Actually, syntactically that is a pretty ambiguous statement.
If a sentence is properly constructed, you should be able to remove the modifier to get the meaning of this statement. "Neither the person nor the company" is just a modifier of "Dell" to specify which "Dell" they're talking about. Remove it for the sentence's meaning:
"Dell is interested in acquiring Red Hat"
However, they use a negative "Neither/nor" construction in an inclusive modifier, which really confuses things. If they really mean "not" they should start with a negative sentence:
"Dell is NOT interested in acquiring Red Hat"
and then modify it with an inclusive modifier:
"Dell, EITHER the person OR the company, is not interested in acquiring Red Hat."
Or they could be more specific and retain the neither/nor construction:
"Neither Dell corporation nor Michael Dell is interested in acquiring Red Hat."
Grammar slackers often make fun of grammar nitpickers, saying "they know what I mean." Well, not in this case. Taken as written, this sentence means the exact opposite of what was probably intended. Grammar conveys specific meaning, and people who do not know or care to follow the rules of grammar risk misunderstanding.
This story is a great example of the fact that the slashdot editors seem to fall into at least one of those categories.
That sounds good to me. If you need to be able to test hypothesis in order to qualify as science, then intelligent design doesn't have a chance, does it? I mean, you could theoretically test evolution, but how can you test intelligent design? The only test I can think of is to find a fresh, new world, toss down some microbes, wait 10 billion years and see what happens. Even then, whether anything happens or not, it still doesn't prove or disprove intelligent design, it could only prove that evolution is plausible, not that it happened in the particular case of Earth.
Also, these people who say we couldn't have gotten here by chance are just incapable of grasping really, really large numbers. No matter how unlikely life is, it's got millions of billions of stars and worlds to multiply those small odds against.
I've never done that with newegg. Have you called your credit card company and had the shipping address that you're using added to a note on your account? Once you do that, you shouldn't have to do that anymore. Many credit card companies REQUIRE that retailers call if phone/address do not match and there is no account note, as part of an anti-fraud measure. Usually the retailer gets a lower percentage rate for fully complying with the bank's anti-fraud measures. So if you're not having to do it, the company is probably paying more for using the card, and that means you're probably paying a little more.
It works fine with BitComet, and it doesn't even drain the system too much. I can watch videos, encode, do my editing, run Apache and MySQL, whatever else, no problems.
That's one of the great things about Newegg. They tell you what you're paying for shipping beforehand. It makes the decision so much easier.
Yeah, and it's usually too high. Newegg is where I go for big items, but their shipping on small items like cables is KILLER. Paying $4.99 to ship a $2 cable gets painful in a hurry if you need a dozen cables. I've cancelled several Newegg orders when I get to checkout time and find I have $30 shipping on $25 worth of merchandise, with a total weight of about 2 pounds.
Sorry, but going from one 2-ounce cable in the box to three of them does not add $8 to the cost of shipping and handling. Their system is broken for items like this.
Communism is mainly a problem when it fails to reward hard work. If it doesn't matter if you slack off, then why not slack off?
The extreme of this is when you get situations like you had in the USSR where they had ball bearing plants that shipped their excess product to be melted down into ingots, which were shipped to the ball bearing plant. Doesn't take long for the workers to figure out that it doesn't matter how badly they do their job.
OSS is a bit different, because people only work on it if they want to, the work only needs doing once, and the people working on it take pride in their work.
Someone gets infected, disconnect them until they are clean. Second offense, disconnect them, and they only get reconnected via a filter box, which they pay rent on, say, $50 a month with a minimum of 3 months.
Alternatively, at the second infection, require them to pay a pro to clean their system and update their scanning software, since they've proven they can't do it themselves. They don't get reconnected until they can show a receipt from an approved vendor.
I'd like to see it ported to something other than Java. I really like Azareus's interface, and it works well, but it scales horribly. I really can't use it. I tried it out and it seemed good, then I tried using it as my main service, and it just destroyed my system. Try seeding 30 or 40 torrents out of a modest (2GHz, 1GB RAM) machine sometime. It's horrible. If you're web browsing, editing/encoding video, using PhotoShop, scanning film, etc on the same machine, you'll be crying.
By contrast, BitComet (or multiple BitTornado instances) can do that and I don't even know it's running.
If all you're doing is leeching, then Azareus is great. I do recommend it to people. But BitComet is more scalable. I also use BitTornado for a day or two on new torrents, because BitComet doesn't super-seed.
