I agree completely, it amazes me as well, but we can't be safe, with or without constitutional freedoms; safety doesn't exist. You can be safer, but you're never safe. There are only varying degrees of danger... and the threat of terrorism is about the least of all physical dangers Americans face. I mean, 40,000 people die on the highways every single year. They could make America far less dangerous ("safer") by spending the TSA money on safer highways.
Oh, as to a theocracy, we already live under a theocracy. The religion is mammon and their temple is called a "bank" and their high priests are called "investment bankers". Look at how they call economics a "science", much like the Christian Science religion does. Also notice that if you put trojan rootkits on a single computer Sony owns, they'll find you and you'll go to prison, but if Sony puts trojan rootkits on thousands of uinsuspecting customers' computers, they suffer no penalties whatever? In a society whose god is a dollar, whoever has the most "god" rules.
"Fuel" and "fire" and "burn" are all just lies to children.
Not lies to children, but the obvious. Of course, what may seem obvious often isn't ("the world is flat"). You and I know that if you combine a piece of wood and oxygen, both are converted, but you have to know how it works first. But at any rate, "fire" is a synonym of "oxidation". Fire is what you get when you combine a combustable material, oxygen, and heat. It's real, it's no lie. The combustable material is the fuel, oxygen is the oxident, and "burn" is the conversion of the fuel and oxygen to a different form. It's semantics, not lies.
Either that, or Iron is also a "fuel" with an end result of "rust" ash.
Actually, rust is steel's ashes, and you can make steel burn quite fast of you get it hot enough; ask any blacksmith. You can make sparklers out of pieces of wire coat hangers or bailing wire, coated with saltpeter mixed with flour or sugar. The sparkles on any sparkler you buy at a fireworks stand is the steel's flames, and that's exactly what you see if you put a thin piece of steel in a forge with the bellows going. Take the steel out of the fire and it sparkles like a sparkler, and leaves rust behind.
I could have sworn I'd read Asimov's Mysteries, but I don't remember that story. Guess I'll have to take a trip to the library Saturday. Too bad our corporate-bought copyright extensions have made it so a fifty year old story written by a dead man can't be published in the internet.
And, Asimov got his PhD in biochemistry. He taught (a little) at Boston University, and also did cancer research there.
In a hydrocarbon atmosphere, you can burn oxygen. All our definitions are oriented around our oxygen-based atmosphere. I'm sure we'd call oxygen 'fuel' if we lived in a hydrocarbon atmosphere and oxygen was the scarcer material.
No, it would still be the hydrocarbons oxidising, not the oxygen hydrocarbonizing. Add oxygen and heat to any combustable material and it burns. What can you add hydrocarbons with to make it burn, except oxygen?
Fire is the result of mixing oxygen with anything flammable. Nothing but oxygen makes fire afaik (if I'm wrong I hope a physicist or chemist here will correct me).
I guess I can't like the muppets any more. Kermit, you dirty corporate whore:(
I didn't know this until the other day, but Kermit was born as a dirty corporate ho over half a century ago. Wikipedia doen't have a word to say about Kermit's ancient prostitution, of course, since wiki fiddlers were almost all brought up on the ho's teats. But a thing on (of all places) TV network news revealed that the muppets got their start in TV commercials!
And since Disney bought the rights to the muppets in 2004, what do you expect? Once a crackwhore, always a crackwhore.
So you probably shouldn't have liked him in the first place -- but if you were born after 1970, it would have been hard not to have.
Indeed, both are fatally flawed, but in different ways. Copyrights are free, and cheap to register, and are easy to get, but they lasy WAY too long and carry way too many restrictions.
Patents, otoh, only last 20 years but they cost so much that you have to be rich to get one.
Imagine how technology would stagnate if patents lasted 95 years longer than their inventors? That's how art is stagnating. But patents could spur a lot more innovation if you or I could reasonably obtain them.
I skipped KDE 4. I was on Mandriva then, and was happy with the version of KDE I was using (don't remember what version). Kubuntu 9's KDE had some serious flaws, but it appears that the latest doesn't have them, although it could have a few I just haven't run across yet.
The ones in red are ones not everyone can see yet. If you're a subscriber, you see stories before they're posted for everyone, giving you a chance to RTFA first. If you see a first post that isn't a joke or a troll, it was probably posted by a subscriber. I'm guessing they posted it seconds before you hit the link, or you wouldn't have been able to comment.
I think it's likely that we Americans have the very worst public education system in the developed world. From what I've read, much of what Europeans learn in high school, Americans aren't taught until college.
From TFA: You injure other people today also using social media. You've informed on them. You've created more records about them. You've added to the problems not of yourself but of other people.
