Microsoft: Trouble at mill. Apple: Oh no - what kind of trouble? Microsoft: One on't cross beams gone owt askew on treadle. Apple: Pardon? Microsoft: One on't cross beams gone owt askew on treadle. Apple: I don't understand what you're saying. Microsoft: [slightly irritatedly and with exaggeratedly clear accent] One of the cross beams has gone out askew on the treadle. Apple: Well what on earth does that mean? Microsoft: *I* don't know - Mr Wentworth just told me to come in here and say that there was trouble at the mill, that's all - I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Extremadura.
[JARRING CHORD]
[The door flies open and Cardinal Perenz of Spain enters, flanked by two junior cardinals.
Perenz: NOBODY expects Linux! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and freedom.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and freedom...and an almost fanatical devotion to Stallaman.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.
That's true when it comed to learning-disabled kids (most retardation is environmental rather than hereditary), but not with the gifted ones. A kid not born retarded can become retarded, but if you're not born gifted you'll never be gifted.
A child raised in a family with no computer will take longer to adapt.
When I was born, nobody ever heard of a computer, and the world's most powerful compter wasn't even as powerful as a musical Hallmark greeting card. Nobody taught me computing or programming, I just read lots of books and tried it out. Someone who hadn't the advantages of my genetics couldn't have done that.
Anyway, computer literacy is important, but you don't have to know much really.
That's very true now. When I bought my first computer in 1982 (Sinclair TS-1000) I had to learn to program to use it, because there was almost no commercial software for it, let alone a FOSS movement. Nobody needs to know how to program to use a computer these days.
They can't tell the difference between lose and loose, or they're and their and there, how in the hell are they going to write two lines of code without getting a syntax error?
Teach programming to kids? Yeah, lets do that. Lets make them learn how an internal combustion engine works and how to build one before we teach them to drive?
Sheesh... this is a case of extreme tunnel vision. Kids don't need to learn to program any more than they NEED to know how to play basketball (a sport I thoroughly hate, thank you Mr. 6th grade gym teacher).
Not a God-given right, a CONTRACT-given right. I'm not paying by the bit for computer internet access, why should I pay it for internet access on my phone? And BTW, I have AT&T for home internet, the phone is Boost Mobile, unlimited everything for half the price of AT&T's cheapest phone data plan, even if you don't hit AT&T's caps.
And I could watch TV 24/7 (well, ok, 16/7, stations didn't run late at night back before the stone age) for FREE fifty years ago. I'm still watching for free. Cable? Why? A hundred channels of crap I don't want to watch, most of which are on the internet hosted by their networks (I have kubuntu TV, my computer uses the TV as a monitor).
Why do you expect me to pay for what was once free, and especially for what's free right now? No wonder everybody's broke, they're throwing their money away on bottled water, TV, radio, exercize, data, music... shit that they can get for free. What a bunch of maroons, as Bugsy would say! Pay five dollars for a goddamned cup of coffee when I can buy a two pound can of Maxwell House or Folgers for ten, and have a whole pot of coffee every day for a month? How fucking stupid would I have to be??? Kids, if you have money to waste, give your charity to the poor, not the rich bastards that own Starbucks and Comcast.
Awesome! Er, but, I can already do that with kubuntu. And every other version of Linux. And even with Windows -- my notebook has text to speech, and if you want to type DOS commands you can open a DOS window.
Reading fail, did you not see where I wrote I WILL NOT VISIT THAT CLUSTERFUCK? If you want me to read whatever garbage is at that link, copy and paste it. Infoworld does not get my eyeballs, I refuse to reward someone for having one of the worst sites on the internet. Infoworkd shoud just go away; with web pages like theirs they have to be completely clueless about computing.
otherwise known as epic fail. Nothing came out of it.
No? "President Barack Obama is preparing to issue a populist cry for economic fairness as he aims to corral the sympathies of middle-class voters 10 months before Election Day."
