Life would be a lot less dangerous if cretins like this didn't insist on doing stupid shit in public.
No, it wouldn't, and that's central to the argument. One guy per year driving a Beemer cross country at stupid speeds, might get into an accident. Let's say he takes out a minivan of kids. No, two. Three minivans of kids, and a dozen children and their soccer moms die. If people of this caliber of stupidity are as rare as they seem to be (it's rare that I see someone passing me at 100mph on the shoulder), and they only kill a dozen people, then that's a pretty low risk compared to the normal risks of drunk driving plus cell phones, plus every other thing that normally goes wrong in a car driving within 10 mph of the speed limit. In order to have an impact on "life would be a lot less dangerous", you have to be a significant portion of life's danger, and either reduce the odds of it happening (reduce drunk driving, for example) or reduce the consequences (air bags and seat belts).
If my biggest risk was rich people driving 100mph cross country, I'd sleep easier at night, even if it were 100 times as frequent.
So, in short, the 13 yr old had no problem with it, but the mother couldn't understand it, so it's a bad OS? Yeah, that's GREAT logic.
Also, "she's 13" is not a valid retort for why it shouldn't matter that she found value in it. She obviously knew how to use it more than the mother did.
I'm sorry, wait, what? The 13 year old daughter liked the widgets. Mom explicitly said that's why the daughter wanted it. Maybe we can assume Mom thought shelling out >$100 would at the minimum be neutral (hopefully improving) every feature she came to love about XP. Instead, the experience degraded. The 13 year old daughter, who has probably never worked a day in her life, nor is she likely to for another 2-3 years, is unable to grasp the value of the money it cost to get the OS upgrade, so is unable to judge the value of the product. Just because she knows how to use the widgets better than Mom doesn't mean she can weigh the value of the money it took to buy the upgrade against the other things that money could have been used for.
I side with Mom. The girl is 13. Her opinion matters, but her opinion is not the only thing that matters.
The price of all those mass produced pieces can't even cost half that, let alone the price you'd pay with unlimited virginity were you to actually assemble that.
Unlimited virginity? Damn, my wife's going to be upset. Wait, mine, or hers?
Looks like someone never studied basic relativity. In relation to the Euro, the US dollar is falling. In relation to the US dollar, the Euro is rising. Currency trading works the same way as physical motion in this respect. Now the root cause is indeed the same, but that doesn't make it incorrect to say that other currencies are rising against the dollar.
Either you're exceptionally right, and proving your own point, or you're so deep in theoretical physics you've lost touch with the real world. If I jump, I can easily say that I've risen (defining "up" is easily accepted here) -- clearly every reasonable frame of reference, from the room around me to the ground below me, has not been pushed away from my feet. A theoretical physicist, of course, is free to change his frame of reference and define me as "staying still", but the math gets hard to compute everything else in the known universe moving with respect to my static body when my legs are moving like that. Similarly, if a reasonable person says the dollar is falling, a reasonable person understands that the average other currency is staying still. If a reasonable person says that Canadian dollar and the Euro are rising against a static dollar, but it turns out every other currency in the known world is also rising by the same amount, it turned out to be less misleading to state the dollar was falling.
Put another way, if the Yen, Canadian dollar, Euro and Australian dollar are all rising at the same rate against the US dollar, then it's in fact the dollar that's falling, indicating that the US can't keep up with parity. Unfortunately, due to Chinese policy, we can't directly interpret the Yuan's exchange rate.
Trackballs and mice are two different beasts. Someone who wants to use one will misuse the other, in my experience. The mouse users will move their entire arm to move a trackball and the trackball users will complain about how they have to move their entire arm around the desk in order to get anything done with a mouse.
I'm on my third and forth Kensington trackballs. My first was Mac specific, ADB Expert Mouse. The second was 9 pin serial, PC specific Turbo Mouse. Now I've got a Turbo Mouse Pro at work (USB, scroll wheel above the wheel, 4+6 buttons) in RHEL, which is great, except it's still roller controlled. At home, I'm blessed with their optically controlled Expert Mouse (USB / MacOSX), which has a scroll wheel surrounding the ball and 4 buttons on the periphery. Any replacement will be that exact model, if possible. Before finding Kensington, I found a variety of trackballs that were better than mice, but typically had inertia-less balls or too much friction on the bearing.
I got near-deadly accuracy on Quake Team Arena with my trackball (in 2001?), and I use my trackball at work doing CAD work, which some people might call graphic design. The truth is, it's great for any general use, and I've gotten very good at fine pointing too; but I cannot convert any mouse user to my preference. They just don't see the advantages.
