IINM 4 inches of snow is pretty common in at least half of the world (the northern 1/4 and the southern 1/4th). However, they say not to use cruise control in the snow but it never caused me much problem. I always use cruise on the highway, better gas mileage and a less tired right foot.
I would expect an autonomous car to do far better than a meatbag driving in the snow, most people are really stupid. As long as the programmers aren't it should be OK.
Non-nerds use their computers to email, play simple games, look stuff up on google, post lolcats on facebook, look at YouTube videos and that's about all. A tablet suffices; you only need a mouse and keyboard for content creation and PC gaming (not angry birds), and only a tiny minority do that.
You might want to look it up. An illiterate can't read, an aliterate can but doesn't. To misquote Twain, an aliterate has no advantage over an illiterate.
I still miss good old Mandriva. Dropped that for Ubuntu, which before Unity was a great Gnome2 desktop.
I went to ubuntu when I heard Mandriva was dying, but afaik it never did die. Tried Ubuntu, hated Gnome and went back to mandriva (I'd been using it since it was Mandrake). I found kubuntu and never looked back, being KDE it's very similar too mandrake/driva.
I don't think "free and easy to use" comes into play; Windows is "free" in that it's already installed on any computer you buy. I'd paid for DOS 3.3, DOS 6.2, W95, W98, and XP but I went to Linux because Windows kept pissing me off. The straw that broke the camel's back was XP. As soon as I installed it, it informed be that it had disabled the CD burning software that had come with the burner because it "made the OS unstable" despite the fact that I'd never had stability issues with W98, and it wouldn't let me uninstall the software and on every boot taunted me, "nya, nya, I disabled your burner!".
Then the day after I installed XP I couldn't get on the network. The ISP could see the modem but not the PC so my card must be bad. Tried a different cable, almost bought a network card but reinstalled XP to get rid of the program Microsoft disabled and wouldn't let me uninstall that it nagged me about every boot.
When I booted after the reinstall, the network worked fine. Microsoft had replaced a perfectly good driver with one that didn't work at all.
Discovering that Mandrake had features Windows lacked, and that installing it was way faster and easier than installing XP and what's more, didn't insist I did everything their way and came with all the apps I needed was icing on the cake. I'd have paid more for Mandrake than I had for XP because it was clearly WAY better.
To top it off, I'd installed dual-boot figuring there would be a huge learning curve (there wasn't) and Windows got flaky and started freezing and bluescreening and booting itself unexpectedly. I figured it was a corrupt registry until Linux stopped, too -- my power supply was going out. Linux kept chugging until the power supply died completely.
Windows is just crap. If computers didn't come with it preinstalled, nobody would use it.
Slashdot needs to give out more mod points. There aren't enough, and it limits the number of comments. People get depressed if they never have a comment modded up.
If they never get modded up they need to post better comments. Few days go by that I don't get at least one +5. The problem is, folks think uninformed opinions that are flat-out wrong are worth modding up (and some are modded up, then when someone points to a good citation that shows they're flat out wrong they get modded back down).
I haven't seen you be guilty of this, but folks who show an obvious lack of education or literacy should NOT be modded up, but often are. IMO there are too many 4chan refugees here these days, this ain't 4chan and old timers resent the 4chan attitude.
Be accurate, be informative, be insightful, be polite and erudite and you will be modded up. Be an ignorant jerk or an obviously insane person and expect -1s.
How does one license a particular software make it more or less different then an other piece of software?
*head asplodes*
Are you REALLY that stupid, or are you trolling? Did you not see the GP saying "diversity rocks?" How many different versions of Windows can you buy in a store? One, W8. How many Mac desktops are available? One. Why? Because they control the code. You're not allowed to write an alternate desktop. OTOH there are many different choices for Linux; Gnome, KDE, Unity, Mint, the list goes on. If you don't like your W8 desktop, well, tough shit you should have bought your PC when they were still selling W7. Don't like Gnome? No problem, install a different one. Don't like any of them? You can write your own.
You can't do that with closed source software.
Really, that had to be explained to you? My oldest daughter is autistic to the point that she's on disability and she can figure it out. Jesus, man!