If that's so, then the same could be said of any branch of science. If you assume an omnipotent being that's trying to mindfuck us, then you can't even really trust anything, even your own senses.
It's just as possible (if not moreso) that the bible was put here to test our faith in some other religion that was passed down via oral tradition only, and actually died a thousand years ago, and we're all thereby screwed for eternity.
A bunch of stuff in daily use was designed using "theories" - including color TV; the electron gun placement takes relativity into account. Ask them if they're willing to forgo watching TV, because it was designed using an unproven "theory" that's not backed by biblical teachings.
These boneheads fundamentally do not understand the basic operation of the scientific method, or they'd realize what a moronic argument they're putting forth. Religious people have this fundamental need to be "right" - they can't relate to a system where what you believe to be "right" today can be disproven, and tomorrow you're going to have a different set of beliefs based on your new evidence.
Not too surprising that the same group of people said that Kerry was "flip-flopping" when he actually changed his mind on an issue based on new evidence. To them, there's right and wrong, and if any evidence comes to light that shows their "right" to be wrong, then the evidence must be flawed.
Can't the ID folks consider the possibility that evolution is the tool God used to create us?
I know many people, including scientists and people who have taken lifetime religious vows, who choose to see the intricacies of nature as testament to the wonder of God's creation. By contrast, the ID people choose to see anything that isn't described in some holy script to be the work of the devil.
It just comes down to what you want to believe. If you want to think that the books of the Bible are the complete and infallible truth in the world, and all else is distraction and satanic propaganda, then you're going to be at odds with most of the people, most of the time. Unfortunately they get control through deception (because any means are justified by the ends, if you have deluded yourself this much) and push changes upon those too apathetic to care.
If all of them had been moving at.999 speed of light (in our point of view), there still wouldn't be a difference
Well, there might have been; some lower frequencies of external source could have been shifted up into a wavelength that would have interfered with their wireless, or sunlight from behind them may have shifted downwards.
Also, light from in front of them may have shifted into gamma rays or higher and killed them before they managed to get to level 2.
Yup, but if you want to buy the truck that's MOST "made in America" I wouldn't be surprised if it's a Toyota. They're running very high US component percentage, plus US assembly. More than many Ford/GM products
I bought my first computer about a year before the first hard drive became available for personal computers. That hard drive was about 8 mb IIRC and cost about $5000.
Anyway, I use gmail, and after only a few months I'm up to 20 mb, which is 2% of the old quota. I still have the unix mailbox format files of every email I've received for the last 15 years, and they're well into the hundreds of megs. If gmail really is a lifetime email account, then a couple of GB will require some pruning along the way to stay within that limit.
But Google basically said back on April 1 that they're planning to just grow the limit as people's needs grow. They jumped it from 1 to 2 gb right away and are still creeping it up.
While I like PA a lot, I can see how not everyone would find it funny. But there's no excuse for thinking UF is even remotely humorous.
Oh, come on. UF is a little amusing about once per month or two. About as often as PA is not funny. OK, more often than that, PA is very rarely not funny.
I'm not "not laughing" at UF because I don't get it, either. I'm not laughing because it's not funny. Glad there are at least some here that agree.
I've talked with Illiad at some cons too, and he's a funny guy, but his geek humor just falls flat for me.
Or you can just use Net Transport (windows) or mplayer and grab the original stream directly. I grabbed the RM from the "listen again" page. As a bonus, they had a much higher quality link there than what ran over the live stream. Those with modern Palms can play the RM stream on those, or convert them to something else, but it's always nice to keep the original format.
Use some other port and redirect it from your registrar, and you've got a web server. I use 443 myself, because it's pretty standard and my ISP doesn't block it inbound, but any old port would work (except 80).
I dunno, I was under the impression that information had to be given some value otherwise Maxwell's demon would actually work. Also, Hawking had that phantom particle within a black hole which was able to quantify all spin/state information of every particle which entered the black hole, so that when the black hole evaporated all the information was again released into the universe.
I assumed that if Hawking was going to that much trouble to preserve information, there must be some fundamental law of conservation of information, and I guessed that had something to do with thermodynamics.
That's the way all living beings are. It's what drive sexual behavior. Race survival in general is fine-tuned by evolution.
