Going through his comment history is almost like reading satire, which pulled me in.
It's actually a troll, but it works because he's trolling Christians on a predominantly agnostic/athiest site. There is SO much that gives him away, starting with the "These atheist-backed scientists" as if Christians are anti-science. The fact is, over half of US scientists are, in fact, Christians. From conversations I've had here, many athiests don't think science and religion can coexist, and don't seem to be able to (or perhaps want to) understand that science answers "how" while religion answers "why".
Then there's the "it is clearly outlined in the Bible that God created Adam and Eve 5,000 years ago". Um, no, the bible doesn't say that. Not anywhere. There isn't a real preacher in the entire world that believes the earth is 5k years old. Some dimwit a couple hundred years ago did some faulty math, and somehow people believed the nonsense.
Then there's "I wish these scientists well with their work and pray that they will break free from the yoke of grants from godless individuals and governments." One google search dispells this lie.
Pastor Golf is a wolf in sheep's clothing. A very stupid wolf.
But more importantly, how many thousand apps can you run on your phone?
That's an excellent question; how many apps can fit on each phone? And I also wondered why both platforms need apps when a computer can just use the web site for most things (radio stations are the first to come to mind). Why do you need (for instance) a Google Maps app when all you should have to do is surf to Google?
Maybe it is just because I am more used to the iPhone, but when using an Android, I find the experience to be downright hostile.
I have friends with one or the other platform, and only played with the Android interface for a few minutes, but I, too found it frustrating. It was almost like using Windows; nothing was anywhere I would have expected it in either Linux or Windows... and these ARE computers. I'm not buying a tablet until I can get one with wifi, no phone company, several USB ports, and touch-enabled KDE ofr that exact reason.
It's almost like they were purposely designing the interface to frustrate. Somehow I expect the iPhone interface to be just as bad, especially since you said "sometimes the iPhone tries to be "too smart" and do stuff for me that I'd rather it not do", that's one of my biggest gripes about Microsoft software.
At least in the US, price of the phone is nothing compared to the price of the service.
So true. I broke my phone earlier in the week, and am trying to repair/replace it. I was surprised to find Android at the Boost store, and probably would have bought one (interface sucks, but it sucks less than my Motorola) but they won't let you use one on the pay as you go plan.
You don't need a pill to cure ED, all you need to do is get rid of the ugly broad you can't get it up for and find a woman that looks a little more female and a little less ghastly.
That's why your close vision deteriorates when you get old -- so you won't see how ugly your wife's gotten. I never needed viagra at all before I got my CrystaLens implant, I still don't need it with a 40 year old. A woman my own age? Give me two pills!
whoever does come up with the total cure for cancer is likely to get some small-prize announcement and that would be the end of the story by the news media
It's doubtful anyone will come up with a "silver bullet" that will cure all cancers, because all cancers are different. It appears that they have cured (or at least stopped progression of) breast cancer. From an item I saw on the TV news the other night, it looks as though this will work even after the cancer has metathesized and spread to other parts of the body. The next step is combining it with radiation and other treatments. Not yet FDA approved, still experimental.
The other day in another thread someone touted the "obvious" superiority of iPhone over Android. I called him on it, asking what would make the iPhone wrth its higher asking price. The only answer he could come up with was "app availability." (note, I was in a Sprint store yesterday triying to get my phone fixes, and it appeared some Androids cost more than iPhones, but that may have been part of the cantract, with the iPhone subsidized)
It looks like he was trolling. But I am curious, guys, wht with this thread and all, which one has more apps? More important, which one has more apps that are actually useful? If iPhone has 2 million apps and Android has 1.5 million apps, but 1.5 million iPhone apps are all Angry Birds clones, the "iPhone has more apps" would be a red herring; they're not all useful.
Note that these numbers aren't real, they're only illustrations. I'd really like to know which platform is better, iPhone or Android? How well are each built (and I realize that Android's quality is probably all over the board, since there are many different manufacturers).
And does the difference between phone company crippling make the question of Apple vs Android moot?
Chances are you'd have the same probem with your lazy co-workers whether or not the shop was unionized. Under any reasonable union contract, goldbricks can be taken care of. It's a matter of the non-union supervision not doing their jobs.
If I were designing a drone that was supposed to be uber-top secret, I'd fill it with C-4 and program it to explode if signal was lost after a designated period of time.
But certain cars explode easily when they're in an accident. Ford's Crown Vic and Pinto, one of Chevy's pickup trucks. As to the 1/4 tank of gas, it won't explode but when it leaks all over the pavement and there's a spark there's no "boom" but there certainly is a WOOSH. Personally, I'd rather be killed instantly in an impact or by shrapnel than slowly roasted over a gasoline fire.