Sex when I was 18 was awkward and boring, I can't imagine the kind of horrible flopping around I would have had if I had been 14 or 15.... I much prefer my twenties, and I'm looking forward to my thirties. I'm having a great time compared to ten years ago.
I'm in my thirties. I've got to tell you, the 20s were pretty darn good. And if you're a teenager who realizes his limitations and is willing to have fun, despite the awkwardness, you have fun too -- no matter what you're doing.
It seems to me that you're the kind of person who blooms late because he's not ready to have fun before he's comfortable, and if that's the case, learning how to be comfortable takes a very long time. Throughout life, the more you question your own boundaries, the more fun you have. Of course, when you're 30 and older, the more you question your physical boundaries, the more you wonder why the next morning. The mantra of the 30s is "Wow, that's gonna hurt tomorrow".
We understand the size of the target market. We understand that it may not be economically viable. But does it hurt to ask for a port? I'd drop wine/WoW for a native LOTR online port.
What a strange thing to say, dropping a particular product with a native compatibility library for another based on the libraries themselves. Do you do that with Motif, Qt or GTK? Google's Picassa includes the Wine libraries (Wine Is Not an Emulator, remember?) for Linux compatibility. What if Blizzard included Wine libraries in a WoW package for Linux? We all know it won't happen, but would you have a problem with Wine then? If LOTRO stated it ran on Linux, but it turned out it did so with the assistance of included Wine libraries, would you then stop using it?
I know there are some people who disagreed with TrollTech a few years ago, and there are still people who disagree with the vendors who sell Wine (and employ several developers, and feed patches back), but that didn't seem to be where you were at.
Each person has his or her own personal styles. Experiment. Get variety packs. Freshness matters for some people -- roast within a year of picking, grind within 2 weeks of roasting, brew within 2 hours of grinding. Personally, I don't follow those at all -- I care, but not that much. Without getting into superiority contests, some people just don't care -- my mother prefers instant Folgers to anything I drink.
I prefer Green Mountain Coffee to anything else I've consumed. I've had everything my grocery stores in three states and two countries will sell me. Lately, I've preferred lighter roasting over darker roasts, with my recent favorite flavor being Green Mountain's Ethiopian organic.
I don't like the metal or plastic flavors that many coffee makers instill, so I've been enjoying a Chemex coffee maker since 2001. Simple, gravity drip. There's some science behind it that may as well be snake oil, but I really like it.
I went to a "coffee class" when I was living in Japan. The instructor swore the best way to make coffee was to drip it. You had to pour just a little bit into the ground beans, to get it to bloom. Then you could pour in slowly as long as the grounds were floating. You don't let it fill up, you certainly don't let the water get to the edge of the filter, just a slow but constant flow. Before all the water finishes dripping, you remove it from your drink. If done properly, you can see a dry ring of unused grounds around the edge of the filter. Otherwise, all the bitterness is released and flows to the coffee. I think he was crazy and he couldn't pass a double blind test.
My last coffee preference -- if you're in Japan and get coffee in a can from a vending machine, Boss makes the... least bad.
I thought the whole thing was that it was a 128 bit prime, because factoring out smaller numbers reduced the effectiveness of the cipher. Wouldn't it therefore be more interesting to find 128 bit primes? Certainly it would be possible to publish a list of all prime numbers with 16 and fewer digits, even if the computational power required to do so would be high.
The bag, upon further inspection, seems to be devoid of any felines! It would appear they have recently vacated said container!
Last time I saw a cat get out of a bag, there was a whole bunch of hissing and yeowling, some fur and pieces of plastic bag flying through the air, cat urine on the carpet and a blur running up the stairs. Truly it is wise to "let the cat out" than to allow it to escape on its own.
The time for taking Vonage is coming to a middle?
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The End for Vonage?
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When I was looking to see what to do about a phone last year, it looked like Vonage's quarterly losses were identical to their quarterly budget for advertising. If they can stem the tide of people leaving and cut their advertising budget, maybe that brings them close to a break-even. On the other hand, I'd be foolish not to look into their competition and figure out how to hedge my bets in case they circle the drain.
My time for taking Vonage seriously is certainly coming to a middle.
My MP3 player fits in the palm of my hand or in my pocket and has a 15 hour playing time. My cell phone has a 2 hour talk time and several day stand-by time, which in my case translates to about 2 days between charging. Why would I risk missing/losing an important phone call to listen to music?