BTW, "it's" is a contraction of "it is". The posessive is its, no apostrophe, just as his and hers have no apostrophes.
Judas iscariot was never a tax collector, before his conversion he was a thief. Matthew was the tax collector (before conversion of course, Paul's job was murdering Christians before his conversion).
Judas Iscariot is hated because he was a narc, taking a bribe to turn an innocent man in to the authorities so they could railroad him, not unlike today's narcs.
But the ancient tax man wasn't hated because he was a tax man, the ancient tax men were hated because they were thieves. They would tax at a higher rate than they were supposed to and pocket the difference.
I've only used the tablet I got my daughter for her birthday this summer but I don't get it. You have trouble reading a standard size paperback? Leila's little seven inch tablet is bigger.
Is it a geezer thing? (yes, I'm a geezer but I had a lens replacement in my left eye and now see better than kids so I would no longer know)
The only religious text I've fully read is the Christian bible, the first half of which is part of Islam and Judaism's bibles. I spent a year in Thailand, a Buddhist country, and the morality it teaches is no different than the morality of my own religion.
Those who denigrate the religions of others do so out of ignorance.
...and that's why perfectly good comments are modded down, the equivalent of "I disagree" but also, because of Slashdot's thresholds, the equivalent of one user hiding another's comments.
YMMV I guess, but I find that most of my comments have been fairly moderated (of course, I'm modded up far more than down). Yeah, there are occasions that someone mods me "troll" for a valid opinion, but even then their moderation is often undone by others modding the same comment up to +5.
That's also why high quality comments from anonymous posters are often buried from the moment they are posted
ACs start at zero, logged in users without shitty karma start at 1, and nobody trusts an AC. I find that far too few offtopic AC posts are modded down; moderators pretty much ignore ACs unless the trolling or stupidity is excessive.
Fortunately, a bunch of very smart posters means that "group think" here isn't nearly as uniform as it is elsewhere.
It used to be like that before the aliterate 4channers and redditers started showing up in droves, saying global warming is a hoax, quastioning the worth of science, not knowing how to write (there car's were over they're and I almost loosed my mind). These days it's pretty obvious that many "nerds" never bothered finishing high school.
Slashdot's moderation/metamod system is BADLY broken.
Moderation seems to work, but metamoderation is broken. I wish they'd bring back the old version.
Why is it that some people see a decline in a market and translate that to it being 'dead'? I suppose desktops and laptops are dead too? We might as well just ditch them and shift to....what?
Twenty years ago a video card was absolutely necessary; there were no motherboards containing video chips. A few years later when motherboards started sporting video chips, most home PCs were mostly gaming rigs (single player because everyone was on a 33k modem) and more were on BBSes than on the internet, and dedicated game consoles wre sucky little toys compared to a PC. These days a video card is completely unnecessary unless you're a PC gamer, and most gamers have moved on to consoles; unlike the past, a console's video is as good as a computer's now that TVs are high def.
Folks are eschewing their home PCs for tablets and consoles. The desktop is for content creation, not consumption. You still need one in the office, you need one if you're a writer or a photographer or other content creator, you need one for spreadsheets and databases and all the other work-related stuff but homes? Few homes need a PC any more, they can play Angry Birds and surf Facebook on their tablets and phones.
PC gaming started out geeks-only. The mainstream joined, but these days it's pretty much geeks-only again.
IMO a stupid dream. I cannot think of a single thing I have at home that I would want to control from work. I mean, if I forget to shut off the coffeepot or the living room lamp I'm not going to know I forgot until I get home. This "internet of things" seems pretty stupid to me.
After a little googling it appears that Plato attributed it to Socrates, but it seems to be controversial who came up with it first.
Frederick Lewis Allen covered a similar thing in his book about the 1920s (it was required reading in a general studies history class I took in the '70s).
I wouldn't doubt that Ogg the cave man said something similar. Whenever I think about bitching about "those damned kids" I remind myself that I was once one of them and was the same way they are now.
Coincidences do seem magical when you're high (get stoned enough and the mundane is magical) but that doesn't explain the taxi driver not noticing that there was a fat guy in a bright orange robe sitting between us, or that the fat guy turned out to be a revered figure few had seen (the driver almost wrecked the truck when he saw the priest).