One of those shows had a university-sponsored list of items sold in their bookstore for dorms; sheets, blankets, pillows, drapes, cleaning supplies, etc. ABC news found the same list of goods made in the US for cheaper than the university sponsored foreign items.
The problem is that few if any of our rich are patriots who give two shits for their country or its citizens, including University Presidents.
It's true. My gasoline-powered cars catch fire all the time.
I've only had one catch fire, and it wasn't even in a wreck. The difference between gasoline cars catching fire after a wreck and electric cars catching fire after a wreck is that the gas car will burn immediately, while it will take a week for the electric car. Nobody has died in an electric car fire (yet), but a lot of people have died in gasoline fires. Look at Pintos and Crown Voctorias.
No, Dave's right. Datum is singular, data is plural, whether you're speaking Latin or English. From Wikipedia:
The term data refers to qualitative or quantitative attributes of a variable or set of variables. Data (plural of "datum") are typically the results of measurements and can be the basis of graphs, images, or observations of a set of variables. Data are often viewed as the lowest level of abstraction from which information and then knowledge are derived. Raw data, i.e. unprocessed data, refers to a collection of numbers, characters, images or other outputs from devices that collect information to convert physical quantities into symbols.
Using "data" as a singular noun is simply the result of ignorance. You'll be marked down in a college course if you make the mistake of saying "data is".
The profit is owned by the company, and the company is owned by the shareholders. IBM could have more shareholders in Germany than the US and would still count as an American company, while Toyota could have most of its shares held by Americans, with its cars being manufactured in Tennessee, and stll be a Japanese company.
There are no more Anerican corporations, no more Japanese corporations. The corporate world is multinational these days.
Personally, I don't which country's rich parasites get the profits, I want Americans to have the jobs. A rich American doesn't help America any more than a rich Italian does.
Agreed, but how would you get normal people to take a job like that? It seems that wanting to be a cop or a politician should automatically disqualify you for the position, since both jobs only attract the power hungry.
Term limits wouldn't help, Ryan was a one term Governor. With term limits, they just jump from position to position; Ryan was SoS before he was Governor. Obama served one term as State Senator, then part of a term as Federal Senator, then President. He hasn't served two terms in any office so far.
They were partying in the streets here in Springfield last night. State workers hated Blago more than anyone did, partly because he screwed them all over and partly because he screwed the state over so bad.
One woman from Human Services was telling me that the first thing he did was to appoint an incompetent crony who hadn't supervised more than 150 employees at a college before being handed the reigns to the biggest agency in the state, with thousands of employees. The first thing she and Blago did was to offer early retirement to all the people who knew how things worked and how to get things done. The next thing they did was to lay off the low-level workers -- the ones who actually did the work. Then the dept head or whatever she was called transferred everybody to jobs they had no clue how to do.
People wonder why state government is so disfunctional, that's why. I think Blago was Bush's long lost brother, because their governing styles were exactly the same.
OTOH another friend works for the SoS, she says that things vastly improved when Ryan left, and I noticed when I got my drivers license renewed it was a lot better for me, the client, too. Saturday morning and no lines, it took ten minutes. It was a three hour ordeal under Ryan.
Why don't these union bosses ask their members to voluntarily pay their dues instead writing laws that make them mandatory and their membership a requirement to work.
Your choice of words is very telling. There are no "union bosses". The union leadership does what the membership says, not the other way around. The bosses are all in management.
Union dues are mandatory for the same reason that taxes are mandatory. Taxes are necessary for government to function, dues are necessary for unions to function, but nobody would pay either if they were voluntary.
most of these union bosses are paid more than the company executives they are so against
Again, your poor choice of loaded words. "So against" as if they hate them. No, they're hired by the membership to negotiate with management. As to your claim that they make more than company CEOs, that is laughably doubtful and you're going to have to post a respectable link to back up your absurd remark (note, a link from FOX news or BusinessWeek are not valid links).
Maybe these workers should be able to "Democratically" choose to be a union or not
They are. Union members can and do vote out the leadership, all contracts are voted on by union members before ratification, and unions can and sometimes are decertified by their members. In order to unionize a non-union shop you have to have a majority of workers who want to unionize. The AFL-CIO can't just walk into your workplace and say "ok, you're all in the union." It doesn't work like that. In fact, I doubt anything about any union is anything like you think it is.
Well, that's not too different than my situation. They do good backups, but I always have a copy on my hard drive just in case the network goes down from a bad router or something.
Years ago I had to do backups at a remote office. Changing a tape isn't hard.
all of that 'classic american technology' was built with union hands and by people paying union dues. they went on something called a 'strike' once in a while, too. fascinating concept - you stop working in order to improve conditions and pressure employers.
There is also a thing called a "lockout", which is the same as a strike but is instigated by management. Neither are ever used lightly. The membership must vote to strike, and nobody is going to go on strike unless they're REALLY getting fucked hard without lube by management. Likewise, you won't see a lockout unless the union demands are too unreasonable or management is batshit insane.
As to the EPA, what would you do about that? Go back to the 1960s when you couldn't drive past a Monsanto with the windows rolled down, and where rivers are so polluted they catch fire?
How about attaching tarriffs to products from countries without these regs?
Now, to you -- why do you share a distatse for unions? Are you an employer who exploits his workers or otherwise treats them bad? The only way you're going to get your shop unionized is to treat your workers like shit. As a former CEO of a (then) nonunion airline put it, "any company that gets a union deserves one."
Unions brought us weekends, vacations, safe working conditions, sick leave, fair pay... note that all these things are dying today, right along with the unions.
If you work for someone else and have a distaste for unions, you've been brainwashed. The only people with a rational distaste for unions is an employer who treats his workforce badly.
I was in a bar last year with a guy who had a strange mechanical gizmo. I asked what it was, and he said it was a $25 part for a gas furnace that replaced $250 worth of electronics that had gone out -- old school stuff.
Likewise your refrigerator, stove, and air conditioner. Just because they stuff electronics in them doesn't mean those electronics are needed. In the case of the furnace thing (I forgot what he called it), there's an example of why things cost more and don't last. That $250 circuit had only lasted three years, the mechanical replacement would probably last at least 30.
I don't need my stove or refrigerator to be on the internet, nor do I want it to be. Electromechanical thermostats are far more long-lived and far cheaper than their electronic counterparts.
Slashdot Mirror
Going through his comment history is almost like reading satire, which pulled me in.
It's actually a troll, but it works because he's trolling Christians on a predominantly agnostic/athiest site. There is SO much that gives him away, starting with the "These atheist-backed scientists" as if Christians are anti-science. The fact is, over half of US scientists are, in fact, Christians. From conversations I've had here, many athiests don't think science and religion can coexist, and don't seem to be able to (or perhaps want to) understand that science answers "how" while religion answers "why".
Then there's the "it is clearly outlined in the Bible that God created Adam and Eve 5,000 years ago". Um, no, the bible doesn't say that. Not anywhere. There isn't a real preacher in the entire world that believes the earth is 5k years old. Some dimwit a couple hundred years ago did some faulty math, and somehow people believed the nonsense.
Then there's "I wish these scientists well with their work and pray that they will break free from the yoke of grants from godless individuals and governments." One google search dispells this lie.
Pastor Golf is a wolf in sheep's clothing. A very stupid wolf.
But more importantly, how many thousand apps can you run on your phone?
That's an excellent question; how many apps can fit on each phone? And I also wondered why both platforms need apps when a computer can just use the web site for most things (radio stations are the first to come to mind). Why do you need (for instance) a Google Maps app when all you should have to do is surf to Google?
Maybe it is just because I am more used to the iPhone, but when using an Android, I find the experience to be downright hostile.
I have friends with one or the other platform, and only played with the Android interface for a few minutes, but I, too found it frustrating. It was almost like using Windows; nothing was anywhere I would have expected it in either Linux or Windows... and these ARE computers. I'm not buying a tablet until I can get one with wifi, no phone company, several USB ports, and touch-enabled KDE ofr that exact reason.
It's almost like they were purposely designing the interface to frustrate. Somehow I expect the iPhone interface to be just as bad, especially since you said "sometimes the iPhone tries to be "too smart" and do stuff for me that I'd rather it not do", that's one of my biggest gripes about Microsoft software.
At least in the US, price of the phone is nothing compared to the price of the service.
So true. I broke my phone earlier in the week, and am trying to repair/replace it. I was surprised to find Android at the Boost store, and probably would have bought one (interface sucks, but it sucks less than my Motorola) but they won't let you use one on the pay as you go plan.
You don't need a pill to cure ED, all you need to do is get rid of the ugly broad you can't get it up for and find a woman that looks a little more female and a little less ghastly.
That's why your close vision deteriorates when you get old -- so you won't see how ugly your wife's gotten. I never needed viagra at all before I got my CrystaLens implant, I still don't need it with a 40 year old. A woman my own age? Give me two pills!
But they didn't do anything illegal.
