The US military can experiment on the troops, using them as guinea pigs for new drugs the FDA never approved.
In 1971 or 1972 when I was stationed at Dover Hell Hole Base I went to the dentist for a filling, and he said they had this new stuff, "not even FDA approved yet" that was super fast acting.
So he took the needle out of my mouth and asked if it was numb. "nope". He gave me another minute, nope. Another minute and another shot. And another and another. After fifteen or twenty minutes it got a little numb, and the pain was excruciating. He gave me another shot halfway through the procedure. It was the most extremely painful dental work I ever had, including the Air Force root canal where they stuck a needle down the canal to see how deep the root was (before the electronic doohickeys they use now).
Three hours after leaving the dentist the whole left side of my face was paralyzed, and stayed that way for over a day.
from the point of view of the government, the reason they ban certain substances is that abuse of it leads to either a) illegal behavior
Something sometimes causes illegal behavor so you write laws to make the behavior that causes illegal behavior illegal. Yeah, that's logical, Mr Spock.
...because of the cost to keep you in ``business'', b) generates a significant increase in medical care due to after (side) effects of the abuse, c) a+b
That may be a valid reason in the civilized world, but here in the socially unenlightened USSA where 70% of prisoners are there for drug "crimes", the government has no stake in health care whatever*, outside Medicare which covers only old people. And if you're a junkie you're not very damned likely to live long enough to get Medicare.
When they start writing respectable laws I'll start respecting the law. Speaking of which, I got a couple of new whores! And I may have found a real girlfriend who isn't a whore! WooHoo!
-mcgrew
* Except, of course, for the vast sums of cash the insurance industry "contributes" to candidates to ensure that we never get universal health care; that is, unless it will make the greedheads who run the insurance corporations even more filthy lucre.
Two things: First, cocaine is s stimulant, not an opiate. The opiates use the same receptors as endorphins, which are the body's natural pain killers. I'm not sure how the *cains, which are region-specific numbers, work. And how do the NSAID pain killing drugs like aspirin and Naproxin Sodium work? And yes I know that sentence was redundant since the D in NSAID stands for "drug". So sue me. Won't do any good, the hookers get all my money anyway.
Second, speaking of hookers, NO! NO! FOR GOD'S SAKE NO!!!! This is terrible! If they weren't addicted to crack half my whorem* would desert me!
-mcgrew
* "Whorem" is a word I just now made up, a combination of "whore" and "harem".
And I probably shouldn't be making comments at slashdot this week because I got my nerd license suspended yesterday afternoon. I'd chronicle it in my journal but I got my nerd license suspended and they won't let me... will they?
Damn, now I'm in trouble. I hope I don't get pulled over and ticketed for commenting on a suspended license!
These guys (disclaimer: I'm not one of them and in fact haven't owned any stock for over 20 years) always say that you should pick a stock with a dividends to price ratio if ten to one or better.
Microsoft, the last I heard, pays no dividends.
So I think MS is probably a "stock for fools". If you buy a stock with the expectation of its price rising, you're gambling, not investing. That's not to say that gambling that Mars won't explode in the next two weeks isn't a good bet; some gambles are worthwhile.
As to the record companies, DUH! You don't need an expert to tell you that a company whose sales have been falling for over five years is a turkey.
I mostly disagree. You should use the conventions that the user expects, of course, but don't look to Microsoft for good design. Silk purses and sow's ears and all that, you know.
Study Microsoft design for good design in the same vein as going to webpagesthatsuck.com/ for learning good design. For example, if you have the "options" uder "file" in version 1.1 of your program, don't move it to "edit" in 2.1 and "tools" in 3.1 as Microsoft is wont to do.
-mcgrew
From the linked site (and I haven't put all the checklists in, because slashdot's horrid design gives an error message about too few characters per line):
The answer sheet: If you check the box for any of the questions, your web site sucks. Period.
There is a really big problem, though. It takes a great deal of knowledge to fill out the checklist. You have to know how your site is constructed and you have to have a good understanding of web design. If you don't know what a MARQUEE tag does or that your site's content came from a Microsoft Word document and was converted to HTML, how can you fill out the checklist?