I got the saddest email from my daughter Patty a few days ago. She runs a gamestop across the Kentucky border from Cincinnati, and says "when parents tell me they want their 5 year old kids to play GTA so they can learn how the world is, it makes me want to vomit."
Poor kid, GTA is hurting her GPA, she made straight As last semester but says she only made a B on her first Spanish class. She's working her ass off at GameStop what with the record-breaking game redneck parents are buying their five year olds.
As long as people are willing to take the economic consequences for the havoc they cause my vote is against laws regulating texting, cell phones etc.
Economic consequences? Buddy, if you run over my daughter because you're not paying attention to your driving I want you in fucking PRISON. Economic consequences? The consequences of an auto accident can be far worse than economic, you idiotic, ignorant, money-worshiping fool!
I've noticed that you "no taxes, no regulations, government is always bad" libertarians show a correlation between the lack of an education and the lack of intelligence. None of you bozos know the difference between there and their or lose and loose, all use grocer's apostrophes and generally show evidence that you probably never read a book you weren't forced to read.
Here's a clue, DarkOx: Nerds are literate and intelligent. I'd be beet red with embarrassment if I were you, because that comment was really STUPID (as well as ignorantly written).
I would stick with privacy (which is not in the constitution).
The constitution doesn't bestow rights on citizens; rights are endowed "by the creator". The constitution grants powers to the government and defines its structure, and spying on its citizens (taking away their god-given right to privacy) is not a power that is granted by the constitution anywhere at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's funny, moron. Go back to 4chan.
IINM 4 inches of snow is pretty common in at least half of the world (the northern 1/4 and the southern 1/4th). However, they say not to use cruise control in the snow but it never caused me much problem. I always use cruise on the highway, better gas mileage and a less tired right foot.
I would expect an autonomous car to do far better than a meatbag driving in the snow, most people are really stupid. As long as the programmers aren't it should be OK.
there are always going to be idiots modded up
Sock puppets. And idiot moderators (alas, far too many these days).
Non-nerds use their computers to email, play simple games, look stuff up on google, post lolcats on facebook, look at YouTube videos and that's about all. A tablet suffices; you only need a mouse and keyboard for content creation and PC gaming (not angry birds), and only a tiny minority do that.
You might want to look it up. An illiterate can't read, an aliterate can but doesn't. To misquote Twain, an aliterate has no advantage over an illiterate.
I still miss good old Mandriva. Dropped that for Ubuntu, which before Unity was a great Gnome2 desktop.
I went to ubuntu when I heard Mandriva was dying, but afaik it never did die. Tried Ubuntu, hated Gnome and went back to mandriva (I'd been using it since it was Mandrake). I found kubuntu and never looked back, being KDE it's very similar too mandrake/driva.
I don't think "free and easy to use" comes into play; Windows is "free" in that it's already installed on any computer you buy. I'd paid for DOS 3.3, DOS 6.2, W95, W98, and XP but I went to Linux because Windows kept pissing me off. The straw that broke the camel's back was XP. As soon as I installed it, it informed be that it had disabled the CD burning software that had come with the burner because it "made the OS unstable" despite the fact that I'd never had stability issues with W98, and it wouldn't let me uninstall the software and on every boot taunted me, "nya, nya, I disabled your burner!".
Then the day after I installed XP I couldn't get on the network. The ISP could see the modem but not the PC so my card must be bad. Tried a different cable, almost bought a network card but reinstalled XP to get rid of the program Microsoft disabled and wouldn't let me uninstall that it nagged me about every boot.
When I booted after the reinstall, the network worked fine. Microsoft had replaced a perfectly good driver with one that didn't work at all.
Discovering that Mandrake had features Windows lacked, and that installing it was way faster and easier than installing XP and what's more, didn't insist I did everything their way and came with all the apps I needed was icing on the cake. I'd have paid more for Mandrake than I had for XP because it was clearly WAY better.
To top it off, I'd installed dual-boot figuring there would be a huge learning curve (there wasn't) and Windows got flaky and started freezing and bluescreening and booting itself unexpectedly. I figured it was a corrupt registry until Linux stopped, too -- my power supply was going out. Linux kept chugging until the power supply died completely.