Economic unfairness is what the Occupy movement is (not "was") all about. The media, which is all but the internet controlled by the 1%, would like you to think that there's no Occupy at all, or the numbers are miniscule, when in fact every city in the US, large and small, is being Occupied.
Back in the sixties and seventies we stopped a war and got environmental protections instituted the exact same way the Occupy movement is doing it.
Elves and goblins happen in fantasy all the time, too. Sci-Fi stands for science fiction. And note that you almost never see human-like aliens in literature, only film.
Here are a couple of my short sci-fi stories that have to do with aliens.
Nope. The Declaration says "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The Constitution says "life, liberty, and property". Nowhere does it say safety. The "right to life" is like saying you have the right to break the lightspeed barrier -- you are going to die. There is nothing more sure in this world than death. There's no getting around it.
And there should be no balancing act between safety and freedom; freedom trumps.
If you're so cowardly, how about lobbying for safer highways? 45,000 people die on American highways every year, not one American has died in a commercial airliner in two years, and not a single one has died from terrorism in over 10.
You're afraid of ghosts in the old haunted mansion when ghosts don't exist but you're about to fall through the rotting floor. I cannot understand the way people like you think.
And when we start giving up freedom's
Ah, that explains it. Sorry your teachers were all incompetent. Read a few books, son.
There may well be some form of extremophile life (they would have to be extremophiles there), but it's incredibly unlikely that any life anywhere will in any way resemble earth life, especially in a place as hot and with as much pressure as Venus.
Would we, perhaps, be better off ignoring it?
Why would ignorance ever be preferable to knowlege?
Seriously, are we ready for such a discovery?
If we're not, we never will be.
It may sound silly, but I think there is a large segment of the human population who couldn't deal with it.
Name any one thing, anything at all, and there's a large segment of the population that can't deal with it.
As do I, but I don't waste it trolling. You not only have no right to safety, there is no such thing as safety. When my safety interferes with your rights, your rights trump. What makes your comment even worse is that there have been 3,000 deaths from terrorism in the US in the 21st century, while 45,000 people die on the highways each and every year. It's been over two years since anybody has died on an airliner over US soil.
They should spend that Transportation Safety Administration money on safer highways.
Sadly, you're right about that -- our illiterate inability to know the difference between your, you're, and yore (and their, there and they're) has polluted your culture!
It depends on the type, frequency, and power. You wouldn't want to stand in front of a radar antenna, people have been fried doing that, but your cell phone won't hurt you. OTOH even very low doses of gamma radiation will do you in.
Politico is firewalled off here, but The Guardian isn't.
I wish all 500 of the damned congresscritters and Spentaturds would go through TSA hell, we'd get rid of that worthless abomination. Too bad they didn't arrest him, you'd see a shitstorm then!.
The other way to say it is that majority does not give a rat's ass.
Then explain the Occupy movement. Your remark about Americans being apathetic says that you've swallowed the media bullshit hook, line, and sinker. Most people do care, but they see two candidates arguaing about shit that doesn't matter to them at all, and with both candidated being on the wrong side of the issues that matter to them -- and have been convinced that a vote for anyone else is wasted.
Marijuana laws? Both parties far. Stupidly long copyrights? Both parties for. DMCA? PATRIOT Act? TSA? Both parties for. It's not "I don't care", but "I don't count".
IT idiocy? Is there a more idiotic tech site than IT World itself, with its twenty ad-laden pages for ten paragraphs, after a goddamned splash screen? I refuse to visit those morons. No RTFA this time, folks. Link to a respectable site next time.
The Christian bible also commands people to lynch their neighbors for certain crimes.
No, the Hebrew bible does. It is superceded by the new testament. Quoth:
1Jesus went unto the mount of Olives.
2And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them.
3And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst,
4They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.
5Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?
6This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.
7So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
8And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.
9And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.
10When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?
11She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.
Christians are prohibited from engaging in any violent act whatever, to the point that if someone punches you in the face you're supposed to LET THEM.
