My desktop environment is so far unique over 2,357 samples, and my iPod Touch is unique over 2,239 samples. Interesting. I know I have some interesting pieces to my desktop, but 1/2357 surprised me. My iPod Touch being unique, on the other hand, just tells me more about who they've sampled so far than about the uniqueness of the test.
If you have the Switch Proxy Tool, I strongly suggest you disable it. Caused all sort of issues when upgrading. If you've already upgraded, right click on the shortcut and run in safe mode, there you can disable it. YMMV.
Then I'll just have to wait. At work, I ssh tunnel 95% of my traffic home and bounce it off my Apache server there. It's not fast (by design -- I need to limit my compulsive habits somehow). On occasion, I need to get to stuff fast, like big updates and PDF files. Switch Proxy and FlashBlock are my two reasons for using Firefox.
The cost of malpractice insurance is a bogus metric. What really matters is cost and availability of healthcare. Cost of malpractice insurance is just one factor, and given the results in Texas, apparently an insignificant one.
What I don't understand is why we're all guessing. I think we should have one CPA (or a firm, as long as methodologies are identical) go and audit 100 general practitioners. We should be able to see some remarkable trends, like malpractice insurance is 10-13% of income for 70% of the firms, nurse salaries are 25-30% of income for 90% of firms, rent is 10% for 60% of firms, equipment is...
Obviously, someone has done the work. It's not a complicated plan, and it's entirely obvious. At the same time, the ammunition from such an anonymous survey would be very useful.
Don't believe a single wanker on Slashdot. None of us know where you are, or what you're interested in. Someone could show you some graphs that show how Verizon has the best service nationwide, with the highest bandwidth and fewest coverage holes, and maybe you'd buy from them.
Verizon "can't" get through the walls at work. Distance from a tower, or whatever, nowhere in my complex at work (a site of 4000 people) can get Verizon except occasionally at a window. AT&T is flawless, and I've even see people keep a conversation going in the elevator. Rude people, but the point stands. In my neighborhood, again, people with Verizon are always angry, but AT&T has us covered. My wife loves her iPhone, and never complains about it, aside from a little EDGE related derision. My parents came to visit us in Austin from Phoenix a few years ago. Wouldn't you know it, but Verizon had zero network coverage in the little town where their car broke down. I couldn't tell you if AT&T had the town covered; I can only say they had a cell phone for emergencies and the #1 network in the nation failed them. Now mom won't go more than 90 minutes from her house. Thanks, Verizon. (Mom always had "issues", but now she has another.)
In NYC, I understand, AT&T blows. I'm sure there are plenty of other cities where their network is poor, or maybe even just inferior to other providers. Maybe my tiny little insight into the Verizon network has found the only three weaknesses. Whatever. Talk to your neighbors and coworkers. Don't get what the angry people have, go with the happy people.
When I was in college, I would periodically bring my electronics homework home from Albany to Phoenix. I would usually work on it the entire time tray tables were allowed. Often I didn't need a textbook, only my engineering paper (overpriced graph paper) and my calculator. I would often make those next to me nervous, but obviously I couldn't harm anyone with paper and a pencil. Well, significantly anyway.
As I got to the intermediate classes, I would often find myself with schematics, a bag of chips and wires, and a breadboard. Again, plenty of time to just sit there, I would wire up my breadboard with the chips, wires, and my Leatherman. I had more than a few flight attendants strike up a conversation with me long enough to find out that I was going home / to school, was an engineering student, and was working on a finite state machine / simple computer / complicated blinky light thing. "Wanna see? This is so cool! Watch these eight lights blink! I can program it with these switches!" The only time the conversation lasted even a sentence longer was when I was building laser tag. "No, it doesn't actually have any lasers, they just use that name because it sounds cool. It actually works like your remote control to your TV."
Even at the time, I was fully aware that any technical work done in a public place would draw the skepticism, imagination, and periodically, fear of those around me. Of course, this was in the mid 90's. Times and personal liberties on airplanes in particular are very different. Now, they'd throw a fit if I tried to take my Leatherman near the plane, let alone the chips and bundle of wires running off a 9 volt. I'm much more mature now, and now I see no reason to make people uncomfortable on an airplane in order to stretch their preconceptions.
The kid and his parents now learned a valuable lesson. Work transparently. Don't hide it in a bottle. When it's complete, more times than not, it shouldn't have a top case. If it needs a case, no external wires should be visible.
Of course grounded wire mesh wouldn't do much to reduce the very low frequency magnetic fields coming from power lines. I bet he knew that. I also bet he didn't tell his wife that.
In general, the mesh will block wavelengths longer than half the length between the wires. If he used chicken wire, with say, 2 cm big holes, WiFi signals are going to get through. I believe most high power AC transmission lines are in the tens to hundreds of kHz, so chicken wire would cover that. It wouldn't even need to be grounded, because it's exposed to so many different pieces of the wave that it's all out of phase and very little would transmit inside. A sufficiently paranoid person could probably line the wall and ceiling sheetrock with aluminum foil before texturing. Toss in some aluminum blinds and I bet you can't get OTA TV.
