No, it's just like my saying to my friend Mike that if he adds RAM and defragments his hard drive his computer may run faster and he says "huh? What's a "hard drive? And what do I have to ram it with"?
And like my cluelessly expecting Mike to know what RAM is, what a hard drive is (I used to talk about someone's hard drive and they'd pull out a floppy and say "this?") and about file fragmentation and seeing their eyes glaze over when I explained it, a lawyer will expect us to understand legaleze. It's perfectly understandable English to him.
But just like a lot of nerds would be out of a job if everyone understood computers, there would be a lot less legal work if we all understood legalese, or if the laws themselves were understandable to non-lawyers.
'When a computer fails at a task, it spouts an error message. Babies, on the other hand, just try again a different way, exploring the world by grabbing new objects -- shoving them into their mouths if possible -- to acquire additional data
Access gives me the most amusing error messages. "Error 3417: there is no message for this error" (the message is real, the number I pulled out of my ass).
But thinking about it, a robot looking for better data might be a good idea, but a computer? That might worrry me.
Don't forget that a computer, even one running a robot, is just an alectronic abacus, nothing like a human or any other animal's brain. The temptation is to anthropomorphise.
So when you make fun of Spam, you're essentially making fun of the true hardship of a country at war.
As that war was over before I was born, and I'm over a half century old, I think I can be forgiven for making fun of its food. I do have a friend, Ralph, who fought in that war though. Wasn't "Shit On a Shingle" made of Spam? Seems they sereved it when I was in the Aur Force in the '70s, do they still have it or have they become a bit less barbaric these days?
And baby jeebus won't help you if you make jokes about it and then admit you've never tried it.
I did try it once as a kid. I hated it. I bet the baby jeebus would hate it too! Although he'd forgive the misguided souls that foist it upon an innocent world. I guess it would beat starving, but so would eating grubworms.
Well hell, with a name like "Anonymous Coward" I can see why you would get picked on. My name got its share of yuks, especially since I wore coke bottle glasses* "Oh, mcgrew, you've done it again!"
But I really felt sorry for another kid in class, Charlie Salmon.
-mcgrew
* Coke bottles used to be made of very thick glass back before the stone age. Mr. Magoo was a nearaly blind cartoon character who was too vain to wear his glasses and unwittingly did good in every episode. Yes, I'm a geezer. I see they brought Charlie Tuna back.
What is the motivation for reaching a wide audience? MONEY. Ever read "Courtney does the math?" Did you know that for every major label band that makes it big, there are a hundred you never hear of?
As for "a wide audience", these days a lot of bands reach "a wide audience" without the majors. My friends from The Station are onc such band; they play from Colorado to Ohio, and have been on the same stages as (and with) some of your RIAA guys.
What man can build, man can break. Any system can be cracked. But only Windows systems get viruses. That's only partly because of popularity, mostly because it's easy. Not at all as a "juvinile response due to a dislike of the OS" or you would see a lot of Mac and Linux viruses, because there are a lot of people who hate both OSes. There isn't an OS on the face of the earth that somebody doesn't hate.
You can break into a bank vault, you can break into my house. My house is a hell of a lot easier to break into than a bank vault, however.
The problem is that lots of folks really want or actually need an Internet Presentation Language, not a markup language
In that case they need paper. Monitors are all different sizes and resolutions and have different color temperatures, which is why so much stuff is in Acrobat format.
Perhaps there's someone who really needs to have a page look exectly like he wants it, but I have yet to see such an animal.
No, HTML is dirt simple. Playing the piano is hard (I can't play a piano).
I really don't enjoy coding of any sort
I really don't enjoy working on my car (and I'm not realy that good at it) so I hire someone. Not a lot different than coding. No reason to feel stupid because you suck at something somebody else is good at, everybody sucks at something.
Does it mean I'm some stupid subhuman
Jesus, some people are offended by ANYTHING.
Just because I can't do HTML doesn't mean I'm some unpalatable idiot.
I don't disagree with that. I'm incredibly stupid when it comes to a lot of things. I don't mind being stupid a bit, and don't understand why anybody else should mind either.
