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hey!'s Slashdot CommentsSubmitted by kingprad on February 8, 2009 - 6:57pm.
Re:How deep? A league is about the distance a healthy man can walk on a good road in one hour. A fathom is about the height of a tall man; it is about eighteen hand widths (fingers closed). A US gallon is the volume of eight pounds of water. An imperial gallon (i.e. the UK gallon) is the volume of ten pounds of water. One interesting thing about weights. The system of dram/ounce/pound is base 16, which makes division by two a practical measuring operation. Take a pound of something readily dividable, divide it into two equal portions (using a balance scale). Then repeat the process four times. The result is one ounce. This shows the offsetting virtues of traditional units. While they are difficult to calculate with, they are convenient for measuring things -- especially when it come to quantifying things for sale. Submitted by phil on May 2, 2008 - 11:51am.
Like I always say It's not that writing software is any less fun than they were back in the day. It's that on top of being fun its goddamned annoying. Submitted by phil on March 19, 2008 - 10:33am.
Re:Beer, is there anything it can't hurt? Actually, American versions of Pilsners, while evolving towards lightness, didn't become insipid until after Prohibition. When Prohibition was repealed, Americans were ready to drink anything. Only a few breweries left, which had survived selling malt for malted milk and root beer, provided a thirsty nation with beer that you could drink a lot of, very quickly. I've done a bit of home brewing, and the funny thing is that an American style beer is actually an extremely difficult style of beer to make. Replacing much of the malt with rice means that you end up with a very light flavor. The tiniest off flavor is immediately detectable. Get anything wrong with the fermentation, or the water, or the storage and it tastes really bad. Submitted by Chryana on October 31, 2007 - 8:44pm.
Re:I respectfully disagree... I was an MIT undergrad when Ronald Reagan came into office. The Reagan administration was a boon to certain types of research, and a bust for others. There was an enormous shift in emphasis towards research that could be weaponized. I remember a scientist who joined the project I was working on. He had headed a small lab elsewhere at MIT as a principal investigator, but he signed on to our project as an engineer because research money had dried up. He brought with him this odd stainless steel apparatus that looked like a mutated, high tech water main. We were using it as small vacuum tank. I asked him what the thing was built to do, and he told me that it was a new kind of electron microscope he had invented that could make images showing the distribution of the different kinds of atomic nuclei in the thing being imaged. "Wow, that's very interesting," I said. Submitted by AceJohnny on September 21, 2007 - 8:08am.
Re:Thank you, Daniel Sure you want to get into that battle? Submitted by ssean on April 11, 2007 - 5:05pm.
Re:From 'The Usual Suspects' St. Augustine has a worthwhile point to make here. He was dealing with a fundamental theological problem: how does a good God create a universe in which evil exists. He came up with a novel solution: it's all good, but evil chooses lesser goods over greater goods -- an concept closely akin to the modern economic concept of opportunity cost. You cannot have the capacity to choose without the capacity to choose the wrong thing; if you were forced to choose the right thing all the time then you wouldn't have free will. Therefore free will implies the existence of evil, which is not a thing in itself, but a deficit. Dante sharpens Augustine's point in the Divine Comedy: evil is really the result of stubborn, even aggressive stupidity. As outlandish as the punishments that are meted out in the Inferno, they're all pretty much people getting unlimited quantities of whatever it was they pursued in life. The Devil, then, doesn't need to exist; at least if he does he has no power of his own. There is no need to believe in the nearly all-powerful devil of neo-Christian folklore. The power of Satan, both biblically and by orthodox theology, lies in the stupidity and stubbornness of humanity. A near omnipotent Devil is not really any better off than a powerless but tricky one because (a) near omnipotence is not very useful when the other side is omnipotent and (b) it is impossible to spread evil (in the Augustinian sense) by the exercise of raw power. Submitted by phil on January 31, 2007 - 8:40am.
Re:Apple ads
It's been 5 years or so. And still most of the Apple ads represent one or at most two objects (frequently human actors it seems), which are speaking about how much PC-s suck, This is known in the trade as "shooting fish in a barrel." People are aware that computers are these cool, amazing machines. As is written in the Book of Jobs: "bicycles for the mind The problem is that (Windows) PCs do suck. It's like having to work with a manic depressive coworker who drains your energy by making you deal with his weird issues all the time. You can't sell a computer that you want people to love without reminding them that (Windows) PCs suck, because over time people begin to accept that suckiness is the way computers are supposed to be. You can't change the world without first upsetting the unconscious accomodations people have made to the status quo. The world if full of unreasonable things people get accustomed to; it's only when they are reminded they have a choice that they remember how ridiculous things are. Submitted by Kadin2048 on October 12, 2006 - 1:53pm.
From the post Beetle-Mania, by hey!: If god made humans in his image, does that mean he is also a weakling? Nah, we just tell ourselves that to cover for the undeniable fact that we were scraped together at the end of the Creation project. And at that, using leftovers after the main project deliverable: implementing every imaginable variation on the the concept of "beetle". And if that weren't enough to kick us in the anthropocentric nutes, it's clear we aren't even in the same league as termites, as measured by biomass or biodiversity. This caused some severe editing of the Creation story, particularly Genesis 1:25 - 1:31, which originally went something like this: |