Note #1: Apparently, nobody likes to read much, which is why I haven't put a lot of explanations or outside links in the checklists. I've been looking at sucky design for the last 11 years and I've only been wrong once. That's a topic for another day.
Note #2: Yes, WebPagesThatSuck.com fails to pass the checklist. The site's design has always sucked.
Checklist 1: First Impression / Big Picture
We've designed our site to meet our organization's needs (more sales/contributions) rather than meeting the needs of our visitors.
Our site tries to tell you how wonderful we are as a company, but not how we're going to solve your problems.
It takes longer than four seconds for the man from Mars to understand what our site is about.
The man from Mars cannot quickly find the focal point of the home page.
The man from Mars cannot quickly find the focal point of the current page.
Our site doesn't make us look like credible professionals. Our site doesn't make visitors feel they can trust us.
Our home page -- or any page -- takes more than four seconds to load.
Quickly scanning the page doesn't tell our visitors much about its purpose.
We don 't put design elements where our visitors expect them.
We have not eliminated unnecessary design items.
We don't know which design items are not necessary.
Our site breaks when visited with the Javascript turned off.
Our site breaks because of back-end coding errors.
We say "Welcome to..." on our home page.
Our site is Flash-based (and this is what our site looks like to people without Flash.)
Our site's navigation is Flash-based.
Our site uses a splash page (unless it's a liquor, porn, gambling, adult, tobacco, or a multi-lingual / multinational site).
Our site makes visitors register before they can enter.
Our site uses two or more splash pages.
Our site's TITLE tag is something like "New Document", "Index" and not the name of your company or other search-engine friendly terms.
Our site has a sound file automatically play in the background when a web page loads, but we're not a record label or musician
I don't know if our site looks the same in the major browsers.
Our site doesn't look the same in different browsers.
The important content does not fit in the first screen.
Our pages have too much/too little white space.
Our site uses pop-up windows.
Our site forces visitors to install weird plugins.
Our site has "Download latest browser" text or buttons.
Our site prominently displays what hardware and software was used to create the site.
Our site's design was "borrowed" from another site.
Wrong. "Form follows function" is one of the main tenants of good design. Make your toaster as pretty as you like, but don't forget that its function is to make toast, with the least amount of effort for the toaster user as possible.
If you make your toaster so that it looks like a pig, fine, but if you use the pig's snout as a lever to make the bread go down, you have a shitty design. It should be obvious to the user HOW to make the bread go down.
If your user needs to RTFM, you have failed in your attempt to design well.
The old adage called the "KISS" principle applies: Keep It Simple, Stupid. This has fallen out of favor with the younger generation. Today's apps are busy; too busy. Everyone and their dog wants to be Bill Gates so they copy Microsoft.
However, at the opposite end of the spectrum isn't Apple, but Google. Google does it right. Simple, clean, light, fast. There is little to no trouble finding any of the myriad things Google has to offer these days, yet the interface still isn't cluttered.
IMO if your interface would fit a Microsoft product, it sucks. Microsoft writes the WORST interfaces. Big, heavy, bloated interfaces (and code to match) that give the impression of having more than it actually does, and offering more than you need.
Now, I'm a bit biased from my college training, as I was a fine arts major, and the instructors were mostly minimalists. One of my better instructors, when faced with a busy piece, would often say "there's less here than meets the eye". That's Microsoft.
Is there a patent on the circular menu or something? I have yet to see one an any commercial or OSS application.
If I weren't so damned lazy (and wasting all my time at slashdot) I'd use the KDE codebase to write a GUI that instead of having the windows-like taskbar at the bottom, would have a command line. You would still have icons, wallpaper, etc, but instead of a "start" button like Windows or KDE you would click on any empty part of the screen to pull up a circular menu. If you just started typing (without clicking anywhere first), what you typed would show up on the command line at the bottom of the screen. I still find it a hell of a lot easier to type "dir" or "ls" than to right-click "start", find "Home" or "Explore" in an old fashioned, should be obsolete straight menu, then click and click and click to get to where you were when you pulled it up. I find it easier to type "del ??task.bat" than to use Windows Explorer, drill to where the files are, hold down "alt" and choose the files I want to delete, then... well, GUI is great but command line interfaces have their strengths, too.
