Google just told me that the population of China is 1,306,313,812. No culture has the monopoly on having asshats in their numbers, we are all human. So let's be fair and say that a certain percentage of all people are asshats distributed proportionally across every race/culture. Just for fun, let's say the figure is 30%. So if 30% of Americans are asshats, that would be just under 89 million people. That's a lotta asshats, right? If 30% of Chinese are also asshats, that would be almost 392 million asshats. That's over 4 times as many asshats from China compared to America. More than the total population of America! (Though I daresay the numbers may work out even anyhow in this particular comparison, might have to give America's unused 'asshat credits' to some other nation like Denmark or something.) You've got to work these numbers through other factors of course, like how many of them would be internet-equipped and on particular games, but in mixed company, I think you'd still be bound to notice a behavior among Chinese well before you'd realize how big it was among other groups of people.
I don't know about WoW, never played it, but on Eve we have (had? there was an assload of bans handed out awhile back) gold farmers too. The currency's called ISK, but whatever, the principle's the same. Gold farmers, as they are only playing to get real-world currency, are not playing the game in a way that supports the in-game economy. There's nothing wrong with getting rich in the game see, but if they're not spending it on anything in the markets, then they're not contributing anything to the game world and should take a hike. A gold farmer is just taking away resources that real players could have otherwise obtained. The real players could have used the loot to buy the UberSword of Whatever, and so the cycle of the movement of wealth is maintained. A gold farmer gives nothing back, just ganks the cgame's economy without so much as a half-assed appology. You can argue that the economy isn't really hurt since the gold does get back into circulation via whomever paid real money for it, but it's still a problem because that eBay gold buyer is able to short circuit the in-game wealth-building process, in a way that many players can't afford, or won't consider due to concerns about getting ripped off by sellers. Then there's those that actually feel the TOS means something. One has to take a stand against this kind of abuse of a game they are trying to enjoy for the game that it is.
We should actually be hating the unexpectedly-and-quite-suddenly-rich 'real' players that are buying the fruits of these farming services. You know, like how if you want the hookers to go away you have to crack down on the johns.
Ninja is Japanese, not Chinese. Learn the difference or you will be called an ignorant bigot.
I see you got a Funny mod, but I get the impression you were actually serious. So just in case... Ninja-looting is a term referring to someone taking measures to ensure that once there is a corpse in the vicinity to loot, they are on it faster than you can blink, and have looted it before anyone else gets the chance to start typing the command, because it was the one and only thing they were really watching for. It has nothing to do with race at all, just the impressive inhuman speed of the Ninja.
If you were actually just going for the Funny mod, then I appologize for the lesson.
players are asking anyone who wants to join a group to type one or two sentences in English. If the sentences contain spelling or grammar mistakes, the player is rejected.
I don't get it... How do average caucasians get to join groups then?
I happen to own your lack of surprise, it's all right here in this deed. You now owe me $5.00 for each occurrence that doesn't surprise you, or the viewing of anything in your surroundings that appears to be perfectly normal.
I get some pretty weird ideas when I'm first waking up. I always use the snooze alarm, setting the clock to start half an hour before I actually have to get up, because I like to sort of 'ease into' waking up. But sometimes, when I'm particularly fatigued, I get strange ideas about what is going on with the alarm clock. On a few occasions, I've hit the snooze and thought to myself, "I'm tired, but at least I have this button that gives me 10 more minutes of sleep," and I would translate this as, "Good thing I can travel back in time by 10 minutes, I can keep this up indefinitely until I am bored with sleeping!" Then there'll be a harsh moment of panic when I actually look at the clock and realize that the time travel isn't working right for some reason.
Other times, back when I was learning the guitar, I had the weirdest notion that the pulsing tone of the alarm clock was actually a musical scale of a particular key, and I've have to guess what key it was as I hit the button. Then I'd lie back down to wait for the next "test". The clock was a monotone, but I'd declare, "C minor!" and would feel that I had gotten it right, and I would get it right each time with different answers.:)
They say they hadn't looked at it before because it had been assumed that the presence of oxygen is supposed to mean you can't get methane, and since we know plants put out oxygen it was perceived to be a waste of time to investigate.