So... if you use social media you're Judas Iscariot?
High Priest: "Hey, I just got a tweet about that rabble rousing blasphemer. We'll get him tonight, after supper."
You know, this may be where the "you have to use a CLI in Linux" misconception may come from. On a server, a GUI just gets in the way, and passing by the server room seeing the network admin using a CLI they think a GUI isn't available. If I were running a server it would have no GUI, but on my box at home I never use a command line. Well, OK, once when I forgot the root password and had to go in and change it. But not normally.
On top of that you have the excessively flowery language which further obscures the plot.
The writing itself (perhaps the "flowery language") is one of the things I liked about the books.
Now, if you're not writing for people to read then there's no reason to worry about the audience, but if you're writing for an audience
I didn't really understand what you said there, can you clarify some?
Hemingway would rewrite a passage dozens of times if he didn't get the words write.
Worst pun I've read all day. But IMO Hemmingway did it right. If you don't like the way you've written what you've written, chances are nobody else will either. If you think your crap is crap, it's crap.
...every page and every sentence is moving things along towards the conclusion.
I doubt you'd like my book. Each chapter is a different, yet related story, and the conclusion kind of just kind of happens, like everything else in the book.
One of the quickest ways to kill a book is to use too many words to get where you're going.
Ah, the empty-V generation. The books were written before and during WWII, and I'd bet you wouldn't like movies from that period, either -- too slow paced. OTOH, beautiful flowing prose is a beauty in itself, with or without a plot. A Terry Pratchett phrase which didn't advance the book's plot at all sticks in my head more than any other part of the book, and I grin when I think of it: "He realised that not only was he not the sharpest knife in the drawer, he might even have been a spoon."
it all changes, even within the same distro, over a time span of years. Compare that to XP which has been the same for 10+ years.
XP stayed the same for ten years because MS didn't have Vista ready. My 2002 automobile hasn't chaged since then, either, although a 2012 model would have a lot more gizmos and gadgets. When they released Vista, it still wasn't ready.
As to your "it all changes", I haven't seen it, even changing distros. The kde on my PC now, kubuntu, isn't much different than it was on Mandrake ten years ago, although it's gotten faster and leaner and added features.
me: "remembers how he did that 3 years ago, but now every fucking thing in the GUI is different, the buttons are on the opposite side of the window
Ah, I get it now. Gnome. Jees, there is more than one choice for your desktop, unlike with Windows. Don't like Gnome? Pick a different distro, say, kubuntu instead of Ubuntu. I don't like Gnome either, which is why I don't use it.
But what of the other three that will be on enough ballots to have a mathematical chance of winning? The corporate media is afraid to let us hear THEIR views.
And you surely have friends and relatives who smoke pot. Both the Democrats and Republicans want to keep those insane laws on the books, the Greens and Libertarians don't. Both the Republicans and Democrats were for the PATRIOT act, the Bono act, the DMCA, and now SOPA. I'd like to see where the other three parties stand on these, because I'm against almost everything both major parties are for.
"Oh, but you'll waste a vote." Ok, if a vote for a losing candidate is a wasted vote, then all you people who voted Republican last Presidential election wasted your votes.
Meanwhile, are you going to waste a vote voting for a candidate who wants to take away your rights and freedoms and put your pot-smoking relatives in prison? I'm not. A pox on both their houses.
I just hope the Greens don't run McKinney again, she even makes Michelle Bachmann look sane.
linked poll claims that 40% of Americans believe that the Earth is less than 10K years old.
Jesus, that's pathetic if true. Of course, half the population has lower than median intelligence, so it shouldn't be too surprising. The wolves in sheep's clothing find these poor folks easy pickings. It's a shame.
The Darmok problem occurs far more often than not.
Entirely true. When I was stationed in Thailand in the Air Force in my youth, cultural differences still got in the way of communication even after I learned Thai and was speaking with a Thai person. The Darmok problem almost got me shot once! Let me tell you, someone sticking a gun in your face is a little unpleasant.
I read the first sentence and thought "wow, he got modded troll, must be some pissed off programmers. Understandable." Then I read the second sentence.
Just look at the state of Linux and most open source programs. They might have the specific functionality, but they seriously lack in UI and design.
That's unadulterated bullshit. Microsoft is the one with the worst design. Yeah, Windows is prettier than kde but kde is far easier to use and far more intuitive. It took a month to figure out where to shut off the "tap to click" feature (bad bad BAD design, tap to click is a horror) in Windows; it wasn't in the Control Panel where you would expect it to be. It only took a minute using kde's "control panel". As to the CP itself, that design sure went to hell in Win 7.