But to reiterate, what's worse than Microsoft? Any newspaper's web site.
-mcgrew
PS- don't go to my site looking for good design, it's cobbled together without much effort or thought. It loads fast though.
I used to be a gay hacker. Then they changed the meanings of all the words, now I'm a happey equipment modifier. No, I'm heterosexual but they changed the meaning of "gay" from "happy and carefree" to "homosexual" and changed the meaning of "hacker" from "someone who writes quick-and-dirty but functional code, or modifies equipment" to "an electronic burglar".
I was incredibly disappointed with the article (RTFA? I must be new here), so much so that I made it no farther than page one of the short five page adfest. I thought it was going to be about hacking a wi-fi connection so that it doubled as a firewall or something. We nerds still use "hacker" in the old fashioned sense, just as we geezers still sing "deck the halls" without thinking about sodomy.
Ok, I know language evolves, but unlike the evolution of organisms the evolution of language is usually stupid. Like "gay", which now means "homosexual", half of whom attempt suicide. I never could understand what was so gay about suicide. Now the kids are twisting the word "gay" to mean clumsy, stupid, or dorky.
As to hacking, fine, now a hacker is a burglar. What do we nerds who write quick single-use code, or those of us who take a soldering iron to a transistor radio to turn it into something besides a radio, call ourselves now?
And could someone please point to an real NERD article somwhere that actually has the ten best hacks of 2007, instead of the ten best cracks of 2007?
I'm glad I can afford to be modded down because this really annoys me and I want to know what the rest of the slashdot audience thinks. I wish I'd seen this when it was fresh, nobody will likely seee this comment to mod it down anyway.
Personally, IMO corporations shouldn't be allowed to hold copyrights OR patents; there should be no "work for hire" in intellectual pursuits. The artist or inventor should always hold copyright or patent, and the corporation should only be able to license that work. If the employuee quits the company the company should have to renegotiate the license.
I don't understand my country's penchant for putting profits in front of people. We seem to be the most socially backwards industrialized nation on earth.
I agree with the above "troll". Actually it isn't just "these days" but has always been that way.
Any geezers out there remember "yummie yummie I got love in my tummie?" How about a song called "Timothy" about a couple of guys who get lost in a mine and eat their friend? You kids think today's music sucks (well it does), it sucked just as bad in the '60s.
I have some top 63 lists from 1968, you would not recognize very many of the tunes on them.
Traditionally, copyright was for the life of the author + some reasonably large number
Not in the US. In 1900 it was IINM twenty years, and could be renewed for another twenty. The US Constitution specifically states the copyrights are for the purpose of getting artists to make art which is to go into the public domain.
If my book's selling so well I have more money coming in than I can spendd, why bother writing another one?
Do I actually have to RTFA? Congress isn't about to punish any corporation for anything.
And limiting copyright to half of what it was (IINM) in 1900 is hardly punishment. I think it would be a GOOD thing to limit it to at least 20 years; the present incredibly long copyrights last longer than all non-acid-free paper and longer than any file format or encryption sceme. The present lengths insure that little copyrighted today will ever be seen by anyone after its copyright expires.
That's what I love about slashdot! If I go for "funny" (like I did with that comment) I get modded "insightful" unless it involves Natalie Portman, grits, the USSR, or a beowolf cluster. IINM any comment that contain any of the above terms is automatically moderated "+5 funny".
I think thre really are no mods here, from the way comments are moderated I'd say there was some sort of bot doing it. I mean, I've seen countless first posts that are on-topic and interesting or informative that are rated "redundant". How could the first comment be redundant? Only a bot (Or a PHB) would do that!
When you metamoderate you're reprogramming the bot. This comment will likely bring slashdot down, as the bots won't know how to moderate it (beowolf natalie portman FIRST POST CAN'T... COMPUTE... BZZZT fizzle POP
Probably, it's the second Monday this week and I don't do mondays well at all.