Windows is just crap. If computers didn't come with it preinstalled, nobody would use it.
Slashdot needs to give out more mod points. There aren't enough, and it limits the number of comments. People get depressed if they never have a comment modded up.
If they never get modded up they need to post better comments. Few days go by that I don't get at least one +5. The problem is, folks think uninformed opinions that are flat-out wrong are worth modding up (and some are modded up, then when someone points to a good citation that shows they're flat out wrong they get modded back down).
I haven't seen you be guilty of this, but folks who show an obvious lack of education or literacy should NOT be modded up, but often are. IMO there are too many 4chan refugees here these days, this ain't 4chan and old timers resent the 4chan attitude.
Be accurate, be informative, be insightful, be polite and erudite and you will be modded up. Be an ignorant jerk or an obviously insane person and expect -1s.
How does one license a particular software make it more or less different then an other piece of software?
*head asplodes*
Are you REALLY that stupid, or are you trolling? Did you not see the GP saying "diversity rocks?" How many different versions of Windows can you buy in a store? One, W8. How many Mac desktops are available? One. Why? Because they control the code. You're not allowed to write an alternate desktop. OTOH there are many different choices for Linux; Gnome, KDE, Unity, Mint, the list goes on. If you don't like your W8 desktop, well, tough shit you should have bought your PC when they were still selling W7. Don't like Gnome? No problem, install a different one. Don't like any of them? You can write your own.
You can't do that with closed source software.
Really, that had to be explained to you? My oldest daughter is autistic to the point that she's on disability and she can figure it out. Jesus, man!
BTW, "it's" is a contraction of "it is". The posessive is its, no apostrophe, just as his and hers have no apostrophes.
Judas iscariot was never a tax collector, before his conversion he was a thief. Matthew was the tax collector (before conversion of course, Paul's job was murdering Christians before his conversion).
Judas Iscariot is hated because he was a narc, taking a bribe to turn an innocent man in to the authorities so they could railroad him, not unlike today's narcs.
But the ancient tax man wasn't hated because he was a tax man, the ancient tax men were hated because they were thieves. They would tax at a higher rate than they were supposed to and pocket the difference.
I've only used the tablet I got my daughter for her birthday this summer but I don't get it. You have trouble reading a standard size paperback? Leila's little seven inch tablet is bigger.
Is it a geezer thing? (yes, I'm a geezer but I had a lens replacement in my left eye and now see better than kids so I would no longer know)
1 megapixel? No shit? Wow... my $125 Android has a 5.5 megapixel camera, the new iPhones have 8 megapixels.
Jesus, MS is pathetic.
Kids aren't commodities. They are people (this is why the "fully formed person" and the hatred of teenagers get on my craw... they aren't non-humans)
They're not commodities or non-humans or subhuman, but they are indeed not fully formed. You might want to read up on human brain development.
The only religious text I've fully read is the Christian bible, the first half of which is part of Islam and Judaism's bibles. I spent a year in Thailand, a Buddhist country, and the morality it teaches is no different than the morality of my own religion.
Those who denigrate the religions of others do so out of ignorance.
...and that's why perfectly good comments are modded down, the equivalent of "I disagree" but also, because of Slashdot's thresholds, the equivalent of one user hiding another's comments.
YMMV I guess, but I find that most of my comments have been fairly moderated (of course, I'm modded up far more than down). Yeah, there are occasions that someone mods me "troll" for a valid opinion, but even then their moderation is often undone by others modding the same comment up to +5.
That's also why high quality comments from anonymous posters are often buried from the moment they are posted
ACs start at zero, logged in users without shitty karma start at 1, and nobody trusts an AC. I find that far too few offtopic AC posts are modded down; moderators pretty much ignore ACs unless the trolling or stupidity is excessive.
Fortunately, a bunch of very smart posters means that "group think" here isn't nearly as uniform as it is elsewhere.
It used to be like that before the aliterate 4channers and redditers started showing up in droves, saying global warming is a hoax, quastioning the worth of science, not knowing how to write (there car's were over they're and I almost loosed my mind). These days it's pretty obvious that many "nerds" never bothered finishing high school.
Slashdot's moderation/metamod system is BADLY broken.