There's the infamous MS double click. I absolutely HATED that back in the 90s when I was teaching people how to use Windows. That was the single hardest thing about Windows for folks to learn -- and it's completely unnecessary; your mouse has TWO buttons. MS was copying Apple, whose mice only had one button at the time. They're finally offering single click selection in Win 7, but it's far from polished.
Then there's the start button. "How do I stop the computer?" "Press 'start'". Yeah, that's logical and reasonable. They finally followed kde's lead here, too, in Win 7 because instead of "start" it now has a Windows logo, just like kde has a kde logo and has had for a decade or more.
On top of that linux geeks fail to understand that people don't want to use command line to do tasks.
I feel sorry for you. You're either a pathetic troll or incredibly ignorant. I haven't been at a command prompt in Linux for years, but I have been at a Windows command prompt recently.
That's because programmers cannot think logically like most people do.
That's the most idiotic thing I've heard so far this year. Why don't you try a GNAA next time? Far more real looking. Moron.
Good example is Ribbon UI. Ribbon is actually a great step forward in terms of usability.
I haven't used the ribbon (we have old software at work), but from what I've read it's almost universally despised and has made some folks switch to Open Office despite OO's shortcomings.
BTW, the paragraph I refer to reads like a press release straight out of Redmond. If you're shilling, you're doing an offal job of it.
Also, considering that geeks usually complain how people don't get them or they're bullied, they seem to have a huge "I'm better and more intelligent than the rest of people" complex.
Nice. Now, sonny, why don't you run off to the AARP site and bitch about your money going to Social Security? Asshole.
To tell the truth, I try to avoid getting first post because they're so often modded down simply for being first, even if they are the rare non-joke FPs.
As to the subject and the AC FP, I'm sure he's telling the truth. I'm an office drone, too! Aren't you?
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the first time it's happened to this country though, we actually banned alcohol once.
Why the surprise that alcohol was banned but no surpise that marijuana is STILL banned?
I agree completely, it amazes me as well, but we can't be safe, with or without constitutional freedoms; safety doesn't exist. You can be safer, but you're never safe. There are only varying degrees of danger... and the threat of terrorism is about the least of all physical dangers Americans face. I mean, 40,000 people die on the highways every single year. They could make America far less dangerous ("safer") by spending the TSA money on safer highways.
Oh, as to a theocracy, we already live under a theocracy. The religion is mammon and their temple is called a "bank" and their high priests are called "investment bankers". Look at how they call economics a "science", much like the Christian Science religion does. Also notice that if you put trojan rootkits on a single computer Sony owns, they'll find you and you'll go to prison, but if Sony puts trojan rootkits on thousands of uinsuspecting customers' computers, they suffer no penalties whatever? In a society whose god is a dollar, whoever has the most "god" rules.
"Fuel" and "fire" and "burn" are all just lies to children.
Not lies to children, but the obvious. Of course, what may seem obvious often isn't ("the world is flat"). You and I know that if you combine a piece of wood and oxygen, both are converted, but you have to know how it works first. But at any rate, "fire" is a synonym of "oxidation". Fire is what you get when you combine a combustable material, oxygen, and heat. It's real, it's no lie. The combustable material is the fuel, oxygen is the oxident, and "burn" is the conversion of the fuel and oxygen to a different form. It's semantics, not lies.
Either that, or Iron is also a "fuel" with an end result of "rust" ash.
Actually, rust is steel's ashes, and you can make steel burn quite fast of you get it hot enough; ask any blacksmith. You can make sparklers out of pieces of wire coat hangers or bailing wire, coated with saltpeter mixed with flour or sugar. The sparkles on any sparkler you buy at a fireworks stand is the steel's flames, and that's exactly what you see if you put a thin piece of steel in a forge with the bellows going. Take the steel out of the fire and it sparkles like a sparkler, and leaves rust behind.
I could have sworn I'd read Asimov's Mysteries, but I don't remember that story. Guess I'll have to take a trip to the library Saturday. Too bad our corporate-bought copyright extensions have made it so a fifty year old story written by a dead man can't be published in the internet.
And, Asimov got his PhD in biochemistry. He taught (a little) at Boston University, and also did cancer research there.
No, saying "They once fought the Nazi's" is far worse, especially considering that Elrous0 is educated and knows better!
In a hydrocarbon atmosphere, you can burn oxygen. All our definitions are oriented around our oxygen-based atmosphere. I'm sure we'd call oxygen 'fuel' if we lived in a hydrocarbon atmosphere and oxygen was the scarcer material.