It's funny, because I just had this conversation with my dad. He was wondering why he had such terrible cell reception, even though he could see a cell tower -- he wondered if it was because of the metal mesh that went behind the stucco when the house was built. We talked a little bit of math and pointed out that even radios and TV worked inside (KHz and MHz range), and now he's back to being angry with Sprint. There's no sense pointing out that the cell tower he sees is 10 miles away on top of a mountain in the middle of Phoenix and the HOA won't let a cell tower anywhere near them.
Nobody ever said the war even had a single battle on Miranda, so let's drop that paragraph. "Uninhabitable. Terraforming didn't hold, somesuch, a few settlers died" "Was it right before the war?" "I believe so." (1:04:55)
Miranda was basically just opening up. "There was a call for settlers..." Not much of a population, even if a few cities were set up. Based on the number of Reavers, it would appear that at most we're talking about a few tens of thousands of people -- hardly enough to justify a lot of interplanetary smugglers to add it to any kind of regular route. Even if it were a few million on the edge of the solar system, the label "uninhabitable" would probably keep away all those who required air to breathe. Besides, if you had a bunch of people on the news talking about how all their relatives in St. Louis were suddenly not answering their phones or writing back, and the government said the sanitary system had suddenly failed and wasn't worth repairing, would you go investigate for yourself? You might notice it on a navigator's map and explicitly go around it.
Miranda never went unnoticed. To use your Atlantis metaphor, it'd be like finding out Atlantis was this one island that was on all the navigational charts all along, but not on any of the population charts. Oh, and the map maker drew a big death head on it and a little nuclear warning next to it. It's there, you can go around it, and you don't come up with any reasons to visit. Take a look at 1:04:33 or 1:05:30 and tell me the planet is missing.
Now, if you'd like to concentrate on Wash saying "There's nothing about it on the Cortex. History, astronomy, it's not in there", you have to listen to Mal's response -- "Half of writing history is hiding the truth". Heck, I didnt even know about Haumea or Makemake until I went looking for them specifically and I can't tell you how long I've peered into the night sky with binoculars.
These days, excluding Pluto from a lot of those things would be acceptable -- it's been demoted from a planet. Or is that where Osama bin Laden is really hiding?
Firefly wasn't your thing. Fine. I get it. It's not for everybody. Just don't pick it apart out of ignorance. Even if a suspension of disbelief is necessary, getting into a war of trivia with a fan isn't too smart.:) You'd be better off asking about the energy required to leave orbit and then safely land as often as they do and asking where and how all the fuel is stored.
Agreed, un-kill Wash and Shepard Book. Although, honestly, a 7 year run could take place in the intervening year between the end of the series and movie. Not sure a sane genius class River would improve a continued show any.
Miranda is easy to accept, though. She's not a planet that's forgotten or overlooked, not a perturbation on plots or anything. She was a young colony that was still new to people's minds. Mal even knew "terraforming didn't take or somesuch". She was publicly known to be a failure, and even the mangnitude of the failure was known. The nature of the failure was the only unknown.
Human history is filled with similar misdirected failures.
I am perfectly capable of managing my own digital rights. I don't need someone else's server to handle it, mine does so just fine. Keep sending out encryption of the same caliber as DVDs and I'll keep supporting your industry. If you treat me like I can't be trusted, I can, will and do act like it.
As an electrical engineer, I often choose to automate my tasks through Perl hacking (previously Cadence SKILL). I have never wished I had spent more time in differential equations or euclidean space, but I have often wished my training included far more graph theory.
Graph theory has proven interesting, for example, when it is necessary to hand wire a net. Sure, one wire is easy to do, but dozens are tougher. Sometimes vendor provided tools are not sophisticated enough to understand all the constraints that an engineer or even a technician understand, but I have often thought that a graph theory centered automatic scoring approach could take into account all the tradeoffs I consciously make.
That said, every college graduate should be required to take at least two classes from the college of business or management. Time value of money, specifically, should be taught in high school and again in college. It's just that important. If half of America understood something about interest rates and risks, we'd all be better off. Except rent-to-own and payday loan places.
You are at work to work, you are not at work to read slashdot and gmail.
You have this awful sense of entitlement. Free coffee? Have to justify travel expenses? C'mon the company does not exist to serve you, you exist to work for them and provide value at a minimum of expense.
The companies responsibility is to its stakeholders to provide maximum profit. Employees are the largest expense a company has, so in lean times like these, they have to cut spending of all expenses to survive.
A company that mistakes its employees for machines or robots will suffer productivity losses. We are people, and yes, we develop a sense of entitlement for benefits we take for granted. I've never worked a place with free coffee, so I don't get the big deal. I'd be grateful if the company offered that minor expense. I bring in my own Thermos of coffee every day, and it sets me back 10 minutes in the morning to make it, plus $10/month in beans. It's not a significant investment, compared to even the IT costs for my e-mail alone.
