a study a couple of years ago to determine how much piracy was costing him and found to his surprise that as soon as his books hit the internet, there was a sales spike rather than a loss of sales.
Piracy sells media. The problem is, the publishers want to get paid for media-less content. Worse, they want to charge more for an MP3 collection than for a CD, more for a downloaded movie than a DVD, and more for an ebook than for one printed on paper that has manufacturing costs, distribution costs, warehousing costs, etc.
The only pirates are the publishers who steal the public domain from artists who NEED that public domain. Do like Doctorow does (he credits his status as a best seller to it) -- give the ebook away and sell the dead tree book. People like things to put on their shelves.
Also, if I want to read your crappy book or see your crappy movie or listen to your crappy CD I can check it out from the library, for FREE, and you're not gettinng a dime -- unless I like the work, in which case I'm liable to buy a copy of your next.
God, what fools are running things. No wonder the world's economy is in shambles.
Angle brackets: for the "less than" bracket, < will produce <
The greater than bracket just works as is, just hit the key.
That would still shaft the people who actually did the creating and leave the collected money to the publishers. Better yet is to simply make non-commercial use non-infringing. We're almost past the point of needing publishers at all.
The problem is, the internet does not always work in a straight line
I think the bigger problem is, the internet doesn't always work. Like when I unplug my router and modem because they interfere with my VCR when I'm digitizing a tape. I can still listen to my oggs and MP3s without the internet, even if Amarok won't feed me the lyrics.
An app that doesn't need internet access shouldn't have internet access. I see no reason why a PDF reader or an image program or a spreadsheet should require the internet.
I'm not. Jees, guys... art is like science and technology, in that everything new comes from the old. Shoulders of giants and all that. Imagine how technology would stagnate if patents lasted as long as copyrights? That's how music, literature, and film are stagnating now.
You would have it so only the rich could write. Copyright is way too long as it is.
But recoil is proportional to involved masses: that's why the bullet goes out at high speed while you just notice a bump in your elbow
You've never fired anything more powerful than a .22, have you? You have to keep a shotgun stock tight against your shoulder when firing or you'll have a hell of a bruise and your arm isn't going to work well for a while. Fire a 20 guage in space and the recoil is going to send you backwards pretty damned fast.
It doesn't take much thrust to move a weightless object in a vaccuum. Oh, and it doesn't need oxygen; the oxidant is in the gunpowder. Don;t believe me? Light a cherry bomb, throw it in the toilet, and flush it. Not much oxygen in the sewer pipe.