But we know the host always opens a door with nothing behind it, which leaves two doors and a second choice between two doors and we know there's a prize behind one of these doors. Basically, the first choice you make is useless, you might as well just have two doors with a prize behind one of them.
My point was that you make two choices with the first one being essentially useless since the host always opens one of the doors that has no prize behind it. And then you get to choose between two doors, one with a prize and one without a prize. Thus, a 1/2 chance of winning regardless if you once again pick the door you picked first or choose the other door.
One of the doors you did not pick is opened, an empty door is always chosen.
You are once more given a choice, this time between the two doors that have not been opened.
Since this is how the game plays out then you always have a 1/2 chance of getting it right, regardless of what door you always end up having to pick between two doors, one with a prize and one without a prize.
I actually had a few "Deathstars", in fact, I still have one in one of my machines still running fine. Not a single one of them has crashed for me, one made the infamous "click of death" but then just kept on running...
I always love mentioning that when people say IBM hardware is of poor quality (generally gamers and similar people who will never again touch any product by a company if they so much as hear a rumour about one of their products failing a bit too often, yet they'll gladly buy the cheapest possible parts and bitch about anything that isn't consumer-grade crap is overpriced).
The stalker idea sounds interesting, unfortunately the only women who have exhibited that behaviour toward me have either been 40 year-old single mothers or 15 year-olds and since I'm in my mid-twenties I'd rather go for someone a bit more my age.
Additionally, you don't want damaged goods like the girls you mention. Women in particular have the problem of expecting men to be mind readers once they are in a relationship. Can you imagine if you lucked into banging a girl whose initial signal was glancing at you across a crowded room? The rest of the relationship would be you having to defend yourself because you didn't KNOW she was ready to go home by the way she was blinking.
Ah yes, my last girlfriend fit the bill for that quite well although I met her through a mutual friend, we had some good times but it was obvious that she had a very feminine way of communicating which caused issues, she always expected me to read between the lines and when I failed on the first attempt she would be very upset. So right now I'm sticking to one night stands until I meet someone who is at least capable of overlooking my inability to always read between the lines..
Exactly, and what's even more interesting is that if a man decides to be slightly more subtle than "UGH! ME MAN! YOU WOMAN!" but still way more obvious than women generally are then most women seem to completely miss that the man was hitting on them and I've heard women complain about how a guy should've been "more clear about it" yet they themselves think a smile and twirling their hair between their fingers while looking at a guy for two seconds from across the room somehow is enough effort to be considered "taking the first step".
And then they can't understand why the guys they like never understand that they're attracted to them...
Here are my three main gripes about Photoshop's interface:
Why is undo (ctrl-Z) single-level by default? If I'm using a tablet, one pen stroke usually ends up as multiple steps. Why do I have to hold down ctrl-ALT-Z?
I actually find this convenient as I often like hopping back and forth to see if the last edit I made looks "right".
Why am I forced to select something before doing most operations? If nothing is selected, surely it's logical I want to do it on the whole image.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by this.
What is Photoshop's equivalent to "Alpha to Selection", which I use all the time? (I'm sure it has one but damned if I can find it)
Switch to the Channels view and Ctrl/Cmd-click the alpha channel you want to use as the selection
I have no idea how they do crop in photoshop though....
There are actually two ways to crop a picture in Photoshop that are commonly used:
The first is to use the Canvas Size tool, I normally only use this when I know exactly how much I need to crop (like say, 372px on the left side and 53px on bottom), this tool is accessed through the Image menu or by pressing Cmd+Alt+C
The second way to crop is the regular crop tool, press C to select the crop tool and then hold down your left mouse buttons and just drag and release the mouse button, now everything outside the area you selected is shaded by default and you can adjust the select area before either clicking the button in the top toolbar or double-clicking the selected area to finish the crop.
Interesting, I tend to have my "standard" setups of software to run, Maya + Photoshop, Photoshop + Illustrator and so on. Running more than two while running a few "desktop apps" like Adium, Safari/Firefox and Mail.app will get my RAM use up to above 2 GiB. And since I like to have some free RAM to work with (in case I need to open a new large PSD or make twenty copies of an object in Maya etc.) I limit myself to two "heavy" apps at a time...