Oh, and don't take anything I write TOO seriously, young fellow. Unless I'm talking about how incredibly stupid I am.
Grace Hopper's bug was a moth that got stuck in a relay in the computer.
While she was working on a Mark II Computer at Harvard University, her associates discovered a moth stuck in a relay and thereby impeding operation, whereupon she remarked that they were "debugging" the system. Though the term computer bug cannot be definitively attributed to Admiral Hopper, she did bring the term into popularity. The remains of the moth can be found in the group's log book at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C..[3]
A musical Hallmark card has more computing power than the Mark II, and it's a lot smaller than Hopper's moth (pictured in the Wikipedia article linked).
Actually, Spam is considered a delicacy in the Pacific Islands
Find the vilest, most barf-provoking thing you can think of and it's a delicacy somewhere. Snails, certain funguses, raw fish, spam, all sorts of disgusting stuff is considered not only "food" but "delicacy".
Speaking of disgusting things people put in their mouths (don't go there now Sally) why do they call McDonald's and Burger King "fast food?" It's never fast and you can hardly call it "food".
Man.... I really go off on long-winded tangents.... don't I?
Damn, Grandpa, and the kids say I'm to old to post at slashdot! Weren't they going to legalize potted meat? And cracked corn? Speaking of which, where did I put that extra prostitute, I know I had a spare around here somewhere. Shit, I bet I left her at the office. Hope the boss doesn't find her, he'll spill ketchup or something all over her and she's the cleanest one I've got,
What were we talking about again? Oh, spam. What do you call spam with one eye? Spammy Davis Junior
Twenty years ago you NEEDED a nmajor label to "cut a record". Today you don't, and only the least talented are willing to give up copyright to their own songs to sign with a major label.
I think not. There are a few studios here in Springfield (with a population of only 110,000), but none of the bands who record for the majors are using them. Instead it's the major labels' biggest threat who are using them - talented locals who play in bars.
MP3 is killing the RIAA labels because that's mostly the format the local guys post their songs on the internet in. And those MP3s are selling CDs. Every two indie CDs sold is an RIAA CD that isn't.
I have quite a few musician friends here, and not a single one of them would sign a contract with the majors and give up copyright to their own music, only to have "creative accounting" eat up any of the tiny royalties they would get.
No, you British need more logic. The FBI is one thing. The FBI is, the people of the FBI are. Data are. A datum is.
Which reminds me of an old Cajun joke by the "Cajun Cook", Justin Wilson.
A Cajun sends his son off to college, and when he comes back on spring break, the old man asks "Well, boy, whad'ja larn in college?" His son replies "Pi r squared". The old man says "What kinda damned fools are teachin' you? Pie are ROUND. Cornbread are square!"
Yes, I know. From a blagh post from a couple of years ago:
Legend has it that one night this ape-decended life form was stoned out of his mind from smoking the dried buds of a strange type of plant and drinking Irish Car Bombs and noticed a book in his rucksack called The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe. In his discombobulated state of mind he thought it was hilarious, and wrote a radio play parodying this book and indeed, science fiction in general.
I never got to hear the play, despite the fact that it was broadcast on the BBC, who has (not "have" you stupid Limeys) claimed that they were displaying all their works on the internet. This was obviouusly some strange useage of the words "all" and "display" that I have not been aware of, as I haven't seen any BBC works on their website at "all".
Perhaps the plays are on display in a locked cabinet in a dark, disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "beware of the ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal" in a basement with broken stairs.
And yes, I did say "their", referring to the people. I'm so coinfused...
Actually, I was only hit with malware twoce - once at work when a co-worker infected my work PC with the Michaelangelo virus (long time ago) and once with the Sony Rootkit. But you and I are nerds; I've seen too many normal friends' machines trashed with everything and anything.
Take Jeff, for example. He'd never had a computer before; he got so infected his eMachines was worthless, twice, and I ghosted it twice before giving up, installinjg a Linux partition with Mandriva on it, and disabling networking in Windows. After that he didn't get any more infections.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I just need my coffee
No, it's just like my saying to my friend Mike that if he adds RAM and defragments his hard drive his computer may run faster and he says "huh? What's a "hard drive? And what do I have to ram it with"?