I think they're shooting for the kind of person who will be able to plug the device in wherever they like. For example, someone listens to music on the way to a destination, then docks it there (work, school, etc). For most people, that would be more than enough time for a 1-2 hour commute home, make a few brief calls after work and again before work the next day, another 1-2 hour music-filled commute, then docking at work for the day (or at home for the night).
With new functionality, phones are changing what people want. A few years ago, I wanted a simple phone with good audio quality (closer to my old analog brick than the new low-bitrate digital flimsy things) and a 12 button keypad. Forget the camera, games, etc. Now that bluetooth allows synching with my address book, I'm really appreciating a visible screen, menus and function keys. Those cameras come in handy sometimes too (documenting car accidents, a sign to look up later, the contents of a whiteboard at work).
When the iPhone matures, we'll have to see what Apple comes up with. Maybe we won't need 3rd party support. Maybe the widget/applet/dashboard thing can fill the need of most of our favorite third party apps and the installed programs will actually be good enough we don't have to replace them with other things.
With that said, I don't care what the phone does, if it costs $500, I don't need it -- nevermind the requisite data packages. As much as I like some of the free phones now (or even negative cost after rebate), I don't need one. I have a desk job and I don't go anywhere else without my wife -- who has a decent enough phone for emergencies.
Video games offer simulated friends. Whether they're voiceless automated opponents, voiced automated allies or people on the other side of Live or Battle.net, video games provide personal interaction that television and Legos don't.
How can Legos, Lincoln Logs and action figures win? They don't come WITH friends, you still have to invite someone to play. Barring that, it's solitary play because the parents are likely busy with their own lives.
Non video games can't win until they come with parents and playmates that make them more interesting and compelling than their electronic counterparts. This doesn't mean the 10 hours a week you're not too tired from work, this means 150% of the time the kid wants to play -- if availablility is a scarce resource, the kid may hesitate to ask for it.
I want my kids to learn how to play without the computer, and they are doing a good job so far, but one day the instant digital companion is just going to win.
And then you can pay $300 again in six months when the flimsy POS dies and needs to be replaced. According to some stats I've seen most Macs are used and kept around for about four years, whereas the replacement rate for PCs is just two.
My current primary home machine: 1.0GHz Powerbook G4. It's a 2002 machine that I didn't get until 2004. Going on 5 years and will hopefully make another 12-18 months. (5 year life, identical machines on eBay are showing the model holds its value) I have half a mind to keep my Powerbook going until it craters, but the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros beckon.
My Powerbook G4 replaced a dual 500MHz PowerMac G4. It was a 1999 machine that I got in 2001. Sold it on eBay for over $500 in 2004. (5 year lifetime, not fully depreciated)
My dual 500MHz PowerMac G4 replaced a homebuilt 350MHz AMD K6+ machine I put together in 1998. The motherboard, an Asus (P55T2P4) was well known as a quality board, but was on its way south when the Powermac came my way. It wasn't going for more than shipping cost on eBay.
The late 1990s brought me a variety of x86 machines that were short lived. 486-80 that lived from 1996 to 1999 (couldn't upgrade the RAM enough), a 486 66 that lasted from 1994 to 1996 (some driver problems with Win95) and a 286 that came to me used made in 1991(?) to 1994.
Beating my current 5 year old Powerbook, however, is my dad's IBM PC. I beat on it as a kid almost daily from the time it came home in 1982 until it finally gave up the ghost in 1989. It went into a repair shop, saw some expensive upgrades (like a 10 meg MFM hard drive on an RLL controller for a "hot and unstable but it'll give you 5 extra megs free") and finally stayed down in 1992.
Education educates consumers. Marketing misleads them. The statement
"This can only be done when businesses are allowed to market their products and services."
is patently false. Consumer Reports, for example, won't fold up and die if marketing magically ceased to exist.
Funny you mention Consumer Reports as "education" by that definition. I find them misleading in every topic I can. I've read a few articles from them and they're all bunk. They wrote up the Ionic Breeze a few years ago -- an air filter that has no moving parts and is sold by Sharper Image. They called it entirely ineffective and cited the lack of fans as justification that it didn't do anything at all. Utter crap! I have owned three and they work great for medium sized rooms!
And ask any educated mother of someone under the age of 6 what Consumer Reports just did about car seats.
Consumer Reports is uneducated crap proving that people starving for information will buy anything.
I fully expect that if I met all the people at Consumer Reports, each and every one would be very well educated writers, probably nice people to boot, but they're hardly experts in all the areas they write about. I wonder about calling them enthusiasts in these areas, but even a car seat enthusiast (they do exist) is able to shoot down what Consumer Reports has done.