If you threaten my 401k, I'll go elsewhere. There are other companies in this city, and I don't even like this city. There are still companies preserving 401k matching.
"Times like these" are largely self-described to several companies. Spending is not down across the board. If you have a significant customer base in Detroit, or if you're in several manufacturing industries, obviously you've been hit. But some of us are doing quite well and getting a little upset that the company is still cutting back and pointing to other unrelated industries as the reason.
Complying with a legitimate legal request (subpoena, court order, order in council whatever) is completely different from handing over *someone else's* personal information just because someone asks.
Handing over information to police who have no jurisdiction over Blizzard is exactly the same as handing over information to an unauthenticated third party.
As a general rule, I fill out bug reports for projects that don't require new userids. If they need a new userid, I look to a forum to discuss the issue. If the forum requires a new userid to post, that's where I stop.
I've made hundreds of anonymous changes to Wikipedia, and they're generally my benchmark for how much trouble I am willing to go through to do something I have no ownership in.
OpenOffice needs better programming support. The stuff people do with Visual Basic and all the scripting crap should be completely transparent in OpenOffice. It could be so much easier than it is for Microsoft, but it isn't. A compatibility mode where scripts from Office run would be nice (but I haven't found it yet), but an environment where scripts can be better integrated, perhaps with a better Perl API than currently exists.
Personally, there's one thing that I've needed OpenOffice to do that it can't, and that's export proper.xls files. As long as I can run OOO and my coworkers can't tell what I'm using when I export them files, it's all gravy. But when the.xls file isn't opened by Excel properly, that's a no go. I've gotten fed up with each version that can't do it. My simple test: on one tab, put a value in two cells. On another tab, have a cell equal the sum of the other two cells on the other tab. Export to.xls. Open in Office (OOO can read this just fine), and shake fist in anger. It's been 2 years since I've even tried this, so hopefully it's fixed, but last I checked the Excel would come up with the equation in the second cell, but the value was #ERR or something until I highlighed the cell, put the cursor in the equation and pressed "enter". A good QA team would have caught this, but alas, that's a weakness of most open source products.
If the kid is interested in (his|her) own computer, then some Cocoa or Visual Basic will get the GUI baubles up pretty quickly. Pressing buttons and causing things to happen is possibly what's going to light the fire.
If the kid is fascinated with the outside world, I agree with ebbe11. Mindstorms is the way to interact with the outside world.
If the kid is interested in Facebook and Myspace and other web trappings, Greasemonkey is the way to go. Try to get a copy of the MWAP (Mafia Wars Autoplayer) as an indication of what you can do if you're interested. Greasemonkey can help script all manner of things with web pages, and the foundations of variables and function calls are all there, and easily portable to other languages.
As near as I can tell, our system is so full of holes that we should just stop worrying about it.
A sufficiently endowed organization can get any decent quality of hydrogen peroxide they desire, and anybody's uncle can get decent quality acetone. Neither of these will change. Given a little care, a large bundle of bombs can be made to look like laptop batteries. I assume the new format Macbook Pros make this even easier, as large normal batteries can have strange form factors. Any terrorist cell can fly a few dozen people from any few dozen cities to directly (or indirectly) converge on a central city. Each individual passes through security with an innocuous looking thing that's not detectable on X-Ray or modern bomb detectors. All it takes is one person to take everyone's "batteries" and assemble them in a backpack in a bathroom. A simple timer, GPS, or even radio activation can take sufficiently determined justice driven passengers out of the equation.
I would fly any day of the year, feeling as secure having faced the full onslaught of the security theater as I would if we all could walk on the plane with as much security screening as a train.
In 1997, I made it through airport security once with steel toed boots on. The metal detector went off, and they wanded me with my boots on. On that date, I recognized the security theater for what it was, and started seeing all the many and various security holes every day. It's insane to think we're impacting security by denying lock blades or water bottles. As long as each individual or family isn't seated in an individual explosive proof canister (ref http://adland.tv/content/vw-polo-viral-punchline-kills-uk ), there are security problems inherent in public mass air transportation.
A simple search for matchhead bombs on youtube starts to suggest the cheapness of rudimentary bombs (honestly, this is a fun 15 minutes). From there, the biggest problem is figuring out an innocuous form factor for your chemistry of choice.
You're mistakenly using watts per lumen, which is very similar to watts per pound (the important factor in space). For the vast majority of energy production, the important factor is watts per dollar.
Glitter sized cells scare me because they must be approaching the point where the kerf size is exceptionally relevant to the product size.
I live in Central PA, and that car was unstoppable in the snow. The only thing I've driven that was close is my Jetta, and that has 4-wheel ABS and traction control. The SAAB certainly did not. And I'm no slipmatic driver either.
Try any Audi with Quattro. An A4 with standard all-season tires would be great for PA. If you decide to go for some serious snow, you can upgrade your tires to Hakkapeliitta.
Having spent 5 years in upstate New York (at the top of a hill, which was dangerous on ice) and another 2 in Burlington, VT, I can say that every other car had more trouble than the Audi Quattro, although the Subaru wasn't bad. There are some days that nobody should be out driving, and on those days, the only cars that make it over snow drifts and stay in straight lines on the road are Audis and Subus.
I'm pretty sure we don't know what he wants now, but I remember what I read in 2001 and 2002. Since before the Cole bombing, Bin Laden felt the US was exerting itself in places it didn't belong. Israel for one, but all of that region too. As a method of getting rid of us, he used the Soviet model -- he wanted to engage us in a war we couldn't win that would deprive us of our resources. This is why not just any landmark would do, he had to strike at a symbol of wealth and prosperity, and also a symbol of war. Additionally, his intent was to curb our freedoms in such a manner that we would feel less obligated to spread them. Level the playing field, so to speak. I'm pretty sure he didn't have the TSA in mind, but I'm ashamed to say what Guantanamo has spoken about our true belief in freedom.
In many places, single people are not allowed to adopt. So, if she is in the closet and adopted, then she is married to a man. So it's most likely (at least in my opinion) that she gave birth to the child.
In 1992, a single female friend of my mother adopted a little boy. I believe the legal adoption was in Virginia, although her residence was in Arizona. Based on what else I know of this person, I cannot guess if this was a rare case where single adoptions were accepted, if times have changed, or if fraud was involved. While none of those three would surprise me, it had not occurred to me that single people could not adopt.
Throw in a good chance that if her id is revealed her husband may be able to divorce on grounds of infidelity.
I'm not familiar with the odds, but there are a whole wide range of other possibilities. I went to college with a girl whose mom was a lesbian. She had married young to the guy who made all the sense in the world, who loved her and who treated her like a princess, assuming she'd fall in love eventually. Their marriage was consummated, producing a daughter. Mom figured things out, they divorced amicably (supposedly; personally, I can't imagine that going well), and the girl I went to school with would periodically talk about her mom and her mom's girlfriend just as any of us would periodically discuss our families.
Of course, there's also the artificial insemination route, but I think that's relatively uncommon. If she lives in a state where adoptive parents damn well better be straight, then remaining closeted may very well be in her best interests. I know of an instance where a lesbian wanted a child and couldn't afford anything other than "the natural route", so she found a "willing donor" and did things the natural way, finding her desire for a child stronger than her desire for a man not to touch her that way.
Holy shit, 3 Hz?! I've been married for almost 10 years and have 2 kids, so maybe I'm not exactly in my prime sex life, but 3 Hz! Damn, man! That passes chafing and you start worry about friction burns.
What this author forgets is that if your survival is on the line people will generally do what they think needs to be done regardless of what the law, lawyers or anyone else may say. Just look at the US after the 11/9 attacks.
I hope you're not an American, because if you are, you've demonstrated the most dangerous misperceptions I've ever seen. Normally, I'm a big fan of telling people to get out and get their beliefs heard by voting, but stay home. Seriously.
1) OBL's 2 goals was to a) Get the US to overextend itself by fighting at least one battle on the other side of the world and deplete its riches (at the time, widely thought to be way too ambitious, but I think we know how things are going in this department) and b) Deprive the US of our freedoms (I hope you flew once before 9/11 and once after to see how this worked). Maybe you've read Slashdot or any other non-Fox news source for a few other examples.
2) Invading Afghanistan had at least a little international support, and from more than just the UK. Invading Iraq, on the other hand, did do quite a bit of international law violating, or just skirting around it. France understood the threat Iraq posed to the international community, far better than anyone gave them credit for. The UN is there to prevent nations from infringing on each other's sovereignty and doing something colossally stupid out of a knee jerk reaction (and hopefully not relevant here, preventing World War 3).
3) Let's make a list of people's opinions who were changed by bullets, and another list of people's opinions who were changed by money. Let's start with World War II, take a walk down history lane through Korea and we can stop today's exercise with Vietnam. Bullets don't make friends. The only time the US made any friends was in the reconstruction period afterward. If you asked me, and those who did laughed at me, Afghanistan needed hundreds of millions of dollars a year to give them a useful manufacturing industry and a good educational background -- a fraction of what we're spending today. Going over there and shooting at people who don't like us, interestingly enough, makes more people not like us.
So how will users who have installed ad blocking software at some point realize that the ads they are no longer seeing aren't really that annoying anymore?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say they're talking about me. In 2004, I installed a bunch of ad blockers, and I saw next to no ads. That lasted for a few years until I got a new computer. With the new computer, the ads were far less intrusive, and generally not worth going through all the ad blocking hassle (which isn't much, so obviously a threshold was crossed). The stupid monkey was gone, all the blue/red flashing background was missing, etc. I'll still keep FlashBlock on until the day the machines rise up against their masters, though. A line was irrevocably crossed when an ad started making noise and wouldn't shut up. Flash is great for games, but for so much of what's done, a simple JPG would suffice at a fraction of the development and delivery cost.
How does multiview work? Is each video channel its own stream? Or is one channel a master, and deltas stored off that? Do they share common base frames?
I don't enjoy 3d movies. I don't find wearing glasses that long to be comfortable, and I don't find any added benefit to the extra dimensionality of the product. I saw the 3d Toy Story double feature at the local theater, and while the 3d was near perfect, I never once felt it added anything to my enjoyment. I've also seen Coraline, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and Monsters vs. Aliens in 3d, and I think I'm done. They're just not worth it.
3d video games, however, might be interesting, if they can lighten up the glasses and figure out a way to make them work with my own glasses.
Slashdot Mirror
My desktop environment is so far unique over 2,357 samples, and my iPod Touch is unique over 2,239 samples. Interesting. I know I have some interesting pieces to my desktop, but 1/2357 surprised me. My iPod Touch being unique, on the other hand, just tells me more about who they've sampled so far than about the uniqueness of the test.
Then I'll just have to wait. At work, I ssh tunnel 95% of my traffic home and bounce it off my Apache server there. It's not fast (by design -- I need to limit my compulsive habits somehow). On occasion, I need to get to stuff fast, like big updates and PDF files. Switch Proxy and FlashBlock are my two reasons for using Firefox.
What I don't understand is why we're all guessing. I think we should have one CPA (or a firm, as long as methodologies are identical) go and audit 100 general practitioners. We should be able to see some remarkable trends, like malpractice insurance is 10-13% of income for 70% of the firms, nurse salaries are 25-30% of income for 90% of firms, rent is 10% for 60% of firms, equipment is ...
Obviously, someone has done the work. It's not a complicated plan, and it's entirely obvious. At the same time, the ammunition from such an anonymous survey would be very useful.
Don't believe a single wanker on Slashdot. None of us know where you are, or what you're interested in. Someone could show you some graphs that show how Verizon has the best service nationwide, with the highest bandwidth and fewest coverage holes, and maybe you'd buy from them.
Verizon "can't" get through the walls at work. Distance from a tower, or whatever, nowhere in my complex at work (a site of 4000 people) can get Verizon except occasionally at a window. AT&T is flawless, and I've even see people keep a conversation going in the elevator. Rude people, but the point stands. In my neighborhood, again, people with Verizon are always angry, but AT&T has us covered. My wife loves her iPhone, and never complains about it, aside from a little EDGE related derision. My parents came to visit us in Austin from Phoenix a few years ago. Wouldn't you know it, but Verizon had zero network coverage in the little town where their car broke down. I couldn't tell you if AT&T had the town covered; I can only say they had a cell phone for emergencies and the #1 network in the nation failed them. Now mom won't go more than 90 minutes from her house. Thanks, Verizon. (Mom always had "issues", but now she has another.)
In NYC, I understand, AT&T blows. I'm sure there are plenty of other cities where their network is poor, or maybe even just inferior to other providers. Maybe my tiny little insight into the Verizon network has found the only three weaknesses. Whatever. Talk to your neighbors and coworkers. Don't get what the angry people have, go with the happy people.
When I was in college, I would periodically bring my electronics homework home from Albany to Phoenix. I would usually work on it the entire time tray tables were allowed. Often I didn't need a textbook, only my engineering paper (overpriced graph paper) and my calculator. I would often make those next to me nervous, but obviously I couldn't harm anyone with paper and a pencil. Well, significantly anyway.
As I got to the intermediate classes, I would often find myself with schematics, a bag of chips and wires, and a breadboard. Again, plenty of time to just sit there, I would wire up my breadboard with the chips, wires, and my Leatherman. I had more than a few flight attendants strike up a conversation with me long enough to find out that I was going home / to school, was an engineering student, and was working on a finite state machine / simple computer / complicated blinky light thing. "Wanna see? This is so cool! Watch these eight lights blink! I can program it with these switches!" The only time the conversation lasted even a sentence longer was when I was building laser tag. "No, it doesn't actually have any lasers, they just use that name because it sounds cool. It actually works like your remote control to your TV."
Even at the time, I was fully aware that any technical work done in a public place would draw the skepticism, imagination, and periodically, fear of those around me. Of course, this was in the mid 90's. Times and personal liberties on airplanes in particular are very different. Now, they'd throw a fit if I tried to take my Leatherman near the plane, let alone the chips and bundle of wires running off a 9 volt. I'm much more mature now, and now I see no reason to make people uncomfortable on an airplane in order to stretch their preconceptions.
The kid and his parents now learned a valuable lesson. Work transparently. Don't hide it in a bottle. When it's complete, more times than not, it shouldn't have a top case. If it needs a case, no external wires should be visible.
In general, the mesh will block wavelengths longer than half the length between the wires. If he used chicken wire, with say, 2 cm big holes, WiFi signals are going to get through. I believe most high power AC transmission lines are in the tens to hundreds of kHz, so chicken wire would cover that. It wouldn't even need to be grounded, because it's exposed to so many different pieces of the wave that it's all out of phase and very little would transmit inside. A sufficiently paranoid person could probably line the wall and ceiling sheetrock with aluminum foil before texturing. Toss in some aluminum blinds and I bet you can't get OTA TV.
It's funny, because I just had this conversation with my dad. He was wondering why he had such terrible cell reception, even though he could see a cell tower -- he wondered if it was because of the metal mesh that went behind the stucco when the house was built. We talked a little bit of math and pointed out that even radios and TV worked inside (KHz and MHz range), and now he's back to being angry with Sprint. There's no sense pointing out that the cell tower he sees is 10 miles away on top of a mountain in the middle of Phoenix and the HOA won't let a cell tower anywhere near them.
Nobody ever said the war even had a single battle on Miranda, so let's drop that paragraph. "Uninhabitable. Terraforming didn't hold, somesuch, a few settlers died" "Was it right before the war?" "I believe so." (1:04:55)
Miranda was basically just opening up. "There was a call for settlers..." Not much of a population, even if a few cities were set up. Based on the number of Reavers, it would appear that at most we're talking about a few tens of thousands of people -- hardly enough to justify a lot of interplanetary smugglers to add it to any kind of regular route. Even if it were a few million on the edge of the solar system, the label "uninhabitable" would probably keep away all those who required air to breathe. Besides, if you had a bunch of people on the news talking about how all their relatives in St. Louis were suddenly not answering their phones or writing back, and the government said the sanitary system had suddenly failed and wasn't worth repairing, would you go investigate for yourself? You might notice it on a navigator's map and explicitly go around it.
Miranda never went unnoticed. To use your Atlantis metaphor, it'd be like finding out Atlantis was this one island that was on all the navigational charts all along, but not on any of the population charts. Oh, and the map maker drew a big death head on it and a little nuclear warning next to it. It's there, you can go around it, and you don't come up with any reasons to visit. Take a look at 1:04:33 or 1:05:30 and tell me the planet is missing.
Now, if you'd like to concentrate on Wash saying "There's nothing about it on the Cortex. History, astronomy, it's not in there", you have to listen to Mal's response -- "Half of writing history is hiding the truth". Heck, I didnt even know about Haumea or Makemake until I went looking for them specifically and I can't tell you how long I've peered into the night sky with binoculars.
These days, excluding Pluto from a lot of those things would be acceptable -- it's been demoted from a planet. Or is that where Osama bin Laden is really hiding?
Firefly wasn't your thing. Fine. I get it. It's not for everybody. Just don't pick it apart out of ignorance. Even if a suspension of disbelief is necessary, getting into a war of trivia with a fan isn't too smart. :) You'd be better off asking about the energy required to leave orbit and then safely land as often as they do and asking where and how all the fuel is stored.
Agreed, un-kill Wash and Shepard Book. Although, honestly, a 7 year run could take place in the intervening year between the end of the series and movie. Not sure a sane genius class River would improve a continued show any.
Miranda is easy to accept, though. She's not a planet that's forgotten or overlooked, not a perturbation on plots or anything. She was a young colony that was still new to people's minds. Mal even knew "terraforming didn't take or somesuch". She was publicly known to be a failure, and even the mangnitude of the failure was known. The nature of the failure was the only unknown.
Human history is filled with similar misdirected failures.
I am perfectly capable of managing my own digital rights. I don't need someone else's server to handle it, mine does so just fine. Keep sending out encryption of the same caliber as DVDs and I'll keep supporting your industry. If you treat me like I can't be trusted, I can, will and do act like it.
As an electrical engineer, I often choose to automate my tasks through Perl hacking (previously Cadence SKILL). I have never wished I had spent more time in differential equations or euclidean space, but I have often wished my training included far more graph theory.
Graph theory has proven interesting, for example, when it is necessary to hand wire a net. Sure, one wire is easy to do, but dozens are tougher. Sometimes vendor provided tools are not sophisticated enough to understand all the constraints that an engineer or even a technician understand, but I have often thought that a graph theory centered automatic scoring approach could take into account all the tradeoffs I consciously make.
That said, every college graduate should be required to take at least two classes from the college of business or management. Time value of money, specifically, should be taught in high school and again in college. It's just that important. If half of America understood something about interest rates and risks, we'd all be better off. Except rent-to-own and payday loan places.
A company that mistakes its employees for machines or robots will suffer productivity losses. We are people, and yes, we develop a sense of entitlement for benefits we take for granted. I've never worked a place with free coffee, so I don't get the big deal. I'd be grateful if the company offered that minor expense. I bring in my own Thermos of coffee every day, and it sets me back 10 minutes in the morning to make it, plus $10/month in beans. It's not a significant investment, compared to even the IT costs for my e-mail alone.
If you threaten my 401k, I'll go elsewhere. There are other companies in this city, and I don't even like this city. There are still companies preserving 401k matching.
"Times like these" are largely self-described to several companies. Spending is not down across the board. If you have a significant customer base in Detroit, or if you're in several manufacturing industries, obviously you've been hit. But some of us are doing quite well and getting a little upset that the company is still cutting back and pointing to other unrelated industries as the reason.
Handing over information to police who have no jurisdiction over Blizzard is exactly the same as handing over information to an unauthenticated third party.
As a general rule, I fill out bug reports for projects that don't require new userids. If they need a new userid, I look to a forum to discuss the issue. If the forum requires a new userid to post, that's where I stop.
I've made hundreds of anonymous changes to Wikipedia, and they're generally my benchmark for how much trouble I am willing to go through to do something I have no ownership in.
OpenOffice needs better programming support. The stuff people do with Visual Basic and all the scripting crap should be completely transparent in OpenOffice. It could be so much easier than it is for Microsoft, but it isn't. A compatibility mode where scripts from Office run would be nice (but I haven't found it yet), but an environment where scripts can be better integrated, perhaps with a better Perl API than currently exists.
Personally, there's one thing that I've needed OpenOffice to do that it can't, and that's export proper .xls files. As long as I can run OOO and my coworkers can't tell what I'm using when I export them files, it's all gravy. But when the .xls file isn't opened by Excel properly, that's a no go. I've gotten fed up with each version that can't do it. My simple test: on one tab, put a value in two cells. On another tab, have a cell equal the sum of the other two cells on the other tab. Export to .xls. Open in Office (OOO can read this just fine), and shake fist in anger. It's been 2 years since I've even tried this, so hopefully it's fixed, but last I checked the Excel would come up with the equation in the second cell, but the value was #ERR or something until I highlighed the cell, put the cursor in the equation and pressed "enter". A good QA team would have caught this, but alas, that's a weakness of most open source products.
You don't teach a kid programming. They learn it.
If the kid is interested in (his|her) own computer, then some Cocoa or Visual Basic will get the GUI baubles up pretty quickly. Pressing buttons and causing things to happen is possibly what's going to light the fire.
If the kid is fascinated with the outside world, I agree with ebbe11. Mindstorms is the way to interact with the outside world.
If the kid is interested in Facebook and Myspace and other web trappings, Greasemonkey is the way to go. Try to get a copy of the MWAP (Mafia Wars Autoplayer) as an indication of what you can do if you're interested. Greasemonkey can help script all manner of things with web pages, and the foundations of variables and function calls are all there, and easily portable to other languages.
As near as I can tell, our system is so full of holes that we should just stop worrying about it.
A sufficiently endowed organization can get any decent quality of hydrogen peroxide they desire, and anybody's uncle can get decent quality acetone. Neither of these will change. Given a little care, a large bundle of bombs can be made to look like laptop batteries. I assume the new format Macbook Pros make this even easier, as large normal batteries can have strange form factors. Any terrorist cell can fly a few dozen people from any few dozen cities to directly (or indirectly) converge on a central city. Each individual passes through security with an innocuous looking thing that's not detectable on X-Ray or modern bomb detectors. All it takes is one person to take everyone's "batteries" and assemble them in a backpack in a bathroom. A simple timer, GPS, or even radio activation can take sufficiently determined justice driven passengers out of the equation.
I would fly any day of the year, feeling as secure having faced the full onslaught of the security theater as I would if we all could walk on the plane with as much security screening as a train.
In 1997, I made it through airport security once with steel toed boots on. The metal detector went off, and they wanded me with my boots on. On that date, I recognized the security theater for what it was, and started seeing all the many and various security holes every day. It's insane to think we're impacting security by denying lock blades or water bottles. As long as each individual or family isn't seated in an individual explosive proof canister (ref http://adland.tv/content/vw-polo-viral-punchline-kills-uk ), there are security problems inherent in public mass air transportation.
A simple search for matchhead bombs on youtube starts to suggest the cheapness of rudimentary bombs (honestly, this is a fun 15 minutes). From there, the biggest problem is figuring out an innocuous form factor for your chemistry of choice.
You're mistakenly using watts per lumen, which is very similar to watts per pound (the important factor in space). For the vast majority of energy production, the important factor is watts per dollar.
Glitter sized cells scare me because they must be approaching the point where the kerf size is exceptionally relevant to the product size.
Try any Audi with Quattro. An A4 with standard all-season tires would be great for PA. If you decide to go for some serious snow, you can upgrade your tires to Hakkapeliitta.
Having spent 5 years in upstate New York (at the top of a hill, which was dangerous on ice) and another 2 in Burlington, VT, I can say that every other car had more trouble than the Audi Quattro, although the Subaru wasn't bad. There are some days that nobody should be out driving, and on those days, the only cars that make it over snow drifts and stay in straight lines on the road are Audis and Subus.
I'm pretty sure we don't know what he wants now, but I remember what I read in 2001 and 2002. Since before the Cole bombing, Bin Laden felt the US was exerting itself in places it didn't belong. Israel for one, but all of that region too. As a method of getting rid of us, he used the Soviet model -- he wanted to engage us in a war we couldn't win that would deprive us of our resources. This is why not just any landmark would do, he had to strike at a symbol of wealth and prosperity, and also a symbol of war. Additionally, his intent was to curb our freedoms in such a manner that we would feel less obligated to spread them. Level the playing field, so to speak. I'm pretty sure he didn't have the TSA in mind, but I'm ashamed to say what Guantanamo has spoken about our true belief in freedom.
In 1992, a single female friend of my mother adopted a little boy. I believe the legal adoption was in Virginia, although her residence was in Arizona. Based on what else I know of this person, I cannot guess if this was a rare case where single adoptions were accepted, if times have changed, or if fraud was involved. While none of those three would surprise me, it had not occurred to me that single people could not adopt.
I'm not familiar with the odds, but there are a whole wide range of other possibilities. I went to college with a girl whose mom was a lesbian. She had married young to the guy who made all the sense in the world, who loved her and who treated her like a princess, assuming she'd fall in love eventually. Their marriage was consummated, producing a daughter. Mom figured things out, they divorced amicably (supposedly; personally, I can't imagine that going well), and the girl I went to school with would periodically talk about her mom and her mom's girlfriend just as any of us would periodically discuss our families.
Of course, there's also the artificial insemination route, but I think that's relatively uncommon. If she lives in a state where adoptive parents damn well better be straight, then remaining closeted may very well be in her best interests. I know of an instance where a lesbian wanted a child and couldn't afford anything other than "the natural route", so she found a "willing donor" and did things the natural way, finding her desire for a child stronger than her desire for a man not to touch her that way.
Holy shit, 3 Hz?! I've been married for almost 10 years and have 2 kids, so maybe I'm not exactly in my prime sex life, but 3 Hz! Damn, man! That passes chafing and you start worry about friction burns.
I hope you're not an American, because if you are, you've demonstrated the most dangerous misperceptions I've ever seen. Normally, I'm a big fan of telling people to get out and get their beliefs heard by voting, but stay home. Seriously.
1) OBL's 2 goals was to a) Get the US to overextend itself by fighting at least one battle on the other side of the world and deplete its riches (at the time, widely thought to be way too ambitious, but I think we know how things are going in this department) and b) Deprive the US of our freedoms (I hope you flew once before 9/11 and once after to see how this worked). Maybe you've read Slashdot or any other non-Fox news source for a few other examples.
2) Invading Afghanistan had at least a little international support, and from more than just the UK. Invading Iraq, on the other hand, did do quite a bit of international law violating, or just skirting around it. France understood the threat Iraq posed to the international community, far better than anyone gave them credit for. The UN is there to prevent nations from infringing on each other's sovereignty and doing something colossally stupid out of a knee jerk reaction (and hopefully not relevant here, preventing World War 3).
3) Let's make a list of people's opinions who were changed by bullets, and another list of people's opinions who were changed by money. Let's start with World War II, take a walk down history lane through Korea and we can stop today's exercise with Vietnam. Bullets don't make friends. The only time the US made any friends was in the reconstruction period afterward. If you asked me, and those who did laughed at me, Afghanistan needed hundreds of millions of dollars a year to give them a useful manufacturing industry and a good educational background -- a fraction of what we're spending today. Going over there and shooting at people who don't like us, interestingly enough, makes more people not like us.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say they're talking about me. In 2004, I installed a bunch of ad blockers, and I saw next to no ads. That lasted for a few years until I got a new computer. With the new computer, the ads were far less intrusive, and generally not worth going through all the ad blocking hassle (which isn't much, so obviously a threshold was crossed). The stupid monkey was gone, all the blue/red flashing background was missing, etc. I'll still keep FlashBlock on until the day the machines rise up against their masters, though. A line was irrevocably crossed when an ad started making noise and wouldn't shut up. Flash is great for games, but for so much of what's done, a simple JPG would suffice at a fraction of the development and delivery cost.
How does multiview work? Is each video channel its own stream? Or is one channel a master, and deltas stored off that? Do they share common base frames?
I don't enjoy 3d movies. I don't find wearing glasses that long to be comfortable, and I don't find any added benefit to the extra dimensionality of the product. I saw the 3d Toy Story double feature at the local theater, and while the 3d was near perfect, I never once felt it added anything to my enjoyment. I've also seen Coraline, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and Monsters vs. Aliens in 3d, and I think I'm done. They're just not worth it.
3d video games, however, might be interesting, if they can lighten up the glasses and figure out a way to make them work with my own glasses.