And lynchings certainly still occur in Christian-majority nations such as the United States over acts that are often considered prohibited by the bible, although legal under national law, such as being a gay male - see the Matthew Shepard case for example.
The despicable people who did that lived in a "Christian majority" nation, but they were in fact secularists. There are an awful lot of people who pretend to be Christian just to fit in, and Christians get blamed for their actions. And I am offended that you hypocritically equate me with them.
Progress never stops, fortunately. The ground cables he was laying was in the late 1970s, he's been retired for 20 years. I never knew they had horizontal drillers (he probably doesn't either). Thanks for keeping me up to date!
Charity is its own reward, and like I said, a tax dodge isn't charity. The grants were almost all nonprofit organizations set up when some incredibly rich person died; they invest, and put the earning to charity use.
There, fixed that for you. And I hate flash because it's so often misused -- like by radio stations to stream their music, when MP3 and AAC work far better and use far fewer resources (kudos to WQNA who give you a choice of MP3 or AAC).
One idiot radio station in town (WCVS to name and shame) insists on silverlight. I emailed them last night informing them of how brain dead stupid they were for their choice and how I could only hear them in the car; Jesus, Flash is bad enough, but at least they finally got it running almost ok on my Linux box.
If website only used Flash when it was warranted, instead of stupid shit like using it when MP3, AAC, or even plain old HTML will do, nobody would hate it, but unfortunately its #1 use seems to be for obnoxious ads. Same with javascript, using javascript for links is about as retarded as you can get and still have enough brainpower to not forget to breathe.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft: Trouble at mill.
Apple: Oh no - what kind of trouble?
Microsoft: One on't cross beams gone owt askew on treadle.
Apple: Pardon?
Microsoft: One on't cross beams gone owt askew on treadle.
Apple: I don't understand what you're saying.
Microsoft: [slightly irritatedly and with exaggeratedly clear accent] One of the cross beams has gone out askew on the treadle.
Apple: Well what on earth does that mean?
Microsoft: *I* don't know - Mr Wentworth just told me to come in here and say that there was trouble at the mill, that's all - I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Extremadura.
[JARRING CHORD]
[The door flies open and Cardinal Perenz of Spain enters, flanked by two junior cardinals.
Perenz: NOBODY expects Linux! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and freedom.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and freedom...and an almost fanatical devotion to Stallaman.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.
Genetic predisposition[s] are overrated.
That's true when it comed to learning-disabled kids (most retardation is environmental rather than hereditary), but not with the gifted ones. A kid not born retarded can become retarded, but if you're not born gifted you'll never be gifted.
A child raised in a family with no computer will take longer to adapt.
When I was born, nobody ever heard of a computer, and the world's most powerful compter wasn't even as powerful as a musical Hallmark greeting card. Nobody taught me computing or programming, I just read lots of books and tried it out. Someone who hadn't the advantages of my genetics couldn't have done that.
Anyway, computer literacy is important, but you don't have to know much really.
That's very true now. When I bought my first computer in 1982 (Sinclair TS-1000) I had to learn to program to use it, because there was almost no commercial software for it, let alone a FOSS movement. Nobody needs to know how to program to use a computer these days.
...or simply writing correct English.
They can't tell the difference between lose and loose, or they're and their and there, how in the hell are they going to write two lines of code without getting a syntax error?
Teach programming to kids? Yeah, lets do that. Lets make them learn how an internal combustion engine works and how to build one before we teach them to drive?
Sheesh... this is a case of extreme tunnel vision. Kids don't need to learn to program any more than they NEED to know how to play basketball (a sport I thoroughly hate, thank you Mr. 6th grade gym teacher).
Not a God-given right, a CONTRACT-given right. I'm not paying by the bit for computer internet access, why should I pay it for internet access on my phone? And BTW, I have AT&T for home internet, the phone is Boost Mobile, unlimited everything for half the price of AT&T's cheapest phone data plan, even if you don't hit AT&T's caps.