Consumer Reports is advertising. Maybe they're not getting paid by the companies they recommend, but they recommend purchasing one or more items and disparage one or more items using pseudoscience and personal preference as reasons. That's advertising in my book.
You're going to the wrong cinemas, man.
http://www.drafthouse.com/
Over 18 only, a full waitstaff to bring you food and beer while you enjoy the show, and plenty of mainstream, non-mainstream, and local movies. I don't go to regular theaters anymore since I moved to Austin and discovered the Drafthouses.
Holy shit you're right! I'm so stupid! I should drive accross town just to see a movie at one of the prearranged times, pay for someone else's beer and chips plus the babysitter!
Or... I could press play from the comfort of my own TV, have a beer, water, soda, tea, coffee, whatever, listening to my children sleep, pausing whenever the baby monitor picks up something abnormal.
Downloading movies isn't just about sticky floors. The Alamo Drafthouse doesn't solve every problem the over 21 crowd has. In fact, for a lot of us, it poses more problems than it solves (so much for the dinner in the movie, can't take kids). So, I'm left to wait for the DVD. Or, honestly, I've likely forgotten about all the movies that sounded good 3-6 months ago.
For those of us who want to see a new movie and can't afford to hit the theaters a few times a week, we either can download what we see advertised on television (2 bucks for a movie would be a reasonable download fee but torrents are a convenient alternative), or we can do a bunch of research on Rotten Tomatoes to pick out something we can queue up in Netflix (waiting days to weeks for the selection) or drive to blockbuster.
I don't know anybody who watches any downloaded movies they'd pay to see in the theaters. The geek crowd still turns out in droves to see Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, even though we all have the ability to download. Downloaded movies take the place of television, in my experience. MPAA members don't suffer from missed revenue. Maybe NBC and CBS should do the suing...
Sorry.. I normally try to refrain from commenting on these kind of issues, since I'm European, and will be considered someone not knowledgable enough by a lot of people. But... I can't resist this time.
As an American who put in over a year overseas, I know our foreign policy reputation at this time. It's not kind. I have been recognized on the streets as an American and confronted on my political beliefs. I'd like to think I gave the "right answer", but I honestly don't know what would have happened a few times if I had expressed support for my president. Let me just let you know, there are many of us (maybe less than 50%, but more than 10%) who believe the French were right in holding off invasion plans and who believe the United Nations was founded in order to prevent another World War II. A seemingly unending bureaucracy it may be, but it's checked by the majority of countries with a last sanity check of the consensus of a diverse group with the most vested interest in a stable world.
We're fighting to change the political future of our country. It's slow, and it's built upon a mountain of vested interests in large corporations and minimization of energy insecurity.
" - Humor (not a strict requirement perhaps, but the movies have humor too)."
Wow, "have humor?"
The first Ghostbusters is one of the funniest films of all time.
Did you even see the second one? The inside of the Statue of Liberty was covered in Pink Mood Slime and she was driven around with a joystick. That's not even approaching funny. The first movie was great. The cartoon was a staple of many children's Saturday mornings and later their schoolday afternoons. The second movie was like the second Gremlins.
The plural of Lego is Lego NOT Legos! I'm getting fed up with every slashdot article on Lego getting this wrong, and a huge portion of the debate being about the pluralisation not the story.
Oh boy, I love it when people get nitpicky about things they don't know about. Whether we call them Legos, Lego, LEGOs or LEGO, we're legally wrong (and I do it all the time). The correct answer, as Susan Williams instructed us on the back of every instruction manual from the late 70s through 1987 (?) is to call them Lego brand building blocks. "Lego", it turns out, is the brand name, not the product. They're afraid of Tyco being able to call their products "MegaBlock brand lego blocks" and diluting their trademark like so many other companies.
Personally, I have a closet loaded with Legos. When my daughter graduates from Duplos, she'll get Legos. I'm not a lawyer, and I really don't care about trademarks enough to force that kind of burden onto children. My children will be taught that copyright and intellectual property law is there only to further the progress of art and science, not for the purpose of furthering jobs or corporate profits (although in any free market economy companies will be rewarded for meaninful progress of art and science). While I lean liberal in many beliefs, I'm fully aware of how limiting the US Constitution is with regard to intellectual property; it's very precise and quite limiting.