Sweden has a population density around 20 per square km. That would be comparable to Arkansas or Iowa and significantly less than the majority of US states yet the average broadband speed here is, once again, 18.2 Mbps. Where I live right now (in the northern half of Sweden known to southerners as the horrible frozen wasteland "Norrland";) I can get 24/8 Mbps via cable or 24/3 ADSL2+ (annex.m) but the real speed of DSL would be closer to 15-16 Mbps due to loop length. Yet I constantly hear of americans living a block away from the DSLAM being told that they can only get something along the lines of 2000/128 kbps because of crappy phone lines... I really don't think bundling us with semi-third world countries like Greece and Italy is fair, although comparing US states to European nations also has its own problems.
Of course, it was Cogent that dropped peering and then proceeded to block alternate routes to their network for any traffic that originates in Telia's network.
Also, Telia is hardly "too small for [you] to care", in both europe and the US they are a regional Tier 1 and with over 30k employees in the entire company (TeliaSonera) and $16 billion in revenue last year they're not exactly tiny...
You can't really compare the US to the European Union since there is a lot more diversity within the EU than there is within the US, the countries in the EU are independent countries (a whole bunch of them recently agreed to share a common currency but some (like us Swedes) have opted out of that). If you look at the page at Ars that was linked to the average speed here in Sweden is 18.2 Mbps with The Netherlands at 21.7 Mbps being the only other european nation to beat us, but if you average our connections out with those in Greece (1.0 Mbps) and the UK (2.6 Mbps) then of course we're gonna seem backwards. And now two of our largest ISPs are about to roll out VDSL2 so hopefully us DSL users will no longer be limited to 24 Mbps ADSL2+ (or hacked-up 28 Mbps ADSL2+ through TDC Song's network).
Actually, you left out the Vodka Belt, us real northern europeans like our drinks strong (of course, in Sweden this almost resulted in the downfall of our society since such a large percentage of our population was made up of alcoholics, we prefer not to tell foreigners about that though).
Of course there will be but that's not tech support's problem, that's for customer services when the customer gets shut down for running a spam zombie...
This is how things would play out:
User has set Norton/Panda/RandomCrapSWFirewall to auto-update because it told them it was a good idea.
Firewall updates itself and decides that no network connections should be allowed.
User decides after absolutely no attempt to research the problem that it must be be an ISP problem and calls tech support.
Two minutes later the user gets through to tech support and proceeds to bitch about the horribly long queue for about three to four minutes.
Next the tech support agent spends anywhere from two to thirty minutes figuring out that the connection is working fine and that the problem is in the user's computer. (time depends on how cooperative the user is and how fucked up the user's computer is)
The user will now refute this for another few minutes because "it was working an hour ago".
Eventually the user admits he/she does have a firewall and tech support asks the user to disable this firewall and call back if there is still a problem after doing so (since the user will no doubt be unable to figure out how to disable the firewall and will have to call the tech support line for the firewall software to accomplish this).
In the likely event that the problem occured several days before the user bothered calling in then the user will most likely then call customer services to demand the ISP credit the time that the customer's faulty software made the connection inaccesible (because someone else has to be responsible).
Seriously, this is how these cases usually play out and if you'd ever spent any time working first line support then you would understand that all solutions that involve fixing things on the user's computer have to be either hack'n'slash or someone else's problem (since anything beyond the standard config tools in Windows 9x/xp/vista, OS X and Linux is impossible for an ISP tech support agent to have to deal with, and if you're using the OEM's own network configuration tool then you'll either have to get their help disabling it or you'll get no support from your ISP).
Basically, don't backtalk the tech support "monkeys" until you've had to do their job. It pays crap, the customers treat you like shit and refuse to even consider that the problem might be on their end (and this is true regardless of how good you are at persuading them otherwise, that skill simply helps keep call times down since you are able to convince them that they may possibly be wrong a bit faster).
/Mikael (Yeah, I've spent way too much time doing tech support but it's hard to get out of when most potential employers seem to regard "first line tech support" on your resumé to be worse than "sold drugs and watched cartoons")
Yeah, of course when it comes to the router/VoIP box issue there's a very good reason to disconnect it whenever the problem isn't sync-related, and yet 90% or so of the customers will immediatly go into "But it worked yesterday waaaaaah!!"-mode the moment you ask them to disconnect their five year-old DLink DSL router. And amazingly that's also pretty close to the percentage of non sync-related connection issues that are resolved by disconnecting the router (and if the user doesn't have a NAT router or VoIP box you can count on disabling the software firewall will solve almost all problems (if the computer is otherwise properly configured and there are no obvious configuration errors on the ISP side)).
You know, it could very well be that the poor tech support monkey on the other end of the line has a list of things to check before submitting a ticket and if that list says "#23 - Has the computer been rebooted? [Y/N]" then they know they have to get the user to reboot the computer or the ticket will be sent back to them and they'll have to call the user and ask the user to reboot even though they know the problem couldn't possibly be solved by a reboot. And one of the things you learn in tech support is that you don't lie to or argue with 3rd line techs who make modem sync checklists with questions like that, they have more power than you and they don't like being proven wrong by someone in 1st line support.
But DNS cache poisoning isn't really a browser issue, is it? (although I suppose a browser exploit could be used to pollute the local DNS cache on a user's machine)
I believe the key part of your statement is "...in their right mind...", I've encountered way too many parents who seem to drag their kids along where ever they feel like going, it seems quite a lot of parents just filter the screams and random snot-blowing at complete strangers and other annoying behaviours right out, nothing beats sitting on the same plane/bus/train as a screaming child that flinging things all over the place while mommy is sitting right next to the kid reading a tabloid or talking on her cellphone.
Of course, doing that is like trying to get the cops to patrol in your neighbourhood more often by going around assaulting random strangers who would also love to have more cops, the people in the call centers who have to deal with the calls can't do anything about a generally bad service and they're the ones who have to take all the shit. Trust me when I say that the telco won't change just because there are more support calls, I worked tech support for a company that had five hour queues for months due to various problems and as I said, it took them months to get around to hiring more people (took over a month before they put out an ad and started holding interviews). The end result was that people in tech support ended up getting stressed to pieces, quitting due to the pressure from management to take more calls and work more night shifts while upper management just shrugged the whole thing off with the occasional email about how they were aware of the "situation" and were "taking appropriate actions".
And how many times have you been arrested? Just curious. It sounds to me like your parents are the ones that abdicated their responsibility. Until you are 18 in most states, they are still legally responsible for your behavior whether they feel that way or not.
I've never been arrested, I have testified for the prosecution though. As for my parents, they chose to actually teach me how to judge right from wrong. Also, I'm not in the US so legally their responsibilities where a bit different than they are in most places in the US.
My example you immediately took out of context was on how children WANT some boundaries. If her parents didn't care what she did, would she feel comfortable telling the boy "no" even if she didn't want to make out, have sex, whatever? A lot of girls that age don't have the self-esteem and will go along with things they wouldn't otherwise because they're afraid of losing the boyfriend. It doesn't matter how many times you tell them, if he pressures you, he's not worth it. They're IN LOVE. But (and I'm talking about today's maturity level), a 16 year-old is NOT emotionally mature enough to handle an adult relationship and it's consequences, whether they break up, she gets pregnant, gets an STD, etc. Most of these girls are not even mature enough to use birth control consistently. And if they're a minor--guess what--you the parent ARE responsible.
Strangely most people in the country I live in seem to consider it pretty normal that 15-16 year-old teens are having sex and kids are taught about sex, its consequences and how to protect yourself from these consequences in the best way at a fairly early age. And AFAIK when I was that age most girls seemed quite capable to use birth control pills and most people would use a condom when with a new sex partner.
But my point is, it makes a child's life easier if they have parents they can fall back on. It's much easier for a kid to complain that their parents are soooo strict and they won't let them do X than for them to stand up to their friends.
I disagree, IMO you're rationalising your paranoia about your kids when you should've taught them how to deal with their own problems and be available if/when they need your help.
Yes, you want children to take on *age appropriate* responsibility. But you've got to have some boundaries and consequences--that's how they learn responsibility. If there are no consequences then the boundaries are useless. And you can't expect a child to reason like an adult. They have to learn. Babies are all about me and mine. You have to teach them that everything doesn't belong to them and they are not the center of the universe. As they grow, you have to teach them to respect others and the rules to get along in society. To not do so is to end up with a selfish, anti-social adult.
Exactly, and for me and my sister most boundaries where gone by the time we were 12-13 years old, yet we weren't out torching cars and robbing gas stations, I suspect we just disagree about at what age a child is ready to be independent from his/her parents.
Personally, I started to wonder if this whole story was a bunch of made up crap. What is a seven year old going to do--get a MySpace page? And what did her brother do that made the parents slap on the restricted Internet. Is she just hearing him grousing about it and so she immediately think it's something worse than what it is--that she won't be able to play her my pretty pony game without mom's okay?
Well, in my home country most kids old enough to read and write seem to have user accounts on various web forums, her brother probably just had paranoid parents who thought that either Teh Intarwebs!!11 would drag him to some dark alley and rape and murder him or he would look at pictures of naked people. Some people are clueless enough that they'll installer SuperMegaBlocker2008XP++ and think that anything that it blocks must be bad regardless of how obvious it is that the block is erronous.
The media player in windows is complete shit but atleast you can use alternatives. In OSX.. Quicktime is the only game in town. iTunes comes with OSX... It doesnt come with windows.
There are no restrictions in OS X preventing you from using another media player such as Cog, VLC, mpg123 or really anything else that will compile and run on OS X. You also state that iTunes comes with OS X but not with Windows yet Windows comes with WMP but it doesn't come with OS X, oh wait! that's completely irrelevant!
The Dock in OSX is built in... In windows, you can dl docks made by various developers. Windows still could benefit from a dock feature being apart of a standard install.
So somehow having a default UI feature that doesn't even come with another OS means you're a monopoly? Most 3rd party dock software I've seen for Windows has had some interesting bugs (haven't really used Windows in 1-2 years though).
OSX's disk imaging backup time machine thing... It beats the crap out of the Vista one, which is crippled due to the fact that MS would be sued in court for putting the competition out of business.
Well, that's because MS is a convicted monopolist and Apple isn't, personally I use rsync+ssh to mirror data across drives and machines so I don't really know too much about their offerings but I've definitely heard of a couple of annoying limitations of Time Machine.
Vista has a terrible graphics viewer, where as OSX previews just about all file types right in the os.
If anything that implies that Vista is the OS that is selling because it's based on abuse of a monopoly situation.
Apple makes the hardware, sells you the computer, and the OS. It is a monopoly, more so than Microsoft. Microsoft doesnt insist you buy their pc hardware direct from their own stores and then charge you for their os.
Only if you're using some weird twilight zone definition of a monopoly, on the desktop computer market MS has a pretty steady grip of the market, Apple OTOH produce a complete system where they control both the hardware and the operating system, but saying that's a monopoly is like saying GM has a monopoly on the Chevy market.
Apple controls the distro of their hardware, software, and even f'n accesories. Apple Store anyone? iPod liscensed accessories....
Once again, we're in the realm of Apple hardware/software, as for iPod licensed accessories that's just the typical "guarantee" that an accessory will work with the Apple product at hand and is something lots of manufacturers do.
Apple has had their end of things locked up for a while. They have a monopoly more than MS has. MS may have more installs, but Apple is an entire entity that is in complete control of its hardware, software and sales. They dictate prices to you. There is no competition with Apple hardware, or software. You have one place to buy it, and It's from Apple.
Selling a complete system with hardware and OS tightly integrated is not a monopoly any more than selling a truck that comes with seats is a monopoly just because some other guy is selling just seats. Using this analogy may also help illustrate the idea that you're not allowed to run OS X on non-Apple hardware, it would be like telling people who buy extra seats for their trucks that those seats have only been verified to work with your trucks (while also using specials fittings for the seats to make it harder to just stick the seats in any old junk car).
Also remember that, even if you get a decent DSL modem, they may still have you allocated under a lower performance profile just out of average expectation of attainable speed. If you contact tech support and you're lucky enough to get someone knowledgeable, they can get you in contact with the group that actually manage the provisioning at the DSLAM and get them to try some higher rate settings on their end.
I don't know if this is one of these situations where the US ISPs seemingly attempt to be different for the sake of being different (for example, AFAIK PPPoE is fairly rare outside of the US but in the US it's almost impossible to get DSL without PPPoE) but with the ISPs that I have worked with the standard DSLAM profile has always been 8M if the customer is paying for 8M, 24M if the customer is paying for 24M and 2M if the customer is paying for 2M (or any other speed they're paying for). If there's a problem the first step from the ISP's side is generally to activate interleave on the connection, if that doesn't work and there are problem they'll start lowering the speed but there's no point in setting the speed to lower than what the customer is paying for from the start as the predicted max speed isn't very reliable, some people living practially nextdoor to the DSLAM can't get more than 4-5 Mbps and there are people living several kilometers from the DSLAM getting speeds 20-40% higher than what would be expected on an average phone line...
He was first convicted of "Hets Mot Folkgrupp" (Swedish Hate speech law that makes it illegal to publicly make statements that threaten or expresse disrespect for an ethnic group or similar group regarding skin color, national/ethnic origin, faith or sexual orientation) by Kalmar Tingsrätt (lower level court) but was later acquitted by Göta Hovrätt (mid level court) who ruled that while he did break Swedish law a conviction by the court would most likely be overruled by the European Court of Human Rights.
Slashdot Mirror
But we know the host always opens a door with nothing behind it, which leaves two doors and a second choice between two doors and we know there's a prize behind one of these doors. Basically, the first choice you make is useless, you might as well just have two doors with a prize behind one of them.
/Mikael
My point was that you make two choices with the first one being essentially useless since the host always opens one of the doors that has no prize behind it. And then you get to choose between two doors, one with a prize and one without a prize. Thus, a 1/2 chance of winning regardless if you once again pick the door you picked first or choose the other door.
/Mikael
I've always seen this problem as follows:
Since this is how the game plays out then you always have a 1/2 chance of getting it right, regardless of what door you always end up having to pick between two doors, one with a prize and one without a prize.
/Mikael
I actually had a few "Deathstars", in fact, I still have one in one of my machines still running fine. Not a single one of them has crashed for me, one made the infamous "click of death" but then just kept on running...
I always love mentioning that when people say IBM hardware is of poor quality (generally gamers and similar people who will never again touch any product by a company if they so much as hear a rumour about one of their products failing a bit too often, yet they'll gladly buy the cheapest possible parts and bitch about anything that isn't consumer-grade crap is overpriced).
/Mikael
The OP was talking about pot.
And if you haven't seen the anti-drug commercials they do mention marijuana as a product that is somehow connected to terrorism.
/Mikael
The stalker idea sounds interesting, unfortunately the only women who have exhibited that behaviour toward me have either been 40 year-old single mothers or 15 year-olds and since I'm in my mid-twenties I'd rather go for someone a bit more my age.
Additionally, you don't want damaged goods like the girls you mention. Women in particular have the problem of expecting men to be mind readers once they are in a relationship. Can you imagine if you lucked into banging a girl whose initial signal was glancing at you across a crowded room? The rest of the relationship would be you having to defend yourself because you didn't KNOW she was ready to go home by the way she was blinking.Ah yes, my last girlfriend fit the bill for that quite well although I met her through a mutual friend, we had some good times but it was obvious that she had a very feminine way of communicating which caused issues, she always expected me to read between the lines and when I failed on the first attempt she would be very upset. So right now I'm sticking to one night stands until I meet someone who is at least capable of overlooking my inability to always read between the lines..
/Mikael
Exactly, and what's even more interesting is that if a man decides to be slightly more subtle than "UGH! ME MAN! YOU WOMAN!" but still way more obvious than women generally are then most women seem to completely miss that the man was hitting on them and I've heard women complain about how a guy should've been "more clear about it" yet they themselves think a smile and twirling their hair between their fingers while looking at a guy for two seconds from across the room somehow is enough effort to be considered "taking the first step".
And then they can't understand why the guys they like never understand that they're attracted to them...
/Mikael
I actually find this convenient as I often like hopping back and forth to see if the last edit I made looks "right".
Why am I forced to select something before doing most operations? If nothing is selected, surely it's logical I want to do it on the whole image.I'm not sure I understand what you mean by this.
What is Photoshop's equivalent to "Alpha to Selection", which I use all the time? (I'm sure it has one but damned if I can find it)Switch to the Channels view and Ctrl/Cmd-click the alpha channel you want to use as the selection
/Mikael
There are actually two ways to crop a picture in Photoshop that are commonly used:
The first is to use the Canvas Size tool, I normally only use this when I know exactly how much I need to crop (like say, 372px on the left side and 53px on bottom), this tool is accessed through the Image menu or by pressing Cmd+Alt+C
The second way to crop is the regular crop tool, press C to select the crop tool and then hold down your left mouse buttons and just drag and release the mouse button, now everything outside the area you selected is shaded by default and you can adjust the select area before either clicking the button in the top toolbar or double-clicking the selected area to finish the crop.
/Mikael
Interesting, I tend to have my "standard" setups of software to run, Maya + Photoshop, Photoshop + Illustrator and so on. Running more than two while running a few "desktop apps" like Adium, Safari/Firefox and Mail.app will get my RAM use up to above 2 GiB. And since I like to have some free RAM to work with (in case I need to open a new large PSD or make twenty copies of an object in Maya etc.) I limit myself to two "heavy" apps at a time...
/Mikael
Telia is considered a Tier 1 in the US and European regions, in other regions they also pay for transit. They do however have a global backbone...
/Mikael
Sweden has a population density around 20 per square km. That would be comparable to Arkansas or Iowa and significantly less than the majority of US states yet the average broadband speed here is, once again, 18.2 Mbps. Where I live right now (in the northern half of Sweden known to southerners as the horrible frozen wasteland "Norrland" ;) I can get 24/8 Mbps via cable or 24/3 ADSL2+ (annex.m) but the real speed of DSL would be closer to 15-16 Mbps due to loop length. Yet I constantly hear of americans living a block away from the DSLAM being told that they can only get something along the lines of 2000/128 kbps because of crappy phone lines... I really don't think bundling us with semi-third world countries like Greece and Italy is fair, although comparing US states to European nations also has its own problems.
/Mikael
Of course, it was Cogent that dropped peering and then proceeded to block alternate routes to their network for any traffic that originates in Telia's network.
Also, Telia is hardly "too small for [you] to care", in both europe and the US they are a regional Tier 1 and with over 30k employees in the entire company (TeliaSonera) and $16 billion in revenue last year they're not exactly tiny...
/Mikael
You can't really compare the US to the European Union since there is a lot more diversity within the EU than there is within the US, the countries in the EU are independent countries (a whole bunch of them recently agreed to share a common currency but some (like us Swedes) have opted out of that). If you look at the page at Ars that was linked to the average speed here in Sweden is 18.2 Mbps with The Netherlands at 21.7 Mbps being the only other european nation to beat us, but if you average our connections out with those in Greece (1.0 Mbps) and the UK (2.6 Mbps) then of course we're gonna seem backwards. And now two of our largest ISPs are about to roll out VDSL2 so hopefully us DSL users will no longer be limited to 24 Mbps ADSL2+ (or hacked-up 28 Mbps ADSL2+ through TDC Song's network).
/Mikael
Actually, you left out the Vodka Belt, us real northern europeans like our drinks strong (of course, in Sweden this almost resulted in the downfall of our society since such a large percentage of our population was made up of alcoholics, we prefer not to tell foreigners about that though).
/Mikael
Of course there will be but that's not tech support's problem, that's for customer services when the customer gets shut down for running a spam zombie...
This is how things would play out:
Seriously, this is how these cases usually play out and if you'd ever spent any time working first line support then you would understand that all solutions that involve fixing things on the user's computer have to be either hack'n'slash or someone else's problem (since anything beyond the standard config tools in Windows 9x/xp/vista, OS X and Linux is impossible for an ISP tech support agent to have to deal with, and if you're using the OEM's own network configuration tool then you'll either have to get their help disabling it or you'll get no support from your ISP).
Basically, don't backtalk the tech support "monkeys" until you've had to do their job. It pays crap, the customers treat you like shit and refuse to even consider that the problem might be on their end (and this is true regardless of how good you are at persuading them otherwise, that skill simply helps keep call times down since you are able to convince them that they may possibly be wrong a bit faster).
/Mikael (Yeah, I've spent way too much time doing tech support but it's hard to get out of when most potential employers seem to regard "first line tech support" on your resumé to be worse than "sold drugs and watched cartoons")
Yeah, of course when it comes to the router/VoIP box issue there's a very good reason to disconnect it whenever the problem isn't sync-related, and yet 90% or so of the customers will immediatly go into "But it worked yesterday waaaaaah!!"-mode the moment you ask them to disconnect their five year-old DLink DSL router. And amazingly that's also pretty close to the percentage of non sync-related connection issues that are resolved by disconnecting the router (and if the user doesn't have a NAT router or VoIP box you can count on disabling the software firewall will solve almost all problems (if the computer is otherwise properly configured and there are no obvious configuration errors on the ISP side)).
/Mikael
You know, it could very well be that the poor tech support monkey on the other end of the line has a list of things to check before submitting a ticket and if that list says "#23 - Has the computer been rebooted? [Y/N]" then they know they have to get the user to reboot the computer or the ticket will be sent back to them and they'll have to call the user and ask the user to reboot even though they know the problem couldn't possibly be solved by a reboot. And one of the things you learn in tech support is that you don't lie to or argue with 3rd line techs who make modem sync checklists with questions like that, they have more power than you and they don't like being proven wrong by someone in 1st line support.
/mikael
But DNS cache poisoning isn't really a browser issue, is it? (although I suppose a browser exploit could be used to pollute the local DNS cache on a user's machine)
/Mikael
I believe the key part of your statement is "...in their right mind...", I've encountered way too many parents who seem to drag their kids along where ever they feel like going, it seems quite a lot of parents just filter the screams and random snot-blowing at complete strangers and other annoying behaviours right out, nothing beats sitting on the same plane/bus/train as a screaming child that flinging things all over the place while mommy is sitting right next to the kid reading a tabloid or talking on her cellphone.
/Mikael
Of course, doing that is like trying to get the cops to patrol in your neighbourhood more often by going around assaulting random strangers who would also love to have more cops, the people in the call centers who have to deal with the calls can't do anything about a generally bad service and they're the ones who have to take all the shit. Trust me when I say that the telco won't change just because there are more support calls, I worked tech support for a company that had five hour queues for months due to various problems and as I said, it took them months to get around to hiring more people (took over a month before they put out an ad and started holding interviews). The end result was that people in tech support ended up getting stressed to pieces, quitting due to the pressure from management to take more calls and work more night shifts while upper management just shrugged the whole thing off with the occasional email about how they were aware of the "situation" and were "taking appropriate actions".
/Mikael
I've never been arrested, I have testified for the prosecution though. As for my parents, they chose to actually teach me how to judge right from wrong. Also, I'm not in the US so legally their responsibilities where a bit different than they are in most places in the US.
My example you immediately took out of context was on how children WANT some boundaries. If her parents didn't care what she did, would she feel comfortable telling the boy "no" even if she didn't want to make out, have sex, whatever? A lot of girls that age don't have the self-esteem and will go along with things they wouldn't otherwise because they're afraid of losing the boyfriend. It doesn't matter how many times you tell them, if he pressures you, he's not worth it. They're IN LOVE. But (and I'm talking about today's maturity level), a 16 year-old is NOT emotionally mature enough to handle an adult relationship and it's consequences, whether they break up, she gets pregnant, gets an STD, etc. Most of these girls are not even mature enough to use birth control consistently. And if they're a minor--guess what--you the parent ARE responsible.Strangely most people in the country I live in seem to consider it pretty normal that 15-16 year-old teens are having sex and kids are taught about sex, its consequences and how to protect yourself from these consequences in the best way at a fairly early age. And AFAIK when I was that age most girls seemed quite capable to use birth control pills and most people would use a condom when with a new sex partner.
But my point is, it makes a child's life easier if they have parents they can fall back on. It's much easier for a kid to complain that their parents are soooo strict and they won't let them do X than for them to stand up to their friends.I disagree, IMO you're rationalising your paranoia about your kids when you should've taught them how to deal with their own problems and be available if/when they need your help.
Yes, you want children to take on *age appropriate* responsibility. But you've got to have some boundaries and consequences--that's how they learn responsibility. If there are no consequences then the boundaries are useless. And you can't expect a child to reason like an adult. They have to learn. Babies are all about me and mine. You have to teach them that everything doesn't belong to them and they are not the center of the universe. As they grow, you have to teach them to respect others and the rules to get along in society. To not do so is to end up with a selfish, anti-social adult.Exactly, and for me and my sister most boundaries where gone by the time we were 12-13 years old, yet we weren't out torching cars and robbing gas stations, I suspect we just disagree about at what age a child is ready to be independent from his/her parents.