So while the VCR knows to record a show @ 8:00 PM, it can't tune to that channel. You'd need to make sure the tuner is set to the appropriate channel before going out for the evening.
But this is no different than what people with cable boxes and satellite boxes have had all along. I'd be surprised (but not too surprised) if you couldn't set the converter boxes to change chennels at set times.
Unless I'm missing something, but good luck prying my nerd license from my cold dead hands.
I refuse to "kiss and tell" so if you want to suspend my nerd license again you're going to have to come up with Gimped photos.
"Hell yes he got laid," said Tami. "Look at that smile on his face!"
"You're right," Amy said."He ain't foolin' nobody. He hasn't bitched and whined about not getting any pussy even once. And there's only one thing that will make him smile like that!
Slashdot Mirror
The US military can experiment on the troops, using them as guinea pigs for new drugs the FDA never approved.
In 1971 or 1972 when I was stationed at Dover Hell Hole Base I went to the dentist for a filling, and he said they had this new stuff, "not even FDA approved yet" that was super fast acting.
So he took the needle out of my mouth and asked if it was numb. "nope". He gave me another minute, nope. Another minute and another shot. And another and another. After fifteen or twenty minutes it got a little numb, and the pain was excruciating. He gave me another shot halfway through the procedure. It was the most extremely painful dental work I ever had, including the Air Force root canal where they stuck a needle down the canal to see how deep the root was (before the electronic doohickeys they use now).
Three hours after leaving the dentist the whole left side of my face was paralyzed, and stayed that way for over a day.
Any Idea what they shot me up with?
from the point of view of the government, the reason they ban certain substances is that abuse of it leads to either a) illegal behavior
Something sometimes causes illegal behavor so you write laws to make the behavior that causes illegal behavior illegal. Yeah, that's logical, Mr Spock.
That may be a valid reason in the civilized world, but here in the socially unenlightened USSA where 70% of prisoners are there for drug "crimes", the government has no stake in health care whatever*, outside Medicare which covers only old people. And if you're a junkie you're not very damned likely to live long enough to get Medicare.
When they start writing respectable laws I'll start respecting the law. Speaking of which, I got a couple of new whores! And I may have found a real girlfriend who isn't a whore! WooHoo!
-mcgrew
* Except, of course, for the vast sums of cash the insurance industry "contributes" to candidates to ensure that we never get universal health care; that is, unless it will make the greedheads who run the insurance corporations even more filthy lucre.
Two things: First, cocaine is s stimulant, not an opiate. The opiates use the same receptors as endorphins, which are the body's natural pain killers. I'm not sure how the *cains, which are region-specific numbers, work. And how do the NSAID pain killing drugs like aspirin and Naproxin Sodium work? And yes I know that sentence was redundant since the D in NSAID stands for "drug". So sue me. Won't do any good, the hookers get all my money anyway.
Second, speaking of hookers, NO! NO! FOR GOD'S SAKE NO!!!! This is terrible! If they weren't addicted to crack half my whorem* would desert me!
-mcgrew
* "Whorem" is a word I just now made up, a combination of "whore" and "harem".
Breathe life BACK into silverlight?
It had some to begin with?
My Friends, the Whores
And I probably shouldn't be making comments at slashdot this week because I got my nerd license suspended yesterday afternoon. I'd chronicle it in my journal but I got my nerd license suspended and they won't let me... will they?
Damn, now I'm in trouble. I hope I don't get pulled over and ticketed for commenting on a suspended license!
most of you Baby Boomers would line up to cut my generations collective throats.
Most of them would like to anyway. Damned geezers. OH WAIT...
These guys (disclaimer: I'm not one of them and in fact haven't owned any stock for over 20 years) always say that you should pick a stock with a dividends to price ratio if ten to one or better.
Microsoft, the last I heard, pays no dividends.
So I think MS is probably a "stock for fools". If you buy a stock with the expectation of its price rising, you're gambling, not investing. That's not to say that gambling that Mars won't explode in the next two weeks isn't a good bet; some gambles are worthwhile.
As to the record companies, DUH! You don't need an expert to tell you that a company whose sales have been falling for over five years is a turkey.
