...Well, okay, you can deny that it's anthropogenic in the slightest, and you can deny that it's indicative of any long-term trend, but climate change totally happened in Eyjafjallajokull during the last four weeks. It's scientifically factified!
(ed.—this is a joke about the absurdly generic term "climate change". I'm not part of the AGW denial lobby^W crowd.)
Ah, Latin. While we geeks think we're clever with "PEBKAC" and "ID-10-T error", doctors have been using Latin to the same effect for centuries. As have lawyers and clergy.
In cyberspace, he said, it is difficult to deliver an effective response if the attacker's identity is not known.
But commanders have clear rights to self-defense, he said. He added that while "this right has not been specifically established by legal precedent to apply to attacks in cyberspace, it is reasonable to assume that returning fire in cyberspace, as long as it complied with law of war principles... would be lawful."
Senators noted, in their questions, that police officers don't have to know the identity of a shooter in order to shoot back. In cyberspace, the U.S. may be able to counter a threat, rebuff an electronic probe or disable a malicious network without knowing who is behind the attack.
So you can "take both", as I don't see any general threat to privacy here.
Let them respond to cyber attacks today and tomorrow they'll be asking if they can defend against physical attacks. I don't think we can afford to go down this road.
I's fun to think of historians as just attributing everything they learn about societies to religion and superstition, but the biggest reason we think pre-Enlightenment civilizations were obsessively religious is because the priest castes were generally among the most literate and the most concerned with preserving knowledge of the past. Much of what we know about history comes through their writings—and therefore, their perceptions. They quite literally wrote history, to a large extent, and our understanding of their society is colored by their bias.
The Information Age has democratized knowledge to a huge degree. Historians centuries or millennia hence will have plenty of sources other than the lens of the Catholic Church. Given current trends, even just a decade from now a few consumer-grade storage devices could hold everything the Library of Congress or Archive.org contains today. As long as there are a few people in the world interested in preserving it, modern history should be safe.
It's a shortened version of "Y2K38", in homage to "the Y2K bug" (which is itself a conveniently shortened version of "the Y2KOMGWTFBBQwereallgonnadie!1!eleven bug").
Re:Low video ram 256m in a $1800 laptop? and a $40
on
New MacBook Pros Launched
·
· Score: 4, Informative
1. Yeah, it's silly to only have 512mb on the high-end models. But most non-gamers won't care. 2. 4GB DDR3 SO-DIMMs are still expensive. Other PC manufacturers charge about the same. 3. eSATA isn't "sleek" enough for Apple; it needs a second power cable, has a relatively flimsy plug, has hot-plugging/compatibility issues, etc, etc. They'd much rather people use Firewire. 4. Firewire 1600/3200 won't exist on consumer gear until at least late 2010. 5. Intel is dragging their feet on USB 3.0, which means most computers and peripherals won't see it for at least another year. 6. Most people don't use ExpressCards; they'd rather have a slightly larger battery or other features taking up the space.
If it's not what you're looking for in a notebook, last time I checked you're still allowed to not buy one. And if your primary considerations are how well it plays games and how many different things you can have plugged into it, might I suggest you look at desktops instead?
I guess we should also abolish those laws that say an open bottle of beer in the center console means you were probably drinking it, too. And get rid of those expensive police-grade breathalyzers and time-consuming sobriety tests. After all, we don't want to interfere with Every American's God-Given Constitutional Right To Do Whatever They Want While They Operate A Three Ton Vehicle At Deadly Speeds On Government-Owned Public Roads Full Of Other People All Without Any Proper Training Or Oversight, right?
no worse than having a conversation with a passenger
Not entirely true. Talking on a mobile phone is inherently more distracting than talking to the person next to you, for a few reasons:
* Signal/noise. You frequently have difficulty communicating over a cellular link, especially when moving; it's normal to have to repeat yourself, ask the other party to repeat themselves, mentally diagnose communications problems, interpret garbled audio, and re-establish broken connections. Passengers are much easier to talk to.
* Context. People on the phone are more likely to talk about subjects currently relevant to them, like what to buy at a store, how to fix a problem at work, or various off-the-wall topics; they expect your full concentration and send your attention all over the map. Since you're both in the car, passengers are (somewhat) more likely to talk about topics currently relevant to both of you and compensate for the fact that you're driving by simplifying their requests.
* Awareness. The other party has no idea of your current state. A passenger is likely to notice dangerous conditions or notice that you are paying more attention to the road and stop distracting you. If you suddenly break off conversation during a phone call, on the other hand, the other party is more likely to try to distract you even more with inane chatter: "Hey! Hey! Did I lose you? Are you there? Speak up! Hey? Hey? I don't hear anything! Can you hear me? I guess I lost ya! If you can hear me, call me back! I'll talk to ya later! Bye!"
Using a mobile phone while driving is more like having a few wild two-year-olds in the back seat. Which, while still not illegal, isn't a great idea.
Police investigating a traffic accident should be able to get a driver's phone and sms logs. Or if they notice a half-eaten breakfast/dirty shaver/open notebook computer/whatever in reach of the driver, well, they can put two and two together.