Personally, I started to wonder if this whole story was a bunch of made up crap. What is a seven year old going to do--get a MySpace page? And what did her brother do that made the parents slap on the restricted Internet. Is she just hearing him grousing about it and so she immediately think it's something worse than what it is--that she won't be able to play her my pretty pony game without mom's okay?Well, in my home country most kids old enough to read and write seem to have user accounts on various web forums, her brother probably just had paranoid parents who thought that either Teh Intarwebs!!11 would drag him to some dark alley and rape and murder him or he would look at pictures of naked people. Some people are clueless enough that they'll installer SuperMegaBlocker2008XP++ and think that anything that it blocks must be bad regardless of how obvious it is that the block is erronous.
/Mikael
There are no restrictions in OS X preventing you from using another media player such as Cog, VLC, mpg123 or really anything else that will compile and run on OS X. You also state that iTunes comes with OS X but not with Windows yet Windows comes with WMP but it doesn't come with OS X, oh wait! that's completely irrelevant!
The Dock in OSX is built in... In windows, you can dl docks made by various developers. Windows still could benefit from a dock feature being apart of a standard install.So somehow having a default UI feature that doesn't even come with another OS means you're a monopoly? Most 3rd party dock software I've seen for Windows has had some interesting bugs (haven't really used Windows in 1-2 years though).
OSX's disk imaging backup time machine thing... It beats the crap out of the Vista one, which is crippled due to the fact that MS would be sued in court for putting the competition out of business.Well, that's because MS is a convicted monopolist and Apple isn't, personally I use rsync+ssh to mirror data across drives and machines so I don't really know too much about their offerings but I've definitely heard of a couple of annoying limitations of Time Machine.
Vista has a terrible graphics viewer, where as OSX previews just about all file types right in the os.If anything that implies that Vista is the OS that is selling because it's based on abuse of a monopoly situation.
Apple makes the hardware, sells you the computer, and the OS. It is a monopoly, more so than Microsoft. Microsoft doesnt insist you buy their pc hardware direct from their own stores and then charge you for their os.Only if you're using some weird twilight zone definition of a monopoly, on the desktop computer market MS has a pretty steady grip of the market, Apple OTOH produce a complete system where they control both the hardware and the operating system, but saying that's a monopoly is like saying GM has a monopoly on the Chevy market.
Apple controls the distro of their hardware, software, and even f'n accesories. Apple Store anyone? iPod liscensed accessories....Once again, we're in the realm of Apple hardware/software, as for iPod licensed accessories that's just the typical "guarantee" that an accessory will work with the Apple product at hand and is something lots of manufacturers do.
Apple has had their end of things locked up for a while. They have a monopoly more than MS has. MS may have more installs, but Apple is an entire entity that is in complete control of its hardware, software and sales. They dictate prices to you. There is no competition with Apple hardware, or software. You have one place to buy it, and It's from Apple.Selling a complete system with hardware and OS tightly integrated is not a monopoly any more than selling a truck that comes with seats is a monopoly just because some other guy is selling just seats. Using this analogy may also help illustrate the idea that you're not allowed to run OS X on non-Apple hardware, it would be like telling people who buy extra seats for their trucks that those seats have only been verified to work with your trucks (while also using specials fittings for the seats to make it harder to just stick the seats in any old junk car).
/Mikael (IHBT IHL HAND)
I don't know if this is one of these situations where the US ISPs seemingly attempt to be different for the sake of being different (for example, AFAIK PPPoE is fairly rare outside of the US but in the US it's almost impossible to get DSL without PPPoE) but with the ISPs that I have worked with the standard DSLAM profile has always been 8M if the customer is paying for 8M, 24M if the customer is paying for 24M and 2M if the customer is paying for 2M (or any other speed they're paying for). If there's a problem the first step from the ISP's side is generally to activate interleave on the connection, if that doesn't work and there are problem they'll start lowering the speed but there's no point in setting the speed to lower than what the customer is paying for from the start as the predicted max speed isn't very reliable, some people living practially nextdoor to the DSLAM can't get more than 4-5 Mbps and there are people living several kilometers from the DSLAM getting speeds 20-40% higher than what would be expected on an average phone line...
/Mikael
He was first convicted of "Hets Mot Folkgrupp" (Swedish Hate speech law that makes it illegal to publicly make statements that threaten or expresse disrespect for an ethnic group or similar group regarding skin color, national/ethnic origin, faith or sexual orientation) by Kalmar Tingsrätt (lower level court) but was later acquitted by Göta Hovrätt (mid level court) who ruled that while he did break Swedish law a conviction by the court would most likely be overruled by the European Court of Human Rights.
/Mikael