Study Microsoft design for good design in the same vein as going to webpagesthatsuck.com/ for learning good design. For example, if you have the "options" uder "file" in version 1.1 of your program, don't move it to "edit" in 2.1 and "tools" in 3.1 as Microsoft is wont to do.
-mcgrew
From the linked site (and I haven't put all the checklists in, because slashdot's horrid design gives an error message about too few characters per line):
Doesn't matter, neither does anyone else
Wrong. Google knows good design. Lots of people know good design. Unfortunately, way too many people share your apathy towards the user.
It should combine form and functionality
Wrong. "Form follows function" is one of the main tenants of good design. Make your toaster as pretty as you like, but don't forget that its function is to make toast, with the least amount of effort for the toaster user as possible.
If you make your toaster so that it looks like a pig, fine, but if you use the pig's snout as a lever to make the bread go down, you have a shitty design. It should be obvious to the user HOW to make the bread go down.
If your user needs to RTFM, you have failed in your attempt to design well.
-mcgrew
The old adage called the "KISS" principle applies: Keep It Simple, Stupid. This has fallen out of favor with the younger generation. Today's apps are busy; too busy. Everyone and their dog wants to be Bill Gates so they copy Microsoft.
However, at the opposite end of the spectrum isn't Apple, but Google. Google does it right. Simple, clean, light, fast. There is little to no trouble finding any of the myriad things Google has to offer these days, yet the interface still isn't cluttered.
IMO if your interface would fit a Microsoft product, it sucks. Microsoft writes the WORST interfaces. Big, heavy, bloated interfaces (and code to match) that give the impression of having more than it actually does, and offering more than you need.
Now, I'm a bit biased from my college training, as I was a fine arts major, and the instructors were mostly minimalists. One of my better instructors, when faced with a busy piece, would often say "there's less here than meets the eye". That's Microsoft.
Is there a patent on the circular menu or something? I have yet to see one an any commercial or OSS application.
If I weren't so damned lazy (and wasting all my time at slashdot) I'd use the KDE codebase to write a GUI that instead of having the windows-like taskbar at the bottom, would have a command line. You would still have icons, wallpaper, etc, but instead of a "start" button like Windows or KDE you would click on any empty part of the screen to pull up a circular menu. If you just started typing (without clicking anywhere first), what you typed would show up on the command line at the bottom of the screen. I still find it a hell of a lot easier to type "dir" or "ls" than to right-click "start", find "Home" or "Explore" in an old fashioned, should be obsolete straight menu, then click and click and click to get to where you were when you pulled it up. I find it easier to type "del ??task.bat" than to use Windows Explorer, drill to where the files are, hold down "alt" and choose the files I want to delete, then... well, GUI is great but command line interfaces have their strengths, too.
But to reiterate, what's worse than Microsoft? Any newspaper's web site.
-mcgrew
PS- don't go to my site looking for good design, it's cobbled together without much effort or thought. It loads fast though.
I used to be a gay hacker. Then they changed the meanings of all the words, now I'm a happey equipment modifier. No, I'm heterosexual but they changed the meaning of "gay" from "happy and carefree" to "homosexual" and changed the meaning of "hacker" from "someone who writes quick-and-dirty but functional code, or modifies equipment" to "an electronic burglar".
I was incredibly disappointed with the article (RTFA? I must be new here), so much so that I made it no farther than page one of the short five page adfest. I thought it was going to be about hacking a wi-fi connection so that it doubled as a firewall or something. We nerds still use "hacker" in the old fashioned sense, just as we geezers still sing "deck the halls" without thinking about sodomy.
Ok, I know language evolves, but unlike the evolution of organisms the evolution of language is usually stupid. Like "gay", which now means "homosexual", half of whom attempt suicide. I never could understand what was so gay about suicide. Now the kids are twisting the word "gay" to mean clumsy, stupid, or dorky.
As to hacking, fine, now a hacker is a burglar. What do we nerds who write quick single-use code, or those of us who take a soldering iron to a transistor radio to turn it into something besides a radio, call ourselves now?