But I too am skeptical that this contributes to global warming. Now, IANAGWKMAP (I am not a guy who knows much about plants) but they mention in the article that carbon dioxide is worse than methane (methane is in second place) for global warming. Plants take in carbon dioxide. I wonder how much? If it's the same amount or more compared to the methane they apparently emit, then more green still means less global warming. So how much CO2 does the world's biomass remove from the atmosphere annually? Answer that question and you're done figuring out whether more plants are a problem or not.
so we can all walk around with extension cords hanging off our arms?
Nonono, you don't walk around with extension cords, you lie in a nice warm vat of nutrient gunk while neural jacks stimulate your brain to replace reality with The Matrix. Then we use all of that bio-electric power to run the whole thing, and we don't need power for anything else: lights, ovens, cars, factories that make "Tasty Wheat", it's all virtual. Yeah let's make that instead, just don't piss off the machines.
Getting modded through the floor (and losing karma, getting fewer mod opportunities) for posting something inflammatory or derisive is not retribution? I mean, it's sort of open in a way, you can post whatever you want. But that doesn't guarantee anyone will see it half an hour later, while everybody else who knows how to 'play nice' gets heard. So I guess my definition of 'open' is indeed strange to you.
Companies would come up with "quiet time" phone features that would prevent any ring after a certain hour unless you coded it with numbers that were acceptable.
Ooh that gave me a cool idea. At first when I read that I said to myself, "Heh, I would want to start my 'quiet time' at noon and have it go till 11:59 the next morning". So basically anyone who wanted my phone to ring would have to be on my whitelist. This appeals to me because I get lots of telemarketing calls, and also because my phone number is one of those confusing ones with doubled and tripled numbers (only 3 unique numbers out of 7), so I get assloads of wrong numbers too. So now that's what I want my landline phone to do: Have a whitelist, and any call that's not on it goes straight to voicemail, where a special greeting informs them of the situation, and they can leave a message which I can use to decide if their number goes on the whitelist. And call them back right away if appropriate, of course. The phone doesn't ring or do anything at all unless they're on the list. Possibly the 'message waiting' light might kick in if they bothered to leave something on voice mail, and that would be all. If they're on the list, and I'm not home, the normal voice mail kicks in after 4 rings and the proper greeting is there like it is now.
In the meantime I keep getting calls and voice mails from people who think they've called a particular pharmacy, and one of these days I've got to set up some kind of 'Jerky Boys' rig with the phone and computer and have some serious fun with one of them. The funny thing about the drug store is that, the other large segment of misdials I get are for some guy named Chris, and judging by the variety and perceived character of his callers, I'm pretty sure he's a drug dealer.:)
No, Slashdot is not an example why open internet doesn't work. It's the opposite, it's one of many working models which...
Umm, he said the exact same thing you said, you just used more words. To paraphrase: Why would we have moderation and bans on Slashdot if open internet actually worked?
Definately not the dumbest idea I've ever heard -- making a hat out of a plastic bag, for example, would be worse.
You're just jealous because my hat has a convenient drawstring at the neck, to keep out bee swarms. Does your hat keep out bee swarms? I didn't think so. You wait, one day, there'll be a bee swarm, and I'll be able to seal up my whole head instantly. We'll see who's laughing then.
RTFA to get answers to your questions. No, I'm not new here, but I'll summarize anyway:
They recommend motor oil actually, the vegetable oil was what they tried for this 'prototype'. Veggie oil carries the hazard of having fatty acids and junk that could wreck your plastics. My own aside is that such oil goes 'skunky' after awhile too, and slowly dries up, making it thicker and really difficult if not impossible to clean off of things if it has been there long enough. So at the end when they recommended motor oil that made way more sense.
For changing the hardware you have to drain the oil, so their case has a drain plug in the bottom.
And leaks are bad, so don't have any. You had to ask that one?
First, get an ordinary pair of glasses. Next, break them in half at the bridge. Now tape them back together again with a large wad of highly visible tape.
Voila! You have official computer user glasses, enjoy!
The only possible use I can see for this is email or IM, where it would mention to the person on the other end: "They seem pretty angry right now" or something like that. Which would suck in various ways, as I don't need to explain every little thing to someone in email or chat. Maybe I was angry for a moment because the cat jumped somewhere they weren't supposed to, or maybe I just realized I forgot something important from earlier in the day. I really don't need someone now asking what's wrong and having to explain it, when it had nothing to do with them, but they or the computer don't really know that until I explain it. The basic idea here would be to make up for the fact that dry text, even with emoticons, still leads to misunderstandings because the other party doesn't have a sense of the emotion behind your words. But the words I'm typing at a particular moment, and the emotions I'm experiencing may have absolutely nothing to do with each other. So in other words, it's not really useful for its only useful purpose that I can see.