Moderation seems to work, but metamoderation is broken. I wish they'd bring back the old version.
Why is it that some people see a decline in a market and translate that to it being 'dead'? I suppose desktops and laptops are dead too? We might as well just ditch them and shift to....what?
Twenty years ago a video card was absolutely necessary; there were no motherboards containing video chips. A few years later when motherboards started sporting video chips, most home PCs were mostly gaming rigs (single player because everyone was on a 33k modem) and more were on BBSes than on the internet, and dedicated game consoles wre sucky little toys compared to a PC. These days a video card is completely unnecessary unless you're a PC gamer, and most gamers have moved on to consoles; unlike the past, a console's video is as good as a computer's now that TVs are high def.
Folks are eschewing their home PCs for tablets and consoles. The desktop is for content creation, not consumption. You still need one in the office, you need one if you're a writer or a photographer or other content creator, you need one for spreadsheets and databases and all the other work-related stuff but homes? Few homes need a PC any more, they can play Angry Birds and surf Facebook on their tablets and phones.
PC gaming started out geeks-only. The mainstream joined, but these days it's pretty much geeks-only again.
IMO a stupid dream. I cannot think of a single thing I have at home that I would want to control from work. I mean, if I forget to shut off the coffeepot or the living room lamp I'm not going to know I forgot until I get home. This "internet of things" seems pretty stupid to me.
After a little googling it appears that Plato attributed it to Socrates, but it seems to be controversial who came up with it first.
Frederick Lewis Allen covered a similar thing in his book about the 1920s (it was required reading in a general studies history class I took in the '70s).
I wouldn't doubt that Ogg the cave man said something similar. Whenever I think about bitching about "those damned kids" I remind myself that I was once one of them and was the same way they are now.
I tried it on my work computer (W7) and it scrolled to the bottom of the screen. Haven't tried it in Linux yet.
Thanks, I'll have to try that (I'm using kubuntu). Yet another feature Windows lacks!
No problem, Ray. You're one of my 3 favorite lawyers, the other two being the lady who handled my divorce and the man who handled my bankruptcy.
Coincidences do seem magical when you're high (get stoned enough and the mundane is magical) but that doesn't explain the taxi driver not noticing that there was a fat guy in a bright orange robe sitting between us, or that the fat guy turned out to be a revered figure few had seen (the driver almost wrecked the truck when he saw the priest).
Maybe to you 4channers it is, troll, but NYCL is well known and greatly respected here at slashdot. So go back to reddit and leave us grownups alone.
BTW, that -1 moderation you have is a bit ironic, isn't it?
Well done, mods. I agree completely.
I got the saddest email from my daughter Patty a few days ago. She runs a gamestop across the Kentucky border from Cincinnati, and says "when parents tell me they want their 5 year old kids to play GTA so they can learn how the world is, it makes me want to vomit."
Poor kid, GTA is hurting her GPA, she made straight As last semester but says she only made a B on her first Spanish class. She's working her ass off at GameStop what with the record-breaking game redneck parents are buying their five year olds.
There is allot of bad science out there
How big is the allotment?
As long as people are willing to take the economic consequences for the havoc they cause my vote is against laws regulating texting, cell phones etc.
Economic consequences? Buddy, if you run over my daughter because you're not paying attention to your driving I want you in fucking PRISON. Economic consequences? The consequences of an auto accident can be far worse than economic, you idiotic, ignorant, money-worshiping fool!
I've noticed that you "no taxes, no regulations, government is always bad" libertarians show a correlation between the lack of an education and the lack of intelligence. None of you bozos know the difference between there and their or lose and loose, all use grocer's apostrophes and generally show evidence that you probably never read a book you weren't forced to read.
Here's a clue, DarkOx: Nerds are literate and intelligent. I'd be beet red with embarrassment if I were you, because that comment was really STUPID (as well as ignorantly written).
I would stick with privacy (which is not in the constitution).
The constitution doesn't bestow rights on citizens; rights are endowed "by the creator". The constitution grants powers to the government and defines its structure, and spying on its citizens (taking away their god-given right to privacy) is not a power that is granted by the constitution anywhere at all.
Also, see the tenth amendment.