And like my cluelessly expecting Mike to know what RAM is, what a hard drive is (I used to talk about someone's hard drive and they'd pull out a floppy and say "this?") and about file fragmentation and seeing their eyes glaze over when I explained it, a lawyer will expect us to understand legaleze. It's perfectly understandable English to him.
But just like a lot of nerds would be out of a job if everyone understood computers, there would be a lot less legal work if we all understood legalese, or if the laws themselves were understandable to non-lawyers.
-mcgrew
'When a computer fails at a task, it spouts an error message. Babies, on the other hand, just try again a different way, exploring the world by grabbing new objects -- shoving them into their mouths if possible -- to acquire additional data
Access gives me the most amusing error messages. "Error 3417: there is no message for this error" (the message is real, the number I pulled out of my ass).
But thinking about it, a robot looking for better data might be a good idea, but a computer? That might worrry me.
Don't forget that a computer, even one running a robot, is just an alectronic abacus, nothing like a human or any other animal's brain. The temptation is to anthropomorphise.
-mcgrew
So when you make fun of Spam, you're essentially making fun of the true hardship of a country at war.
As that war was over before I was born, and I'm over a half century old, I think I can be forgiven for making fun of its food. I do have a friend, Ralph, who fought in that war though. Wasn't "Shit On a Shingle" made of Spam? Seems they sereved it when I was in the Aur Force in the '70s, do they still have it or have they become a bit less barbaric these days?
And baby jeebus won't help you if you make jokes about it and then admit you've never tried it.
I did try it once as a kid. I hated it. I bet the baby jeebus would hate it too! Although he'd forgive the misguided souls that foist it upon an innocent world. I guess it would beat starving, but so would eating grubworms.
Make fun of that and you'll get some backers.
I make fun of everything and everybody.
you can't just randomly give people untested drugs, you need to try it out on rats first
You can if you're the US Military. I can tell you that from experience. Speaking of drugs...
Well hell, with a name like "Anonymous Coward" I can see why you would get picked on. My name got its share of yuks, especially since I wore coke bottle glasses* "Oh, mcgrew, you've done it again!"
But I really felt sorry for another kid in class, Charlie Salmon.
-mcgrew
* Coke bottles used to be made of very thick glass back before the stone age. Mr. Magoo was a nearaly blind cartoon character who was too vain to wear his glasses and unwittingly did good in every episode. Yes, I'm a geezer. I see they brought Charlie Tuna back.
"It's Labrador."
"Labrador?"
"Yeah, my dog ate my weed, man. I had to follow the little motherfucker around all week. Blew the dog's mind, man!"
"You mean we're smoking dogshit???"
-Cheech and Chong, Up In Smoke
WTF??? Would you guys PLEASE go out and buy a sense of humor? Hookers are only twenty bucks here, that'll lighten your mood.
Now if we can get rid of the RIAA and Clear Channel we'll be rid of the impediment to getting local guys on the air.
Tough room.
Having the trademark appropriated because of a Monty Python sketch and a bunch of geeks is a bummer.
HEY! As one of a bunch of geeks I resent that!
What is the motivation for reaching a wide audience? MONEY. Ever read "Courtney does the math?" Did you know that for every major label band that makes it big, there are a hundred you never hear of?
As for "a wide audience", these days a lot of bands reach "a wide audience" without the majors. My friends from The Station are onc such band; they play from Colorado to Ohio, and have been on the same stages as (and with) some of your RIAA guys.
What man can build, man can break. Any system can be cracked. But only Windows systems get viruses. That's only partly because of popularity, mostly because it's easy. Not at all as a "juvinile response due to a dislike of the OS" or you would see a lot of Mac and Linux viruses, because there are a lot of people who hate both OSes. There isn't an OS on the face of the earth that somebody doesn't hate.
You can break into a bank vault, you can break into my house. My house is a hell of a lot easier to break into than a bank vault, however.
The problem is that lots of folks really want or actually need an Internet Presentation Language, not a markup language
In that case they need paper. Monitors are all different sizes and resolutions and have different color temperatures, which is why so much stuff is in Acrobat format.