Aside from that, there's really no point. If the computer is to somehow become smart enough to realize it's pissing me off, so that it can stop behaving in the way that's pissing me off, then it's already smart enough to not be pissing me off in the first place. This emotion-sensing BS is a solution looking for a problem. It should come after full-fledged AI has been placed in a fully ambulatory android body complete with full-motion video and audio comprehension. Until then, we have no use for this.
Dunno, but somebody screwed up somewhere. Maybe somehow, 'more than 280 million illegal emails' actually means '1.12 billion illegal emails'. Perhaps this is counting the supposed effect of all that penis enlargement?
Quite right, with software design there is little or no science (or sense if you prefer) involved at all. That's one reason why so much help is needed with it.
1,920 kilobytes for the Elven-Kings under the sky,
4,480 for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone 5,760 for Mortal Men doomed to die,
640K for the Dark Lord on his dark throne In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.
640K to rule them all, 640k to find them,
640K to bring them all and in the darkness bind them In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.
Wha? All I was saying is that a particular string of characters forming a filename shows nothing other than what the name of the file is, which does not automatically prove the contents. What this has to do with forbidding police to talk to someone with a gun-shaped bulge in their pocket at a murder scene is beyond me. You analogy needs to extend to include the fact that everyone else at the scene, and for blocks in all directions, all have gun-shaped bulges in their pockets. Then we might be on the same page.
a file called 'Eminem - When I'm Gone.mp3', a reasonable person would expect that it would contain that song
It's very common on P2P to get files whose contents and titles have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Much of that is put there by the RIAA, so they cannot deny the reasonable doubt that exists there.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Though, if you're going to be pointing out grammatical errors, it's probably better to have a.sig that makes grammatical sense, or at least some kind of sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Google just told me that the population of China is 1,306,313,812. No culture has the monopoly on having asshats in their numbers, we are all human. So let's be fair and say that a certain percentage of all people are asshats distributed proportionally across every race/culture. Just for fun, let's say the figure is 30%. So if 30% of Americans are asshats, that would be just under 89 million people. That's a lotta asshats, right? If 30% of Chinese are also asshats, that would be almost 392 million asshats. That's over 4 times as many asshats from China compared to America. More than the total population of America! (Though I daresay the numbers may work out even anyhow in this particular comparison, might have to give America's unused 'asshat credits' to some other nation like Denmark or something.) You've got to work these numbers through other factors of course, like how many of them would be internet-equipped and on particular games, but in mixed company, I think you'd still be bound to notice a behavior among Chinese well before you'd realize how big it was among other groups of people.
I don't know about WoW, never played it, but on Eve we have (had? there was an assload of bans handed out awhile back) gold farmers too. The currency's called ISK, but whatever, the principle's the same. Gold farmers, as they are only playing to get real-world currency, are not playing the game in a way that supports the in-game economy. There's nothing wrong with getting rich in the game see, but if they're not spending it on anything in the markets, then they're not contributing anything to the game world and should take a hike. A gold farmer is just taking away resources that real players could have otherwise obtained. The real players could have used the loot to buy the UberSword of Whatever, and so the cycle of the movement of wealth is maintained. A gold farmer gives nothing back, just ganks the cgame's economy without so much as a half-assed appology. You can argue that the economy isn't really hurt since the gold does get back into circulation via whomever paid real money for it, but it's still a problem because that eBay gold buyer is able to short circuit the in-game wealth-building process, in a way that many players can't afford, or won't consider due to concerns about getting ripped off by sellers. Then there's those that actually feel the TOS means something. One has to take a stand against this kind of abuse of a game they are trying to enjoy for the game that it is.
We should actually be hating the unexpectedly-and-quite-suddenly-rich 'real' players that are buying the fruits of these farming services. You know, like how if you want the hookers to go away you have to crack down on the johns.
Ninja is Japanese, not Chinese. Learn the difference or you will be called an ignorant bigot.
I see you got a Funny mod, but I get the impression you were actually serious. So just in case... Ninja-looting is a term referring to someone taking measures to ensure that once there is a corpse in the vicinity to loot, they are on it faster than you can blink, and have looted it before anyone else gets the chance to start typing the command, because it was the one and only thing they were really watching for. It has nothing to do with race at all, just the impressive inhuman speed of the Ninja.