Should we allow airline pilots to text their friends while landing? I'm sure a few could do it without losing concentration, so why trample on their rights?
I agree that the primary focus should be erratic driving, not any one particular gadget... But the rule of civilization is that some outlying people have to give up some minor liberties to ensure the safety of everyone.
If you want to reduce distracted driving, just enforce fines on people doing it. Make it so people are likely enough to get caught that they'll think twice beforehand. Slap a huge fine (or worse) on anyone who crashes their car due to an obvious and avoidable distraction. Forget the fancy ad campaign; people don't care. Put the money toward a decent public transit system so people don't have to choose between keeping in touch and traveling.
I would have been pissed if they'd copied WinMo's or most other implementations. As it is, it's at about the edge of my tolerance level. I loved the old Palm PDAs, which had execute-in-place but no background tasks to bog the thing down. It was great knowing that when an app was closed it was using zero system resources without losing any unsaved work. Most devices I've used since then turn into a whack-a-mole of ending programs I'd forgotten about and processes that decided they just wanted to stick around and sightsee. Apple's solution tries to satisfy everyone, but I'm not getting my hopes up until I see how developers abuse it.
Around 1996, when I had AOL users complaining that the articles on my website were "cut off at the bottom of the screen", and I had to explain scrollbars to them, I should have found another career, preferably one that involved frequent use of explosives and heavy earthmoving equipment.
But is it so much more efficient that you could stack thousands of layers without turning your chip into a hunk of molten glass? That would probably be an even bigger breakthrough.
Not only that, the position of the camera is wrong. Notice that in the shots of GTA4, the camera is high enough that you can see the ground a few meters in front of the car. With the rig they set up, there's a massive blind spot that stretches 20-30 meters in front of the vehicle.
If they wanted to really duplicate the average video game, they would have had to make the camera boom a couple meters longer... and turn the boom into a hydraulic actuated arm than can be raised, lowered, and swung around the vehicle.
But the whole thing is rather silly, as the reason third person perspective is used in driving games is to get back some of the field of view that's lost when you're limited to a small computer screen. The video is cute, but all it proves is that a poor implementation of a poor substitute for real-world perspective isn't a good way to drive through an obstacle course.
Slashdot Mirror
...Thousands of people caught at awkward moments now traumatized for life.
It's climate change! You can't deny it!
...Well, okay, you can deny that it's anthropogenic in the slightest, and you can deny that it's indicative of any long-term trend, but climate change totally happened in Eyjafjallajokull during the last four weeks. It's scientifically factified!
(ed.—this is a joke about the absurdly generic term "climate change". I'm not part of the AGW denial lobby^W crowd.)
coprolalia
Ah, Latin. While we geeks think we're clever with "PEBKAC" and "ID-10-T error", doctors have been using Latin to the same effect for centuries. As have lawyers and clergy.
From TFA:
In cyberspace, he said, it is difficult to deliver an effective response if the attacker's identity is not known.
But commanders have clear rights to self-defense, he said. He added that while "this right has not been specifically established by legal precedent to apply to attacks in cyberspace, it is reasonable to assume that returning fire in cyberspace, as long as it complied with law of war principles ... would be lawful."
Senators noted, in their questions, that police officers don't have to know the identity of a shooter in order to shoot back. In cyberspace, the U.S. may be able to counter a threat, rebuff an electronic probe or disable a malicious network without knowing who is behind the attack.
So you can "take both", as I don't see any general threat to privacy here.
Let them respond to cyber attacks today and tomorrow they'll be asking if they can defend against physical attacks. I don't think we can afford to go down this road.
Any word on a patch?
I's fun to think of historians as just attributing everything they learn about societies to religion and superstition, but the biggest reason we think pre-Enlightenment civilizations were obsessively religious is because the priest castes were generally among the most literate and the most concerned with preserving knowledge of the past. Much of what we know about history comes through their writings—and therefore, their perceptions. They quite literally wrote history, to a large extent, and our understanding of their society is colored by their bias.
The Information Age has democratized knowledge to a huge degree. Historians centuries or millennia hence will have plenty of sources other than the lens of the Catholic Church. Given current trends, even just a decade from now a few consumer-grade storage devices could hold everything the Library of Congress or Archive.org contains today. As long as there are a few people in the world interested in preserving it, modern history should be safe.
Crowdsourcing Project To Make Predictions More Precise
I think they used to call them "polls".
I'd call it "Dagwood Syndrome", though I doubt anyone remembers the old seaQuest series.
It's a shortened version of "Y2K38", in homage to "the Y2K bug" (which is itself a conveniently shortened version of "the Y2KOMGWTFBBQwereallgonnadie!1!eleven bug").
1. Yeah, it's silly to only have 512mb on the high-end models. But most non-gamers won't care.
2. 4GB DDR3 SO-DIMMs are still expensive. Other PC manufacturers charge about the same.
3. eSATA isn't "sleek" enough for Apple; it needs a second power cable, has a relatively flimsy plug, has hot-plugging/compatibility issues, etc, etc. They'd much rather people use Firewire.
4. Firewire 1600/3200 won't exist on consumer gear until at least late 2010.
5. Intel is dragging their feet on USB 3.0, which means most computers and peripherals won't see it for at least another year.
6. Most people don't use ExpressCards; they'd rather have a slightly larger battery or other features taking up the space.
If it's not what you're looking for in a notebook, last time I checked you're still allowed to not buy one. And if your primary considerations are how well it plays games and how many different things you can have plugged into it, might I suggest you look at desktops instead?
Hey, this is Slashdot. Stop depressing us with your world's-not-going-to-end attitude.
I'm a part-time VCR enthusiast and a card-carrying member of the Classic Video Equipment Club of America, you insensitive clod!
I guess we should also abolish those laws that say an open bottle of beer in the center console means you were probably drinking it, too. And get rid of those expensive police-grade breathalyzers and time-consuming sobriety tests. After all, we don't want to interfere with Every American's God-Given Constitutional Right To Do Whatever They Want While They Operate A Three Ton Vehicle At Deadly Speeds On Government-Owned Public Roads Full Of Other People All Without Any Proper Training Or Oversight, right?
sigh.
no worse than having a conversation with a passenger
Not entirely true. Talking on a mobile phone is inherently more distracting than talking to the person next to you, for a few reasons:
* Signal/noise. You frequently have difficulty communicating over a cellular link, especially when moving; it's normal to have to repeat yourself, ask the other party to repeat themselves, mentally diagnose communications problems, interpret garbled audio, and re-establish broken connections. Passengers are much easier to talk to.
* Context. People on the phone are more likely to talk about subjects currently relevant to them, like what to buy at a store, how to fix a problem at work, or various off-the-wall topics; they expect your full concentration and send your attention all over the map. Since you're both in the car, passengers are (somewhat) more likely to talk about topics currently relevant to both of you and compensate for the fact that you're driving by simplifying their requests.
* Awareness. The other party has no idea of your current state. A passenger is likely to notice dangerous conditions or notice that you are paying more attention to the road and stop distracting you. If you suddenly break off conversation during a phone call, on the other hand, the other party is more likely to try to distract you even more with inane chatter: "Hey! Hey! Did I lose you? Are you there? Speak up! Hey? Hey? I don't hear anything! Can you hear me? I guess I lost ya! If you can hear me, call me back! I'll talk to ya later! Bye!"
Using a mobile phone while driving is more like having a few wild two-year-olds in the back seat. Which, while still not illegal, isn't a great idea.
Police investigating a traffic accident should be able to get a driver's phone and sms logs. Or if they notice a half-eaten breakfast/dirty shaver/open notebook computer/whatever in reach of the driver, well, they can put two and two together.
Should we allow airline pilots to text their friends while landing? I'm sure a few could do it without losing concentration, so why trample on their rights?
I agree that the primary focus should be erratic driving, not any one particular gadget... But the rule of civilization is that some outlying people have to give up some minor liberties to ensure the safety of everyone.
If you want to reduce distracted driving, just enforce fines on people doing it. Make it so people are likely enough to get caught that they'll think twice beforehand. Slap a huge fine (or worse) on anyone who crashes their car due to an obvious and avoidable distraction. Forget the fancy ad campaign; people don't care. Put the money toward a decent public transit system so people don't have to choose between keeping in touch and traveling.
They've got those now? Crap, I need to get to the auction house. WTS green linen shirt!
Wait... *sniff* *sniff* ...never mind, it must be bind on equip.
I would have been pissed if they'd copied WinMo's or most other implementations. As it is, it's at about the edge of my tolerance level. I loved the old Palm PDAs, which had execute-in-place but no background tasks to bog the thing down. It was great knowing that when an app was closed it was using zero system resources without losing any unsaved work. Most devices I've used since then turn into a whack-a-mole of ending programs I'd forgotten about and processes that decided they just wanted to stick around and sightsee. Apple's solution tries to satisfy everyone, but I'm not getting my hopes up until I see how developers abuse it.
Around 1996, when I had AOL users complaining that the articles on my website were "cut off at the bottom of the screen", and I had to explain scrollbars to them, I should have found another career, preferably one that involved frequent use of explosives and heavy earthmoving equipment.
Why bother changing careers?
But is it so much more efficient that you could stack thousands of layers without turning your chip into a hunk of molten glass? That would probably be an even bigger breakthrough.
That's why you need the proper attire.
Not only that, the position of the camera is wrong. Notice that in the shots of GTA4, the camera is high enough that you can see the ground a few meters in front of the car. With the rig they set up, there's a massive blind spot that stretches 20-30 meters in front of the vehicle.
If they wanted to really duplicate the average video game, they would have had to make the camera boom a couple meters longer... and turn the boom into a hydraulic actuated arm than can be raised, lowered, and swung around the vehicle.
But the whole thing is rather silly, as the reason third person perspective is used in driving games is to get back some of the field of view that's lost when you're limited to a small computer screen. The video is cute, but all it proves is that a poor implementation of a poor substitute for real-world perspective isn't a good way to drive through an obstacle course.
Then again, the first link on the Google search results takes you to Yahoo! Finance. Apparently the bean counters are both evil and anarchists.