Perhaps there's someone who really needs to have a page look exectly like he wants it, but I have yet to see such an animal.
Arrogant aren't we?
No, HTML is dirt simple. Playing the piano is hard (I can't play a piano).
I really don't enjoy coding of any sort
I really don't enjoy working on my car (and I'm not realy that good at it) so I hire someone. Not a lot different than coding. No reason to feel stupid because you suck at something somebody else is good at, everybody sucks at something.
Does it mean I'm some stupid subhuman
Jesus, some people are offended by ANYTHING.
Just because I can't do HTML doesn't mean I'm some unpalatable idiot.
I don't disagree with that. I'm incredibly stupid when it comes to a lot of things. I don't mind being stupid a bit, and don't understand why anybody else should mind either.
Oh, and don't take anything I write TOO seriously, young fellow. Unless I'm talking about how incredibly stupid I am.
-mcgrew
So I could start a company that cleans up dog shit and call it Microsoft Scoopers?
No, an antivirus company already took that one.
-mcgrew
Actually, Spam is considered a delicacy in the Pacific Islands
Find the vilest, most barf-provoking thing you can think of and it's a delicacy somewhere. Snails, certain funguses, raw fish, spam, all sorts of disgusting stuff is considered not only "food" but "delicacy".
Speaking of disgusting things people put in their mouths (don't go there now Sally) why do they call McDonald's and Burger King "fast food?" It's never fast and you can hardly call it "food".
-mcgrew
Man.... I really go off on long-winded tangents.... don't I?
Damn, Grandpa, and the kids say I'm to old to post at slashdot! Weren't they going to legalize potted meat? And cracked corn? Speaking of which, where did I put that extra prostitute, I know I had a spare around here somewhere. Shit, I bet I left her at the office. Hope the boss doesn't find her, he'll spill ketchup or something all over her and she's the cleanest one I've got,
What were we talking about again? Oh, spam. What do you call spam with one eye? Spammy Davis Junior
-mcgrew
Then perhaps they should change their name to "Spam, spam, sausage, egg and spam. That's not got a lot of spam in it arrest"?
-mcgrew
(Spam sucks but it's better than.. er, hell I don't know but it has to be better than something.)
Twenty years ago you NEEDED a nmajor label to "cut a record". Today you don't, and only the least talented are willing to give up copyright to their own songs to sign with a major label.
Recording studios would be hit rather hard
I think not. There are a few studios here in Springfield (with a population of only 110,000), but none of the bands who record for the majors are using them. Instead it's the major labels' biggest threat who are using them - talented locals who play in bars.
MP3 is killing the RIAA labels because that's mostly the format the local guys post their songs on the internet in. And those MP3s are selling CDs. Every two indie CDs sold is an RIAA CD that isn't.
I have quite a few musician friends here, and not a single one of them would sign a contract with the majors and give up copyright to their own music, only to have "creative accounting" eat up any of the tiny royalties they would get.
The king is dead. Long live the king!
-mcgrew
No, you British need more logic. The FBI is one thing. The FBI is, the people of the FBI are. Data are. A datum is.
Which reminds me of an old Cajun joke by the "Cajun Cook", Justin Wilson.
A Cajun sends his son off to college, and when he comes back on spring break, the old man asks "Well, boy, whad'ja larn in college?" His son replies "Pi r squared". The old man says "What kinda damned fools are teachin' you? Pie are ROUND. Cornbread are square!"
And yes, I did say "their", referring to the people. I'm so coinfused...
-mcgrew
It it Monday? Every funny post I've seen this morning has been modded "troll" (except the ones I posted, yay me!)
Actually, I was only hit with malware twoce - once at work when a co-worker infected my work PC with the Michaelangelo virus (long time ago) and once with the Sony Rootkit. But you and I are nerds; I've seen too many normal friends' machines trashed with everything and anything.
Take Jeff, for example. He'd never had a computer before; he got so infected his eMachines was worthless, twice, and I ghosted it twice before giving up, installinjg a Linux partition with Mandriva on it, and disabling networking in Windows. After that he didn't get any more infections.