If you were actually just going for the Funny mod, then I appologize for the lesson.
players are asking anyone who wants to join a group to type one or two sentences in English. If the sentences contain spelling or grammar mistakes, the player is rejected.
I don't get it... How do average caucasians get to join groups then?
Somehow I'm not at all surprised.
I happen to own your lack of surprise, it's all right here in this deed. You now owe me $5.00 for each occurrence that doesn't surprise you, or the viewing of anything in your surroundings that appears to be perfectly normal.
Now how are all the Jerrods living in their mothers' basements playing counter-strike going to get fit? It's not like they go outside much as it is.
Brew ten batches of espresso, back to back.
:)
Doesn't that defeat the purpose, since he'd never ever sleep again?
I get some pretty weird ideas when I'm first waking up. I always use the snooze alarm, setting the clock to start half an hour before I actually have to get up, because I like to sort of 'ease into' waking up. But sometimes, when I'm particularly fatigued, I get strange ideas about what is going on with the alarm clock. On a few occasions, I've hit the snooze and thought to myself, "I'm tired, but at least I have this button that gives me 10 more minutes of sleep," and I would translate this as, "Good thing I can travel back in time by 10 minutes, I can keep this up indefinitely until I am bored with sleeping!" Then there'll be a harsh moment of panic when I actually look at the clock and realize that the time travel isn't working right for some reason.
:)
Other times, back when I was learning the guitar, I had the weirdest notion that the pulsing tone of the alarm clock was actually a musical scale of a particular key, and I've have to guess what key it was as I hit the button. Then I'd lie back down to wait for the next "test". The clock was a monotone, but I'd declare, "C minor!" and would feel that I had gotten it right, and I would get it right each time with different answers.
They say they hadn't looked at it before because it had been assumed that the presence of oxygen is supposed to mean you can't get methane, and since we know plants put out oxygen it was perceived to be a waste of time to investigate.
But I too am skeptical that this contributes to global warming. Now, IANAGWKMAP (I am not a guy who knows much about plants) but they mention in the article that carbon dioxide is worse than methane (methane is in second place) for global warming. Plants take in carbon dioxide. I wonder how much? If it's the same amount or more compared to the methane they apparently emit, then more green still means less global warming. So how much CO2 does the world's biomass remove from the atmosphere annually? Answer that question and you're done figuring out whether more plants are a problem or not.
so we can all walk around with extension cords hanging off our arms?
Nonono, you don't walk around with extension cords, you lie in a nice warm vat of nutrient gunk while neural jacks stimulate your brain to replace reality with The Matrix. Then we use all of that bio-electric power to run the whole thing, and we don't need power for anything else: lights, ovens, cars, factories that make "Tasty Wheat", it's all virtual. Yeah let's make that instead, just don't piss off the machines.
Getting modded through the floor (and losing karma, getting fewer mod opportunities) for posting something inflammatory or derisive is not retribution? I mean, it's sort of open in a way, you can post whatever you want. But that doesn't guarantee anyone will see it half an hour later, while everybody else who knows how to 'play nice' gets heard. So I guess my definition of 'open' is indeed strange to you.
Companies would come up with "quiet time" phone features that would prevent any ring after a certain hour unless you coded it with numbers that were acceptable.
:)
Ooh that gave me a cool idea. At first when I read that I said to myself, "Heh, I would want to start my 'quiet time' at noon and have it go till 11:59 the next morning". So basically anyone who wanted my phone to ring would have to be on my whitelist. This appeals to me because I get lots of telemarketing calls, and also because my phone number is one of those confusing ones with doubled and tripled numbers (only 3 unique numbers out of 7), so I get assloads of wrong numbers too. So now that's what I want my landline phone to do: Have a whitelist, and any call that's not on it goes straight to voicemail, where a special greeting informs them of the situation, and they can leave a message which I can use to decide if their number goes on the whitelist. And call them back right away if appropriate, of course. The phone doesn't ring or do anything at all unless they're on the list. Possibly the 'message waiting' light might kick in if they bothered to leave something on voice mail, and that would be all. If they're on the list, and I'm not home, the normal voice mail kicks in after 4 rings and the proper greeting is there like it is now.