If all slashdot posts from the history of Slashdot were sorted into color bins,
* every post including the -2 trolls would get their own unique color,
* all the colors which are predominantly blue would be claimed as "first posts,"
* all the colors which are predominantly green would be unfunny memes like "hot grits,"
* all the colors which are predominantly red would be complaints about editing or journalism,
* the pure cyan, magenta, yellow shades are moderated as insightful or interesting,
* the 256 posts corresponding to completely neutral gray shades are actually insightful or interesting
Can I mod you as a pale reddish cyan? Do users' names end up getting averaged their mod points? Can teenagers make a strategy game of making posts to align with their favorite vanity color? Or is that a "Color Whore", leading/. to change the entire system to a series of 5 colors?
...if Microsoft can have a patch for two states and one territory in a relatively small country...
"Small country"? Small country?! YOU don't have other people on your continent screaming at you to remember you're not the only country on the continent.
Simply have the equipment shut off or unplugged. Then it will be using 0 watts. Much less than using standby.
Good luck with "off". My DishNetwork satellite decoder pulled the same power (30 Watts) whether it was driving the TV outputs and green power light as when it wasn't. My 2x 2GHz PowerMac G5 pulled 32 Watts in standby (aka "sleep") and 30 Watts off (who cares about 2 Watts out of 30?). The only way to actually stop the power these days is to actually turn them off.
But what if a pair of crew members are married, like Mark C. Lee and Jan Davis of STS-47? href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-47.
However, while the media jumped on it, I'm pretty sure it was a non issue. They've got tight enough schedules as it is on those missions without dealing with one extra biological experiment.
I followed your link and I found it quite informative and not very vague on the matter. "the first married couple to fly on the same space mission"... "biotechnology"... "fluid dynamics"... "acceleration measurements"... "Life sciences included experiments on human health... human physiology and behavior... biological rhythms. Test subjects included the crew..." One would think that sex in space would involve at least a few of those.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it wouldn't, and that's central to the argument. One guy per year driving a Beemer cross country at stupid speeds, might get into an accident. Let's say he takes out a minivan of kids. No, two. Three minivans of kids, and a dozen children and their soccer moms die. If people of this caliber of stupidity are as rare as they seem to be (it's rare that I see someone passing me at 100mph on the shoulder), and they only kill a dozen people, then that's a pretty low risk compared to the normal risks of drunk driving plus cell phones, plus every other thing that normally goes wrong in a car driving within 10 mph of the speed limit. In order to have an impact on "life would be a lot less dangerous", you have to be a significant portion of life's danger, and either reduce the odds of it happening (reduce drunk driving, for example) or reduce the consequences (air bags and seat belts).
If my biggest risk was rich people driving 100mph cross country, I'd sleep easier at night, even if it were 100 times as frequent.
I'm sorry, wait, what? The 13 year old daughter liked the widgets. Mom explicitly said that's why the daughter wanted it. Maybe we can assume Mom thought shelling out >$100 would at the minimum be neutral (hopefully improving) every feature she came to love about XP. Instead, the experience degraded. The 13 year old daughter, who has probably never worked a day in her life, nor is she likely to for another 2-3 years, is unable to grasp the value of the money it cost to get the OS upgrade, so is unable to judge the value of the product. Just because she knows how to use the widgets better than Mom doesn't mean she can weigh the value of the money it took to buy the upgrade against the other things that money could have been used for.
I side with Mom. The girl is 13. Her opinion matters, but her opinion is not the only thing that matters.
Unlimited virginity? Damn, my wife's going to be upset. Wait, mine, or hers?
Either you're exceptionally right, and proving your own point, or you're so deep in theoretical physics you've lost touch with the real world. If I jump, I can easily say that I've risen (defining "up" is easily accepted here) -- clearly every reasonable frame of reference, from the room around me to the ground below me, has not been pushed away from my feet. A theoretical physicist, of course, is free to change his frame of reference and define me as "staying still", but the math gets hard to compute everything else in the known universe moving with respect to my static body when my legs are moving like that. Similarly, if a reasonable person says the dollar is falling, a reasonable person understands that the average other currency is staying still. If a reasonable person says that Canadian dollar and the Euro are rising against a static dollar, but it turns out every other currency in the known world is also rising by the same amount, it turned out to be less misleading to state the dollar was falling.
Put another way, if the Yen, Canadian dollar, Euro and Australian dollar are all rising at the same rate against the US dollar, then it's in fact the dollar that's falling, indicating that the US can't keep up with parity. Unfortunately, due to Chinese policy, we can't directly interpret the Yuan's exchange rate.
Trackballs and mice are two different beasts. Someone who wants to use one will misuse the other, in my experience. The mouse users will move their entire arm to move a trackball and the trackball users will complain about how they have to move their entire arm around the desk in order to get anything done with a mouse.
I'm on my third and forth Kensington trackballs. My first was Mac specific, ADB Expert Mouse. The second was 9 pin serial, PC specific Turbo Mouse. Now I've got a Turbo Mouse Pro at work (USB, scroll wheel above the wheel, 4+6 buttons) in RHEL, which is great, except it's still roller controlled. At home, I'm blessed with their optically controlled Expert Mouse (USB / MacOSX), which has a scroll wheel surrounding the ball and 4 buttons on the periphery. Any replacement will be that exact model, if possible. Before finding Kensington, I found a variety of trackballs that were better than mice, but typically had inertia-less balls or too much friction on the bearing.
I got near-deadly accuracy on Quake Team Arena with my trackball (in 2001?), and I use my trackball at work doing CAD work, which some people might call graphic design. The truth is, it's great for any general use, and I've gotten very good at fine pointing too; but I cannot convert any mouse user to my preference. They just don't see the advantages.
I'm in my thirties. I've got to tell you, the 20s were pretty darn good. And if you're a teenager who realizes his limitations and is willing to have fun, despite the awkwardness, you have fun too -- no matter what you're doing.
It seems to me that you're the kind of person who blooms late because he's not ready to have fun before he's comfortable, and if that's the case, learning how to be comfortable takes a very long time. Throughout life, the more you question your own boundaries, the more fun you have. Of course, when you're 30 and older, the more you question your physical boundaries, the more you wonder why the next morning. The mantra of the 30s is "Wow, that's gonna hurt tomorrow".
What a strange thing to say, dropping a particular product with a native compatibility library for another based on the libraries themselves. Do you do that with Motif, Qt or GTK? Google's Picassa includes the Wine libraries (Wine Is Not an Emulator, remember?) for Linux compatibility. What if Blizzard included Wine libraries in a WoW package for Linux? We all know it won't happen, but would you have a problem with Wine then? If LOTRO stated it ran on Linux, but it turned out it did so with the assistance of included Wine libraries, would you then stop using it?
I know there are some people who disagreed with TrollTech a few years ago, and there are still people who disagree with the vendors who sell Wine (and employ several developers, and feed patches back), but that didn't seem to be where you were at.
Each person has his or her own personal styles. Experiment. Get variety packs. Freshness matters for some people -- roast within a year of picking, grind within 2 weeks of roasting, brew within 2 hours of grinding. Personally, I don't follow those at all -- I care, but not that much. Without getting into superiority contests, some people just don't care -- my mother prefers instant Folgers to anything I drink.
I prefer Green Mountain Coffee to anything else I've consumed. I've had everything my grocery stores in three states and two countries will sell me. Lately, I've preferred lighter roasting over darker roasts, with my recent favorite flavor being Green Mountain's Ethiopian organic.
I don't like the metal or plastic flavors that many coffee makers instill, so I've been enjoying a Chemex coffee maker since 2001. Simple, gravity drip. There's some science behind it that may as well be snake oil, but I really like it.
I went to a "coffee class" when I was living in Japan. The instructor swore the best way to make coffee was to drip it. You had to pour just a little bit into the ground beans, to get it to bloom. Then you could pour in slowly as long as the grounds were floating. You don't let it fill up, you certainly don't let the water get to the edge of the filter, just a slow but constant flow. Before all the water finishes dripping, you remove it from your drink. If done properly, you can see a dry ring of unused grounds around the edge of the filter. Otherwise, all the bitterness is released and flows to the coffee. I think he was crazy and he couldn't pass a double blind test.
My last coffee preference -- if you're in Japan and get coffee in a can from a vending machine, Boss makes the... least bad.
I thought the whole thing was that it was a 128 bit prime, because factoring out smaller numbers reduced the effectiveness of the cipher. Wouldn't it therefore be more interesting to find 128 bit primes? Certainly it would be possible to publish a list of all prime numbers with 16 and fewer digits, even if the computational power required to do so would be high.
Last time I saw a cat get out of a bag, there was a whole bunch of hissing and yeowling, some fur and pieces of plastic bag flying through the air, cat urine on the carpet and a blur running up the stairs. Truly it is wise to "let the cat out" than to allow it to escape on its own.
When I was looking to see what to do about a phone last year, it looked like Vonage's quarterly losses were identical to their quarterly budget for advertising. If they can stem the tide of people leaving and cut their advertising budget, maybe that brings them close to a break-even. On the other hand, I'd be foolish not to look into their competition and figure out how to hedge my bets in case they circle the drain.
My time for taking Vonage seriously is certainly coming to a middle.
I think they're shooting for the kind of person who will be able to plug the device in wherever they like. For example, someone listens to music on the way to a destination, then docks it there (work, school, etc). For most people, that would be more than enough time for a 1-2 hour commute home, make a few brief calls after work and again before work the next day, another 1-2 hour music-filled commute, then docking at work for the day (or at home for the night).
With new functionality, phones are changing what people want. A few years ago, I wanted a simple phone with good audio quality (closer to my old analog brick than the new low-bitrate digital flimsy things) and a 12 button keypad. Forget the camera, games, etc. Now that bluetooth allows synching with my address book, I'm really appreciating a visible screen, menus and function keys. Those cameras come in handy sometimes too (documenting car accidents, a sign to look up later, the contents of a whiteboard at work).
When the iPhone matures, we'll have to see what Apple comes up with. Maybe we won't need 3rd party support. Maybe the widget/applet/dashboard thing can fill the need of most of our favorite third party apps and the installed programs will actually be good enough we don't have to replace them with other things.
With that said, I don't care what the phone does, if it costs $500, I don't need it -- nevermind the requisite data packages. As much as I like some of the free phones now (or even negative cost after rebate), I don't need one. I have a desk job and I don't go anywhere else without my wife -- who has a decent enough phone for emergencies.Video games offer simulated friends. Whether they're voiceless automated opponents, voiced automated allies or people on the other side of Live or Battle.net, video games provide personal interaction that television and Legos don't.
How can Legos, Lincoln Logs and action figures win? They don't come WITH friends, you still have to invite someone to play. Barring that, it's solitary play because the parents are likely busy with their own lives.
Non video games can't win until they come with parents and playmates that make them more interesting and compelling than their electronic counterparts. This doesn't mean the 10 hours a week you're not too tired from work, this means 150% of the time the kid wants to play -- if availablility is a scarce resource, the kid may hesitate to ask for it.
I want my kids to learn how to play without the computer, and they are doing a good job so far, but one day the instant digital companion is just going to win.
My current primary home machine: 1.0GHz Powerbook G4. It's a 2002 machine that I didn't get until 2004. Going on 5 years and will hopefully make another 12-18 months. (5 year life, identical machines on eBay are showing the model holds its value) I have half a mind to keep my Powerbook going until it craters, but the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros beckon.
My Powerbook G4 replaced a dual 500MHz PowerMac G4. It was a 1999 machine that I got in 2001. Sold it on eBay for over $500 in 2004. (5 year lifetime, not fully depreciated)
My dual 500MHz PowerMac G4 replaced a homebuilt 350MHz AMD K6+ machine I put together in 1998. The motherboard, an Asus (P55T2P4) was well known as a quality board, but was on its way south when the Powermac came my way. It wasn't going for more than shipping cost on eBay.
The late 1990s brought me a variety of x86 machines that were short lived. 486-80 that lived from 1996 to 1999 (couldn't upgrade the RAM enough), a 486 66 that lasted from 1994 to 1996 (some driver problems with Win95) and a 286 that came to me used made in 1991(?) to 1994.
Beating my current 5 year old Powerbook, however, is my dad's IBM PC. I beat on it as a kid almost daily from the time it came home in 1982 until it finally gave up the ghost in 1989. It went into a repair shop, saw some expensive upgrades (like a 10 meg MFM hard drive on an RLL controller for a "hot and unstable but it'll give you 5 extra megs free") and finally stayed down in 1992.
Funny you mention Consumer Reports as "education" by that definition. I find them misleading in every topic I can. I've read a few articles from them and they're all bunk. They wrote up the Ionic Breeze a few years ago -- an air filter that has no moving parts and is sold by Sharper Image. They called it entirely ineffective and cited the lack of fans as justification that it didn't do anything at all. Utter crap! I have owned three and they work great for medium sized rooms!
And ask any educated mother of someone under the age of 6 what Consumer Reports just did about car seats.
Consumer Reports is uneducated crap proving that people starving for information will buy anything.
I fully expect that if I met all the people at Consumer Reports, each and every one would be very well educated writers, probably nice people to boot, but they're hardly experts in all the areas they write about. I wonder about calling them enthusiasts in these areas, but even a car seat enthusiast (they do exist) is able to shoot down what Consumer Reports has done.
Consumer Reports is advertising. Maybe they're not getting paid by the companies they recommend, but they recommend purchasing one or more items and disparage one or more items using pseudoscience and personal preference as reasons. That's advertising in my book.
Holy shit you're right! I'm so stupid! I should drive accross town just to see a movie at one of the prearranged times, pay for someone else's beer and chips plus the babysitter!
Or... I could press play from the comfort of my own TV, have a beer, water, soda, tea, coffee, whatever, listening to my children sleep, pausing whenever the baby monitor picks up something abnormal.
Downloading movies isn't just about sticky floors. The Alamo Drafthouse doesn't solve every problem the over 21 crowd has. In fact, for a lot of us, it poses more problems than it solves (so much for the dinner in the movie, can't take kids). So, I'm left to wait for the DVD. Or, honestly, I've likely forgotten about all the movies that sounded good 3-6 months ago.
For those of us who want to see a new movie and can't afford to hit the theaters a few times a week, we either can download what we see advertised on television (2 bucks for a movie would be a reasonable download fee but torrents are a convenient alternative), or we can do a bunch of research on Rotten Tomatoes to pick out something we can queue up in Netflix (waiting days to weeks for the selection) or drive to blockbuster.
I don't know anybody who watches any downloaded movies they'd pay to see in the theaters. The geek crowd still turns out in droves to see Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, even though we all have the ability to download. Downloaded movies take the place of television, in my experience. MPAA members don't suffer from missed revenue. Maybe NBC and CBS should do the suing...
As an American who put in over a year overseas, I know our foreign policy reputation at this time. It's not kind. I have been recognized on the streets as an American and confronted on my political beliefs. I'd like to think I gave the "right answer", but I honestly don't know what would have happened a few times if I had expressed support for my president. Let me just let you know, there are many of us (maybe less than 50%, but more than 10%) who believe the French were right in holding off invasion plans and who believe the United Nations was founded in order to prevent another World War II. A seemingly unending bureaucracy it may be, but it's checked by the majority of countries with a last sanity check of the consensus of a diverse group with the most vested interest in a stable world.
We're fighting to change the political future of our country. It's slow, and it's built upon a mountain of vested interests in large corporations and minimization of energy insecurity.
Did you even see the second one? The inside of the Statue of Liberty was covered in Pink Mood Slime and she was driven around with a joystick. That's not even approaching funny. The first movie was great. The cartoon was a staple of many children's Saturday mornings and later their schoolday afternoons. The second movie was like the second Gremlins.
[Homer voice]MMMmmmm. Ecto Cooler Hi-C.[/Homer voice]
Only now does it occur to me that a Wii controller would be a great way to wield a proton pack...
My vote for VI.
... VI equals power ... nevermind ... it was funnier in college...)
(For the less clued, voltage times current equals watts
Oh boy, I love it when people get nitpicky about things they don't know about. Whether we call them Legos, Lego, LEGOs or LEGO, we're legally wrong (and I do it all the time). The correct answer, as Susan Williams instructed us on the back of every instruction manual from the late 70s through 1987 (?) is to call them Lego brand building blocks. "Lego", it turns out, is the brand name, not the product. They're afraid of Tyco being able to call their products "MegaBlock brand lego blocks" and diluting their trademark like so many other companies.
Personally, I have a closet loaded with Legos. When my daughter graduates from Duplos, she'll get Legos. I'm not a lawyer, and I really don't care about trademarks enough to force that kind of burden onto children. My children will be taught that copyright and intellectual property law is there only to further the progress of art and science, not for the purpose of furthering jobs or corporate profits (although in any free market economy companies will be rewarded for meaninful progress of art and science). While I lean liberal in many beliefs, I'm fully aware of how limiting the US Constitution is with regard to intellectual property; it's very precise and quite limiting.
Can I mod you as a pale reddish cyan? Do users' names end up getting averaged their mod points? Can teenagers make a strategy game of making posts to align with their favorite vanity color? Or is that a "Color Whore", leading /. to change the entire system to a series of 5 colors?
"Small country"? Small country?! YOU don't have other people on your continent screaming at you to remember you're not the only country on the continent.
Shit, I know. Axes are dangerous to transport. They're likely to go off at any time.
Good luck with "off". My DishNetwork satellite decoder pulled the same power (30 Watts) whether it was driving the TV outputs and green power light as when it wasn't. My 2x 2GHz PowerMac G5 pulled 32 Watts in standby (aka "sleep") and 30 Watts off (who cares about 2 Watts out of 30?). The only way to actually stop the power these days is to actually turn them off.
I followed your link and I found it quite informative and not very vague on the matter. "the first married couple to fly on the same space mission" ... "biotechnology" ... "fluid dynamics" ... "acceleration measurements" ... "Life sciences included experiments on human health ... human physiology and behavior ... biological rhythms. Test subjects included the crew..." One would think that sex in space would involve at least a few of those.