I wouldn't be doing anything illegal if I had consentual sex with your wife, either. Just because it's legal doesn't make it right.
Google does exactly the same with Chrome
"Well, George banged your wife so it's ok for me to." Why do you excuse immoral, unethical assholes?
Excuse me, sir, but are you the famous Reverend Golf I've heard so much about?
WOOSH!
You must have had a worse week than me if you're so grumpy you didn't get the joke.
whoever does come up with the total cure for cancer is likely to get some small-prize announcement and that would be the end of the story by the news media
It's doubtful anyone will come up with a "silver bullet" that will cure all cancers, because all cancers are different. It appears that they have cured (or at least stopped progression of) breast cancer. From an item I saw on the TV news the other night, it looks as though this will work even after the cancer has metathesized and spread to other parts of the body. The next step is combining it with radiation and other treatments. Not yet FDA approved, still experimental.
The other day in another thread someone touted the "obvious" superiority of iPhone over Android. I called him on it, asking what would make the iPhone wrth its higher asking price. The only answer he could come up with was "app availability." (note, I was in a Sprint store yesterday triying to get my phone fixes, and it appeared some Androids cost more than iPhones, but that may have been part of the cantract, with the iPhone subsidized)
It looks like he was trolling. But I am curious, guys, wht with this thread and all, which one has more apps? More important, which one has more apps that are actually useful? If iPhone has 2 million apps and Android has 1.5 million apps, but 1.5 million iPhone apps are all Angry Birds clones, the "iPhone has more apps" would be a red herring; they're not all useful.
Note that these numbers aren't real, they're only illustrations. I'd really like to know which platform is better, iPhone or Android? How well are each built (and I realize that Android's quality is probably all over the board, since there are many different manufacturers).
And does the difference between phone company crippling make the question of Apple vs Android moot?
Chances are you'd have the same probem with your lazy co-workers whether or not the shop was unionized. Under any reasonable union contract, goldbricks can be taken care of. It's a matter of the non-union supervision not doing their jobs.
If I were designing a drone that was supposed to be uber-top secret, I'd fill it with C-4 and program it to explode if signal was lost after a designated period of time.
But certain cars explode easily when they're in an accident. Ford's Crown Vic and Pinto, one of Chevy's pickup trucks. As to the 1/4 tank of gas, it won't explode but when it leaks all over the pavement and there's a spark there's no "boom" but there certainly is a WOOSH. Personally, I'd rather be killed instantly in an impact or by shrapnel than slowly roasted over a gasoline fire.
One of those shows had a university-sponsored list of items sold in their bookstore for dorms; sheets, blankets, pillows, drapes, cleaning supplies, etc. ABC news found the same list of goods made in the US for cheaper than the university sponsored foreign items.
The problem is that few if any of our rich are patriots who give two shits for their country or its citizens, including University Presidents.
On the assumption that they dont allow sponsorship from any really evil companies
On the contrary, I want to see one sponsored by Sony. It would be a chance to tell those evil bastards a thing or two.
It's true. My gasoline-powered cars catch fire all the time.
I've only had one catch fire, and it wasn't even in a wreck. The difference between gasoline cars catching fire after a wreck and electric cars catching fire after a wreck is that the gas car will burn immediately, while it will take a week for the electric car. Nobody has died in an electric car fire (yet), but a lot of people have died in gasoline fires. Look at Pintos and Crown Voctorias.
No, Dave's right. Datum is singular, data is plural, whether you're speaking Latin or English. From Wikipedia:
Using "data" as a singular noun is simply the result of ignorance. You'll be marked down in a college course if you make the mistake of saying "data is".
Why don't Iranians ever have sex standing up?
They're afraid someone will see them and think they're dancing!
(old recycled Baptist joke)
The profit is owned by the company, and the company is owned by the shareholders. IBM could have more shareholders in Germany than the US and would still count as an American company, while Toyota could have most of its shares held by Americans, with its cars being manufactured in Tennessee, and stll be a Japanese company.
There are no more Anerican corporations, no more Japanese corporations. The corporate world is multinational these days.
Personally, I don't which country's rich parasites get the profits, I want Americans to have the jobs. A rich American doesn't help America any more than a rich Italian does.
Well, you can always go into prefernces and disable "ask slashdot."
Agreed, but how would you get normal people to take a job like that? It seems that wanting to be a cop or a politician should automatically disqualify you for the position, since both jobs only attract the power hungry.
Term limits wouldn't help, Ryan was a one term Governor. With term limits, they just jump from position to position; Ryan was SoS before he was Governor. Obama served one term as State Senator, then part of a term as Federal Senator, then President. He hasn't served two terms in any office so far.