No, it would still be the hydrocarbons oxidising, not the oxygen hydrocarbonizing. Add oxygen and heat to any combustable material and it burns. What can you add hydrocarbons with to make it burn, except oxygen?
Fire is the result of mixing oxygen with anything flammable. Nothing but oxygen makes fire afaik (if I'm wrong I hope a physicist or chemist here will correct me).
I guess I can't like the muppets any more. Kermit, you dirty corporate whore :(
I didn't know this until the other day, but Kermit was born as a dirty corporate ho over half a century ago. Wikipedia doen't have a word to say about Kermit's ancient prostitution, of course, since wiki fiddlers were almost all brought up on the ho's teats. But a thing on (of all places) TV network news revealed that the muppets got their start in TV commercials!
And since Disney bought the rights to the muppets in 2004, what do you expect? Once a crackwhore, always a crackwhore.
So you probably shouldn't have liked him in the first place -- but if you were born after 1970, it would have been hard not to have.
Copyright is different from patent
Indeed, both are fatally flawed, but in different ways. Copyrights are free, and cheap to register, and are easy to get, but they lasy WAY too long and carry way too many restrictions.
Patents, otoh, only last 20 years but they cost so much that you have to be rich to get one.
Imagine how technology would stagnate if patents lasted 95 years longer than their inventors? That's how art is stagnating. But patents could spur a lot more innovation if you or I could reasonably obtain them.
I skipped KDE 4. I was on Mandriva then, and was happy with the version of KDE I was using (don't remember what version). Kubuntu 9's KDE had some serious flaws, but it appears that the latest doesn't have them, although it could have a few I just haven't run across yet.
The ones in red are ones not everyone can see yet. If you're a subscriber, you see stories before they're posted for everyone, giving you a chance to RTFA first. If you see a first post that isn't a joke or a troll, it was probably posted by a subscriber. I'm guessing they posted it seconds before you hit the link, or you wouldn't have been able to comment.
I think it's likely that we Americans have the very worst public education system in the developed world. From what I've read, much of what Europeans learn in high school, Americans aren't taught until college.
The tap to click is generally a part of the touchpad driver, which usually (not always) extends the mouse control panel.
Not on an Acer notebook. Very frustrating trying to find it.
KDE followed windows quite a bit in its' incarnation.
Yes, it did. It would have been foolish to design an interface that had to be 100% relearned.
Win 7 is certainly way better than 98 was, especially its stability, but Linux is still more tolerant of hardware faults.
From TFA: You injure other people today also using social media. You've informed on them. You've created more records about them. You've added to the problems not of yourself but of other people.
So... if you use social media you're Judas Iscariot?
High Priest: "Hey, I just got a tweet about that rabble rousing blasphemer. We'll get him tonight, after supper."
You know, this may be where the "you have to use a CLI in Linux" misconception may come from. On a server, a GUI just gets in the way, and passing by the server room seeing the network admin using a CLI they think a GUI isn't available. If I were running a server it would have no GUI, but on my box at home I never use a command line. Well, OK, once when I forgot the root password and had to go in and change it. But not normally.
On top of that you have the excessively flowery language which further obscures the plot.
The writing itself (perhaps the "flowery language") is one of the things I liked about the books.
Now, if you're not writing for people to read then there's no reason to worry about the audience, but if you're writing for an audience
I didn't really understand what you said there, can you clarify some?
Hemingway would rewrite a passage dozens of times if he didn't get the words write.
Worst pun I've read all day. But IMO Hemmingway did it right. If you don't like the way you've written what you've written, chances are nobody else will either. If you think your crap is crap, it's crap.
I doubt you'd like my book. Each chapter is a different, yet related story, and the conclusion kind of just kind of happens, like everything else in the book.
One of the quickest ways to kill a book is to use too many words to get where you're going.
Ah, the empty-V generation. The books were written before and during WWII, and I'd bet you wouldn't like movies from that period, either -- too slow paced. OTOH, beautiful flowing prose is a beauty in itself, with or without a plot. A Terry Pratchett phrase which didn't advance the book's plot at all sticks in my head more than any other part of the book, and I grin when I think of it: "He realised that not only was he not the sharpest knife in the drawer, he might even have been a spoon."
it all changes, even within the same distro, over a time span of years. Compare that to XP which has been the same for 10+ years.
XP stayed the same for ten years because MS didn't have Vista ready. My 2002 automobile hasn't chaged since then, either, although a 2012 model would have a lot more gizmos and gadgets. When they released Vista, it still wasn't ready.