The problem with space colonization as a step towards race survival is that it requires an intellectual leap to see it in that way, so it's hard to convey that to the masses. The evolutionary programming only really works on immediate stimulus and internal drives. If space colonization had nice tits, NASA's budget would be bigger than the Pentagon's.
Nobody says moondust is useless. It's one of the reasons to GO to the moon. First off, regolith is excellent radiation shielding; every lunar habitation plan from early sci-fi on includes burying the habitat. Next, it has oxygen that can be liberated. Also, it's very rich in minerals. There are plans that have been worked up for years that take regolith and energy (from solar arrays or nuclear) and put high-grade iron, nickel and other elements out the other side, using some chemicals that are recovered in the process so it continues as long as you care to run it.
Dude, all retailers make up for skinny margins and loss leaders by charging high amounts for accessories. Just look at printer cables. You can go to newegg and buy USB cables for $1.50, and they're fine, I've used dozens of them on printers/scanners/hard drives, no problems. Best Buy charges $20 for them.
Back when I was selling clones, the price competition was really bad; we'd make $15 on a $200 printer. You can't live on that at the local retailer level. We'd instantly double our margin by selling a printer cable with it for $20, which we bought from an importer for 74 cents.
I have absolutely no problem with people charging whatever they want for this kind of stuff, selling $100 Monster Cable patch cords, whatever. It helps separate fools from their money, which is almost always a good thing, unless the fools then can't feed their kids or something. That's probably not a problem with people buying DVI cables.
I would have thought $350,000 is a large sum in ANY currency.
It's a particularly *large* sum on the planet Triganic:
Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu.
The other posts are talking about copyright infringement, an act which has been mislabeled by the RIAA et al as "piracy" in order to make it sound horrible.
Unless you have an unusual detector, it doesn't charge the batteries. This may be even worse depending on the design; if it doesn't monitor battery voltage while running from AC, when it tries to switch the battery may already be stone dead. But I think most AC detectors do chirp when the battery gets low.
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Actually, syntactically that is a pretty ambiguous statement.
If a sentence is properly constructed, you should be able to remove the modifier to get the meaning of this statement. "Neither the person nor the company" is just a modifier of "Dell" to specify which "Dell" they're talking about. Remove it for the sentence's meaning:
"Dell is interested in acquiring Red Hat"
However, they use a negative "Neither/nor" construction in an inclusive modifier, which really confuses things. If they really mean "not" they should start with a negative sentence:
"Dell is NOT interested in acquiring Red Hat"
and then modify it with an inclusive modifier:
"Dell, EITHER the person OR the company, is not interested in acquiring Red Hat."
Or they could be more specific and retain the neither/nor construction:
"Neither Dell corporation nor Michael Dell is interested in acquiring Red Hat."
Grammar slackers often make fun of grammar nitpickers, saying "they know what I mean." Well, not in this case. Taken as written, this sentence means the exact opposite of what was probably intended. Grammar conveys specific meaning, and people who do not know or care to follow the rules of grammar risk misunderstanding.
This story is a great example of the fact that the slashdot editors seem to fall into at least one of those categories.
That sounds good to me. If you need to be able to test hypothesis in order to qualify as science, then intelligent design doesn't have a chance, does it? I mean, you could theoretically test evolution, but how can you test intelligent design? The only test I can think of is to find a fresh, new world, toss down some microbes, wait 10 billion years and see what happens. Even then, whether anything happens or not, it still doesn't prove or disprove intelligent design, it could only prove that evolution is plausible, not that it happened in the particular case of Earth.
Also, these people who say we couldn't have gotten here by chance are just incapable of grasping really, really large numbers. No matter how unlikely life is, it's got millions of billions of stars and worlds to multiply those small odds against.
I've never done that with newegg. Have you called your credit card company and had the shipping address that you're using added to a note on your account? Once you do that, you shouldn't have to do that anymore.
Many credit card companies REQUIRE that retailers call if phone/address do not match and there is no account note, as part of an anti-fraud measure. Usually the retailer gets a lower percentage rate for fully complying with the bank's anti-fraud measures. So if you're not having to do it, the company is probably paying more for using the card, and that means you're probably paying a little more.
It works fine with BitComet, and it doesn't even drain the system too much. I can watch videos, encode, do my editing, run Apache and MySQL, whatever else, no problems.
That's one of the great things about Newegg. They tell you what you're paying for shipping beforehand. It makes the decision so much easier.