They were partying in the streets here in Springfield last night. State workers hated Blago more than anyone did, partly because he screwed them all over and partly because he screwed the state over so bad.
One woman from Human Services was telling me that the first thing he did was to appoint an incompetent crony who hadn't supervised more than 150 employees at a college before being handed the reigns to the biggest agency in the state, with thousands of employees. The first thing she and Blago did was to offer early retirement to all the people who knew how things worked and how to get things done. The next thing they did was to lay off the low-level workers -- the ones who actually did the work. Then the dept head or whatever she was called transferred everybody to jobs they had no clue how to do.
People wonder why state government is so disfunctional, that's why. I think Blago was Bush's long lost brother, because their governing styles were exactly the same.
OTOH another friend works for the SoS, she says that things vastly improved when Ryan left, and I noticed when I got my drivers license renewed it was a lot better for me, the client, too. Saturday morning and no lines, it took ten minutes. It was a three hour ordeal under Ryan.
Why don't these union bosses ask their members to voluntarily pay their dues instead writing laws that make them mandatory and their membership a requirement to work.
Your choice of words is very telling. There are no "union bosses". The union leadership does what the membership says, not the other way around. The bosses are all in management.
Union dues are mandatory for the same reason that taxes are mandatory. Taxes are necessary for government to function, dues are necessary for unions to function, but nobody would pay either if they were voluntary.
most of these union bosses are paid more than the company executives they are so against
Again, your poor choice of loaded words. "So against" as if they hate them. No, they're hired by the membership to negotiate with management. As to your claim that they make more than company CEOs, that is laughably doubtful and you're going to have to post a respectable link to back up your absurd remark (note, a link from FOX news or BusinessWeek are not valid links).
Maybe these workers should be able to "Democratically" choose to be a union or not
They are. Union members can and do vote out the leadership, all contracts are voted on by union members before ratification, and unions can and sometimes are decertified by their members. In order to unionize a non-union shop you have to have a majority of workers who want to unionize. The AFL-CIO can't just walk into your workplace and say "ok, you're all in the union." It doesn't work like that. In fact, I doubt anything about any union is anything like you think it is.
Well, that's not too different than my situation. They do good backups, but I always have a copy on my hard drive just in case the network goes down from a bad router or something.
Years ago I had to do backups at a remote office. Changing a tape isn't hard.
Now this story shows that the hosting company's data and servers can get mixed up, and do you want to take that risk with your data?
FTFY. Or did you mean
Now this story shows that the hosting companies can get mixed up, and do you want to take that risk with your data?
I guess you missed the story yesterday, then. We were warned.
Two birds with one stone here. First the GP:
all of that 'classic american technology' was built with union hands and by people paying union dues. they went on something called a 'strike' once in a while, too. fascinating concept - you stop working in order to improve conditions and pressure employers.
There is also a thing called a "lockout", which is the same as a strike but is instigated by management. Neither are ever used lightly. The membership must vote to strike, and nobody is going to go on strike unless they're REALLY getting fucked hard without lube by management. Likewise, you won't see a lockout unless the union demands are too unreasonable or management is batshit insane.
As to the EPA, what would you do about that? Go back to the 1960s when you couldn't drive past a Monsanto with the windows rolled down, and where rivers are so polluted they catch fire?
How about attaching tarriffs to products from countries without these regs?
Now, to you -- why do you share a distatse for unions? Are you an employer who exploits his workers or otherwise treats them bad? The only way you're going to get your shop unionized is to treat your workers like shit. As a former CEO of a (then) nonunion airline put it, "any company that gets a union deserves one."
Unions brought us weekends, vacations, safe working conditions, sick leave, fair pay... note that all these things are dying today, right along with the unions.
If you work for someone else and have a distaste for unions, you've been brainwashed. The only people with a rational distaste for unions is an employer who treats his workforce badly.
Couch, chair, window, furnace*, doors, locks...
I was in a bar last year with a guy who had a strange mechanical gizmo. I asked what it was, and he said it was a $25 part for a gas furnace that replaced $250 worth of electronics that had gone out -- old school stuff.
Likewise your refrigerator, stove, and air conditioner. Just because they stuff electronics in them doesn't mean those electronics are needed. In the case of the furnace thing (I forgot what he called it), there's an example of why things cost more and don't last. That $250 circuit had only lasted three years, the mechanical replacement would probably last at least 30.
I don't need my stove or refrigerator to be on the internet, nor do I want it to be. Electromechanical thermostats are far more long-lived and far cheaper than their electronic counterparts.