And I could watch TV 24/7 (well, ok, 16/7, stations didn't run late at night back before the stone age) for FREE fifty years ago. I'm still watching for free. Cable? Why? A hundred channels of crap I don't want to watch, most of which are on the internet hosted by their networks (I have kubuntu TV, my computer uses the TV as a monitor).
Why do you expect me to pay for what was once free, and especially for what's free right now? No wonder everybody's broke, they're throwing their money away on bottled water, TV, radio, exercize, data, music... shit that they can get for free. What a bunch of maroons, as Bugsy would say! Pay five dollars for a goddamned cup of coffee when I can buy a two pound can of Maxwell House or Folgers for ten, and have a whole pot of coffee every day for a month? How fucking stupid would I have to be??? Kids, if you have money to waste, give your charity to the poor, not the rich bastards that own Starbucks and Comcast.
Awesome! Er, but, I can already do that with kubuntu. And every other version of Linux. And even with Windows -- my notebook has text to speech, and if you want to type DOS commands you can open a DOS window.
Steampunk retro!
Reading fail, did you not see where I wrote I WILL NOT VISIT THAT CLUSTERFUCK? If you want me to read whatever garbage is at that link, copy and paste it. Infoworld does not get my eyeballs, I refuse to reward someone for having one of the worst sites on the internet. Infoworkd shoud just go away; with web pages like theirs they have to be completely clueless about computing.
otherwise known as epic fail. Nothing came out of it.
No? "President Barack Obama is preparing to issue a populist cry for economic fairness as he aims to corral the sympathies of middle-class voters 10 months before Election Day."
Economic unfairness is what the Occupy movement is (not "was") all about. The media, which is all but the internet controlled by the 1%, would like you to think that there's no Occupy at all, or the numbers are miniscule, when in fact every city in the US, large and small, is being Occupied.
Back in the sixties and seventies we stopped a war and got environmental protections instituted the exact same way the Occupy movement is doing it.
Happens in Sci-Fi all the time.
Elves and goblins happen in fantasy all the time, too. Sci-Fi stands for science fiction. And note that you almost never see human-like aliens in literature, only film.
Here are a couple of my short sci-fi stories that have to do with aliens.
A strange discovery
We still haven't found extraforgostnic life
Little Green Men
Nope. The Declaration says "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The Constitution says "life, liberty, and property". Nowhere does it say safety. The "right to life" is like saying you have the right to break the lightspeed barrier -- you are going to die. There is nothing more sure in this world than death. There's no getting around it.
And there should be no balancing act between safety and freedom; freedom trumps.
If you're so cowardly, how about lobbying for safer highways? 45,000 people die on American highways every year, not one American has died in a commercial airliner in two years, and not a single one has died from terrorism in over 10.
You're afraid of ghosts in the old haunted mansion when ghosts don't exist but you're about to fall through the rotting floor. I cannot understand the way people like you think.
And when we start giving up freedom's
Ah, that explains it. Sorry your teachers were all incompetent. Read a few books, son.
What if there is life on Venus, but unlike ours?
There may well be some form of extremophile life (they would have to be extremophiles there), but it's incredibly unlikely that any life anywhere will in any way resemble earth life, especially in a place as hot and with as much pressure as Venus.
Would we, perhaps, be better off ignoring it?
Why would ignorance ever be preferable to knowlege?
Seriously, are we ready for such a discovery?
If we're not, we never will be.
It may sound silly, but I think there is a large segment of the human population who couldn't deal with it.
Name any one thing, anything at all, and there's a large segment of the population that can't deal with it.
Karma? Yes, I do have some to burn...
As do I, but I don't waste it trolling. You not only have no right to safety, there is no such thing as safety. When my safety interferes with your rights, your rights trump. What makes your comment even worse is that there have been 3,000 deaths from terrorism in the US in the 21st century, while 45,000 people die on the highways each and every year. It's been over two years since anybody has died on an airliner over US soil.