Yeah, and it's usually too high. Newegg is where I go for big items, but their shipping on small items like cables is KILLER. Paying $4.99 to ship a $2 cable gets painful in a hurry if you need a dozen cables. I've cancelled several Newegg orders when I get to checkout time and find I have $30 shipping on $25 worth of merchandise, with a total weight of about 2 pounds.
Sorry, but going from one 2-ounce cable in the box to three of them does not add $8 to the cost of shipping and handling. Their system is broken for items like this.
Communism is mainly a problem when it fails to reward hard work. If it doesn't matter if you slack off, then why not slack off?
The extreme of this is when you get situations like you had in the USSR where they had ball bearing plants that shipped their excess product to be melted down into ingots, which were shipped to the ball bearing plant. Doesn't take long for the workers to figure out that it doesn't matter how badly they do their job.
OSS is a bit different, because people only work on it if they want to, the work only needs doing once, and the people working on it take pride in their work.
Someone gets infected, disconnect them until they are clean. Second offense, disconnect them, and they only get reconnected via a filter box, which they pay rent on, say, $50 a month with a minimum of 3 months.
Alternatively, at the second infection, require them to pay a pro to clean their system and update their scanning software, since they've proven they can't do it themselves. They don't get reconnected until they can show a receipt from an approved vendor.
I'd like to see it ported to something other than Java. I really like Azareus's interface, and it works well, but it scales horribly. I really can't use it. I tried it out and it seemed good, then I tried using it as my main service, and it just destroyed my system. Try seeding 30 or 40 torrents out of a modest (2GHz, 1GB RAM) machine sometime. It's horrible. If you're web browsing, editing/encoding video, using PhotoShop, scanning film, etc on the same machine, you'll be crying.
By contrast, BitComet (or multiple BitTornado instances) can do that and I don't even know it's running.
If all you're doing is leeching, then Azareus is great. I do recommend it to people. But BitComet is more scalable. I also use BitTornado for a day or two on new torrents, because BitComet doesn't super-seed.
they were placed here by God to test our faith
If that's so, then the same could be said of any branch of science. If you assume an omnipotent being that's trying to mindfuck us, then you can't even really trust anything, even your own senses.
It's just as possible (if not moreso) that the bible was put here to test our faith in some other religion that was passed down via oral tradition only, and actually died a thousand years ago, and we're all thereby screwed for eternity.
A bunch of stuff in daily use was designed using "theories" - including color TV; the electron gun placement takes relativity into account. Ask them if they're willing to forgo watching TV, because it was designed using an unproven "theory" that's not backed by biblical teachings.
These boneheads fundamentally do not understand the basic operation of the scientific method, or they'd realize what a moronic argument they're putting forth. Religious people have this fundamental need to be "right" - they can't relate to a system where what you believe to be "right" today can be disproven, and tomorrow you're going to have a different set of beliefs based on your new evidence.
Not too surprising that the same group of people said that Kerry was "flip-flopping" when he actually changed his mind on an issue based on new evidence. To them, there's right and wrong, and if any evidence comes to light that shows their "right" to be wrong, then the evidence must be flawed.
Can't the ID folks consider the possibility that evolution is the tool God used to create us?
I know many people, including scientists and people who have taken lifetime religious vows, who choose to see the intricacies of nature as testament to the wonder of God's creation. By contrast, the ID people choose to see anything that isn't described in some holy script to be the work of the devil.
It just comes down to what you want to believe. If you want to think that the books of the Bible are the complete and infallible truth in the world, and all else is distraction and satanic propaganda, then you're going to be at odds with most of the people, most of the time. Unfortunately they get control through deception (because any means are justified by the ends, if you have deluded yourself this much) and push changes upon those too apathetic to care.
If all of them had been moving at .999 speed of light (in our point of view), there still wouldn't be a difference
Well, there might have been; some lower frequencies of external source could have been shifted up into a wavelength that would have interfered with their wireless, or sunlight from behind them may have shifted downwards.
Also, light from in front of them may have shifted into gamma rays or higher and killed them before they managed to get to level 2.
Yup, but if you want to buy the truck that's MOST "made in America" I wouldn't be surprised if it's a Toyota. They're running very high US component percentage, plus US assembly. More than many Ford/GM products
Wait until they air it?
They're only around for a week afterwards. #4 hasn't aired yet, #3 was months ago.
