i signed up no earlier than 2005 and i have a 90,000 lower uid than his (just under yours). Slashdot hasn't changed in any way that i've noticed since then so I can't see that our uids are low enough to distinguish us from anyone signing up today. Also I've seen some 4 digit IDs say the most inane things at times. I'm pretty sure that anyone who bothers to get an account and post here is fairly science/tech savvy. And with any group of humans there is a large contingent of idiots, regardless of age/knowledge level. That having been said i thought grass, paper and mud were all indigestible, not that i'm any kind fount of knowledge, but it does seem an obscure bit of trivia.
Something that doesn't exist has no preferences. I'm arguing against a "what if" game. Appealing to what someone might or might not want should they exist in the future is as much of a "what if" game as you could hope to play.
If you take the position that "potential people" have the same right to exist that existent people have then everybody should be cranking out babies as fast as they can, irrespective of their social, financial or health situation, since choosing not to have a child at any point is robbing that hypothetical person of the choice to live or not.
phone providers/google could set up a "safe mode" in android that only allows signed apps to run. if the user wants to leave safe mode to install an unknown app they can but be shown a warning of the consequences. That way people who want to be safe can be safe and people who want to run what they like can run what they like. Kind of like apple putting a jailbreak button on the iphone. That way people can choose between safety or freedom.
given time as more apps get checked and signed, people would have less and less reason to leave safe mode.
it reminds me of the software repositories on ubuntu - for about 2 or 3 years there was essential stuff missing that forced you to manually install dodgy software that potentially broke your system, but now that it's matured there often no reason whatsoever for a home user to stray outside the repos
A skeptical and rational outlook is a character defining trait. Atheism is just one possible symptom of that trait. It doesn't rule atheism out as a characteristic of someone without such an outlook, since it's possible to adopt the position of atheism simply because you've been told to adopt it by an authority figure. In both cases atheism is not a cause, and is not a necessary outcome. In order to claim that atheism is a direct contributing factor to something, the link must be at least described, and preferably substantiated with data. Correlation is not necessarily causation, in either regard.
that particular stunt didn't break the entire ISO, just the particular committee involved. The rest of ISO is as it was before MS stuffed that committee with disinterested astroturf puppets that will never show up to vote again.
The mathematics is largely redundant is answering the question of whether the LHC will destroy the earth. Particle collisions that are exactly the same (as well as some that are more powerful) as the ones in the LHC have been occurring in the earth's atmosphere ever since it first formed. If the earth has had several billion years to be eaten by blackholes or stranglets produced by one of these interactions, and still hasn't, then it's pretty safe to assume that those interactions simply don't produce those byproducts.
so a more appropriate car analogy would be having a car with the drive belts missing. You can drive it around for a short period of time, but after that the engine gets very hot and the battery goes flat.
in the blue corner it's "hasty generalisation" weighing in at zero examples and in the red corner it's "the opposite hasty generalisation" weighing in at two anecdotes! ding ding! round one!
Do you mean environmentalists in general? Or a particular group? I'm sure i have no idea what might or might not appease a particular idealogical or political interest group. There's no such thing as the pacific garbage patch - it's a myth. Presumably the sodium and chloride you're referring to are from desalination. In desalination the sodium and chloride that are separated out from the sea water are dumped back into the sea. So what is really being removed is the water, thus increasing the concentration of NaCl in the ocean. Unless the water that is separated out is permanently retained on land somehow this also gets back into the water table and returns to the sea, mitigating the impact of desalination, although the initial introduction of concentrated brine into the sea does have environmental impact. If we extracted lithium from the sea and put it into an ever growing arsenal of batteries - would it ever get put back in the sea? Would this matter?
Would extracting lithium from the sea impact sea-life? I imagine if we started doing that and relying on it, our consumption would just keep spiralling upwards while there was a drawn-out global debate about what effect it is having, which gets resolved just in time to stop the human race dying out, but not in time to stop significant destruction to the marine ecosystem.
but i might just be being paranoid/pessimistic as i don't know anything about it.
the 800 dollars i got from some previous comment - i had a look on dabs and amazon and it seems that a colour laser printer could be about £60 second hand. i might very well buy one the next time i run out of ink. didn't realise they were so cheap - last time i knew what a laser printer cost was about 1997 and they cost tons.
Slashdot Mirror
i signed up no earlier than 2005 and i have a 90,000 lower uid than his (just under yours). Slashdot hasn't changed in any way that i've noticed since then so I can't see that our uids are low enough to distinguish us from anyone signing up today. Also I've seen some 4 digit IDs say the most inane things at times. I'm pretty sure that anyone who bothers to get an account and post here is fairly science/tech savvy. And with any group of humans there is a large contingent of idiots, regardless of age/knowledge level. That having been said i thought grass, paper and mud were all indigestible, not that i'm any kind fount of knowledge, but it does seem an obscure bit of trivia.
i was thinking more of an "approved" list of apps that as long as you stick to the list, you have no more responsibility than an iphone owner.
Something that doesn't exist has no preferences. I'm arguing against a "what if" game. Appealing to what someone might or might not want should they exist in the future is as much of a "what if" game as you could hope to play.
If you take the position that "potential people" have the same right to exist that existent people have then everybody should be cranking out babies as fast as they can, irrespective of their social, financial or health situation, since choosing not to have a child at any point is robbing that hypothetical person of the choice to live or not.
Someone else would have made the same discoveries. There are plenty of people that are just as smart.
phone providers/google could set up a "safe mode" in android that only allows signed apps to run. if the user wants to leave safe mode to install an unknown app they can but be shown a warning of the consequences. That way people who want to be safe can be safe and people who want to run what they like can run what they like. Kind of like apple putting a jailbreak button on the iphone. That way people can choose between safety or freedom.
given time as more apps get checked and signed, people would have less and less reason to leave safe mode.
it reminds me of the software repositories on ubuntu - for about 2 or 3 years there was essential stuff missing that forced you to manually install dodgy software that potentially broke your system, but now that it's matured there often no reason whatsoever for a home user to stray outside the repos
A skeptical and rational outlook is a character defining trait. Atheism is just one possible symptom of that trait. It doesn't rule atheism out as a characteristic of someone without such an outlook, since it's possible to adopt the position of atheism simply because you've been told to adopt it by an authority figure. In both cases atheism is not a cause, and is not a necessary outcome. In order to claim that atheism is a direct contributing factor to something, the link must be at least described, and preferably substantiated with data. Correlation is not necessarily causation, in either regard.
it invariably leads to cruelty to humans
i think you need to back up that claim. Invariably is quite a strong word.
there's nothing quite so beautiful as the destruction of words, winston
it happens to me very very infrequently - could tiredness or other factors affect your perceptual "frame rate"?
that particular stunt didn't break the entire ISO, just the particular committee involved. The rest of ISO is as it was before MS stuffed that committee with disinterested astroturf puppets that will never show up to vote again.
it's not an impossibility
ONCE AND FOR ALL!!!
The mathematics is largely redundant is answering the question of whether the LHC will destroy the earth. Particle collisions that are exactly the same (as well as some that are more powerful) as the ones in the LHC have been occurring in the earth's atmosphere ever since it first formed. If the earth has had several billion years to be eaten by blackholes or stranglets produced by one of these interactions, and still hasn't, then it's pretty safe to assume that those interactions simply don't produce those byproducts.
have you heard about this. what with tron sequel coming out next year it's going to be awesome
that's the closest a slashdot comment ever gets to containing sexual tension
always amusing
wtf? it was pathetic and tedious...
so a more appropriate car analogy would be having a car with the drive belts missing. You can drive it around for a short period of time, but after that the engine gets very hot and the battery goes flat.
CHICKENGREASESALT
presumably he'll need some kind of time machine to travel back to 1977 in order to visit this disco
watt charged with resistance
in the blue corner it's "hasty generalisation" weighing in at zero examples and in the red corner it's "the opposite hasty generalisation" weighing in at two anecdotes! ding ding! round one!
Do you mean environmentalists in general? Or a particular group? I'm sure i have no idea what might or might not appease a particular idealogical or political interest group. There's no such thing as the pacific garbage patch - it's a myth. Presumably the sodium and chloride you're referring to are from desalination. In desalination the sodium and chloride that are separated out from the sea water are dumped back into the sea. So what is really being removed is the water, thus increasing the concentration of NaCl in the ocean. Unless the water that is separated out is permanently retained on land somehow this also gets back into the water table and returns to the sea, mitigating the impact of desalination, although the initial introduction of concentrated brine into the sea does have environmental impact. If we extracted lithium from the sea and put it into an ever growing arsenal of batteries - would it ever get put back in the sea? Would this matter?
Would extracting lithium from the sea impact sea-life? I imagine if we started doing that and relying on it, our consumption would just keep spiralling upwards while there was a drawn-out global debate about what effect it is having, which gets resolved just in time to stop the human race dying out, but not in time to stop significant destruction to the marine ecosystem.
but i might just be being paranoid/pessimistic as i don't know anything about it.
the 800 dollars i got from some previous comment - i had a look on dabs and amazon and it seems that a colour laser printer could be about £60 second hand. i might very well buy one the next time i run out of ink. didn't realise they were so cheap - last time i knew what a laser printer cost was about 1997 and they cost tons.