In the meantime I keep getting calls and voice mails from people who think they've called a particular pharmacy, and one of these days I've got to set up some kind of 'Jerky Boys' rig with the phone and computer and have some serious fun with one of them. The funny thing about the drug store is that, the other large segment of misdials I get are for some guy named Chris, and judging by the variety and perceived character of his callers, I'm pretty sure he's a drug dealer.
No, Slashdot is not an example why open internet doesn't work. It's the opposite, it's one of many working models which...
Umm, he said the exact same thing you said, you just used more words. To paraphrase: Why would we have moderation and bans on Slashdot if open internet actually worked?
Definately not the dumbest idea I've ever heard -- making a hat out of a plastic bag, for example, would be worse.
You're just jealous because my hat has a convenient drawstring at the neck, to keep out bee swarms. Does your hat keep out bee swarms? I didn't think so. You wait, one day, there'll be a bee swarm, and I'll be able to seal up my whole head instantly. We'll see who's laughing then.
RTFA to get answers to your questions. No, I'm not new here, but I'll summarize anyway:
They recommend motor oil actually, the vegetable oil was what they tried for this 'prototype'. Veggie oil carries the hazard of having fatty acids and junk that could wreck your plastics. My own aside is that such oil goes 'skunky' after awhile too, and slowly dries up, making it thicker and really difficult if not impossible to clean off of things if it has been there long enough. So at the end when they recommended motor oil that made way more sense.
For changing the hardware you have to drain the oil, so their case has a drain plug in the bottom.
And leaks are bad, so don't have any. You had to ask that one?
These are real easy to make.
First, get an ordinary pair of glasses.
Next, break them in half at the bridge.
Now tape them back together again with a large wad of highly visible tape.
Voila! You have official computer user glasses, enjoy!
That's the weirdest thing man, I just had this waking dream where I used Firefox under XP to reply to a post on Slashdot. Better check my meds...
The only possible use I can see for this is email or IM, where it would mention to the person on the other end: "They seem pretty angry right now" or something like that. Which would suck in various ways, as I don't need to explain every little thing to someone in email or chat. Maybe I was angry for a moment because the cat jumped somewhere they weren't supposed to, or maybe I just realized I forgot something important from earlier in the day. I really don't need someone now asking what's wrong and having to explain it, when it had nothing to do with them, but they or the computer don't really know that until I explain it. The basic idea here would be to make up for the fact that dry text, even with emoticons, still leads to misunderstandings because the other party doesn't have a sense of the emotion behind your words. But the words I'm typing at a particular moment, and the emotions I'm experiencing may have absolutely nothing to do with each other. So in other words, it's not really useful for its only useful purpose that I can see.
Aside from that, there's really no point. If the computer is to somehow become smart enough to realize it's pissing me off, so that it can stop behaving in the way that's pissing me off, then it's already smart enough to not be pissing me off in the first place. This emotion-sensing BS is a solution looking for a problem. It should come after full-fledged AI has been placed in a fully ambulatory android body complete with full-motion video and audio comprehension. Until then, we have no use for this.
Dunno, but somebody screwed up somewhere. Maybe somehow, 'more than 280 million illegal emails' actually means '1.12 billion illegal emails'. Perhaps this is counting the supposed effect of all that penis enlargement?
That's easy: They couldn't get the fifth one open, so the worms in that one are neither alive nor dead, throwing off the count.
It ain't rocket science.
Quite right, with software design there is little or no science (or sense if you prefer) involved at all. That's one reason why so much help is needed with it.
1,920 kilobytes for the Elven-Kings under the sky,
4,480 for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone
5,760 for Mortal Men doomed to die,
640K for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.
640K to rule them all, 640k to find them,
640K to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.
Wha? All I was saying is that a particular string of characters forming a filename shows nothing other than what the name of the file is, which does not automatically prove the contents. What this has to do with forbidding police to talk to someone with a gun-shaped bulge in their pocket at a murder scene is beyond me. You analogy needs to extend to include the fact that everyone else at the scene, and for blocks in all directions, all have gun-shaped bulges in their pockets. Then we might be on the same page.
a file called 'Eminem - When I'm Gone.mp3', a reasonable person would expect that it would contain that song
It's very common on P2P to get files whose contents and titles have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Much of that is put there by the RIAA, so they cannot deny the reasonable doubt that exists there.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
.sig that makes grammatical sense, or at least some kind of sense.
Though, if you're going to be pointing out grammatical errors, it's probably better to have a