They should spend that Transportation Safety Administration money on safer highways.
There are certainly far better ways to protect the nation and its freedoms.
Don't you mean "There are certainly far better ways to protect the nation than taking away its freedoms?"
No one goes out for american food either. Unless you count hamburgers and deep fried meat related products. AKA junk food.
Hey, that IS American cuisine! Matches our culture.
Also, your right about culture gain.
Sadly, you're right about that -- our illiterate inability to know the difference between your, you're, and yore (and their, there and they're) has polluted your culture!
Hopefully that'll bring this BS to an end, along with ending the jobs of the officers that continue to pull this stunt
Good luck with that...
It does seem very unlikely that a complex life from like a scorpion would live on Venus.
It seems even more unlikely that any extraterrestrial life would evolve to look exactly like anything on Earth.
It depends on the type, frequency, and power. You wouldn't want to stand in front of a radar antenna, people have been fried doing that, but your cell phone won't hurt you. OTOH even very low doses of gamma radiation will do you in.
Politico is firewalled off here, but The Guardian isn't.
I wish all 500 of the damned congresscritters and Spentaturds would go through TSA hell, we'd get rid of that worthless abomination. Too bad they didn't arrest him, you'd see a shitstorm then!.
The other way to say it is that majority does not give a rat's ass.
Then explain the Occupy movement. Your remark about Americans being apathetic says that you've swallowed the media bullshit hook, line, and sinker. Most people do care, but they see two candidates arguaing about shit that doesn't matter to them at all, and with both candidated being on the wrong side of the issues that matter to them -- and have been convinced that a vote for anyone else is wasted.
Marijuana laws? Both parties far. Stupidly long copyrights? Both parties for. DMCA? PATRIOT Act? TSA? Both parties for. It's not "I don't care", but "I don't count".
IT idiocy? Is there a more idiotic tech site than IT World itself, with its twenty ad-laden pages for ten paragraphs, after a goddamned splash screen? I refuse to visit those morons. No RTFA this time, folks. Link to a respectable site next time.
The Christian bible also commands people to lynch their neighbors for certain crimes.
No, the Hebrew bible does. It is superceded by the new testament. Quoth:
Christians are prohibited from engaging in any violent act whatever, to the point that if someone punches you in the face you're supposed to LET THEM.
And lynchings certainly still occur in Christian-majority nations such as the United States over acts that are often considered prohibited by the bible, although legal under national law, such as being a gay male - see the Matthew Shepard case for example.
The despicable people who did that lived in a "Christian majority" nation, but they were in fact secularists. There are an awful lot of people who pretend to be Christian just to fit in, and Christians get blamed for their actions. And I am offended that you hypocritically equate me with them.
Progress never stops, fortunately. The ground cables he was laying was in the late 1970s, he's been retired for 20 years. I never knew they had horizontal drillers (he probably doesn't either). Thanks for keeping me up to date!
Charity is its own reward, and like I said, a tax dodge isn't charity. The grants were almost all nonprofit organizations set up when some incredibly rich person died; they invest, and put the earning to charity use.
And me, I don't give nearly as much as I should.
Silver-light never really took off fortunately
There, fixed that for you. And I hate flash because it's so often misused -- like by radio stations to stream their music, when MP3 and AAC work far better and use far fewer resources (kudos to WQNA who give you a choice of MP3 or AAC).
One idiot radio station in town (WCVS to name and shame) insists on silverlight. I emailed them last night informing them of how brain dead stupid they were for their choice and how I could only hear them in the car; Jesus, Flash is bad enough, but at least they finally got it running almost ok on my Linux box.
If website only used Flash when it was warranted, instead of stupid shit like using it when MP3, AAC, or even plain old HTML will do, nobody would hate it, but unfortunately its #1 use seems to be for obnoxious ads. Same with javascript, using javascript for links is about as retarded as you can get and still have enough brainpower to not forget to breathe.
Reefer. Lots and lots of weed.