I bought my first computer about a year before the first hard drive became available for personal computers. That hard drive was about 8 mb IIRC and cost about $5000.
Anyway, I use gmail, and after only a few months I'm up to 20 mb, which is 2% of the old quota. I still have the unix mailbox format files of every email I've received for the last 15 years, and they're well into the hundreds of megs. If gmail really is a lifetime email account, then a couple of GB will require some pruning along the way to stay within that limit.
But Google basically said back on April 1 that they're planning to just grow the limit as people's needs grow. They jumped it from 1 to 2 gb right away and are still creeping it up.
While I like PA a lot, I can see how not everyone would find it funny. But there's no excuse for thinking UF is even remotely humorous.
Oh, come on. UF is a little amusing about once per month or two. About as often as PA is not funny. OK, more often than that, PA is very rarely not funny.
I'm not "not laughing" at UF because I don't get it, either. I'm not laughing because it's not funny. Glad there are at least some here that agree.
I've talked with Illiad at some cons too, and he's a funny guy, but his geek humor just falls flat for me.
You want funny geek humor, go see Dr. Fun.
Or you can just use Net Transport (windows) or mplayer and grab the original stream directly. I grabbed the RM from the "listen again" page. As a bonus, they had a much higher quality link there than what ran over the live stream.
Those with modern Palms can play the RM stream on those, or convert them to something else, but it's always nice to keep the original format.
Use some other port and redirect it from your registrar, and you've got a web server. I use 443 myself, because it's pretty standard and my ISP doesn't block it inbound, but any old port would work (except 80).
I dunno, I was under the impression that information had to be given some value otherwise Maxwell's demon would actually work. Also, Hawking had that phantom particle within a black hole which was able to quantify all spin/state information of every particle which entered the black hole, so that when the black hole evaporated all the information was again released into the universe.
I assumed that if Hawking was going to that much trouble to preserve information, there must be some fundamental law of conservation of information, and I guessed that had something to do with thermodynamics.
Even worse, over 100 watts of the power is lost to heat!
For all practical purposes, ALL the power is "lost" to heat. Information has SOME thermodynamic value, but it's pretty damn small.
If you have a computer that draws 500 watts of power, you have a 499.99999(etc) watt heater.
That's the way all living beings are. It's what drive sexual behavior. Race survival in general is fine-tuned by evolution.
The problem with space colonization as a step towards race survival is that it requires an intellectual leap to see it in that way, so it's hard to convey that to the masses. The evolutionary programming only really works on immediate stimulus and internal drives. If space colonization had nice tits, NASA's budget would be bigger than the Pentagon's.
Now come on, that's "microgravity porn".
Nobody says moondust is useless. It's one of the reasons to GO to the moon. First off, regolith is excellent radiation shielding; every lunar habitation plan from early sci-fi on includes burying the habitat.
Next, it has oxygen that can be liberated. Also, it's very rich in minerals. There are plans that have been worked up for years that take regolith and energy (from solar arrays or nuclear) and put high-grade iron, nickel and other elements out the other side, using some chemicals that are recovered in the process so it continues as long as you care to run it.
Dude, all retailers make up for skinny margins and loss leaders by charging high amounts for accessories. Just look at printer cables. You can go to newegg and buy USB cables for $1.50, and they're fine, I've used dozens of them on printers/scanners/hard drives, no problems. Best Buy charges $20 for them.
Back when I was selling clones, the price competition was really bad; we'd make $15 on a $200 printer. You can't live on that at the local retailer level. We'd instantly double our margin by selling a printer cable with it for $20, which we bought from an importer for 74 cents.
I have absolutely no problem with people charging whatever they want for this kind of stuff, selling $100 Monster Cable patch cords, whatever. It helps separate fools from their money, which is almost always a good thing, unless the fools then can't feed their kids or something. That's probably not a problem with people buying DVI cables.
I would have thought $350,000 is a large sum in ANY currency.
It's a particularly *large* sum on the planet Triganic:
Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu.
(from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Right, he means piracy.
The other posts are talking about copyright infringement, an act which has been mislabeled by the RIAA et al as "piracy" in order to make it sound horrible.
Unless you have an unusual detector, it doesn't charge the batteries. This may be even worse depending on the design; if it doesn't monitor battery voltage while running from AC, when it tries to switch the battery may already be stone dead. But I think most AC detectors do chirp when the battery gets low.