As to your "it all changes", I haven't seen it, even changing distros. The kde on my PC now, kubuntu, isn't much different than it was on Mandrake ten years ago, although it's gotten faster and leaner and added features.
me: "remembers how he did that 3 years ago, but now every fucking thing in the GUI is different, the buttons are on the opposite side of the window
Ah, I get it now. Gnome. Jees, there is more than one choice for your desktop, unlike with Windows. Don't like Gnome? Pick a different distro, say, kubuntu instead of Ubuntu. I don't like Gnome either, which is why I don't use it.
The corporate powers that be prevent me from leaving my connection open; TOS.
Well, ten years isn't long when you're fifty or sixty. I have no idea how I was viewed, nor care much. And yes, I am indeed getting older.
He's dead, Jim.
But what of the other three that will be on enough ballots to have a mathematical chance of winning? The corporate media is afraid to let us hear THEIR views.
And you surely have friends and relatives who smoke pot. Both the Democrats and Republicans want to keep those insane laws on the books, the Greens and Libertarians don't. Both the Republicans and Democrats were for the PATRIOT act, the Bono act, the DMCA, and now SOPA. I'd like to see where the other three parties stand on these, because I'm against almost everything both major parties are for.
"Oh, but you'll waste a vote." Ok, if a vote for a losing candidate is a wasted vote, then all you people who voted Republican last Presidential election wasted your votes.
Meanwhile, are you going to waste a vote voting for a candidate who wants to take away your rights and freedoms and put your pot-smoking relatives in prison? I'm not. A pox on both their houses.
I just hope the Greens don't run McKinney again, she even makes Michelle Bachmann look sane.
linked poll claims that 40% of Americans believe that the Earth is less than 10K years old.
Jesus, that's pathetic if true. Of course, half the population has lower than median intelligence, so it shouldn't be too surprising. The wolves in sheep's clothing find these poor folks easy pickings. It's a shame.
Riker: "TeeVee?"
Data: "It was a form of entertainment that died out sometime in the middle of the 21st century, sir."
-- The Neutral Zone
The Darmok problem occurs far more often than not.
Entirely true. When I was stationed in Thailand in the Air Force in my youth, cultural differences still got in the way of communication even after I learned Thai and was speaking with a Thai person. The Darmok problem almost got me shot once! Let me tell you, someone sticking a gun in your face is a little unpleasant.
I read the first sentence and thought "wow, he got modded troll, must be some pissed off programmers. Understandable." Then I read the second sentence.
Just look at the state of Linux and most open source programs. They might have the specific functionality, but they seriously lack in UI and design.
That's unadulterated bullshit. Microsoft is the one with the worst design. Yeah, Windows is prettier than kde but kde is far easier to use and far more intuitive. It took a month to figure out where to shut off the "tap to click" feature (bad bad BAD design, tap to click is a horror) in Windows; it wasn't in the Control Panel where you would expect it to be. It only took a minute using kde's "control panel". As to the CP itself, that design sure went to hell in Win 7.
There's the infamous MS double click. I absolutely HATED that back in the 90s when I was teaching people how to use Windows. That was the single hardest thing about Windows for folks to learn -- and it's completely unnecessary; your mouse has TWO buttons. MS was copying Apple, whose mice only had one button at the time. They're finally offering single click selection in Win 7, but it's far from polished.
Then there's the start button. "How do I stop the computer?" "Press 'start'". Yeah, that's logical and reasonable. They finally followed kde's lead here, too, in Win 7 because instead of "start" it now has a Windows logo, just like kde has a kde logo and has had for a decade or more.
On top of that linux geeks fail to understand that people don't want to use command line to do tasks.
I feel sorry for you. You're either a pathetic troll or incredibly ignorant. I haven't been at a command prompt in Linux for years, but I have been at a Windows command prompt recently.
That's because programmers cannot think logically like most people do.
That's the most idiotic thing I've heard so far this year. Why don't you try a GNAA next time? Far more real looking. Moron.
Good example is Ribbon UI. Ribbon is actually a great step forward in terms of usability.
I haven't used the ribbon (we have old software at work), but from what I've read it's almost universally despised and has made some folks switch to Open Office despite OO's shortcomings.
BTW, the paragraph I refer to reads like a press release straight out of Redmond. If you're shilling, you're doing an offal job of it.
Also, considering that geeks usually complain how people don't get them or they're bullied, they seem to have a huge "I'm better and more intelligent than the rest of people" complex.
Nice. Now, sonny, why don't you run off to the AARP site and bitch about your money going to Social Security? Asshole.
To tell the truth, I try to avoid getting first post because they're so often modded down simply for being first, even if they are the rare non-joke FPs.
As to the subject and the AC FP, I'm sure he's telling the truth. I'm an office drone, too! Aren't you?