And could someone please point to an real NERD article somwhere that actually has the ten best hacks of 2007, instead of the ten best cracks of 2007?
I'm glad I can afford to be modded down because this really annoys me and I want to know what the rest of the slashdot audience thinks. I wish I'd seen this when it was fresh, nobody will likely seee this comment to mod it down anyway.
-mcgrew
So what would it take to enact such a measure?
An armed revolution?
Personally, IMO corporations shouldn't be allowed to hold copyrights OR patents; there should be no "work for hire" in intellectual pursuits. The artist or inventor should always hold copyright or patent, and the corporation should only be able to license that work. If the employuee quits the company the company should have to renegotiate the license.
I don't understand my country's penchant for putting profits in front of people. We seem to be the most socially backwards industrialized nation on earth.
I hold registered copyrights complete with ISBN numbers, and agree that 5 years is a little short, but the present lengths are WAY too long.
Twenty years is reasonable.
I agree with the above "troll". Actually it isn't just "these days" but has always been that way.
Any geezers out there remember "yummie yummie I got love in my tummie?" How about a song called "Timothy" about a couple of guys who get lost in a mine and eat their friend? You kids think today's music sucks (well it does), it sucked just as bad in the '60s.
I have some top 63 lists from 1968, you would not recognize very many of the tunes on them.
Obviously older bands that still have reasonably good record sales (Led Zeppelin) aren't going on a lot of tours.
Well, John Bohnam doesn't need the money anyway. Neither does Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, or Kieth Moon.
Cut back corporate copyrights from 120 to 5 years makes complete sense
That's one of the many reasons it won't happen.
Traditionally, copyright was for the life of the author + some reasonably large number
Not in the US. In 1900 it was IINM twenty years, and could be renewed for another twenty. The US Constitution specifically states the copyrights are for the purpose of getting artists to make art which is to go into the public domain.
If my book's selling so well I have more money coming in than I can spendd, why bother writing another one?
I'm 55 you insensitive clod.
What's more there are guys here even more geezerly than me.
Now get off my lawn!
-mcgrew
PS- My incarcerated friend Linda wrote me a letter. How many friends do YOU have in maximum security prison? How many prostitues do you know? How many have drinking buddies who get killed by jail guards? You have a lifetime of wierd experiences in front of you, you lucky bastards! Happy new year, young fellows.
Do I actually have to RTFA? Congress isn't about to punish any corporation for anything.
And limiting copyright to half of what it was (IINM) in 1900 is hardly punishment. I think it would be a GOOD thing to limit it to at least 20 years; the present incredibly long copyrights last longer than all non-acid-free paper and longer than any file format or encryption sceme. The present lengths insure that little copyrighted today will ever be seen by anyone after its copyright expires.
-mcgrew
-mcgrew
the front page isn't rife with spelling errors, grammatical errors, and poor headlines
Um WHAT? You're talking about slashdot? THIS slashdot?
-mcgrew
That's what I love about slashdot! If I go for "funny" (like I did with that comment) I get modded "insightful" unless it involves Natalie Portman, grits, the USSR, or a beowolf cluster. IINM any comment that contain any of the above terms is automatically moderated "+5 funny".
I think thre really are no mods here, from the way comments are moderated I'd say there was some sort of bot doing it. I mean, I've seen countless first posts that are on-topic and interesting or informative that are rated "redundant". How could the first comment be redundant? Only a bot (Or a PHB) would do that!
When you metamoderate you're reprogramming the bot. This comment will likely bring slashdot down, as the bots won't know how to moderate it (beowolf natalie portman FIRST POST CAN'T... COMPUTE... BZZZT fizzle POP
Probably, it's the second Monday this week and I don't do mondays well at all.
So while the VCR knows to record a show @ 8:00 PM, it can't tune to that channel. You'd need to make sure the tuner is set to the appropriate channel before going out for the evening.
But this is no different than what people with cable boxes and satellite boxes have had all along. I'd be surprised (but not too surprised) if you couldn't set the converter boxes to change chennels at set times.
Unless I'm missing something, but good luck prying my nerd license from my cold dead hands.
You might want to read this journal entry: