You obviously do not do serious work in the photography industry, because I can tell you that you are flat-out wrong.
But, given that your post amounts to little more than a long-winded ad hominem attack, it doesn't surprise me that your facts are a little off.
I do not work in the photography industry per se, but I'm tech support for a company that sells a DAM software product and most all we do is talk to people who work with RAW images.
Go without visual voice mail or without a 2 year contract. Hmmm. Tough choice...NOT!
I'm really surprised that this isn't discussed more, but you can activate an iPhone without signing up for a 2-year contract. I have a co-worker who did exactly this; he was told how to do it by a sales associate at the store he purchased it from. This is not illegal in any way; AT&T lets you do month-to-month on all of their plans in this manner, if you buy the phone first. Given that the iPhone price is not subsidized by the contract in any way, shape or form, why tie yourself into a contract?
When you activate the iPhone, enter all 9's for your Social Security number. You'll fail the credit check (duh!) and you will be told you can either go to an AT&T store to talk to a representative or you can go month-to-month.
The Mac Mini is getting Core 2 Duo processors! Sweet! But the store page still says 802.11g, not 802.11n. Is this a "you need our 'enabler' to get 802.11n" thing or are they not going to 802.11n for the Mini?
The answer to this will determine if I snap one up or save a couple of months for an iMac.
The formula to convert THAC0/AC to 3rd Edition "Attack Bonus" (and vice versa) is:
* BAB = 20 - THAC0
* THAC0 = 20 - BAB
* 3rd Edition Armor Class = 20 - 2nd Edition Armor Class
* 2nd Edition Armor Class = 20 - 3rd Edition Armor Class
In older versions of D&D, your armor's AC value is a set number; for the case of leather armor, it's AC is 7.
If your THAC0 is 17 and you roll a 14, did you hit or not? Well, you subtract your opponent's AC from your THAC0 to see what number you need to hit; in this case, 17 - 7 = 10, so you hit with a 14.
The THAC0 system is counter-intuitive; better armor has a lower score, and will run into negative. So a person with an AC of -5 is actually harder to hit than a nearly-naked person with an AC of 10. And, with those higher -- er, I mean lower -- AC values, you end up subtracting a negative from your THAC0.
In 3rd edition, it's the same range of scores and modifiers, only it's all done via addition instead of subtraction.
Your base AC is 10; studded leather armor gives you a +3 to AC, so your AC is 13. (Note that with the older THAC0/AC scheme, your AC would be 7; in 3rd edition, we're effectively adding the armor value to the base 10 instead of subtracting it, but it's the same delta from the "unarmored" AC.)
To hit your opponent, take your attack modifier (a 3rd-level fighter has a base attack bonus of +3, we'll ignore modifiers for high Strength and the like for this example) and add it to your die roll. So if you roll a 14, add the +3 for your attack modifier, you get a 17, which beats your opponent's AC of 13 by 4 points. Which, if you'll note, is the same delta as in the THAC0 example.
The advantage is that it's more intuitive. Instead of my THAC0 of 10 being so much better than your THAC0 of 17 and my kickass armor giving me an AC of 2 versus the poor unarmored mage's 10, I have a +10 to hit as opposed to your +3 to hit and my armor class is 18 versus that same mage's 10.
There's one problem with this statement. Babylon 5 was only on TNT for one season -- the fifth. Before that, it was syndicated.
You might be thinking of Crusade, which TNT did their level best to smother while in the cradle. It didn't have the punch of the final couple of seasons of B5, but that's because it was a new show. New characters to explore and create relationships with, new status quo, and so on.
Seems like everyone would be better surved with forums, a web-page and the normal book releases.
Forums? Not the same at all. I don't want to have to wade through mindless rules flamewars and irrelevant conversations to find useful stuff.
Existing books? Sure, those have value, if they can get enough material on a topic to create one. But maybe I just want an article with five new, themed spells, suitable for an NPC, new religion, or a dusty tome of "forgotten" spells. Or maybe I want the excellent Dungeoncraft series to continue, or "100 things you'd find in a marketplace".
Websites? We shall see what WotC comes up with, but websites can be impermanent -- the content is only available as long as the site's owners chose to host it. What would have happened had TSR had such a site when they were looking to go out of business? My guess is, the site would be shut down and that information lost; even if not, little of the content would likely still be available on WotC's site today.
Dungeon improved greatly over the past couple of years, culminating in the Adventure Paths -- a series of linked adventures, one per month, designed to take a party from 1st- to 20th-level. The first one, the Shackled City, was so-so in my opinion. The second one, the Age of Worms, was a lot better; I think they were starting to get the feel for writing them. We are over halfway through the third one, the Savage Tide; it will conclude in the final issue of Dungeon. The Dungeoncraft articles are pretty interesting, too; Monte Cook and Wolfgang Baur have both provided wonderful articles about adventure design and campaign-building.
In my opinion Dragon is still of varying usefulness with the addition of monthly columns devoted to WotC's major campaign settings (Eberron and Forgotten Realms) and my favorite series of articles EVER, Core Faiths. Each article explored a deity in the core D&D pantheon and really fleshed it out -- outlook on life, role of the clergy, aphorisms, new spells or magic items unique to the faith, sample NPCs suitable for summoning via Summon Planar Ally, and more. (The Core Faiths for Vecna was a great Halloween treat last year.)
What eventually convinced me to subscribe was the utility of having those articles on hand whenever and wherever I game. No scouring a series of websites, or hoping that WotC's site hasn't "retired" the article. The fact that subscriptions to Dungeon and Dragon were increasing over the past couple of years tells me that I'm not alone in finding this content valuable.
Paizo will apparently be publishing a new periodical, Pathfinder. It looks to be a hybrid of Dungeon (adventures, including new Adventure Paths) and Dragon (new monsters, spells, NPCs, and locales), and all of their material will be released under the OGL. You will be able to get it in either PDF or dead-tree editions, so people who want that electronic content will have it while old fogeys like me can add to the growing pile of gaming supplements. I'm strongly considering converting my remaining subscriptions and grabbing the first couple of issues.
Bootcamp is beta software with several large known bugs
I was under the impression that all Boot Camp did was allow you to resize an existing HFS partition, insert some EFI extensions so that XP/Vista can load and allow you to select an OS on startup, and burn a drivers CD for you.
A recent build of Boot Camp includes a host of updated drivers, which appear to fix most of the problems I've heard described about.
If you are downloading more the 5GB then you are definitely a pirate.
Really? I think this is funny, since I downloaded two things over the last week, to see how they would play on my new MacBook; the demo for Supreme Commander, which weighs in at a little over 1 GB, and the WoW client which according to Blizzard's little downloader app encompasses about 3 GB. So there's 4GB gone, in under a week.
What are other game demos weighing in at?
Battlefield 2142 demo ~ 1.1 GB Command and Conquer 3 demo ~ 1.2 GB Company of Heroes demo ~ 1.8 GB Warhammer: Mark of Chaos singleplayer demo ~ 1.14 GB Far Cry demo ~ 496 MB Battlefield 2 demo ~ 543 MB
And don't get me started on the iTunes store; with legally-purchased movies taking up over a gig and a half each (Pirates of the Caribbean 2 is about 1.7 GB), it's easy to blow through Verizon's 5 GB without breaking a sweat -- or the law.
OK, go ahead and scream at me that I'm blaming the victim. I'm not.
"I'm not blaming the victim, but" ranks up there with "I'm not a racist/sexist, but" for intellectual dishonesty. Just because you claim it's not doesn't mean it isn't.
It sounds like, in all of your occurrences of mortal danger, you either knew who was attacking you or had someone who's job it was to protect you. How does that make you qualified to judge whether not a person who is concerned about anonymous threats of violence -- possibly coming from "A-list bloggers" or their acquaintances, people that she might actually come into contact with -- is overreacting?
And this has nothing to do with whether or not women are more likely to be victimized by men.
Actually, that has everything to do with it. If you're more likely to find yourself the victim of violence, you're going to be more cautious about putting yourself into situations that enable it.
What I'm essentially saying is that her chances of being raped in a parking lot by a stranger are probably higher than one of these people actually tracking her down and inflicting harm on her.
Wrong. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey for 2005, "[a]bout seven in ten female rape or sexual assault victims stated the offender was an intimate, other relative, a friend or an acquaintance."
I've been online for almost 20 years and I've seen these things often enough to know how they work and why they happen.
And in your 20 years, how many of these threats were directed at you?
FWIW, if I were married and this was my wife that's probably what I'd tell her. It's scary and annoying and whatnot, but she doesn't need to cloister herself up in a room and shiver in fear, because that's exactly what the fucktards that did this wanted to begin with.
I pity the the woman who would be married to you, if you're willing to shrug off her concerns over threats of violence, implied or not, because she'd just be "giving them what they want".
All it takes is one guy who doesn't just want her to be afraid for there to be a disaster. In Kathy Sierra's case, given that some of these threats are coming from people who acquaintances of people she is familiar with, that means she is even more likely to run into one of them than your hypothetical mugger.
The parent post is correct; put yourself in a situation where you have a good chance of being victimized and see how brave you feel then.
We all have the capacity for malicious action, but nearly none of us ever act on it.
All it takes is one person. And with the person who created such sickening stuff being (semi-)anonymous, she doesn't know who to watch out for.
I think she is giving the trollers what they want -- they don't like what she writes (or whatever), so they want to make her stop or go away -- but I understand her reasons for doing so.
People are such cowards these days. It's NAUSEATING.
Out of curiosity, are you including or excluding yourself from that generalization? I find that lots of people on/. like to deride others for cowardice or other moral failings when, truth be told, they wouldn't act any better in similar circumstances.
This woman was not the subject of a harshly-worded argument or even a juvenile personal attack; people were posting Photoshopped images of her in sexually degrading situations, and posting graphic descriptions of violence, mutilation and rape. Maybe that's something you can just laugh off and ignore, but it's getting to the point where women can't even do that any more.
And if she does get assaulted or killed, the same type of people who are condemning her for being too weak to simply put up with it will be condemning her for not taking the threats seriously enough. It's a no-win situation for women and victim-blaming is an easy way to avoid having any empathy for the victim, or feel the need to press for change.
It takes me 3 minutes to figure out if something will take me less than 2 minutes to do, so I get a deadlock. The only real solution is writing post-its on a whiteboard.
As with most things, people like to nitpick the fine details as a way of criticizing the whole.
As a fairly new GTD user, I've discovered that much of GTD is meant to be used as guidelines or strategies, not divine commands from on high. The important principles of GTD are:
1) Collect all of the unfinished tasks and projects in your life ("open loops" in GTD parlance). 2) Go through that collection and decide what needs to be done with each open loop:
* Can it be done right now, in 2 minutes or less? If so, do it.
* If not, can you delegate it to someone else? If so, do so.
* If not, what's the "Next Action" (more GTD jargon) that needs to be done, either to finish it or to move it to the next step? 3) Keep track of your Next Actions in a trusted system -- notebook, PDA, text files, whatever -- so you know what needs to be done when you have time to do it. 4) Once you know what all needs to be done, you are capable of making informed decisions as to what you should be doing at any given moment. (To me, this is the most significant point of GTD.)
If you can make those principles work, the details are negotiable. If it takes you more than two minutes to figure out what needs to be done and your incoming traffic and workload permits it, set the threshold to 5 minutes. The GTD book itself usually describes seveal methods of approaching a step.
This is what drives websites like Lifehacker and 43 Folders; people are sharing things that work for them or pointing out new things that can be used to implement GTD or otherwise improve personal productivity.
(Yes, I know that parent was probably just trying to be funny. But I still wanted to throw my two cents out for people who haven't tried GTD, or tried and haven't been able to make it work.)
The new Apple TV media extender is supposed to ship this month, perhaps even by the time you read this column, and if you are like me you are wondering what that 40-gig hard drive is doing inside. I'm guessing we won't know for sure until later this year [...]
...unless you listened to Jobs' Macworld Keynote or read the flurry of articles that flew around afterwards -- such as this Macworld article -- in which case you would know that the AppleTV is a glorified video iPod that can be synced with iTunes like any other iPod. (Sorry, that's not technically true; apparently the AppleTV can sync over a wireless network connection.)
It will be interesting to hear Apple's explanation for the hard drive.
Or is this simply the most egregious example of not letting the facts -- easily-obtained facts, no less -- get in the way of his "secret answer"? I know these Cringely pieces are often light on substance and heavy on BS, but this in unbelievable...
What would happen if (god forbid) Linus were in Reiser's place? Would everyone here be distancing themselves from using Linux?
This is one Linux distributor making a decision for their product; a decision which may have been in the works even before Hans' arrest, though I assume that may have made the decision an easy one.
Despite my opinion that Hans is guilty, I don't hold it against the software he created. If the remaining developers want to rename Reiser4 to avoid the ugly association, fine.
And, no, I don't think "if you aren't going to use ReiserFS because Hans killed his wife, then you should stop using electricity because Edison created the electric chair" is a legitimate question; it's a straw argument meant to elicit a specific emotional reaction. (For one, I'm pretty sure electricity existed before Thomas Edison did.)
Snarkiness aside, the answer is simple; I'm not a member of the jury, nor am I the judge trying his case, so I have no legal obligation to assume that he is innocent until proven otherwise.
From what little I've read about the actual case, I believe he did it. If I read more that reasonably demonstrates that he did not do it -- as opposed to crackpot Slashdot theories that blood found in his car could have come from a nosebleed, or that Hans Reiser bought books on criminal investigation techniques to satisfy his curiosity -- then I will change my mind. If a jury of his peers finds him not guilty, then I will accept their verdict.
But I'm not required to think the best of Hans Reiser, and this "whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?" meme only reinforces my belief that there are a bunch of shallow, self-indulgent people on Slashdot.
No, retaining a lawyer in the face of criminal charges or a civil action makes perfect sense. Nina Reiser has been missing for over a month, so it's assumed the police have talked to Hans before about it. There's a reason why the police have to let you have access to legal representation when you're accused of a crime. (Well, up util recently anyway...)
If you want to investigate your legal rights as the accused, you buy books on criminal law (or better yet, retain a lawyer). Buying books on police procedure can be shown to have more to do with finding out how to "beat the system".
My point is, if you'd want to kill your wife, you'd obtain these books BEFORE you kill your wife, study them thoroughly for a long time and then despose them. Hans Reiser is not stupid.
Lots of criminals are caught precisely because they believe they're smarter than the people doing the investigating, and end up making that one critical mistake. Look up Ward Weaver -- he plead guilty to charges of murdering a 12- and a 13-year old girl in Oregon City. It took the FBI eight months to come up with a reason to obtain a search warrant for his property, where they ultimately found the bodies.
But go ahead, please try the "I'm a geek! I just wanted to know how the police are going to investigate me should they determine I'm a suspect!" defense, and let me know how it works. You call it "checking the documentation on a bug", but a jury is more likely to consider it obstructing justice or premeditation.
but perhaps someone who led an exemplarily life - volunteer work, good parenting, clean record - until the age of 40 shouldn't spend the rest of his/her life in prison for a single murder.
This has got to be the stupidest goddamn argument I have ever heard.
So how many people should this paragon of virtue be allowed to murder before we lock them up for life? And are you saying you're willing to allow your hypothetical murderer get off with a slap on the wrist, as long as he or she is really this great guy?
And how do we decide who gets the benefit of being let off easy for murder? Does being able to write a great filesystem rank higher than, say, being a pediatrician? How about a minister?
If Hans Reiser did in fact kill his wife, then I don't care how great Reiser4 is, or how great Reiser5 might have been. He should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. I'm sorry if the reality of that situation inconveniences your overprivileged ass, but you'll get over it eventually.
Really? So how does one do any of the following from a thin client or mobile phone?
*Edit digital video *Edit digital audio *Create 3d graphics and animations *Editing large images *Develop and compile software
As long as anyone has any interest in doing any of these, the "desktop era" will keep on keepin' on.
However, if Microsoft wants to turn towards a renting-software-over-the-network paradigm, it'll make it that much easier for me to ignore their offerings. Especially if they only run on Windows.
Wow, they actually managed to kill the product before it hit the market. Nobody will buy this.
They don't have to sell boatloads of them, at least not at first.
They'll market it through back-channels -- you'll see lots of "sign up for XXX and get a FREE Microsoft Zune!" and Zunes given away as prizes in contests. I'm sure that Microsoft has figured out how long they can lose money on Zunes before they have to pull the plug.
I think of the Zune and Zune's music service as "iPod and iTunes Music Store, if the labels got exactly what they wanted."
Slashdot Mirror
"Most" people don't store their photo's "Raw".
You obviously do not do serious work in the photography industry, because I can tell you that you are flat-out wrong.
But, given that your post amounts to little more than a long-winded ad hominem attack, it doesn't surprise me that your facts are a little off.
I do not work in the photography industry per se, but I'm tech support for a company that sells a DAM software product and most all we do is talk to people who work with RAW images.
So in your world, anything that is an exception in a contract is actually "breaking the contract, but we won't sue you for it?"
How sad.
Go without visual voice mail or without a 2 year contract. Hmmm. Tough choice...NOT!
I'm really surprised that this isn't discussed more, but you can activate an iPhone without signing up for a 2-year contract. I have a co-worker who did exactly this; he was told how to do it by a sales associate at the store he purchased it from. This is not illegal in any way; AT&T lets you do month-to-month on all of their plans in this manner, if you buy the phone first. Given that the iPhone price is not subsidized by the contract in any way, shape or form, why tie yourself into a contract?
When you activate the iPhone, enter all 9's for your Social Security number. You'll fail the credit check (duh!) and you will be told you can either go to an AT&T store to talk to a representative or you can go month-to-month.
but what are you going to do now that you just bought a 2-year contract with AT&T that was required with the purchase of your iPhone?
A contract is not required to complete the purchase.
One of my co-workers bought an iPhone and is using it month-to-month on AT&T. No trickery or hackery involved.
The Mac Mini is getting Core 2 Duo processors! Sweet! But the store page still says 802.11g, not 802.11n. Is this a "you need our 'enabler' to get 802.11n" thing or are they not going to 802.11n for the Mini?
The answer to this will determine if I snap one up or save a couple of months for an iMac.
THAC0 is still there, it just has a different name.
From Wikipedia's entry:
The formula to convert THAC0/AC to 3rd Edition "Attack Bonus" (and vice versa) is:
* BAB = 20 - THAC0
* THAC0 = 20 - BAB
* 3rd Edition Armor Class = 20 - 2nd Edition Armor Class
* 2nd Edition Armor Class = 20 - 3rd Edition Armor Class
In older versions of D&D, your armor's AC value is a set number; for the case of leather armor, it's AC is 7.
If your THAC0 is 17 and you roll a 14, did you hit or not? Well, you subtract your opponent's AC from your THAC0 to see what number you need to hit; in this case, 17 - 7 = 10, so you hit with a 14.
The THAC0 system is counter-intuitive; better armor has a lower score, and will run into negative. So a person with an AC of -5 is actually harder to hit than a nearly-naked person with an AC of 10. And, with those higher -- er, I mean lower -- AC values, you end up subtracting a negative from your THAC0.
In 3rd edition, it's the same range of scores and modifiers, only it's all done via addition instead of subtraction.
Your base AC is 10; studded leather armor gives you a +3 to AC, so your AC is 13. (Note that with the older THAC0/AC scheme, your AC would be 7; in 3rd edition, we're effectively adding the armor value to the base 10 instead of subtracting it, but it's the same delta from the "unarmored" AC.)
To hit your opponent, take your attack modifier (a 3rd-level fighter has a base attack bonus of +3, we'll ignore modifiers for high Strength and the like for this example) and add it to your die roll. So if you roll a 14, add the +3 for your attack modifier, you get a 17, which beats your opponent's AC of 13 by 4 points. Which, if you'll note, is the same delta as in the THAC0 example.
The advantage is that it's more intuitive. Instead of my THAC0 of 10 being so much better than your THAC0 of 17 and my kickass armor giving me an AC of 2 versus the poor unarmored mage's 10, I have a +10 to hit as opposed to your +3 to hit and my armor class is 18 versus that same mage's 10.
Jay (=
Okay, so it allegedly doesn't use X11, but you still need to have it installed?
That's because you're looking at the page for the existing OOo X11 port.
The actual page for the Aqua port says nothing about requiring X11.
There's one problem with this statement. Babylon 5 was only on TNT for one season -- the fifth. Before that, it was syndicated.
You might be thinking of Crusade, which TNT did their level best to smother while in the cradle. It didn't have the punch of the final couple of seasons of B5, but that's because it was a new show. New characters to explore and create relationships with, new status quo, and so on.
Seems like everyone would be better surved with forums, a web-page and the normal book releases.
Forums? Not the same at all. I don't want to have to wade through mindless rules flamewars and irrelevant conversations to find useful stuff.
Existing books? Sure, those have value, if they can get enough material on a topic to create one. But maybe I just want an article with five new, themed spells, suitable for an NPC, new religion, or a dusty tome of "forgotten" spells. Or maybe I want the excellent Dungeoncraft series to continue, or "100 things you'd find in a marketplace".
Websites? We shall see what WotC comes up with, but websites can be impermanent -- the content is only available as long as the site's owners chose to host it. What would have happened had TSR had such a site when they were looking to go out of business? My guess is, the site would be shut down and that information lost; even if not, little of the content would likely still be available on WotC's site today.
Dungeon improved greatly over the past couple of years, culminating in the Adventure Paths -- a series of linked adventures, one per month, designed to take a party from 1st- to 20th-level. The first one, the Shackled City, was so-so in my opinion. The second one, the Age of Worms, was a lot better; I think they were starting to get the feel for writing them. We are over halfway through the third one, the Savage Tide; it will conclude in the final issue of Dungeon. The Dungeoncraft articles are pretty interesting, too; Monte Cook and Wolfgang Baur have both provided wonderful articles about adventure design and campaign-building.
In my opinion Dragon is still of varying usefulness with the addition of monthly columns devoted to WotC's major campaign settings (Eberron and Forgotten Realms) and my favorite series of articles EVER, Core Faiths. Each article explored a deity in the core D&D pantheon and really fleshed it out -- outlook on life, role of the clergy, aphorisms, new spells or magic items unique to the faith, sample NPCs suitable for summoning via Summon Planar Ally, and more. (The Core Faiths for Vecna was a great Halloween treat last year.)
What eventually convinced me to subscribe was the utility of having those articles on hand whenever and wherever I game. No scouring a series of websites, or hoping that WotC's site hasn't "retired" the article. The fact that subscriptions to Dungeon and Dragon were increasing over the past couple of years tells me that I'm not alone in finding this content valuable.
Paizo will apparently be publishing a new periodical, Pathfinder. It looks to be a hybrid of Dungeon (adventures, including new Adventure Paths) and Dragon (new monsters, spells, NPCs, and locales), and all of their material will be released under the OGL. You will be able to get it in either PDF or dead-tree editions, so people who want that electronic content will have it while old fogeys like me can add to the growing pile of gaming supplements. I'm strongly considering converting my remaining subscriptions and grabbing the first couple of issues.
Bootcamp is beta software with several large known bugs
I was under the impression that all Boot Camp did was allow you to resize an existing HFS partition, insert some EFI extensions so that XP/Vista can load and allow you to select an OS on startup, and burn a drivers CD for you.
A recent build of Boot Camp includes a host of updated drivers, which appear to fix most of the problems I've heard described about.
What "large known bugs" are you referring to?
If you are downloading more the 5GB then you are definitely a pirate.
Really? I think this is funny, since I downloaded two things over the last week, to see how they would play on my new MacBook; the demo for Supreme Commander, which weighs in at a little over 1 GB, and the WoW client which according to Blizzard's little downloader app encompasses about 3 GB. So there's 4GB gone, in under a week.
What are other game demos weighing in at?
Battlefield 2142 demo ~ 1.1 GB
Command and Conquer 3 demo ~ 1.2 GB
Company of Heroes demo ~ 1.8 GB
Warhammer: Mark of Chaos singleplayer demo ~ 1.14 GB
Far Cry demo ~ 496 MB
Battlefield 2 demo ~ 543 MB
And don't get me started on the iTunes store; with legally-purchased movies taking up over a gig and a half each (Pirates of the Caribbean 2 is about 1.7 GB), it's easy to blow through Verizon's 5 GB without breaking a sweat -- or the law.
And then there's all those Linux distro ISOs...
Jay
OK, go ahead and scream at me that I'm blaming the victim. I'm not.
"I'm not blaming the victim, but" ranks up there with "I'm not a racist/sexist, but" for intellectual dishonesty. Just because you claim it's not doesn't mean it isn't.
It sounds like, in all of your occurrences of mortal danger, you either knew who was attacking you or had someone who's job it was to protect you. How does that make you qualified to judge whether not a person who is concerned about anonymous threats of violence -- possibly coming from "A-list bloggers" or their acquaintances, people that she might actually come into contact with -- is overreacting?
And this has nothing to do with whether or not women are more likely to be victimized by men.
Actually, that has everything to do with it. If you're more likely to find yourself the victim of violence, you're going to be more cautious about putting yourself into situations that enable it.
What I'm essentially saying is that her chances of being raped in a parking lot by a stranger are probably higher than one of these people actually tracking her down and inflicting harm on her.
Wrong. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey for 2005, "[a]bout seven in ten female rape or sexual assault victims stated the offender was an intimate, other relative, a friend or an acquaintance."
I've been online for almost 20 years and I've seen these things often enough to know how they work and why they happen.
And in your 20 years, how many of these threats were directed at you?
FWIW, if I were married and this was my wife that's probably what I'd tell her. It's scary and annoying and whatnot, but she doesn't need to cloister herself up in a room and shiver in fear, because that's exactly what the fucktards that did this wanted to begin with.
I pity the the woman who would be married to you, if you're willing to shrug off her concerns over threats of violence, implied or not, because she'd just be "giving them what they want".
All it takes is one guy who doesn't just want her to be afraid for there to be a disaster. In Kathy Sierra's case, given that some of these threats are coming from people who acquaintances of people she is familiar with, that means she is even more likely to run into one of them than your hypothetical mugger.
The parent post is correct; put yourself in a situation where you have a good chance of being victimized and see how brave you feel then.
We all have the capacity for malicious action, but nearly none of us ever act on it.
All it takes is one person. And with the person who created such sickening stuff being (semi-)anonymous, she doesn't know who to watch out for.
I think she is giving the trollers what they want -- they don't like what she writes (or whatever), so they want to make her stop or go away -- but I understand her reasons for doing so.
People are such cowards these days. It's NAUSEATING.
/. like to deride others for cowardice or other moral failings when, truth be told, they wouldn't act any better in similar circumstances.
Out of curiosity, are you including or excluding yourself from that generalization? I find that lots of people on
This woman was not the subject of a harshly-worded argument or even a juvenile personal attack; people were posting Photoshopped images of her in sexually degrading situations, and posting graphic descriptions of violence, mutilation and rape. Maybe that's something you can just laugh off and ignore, but it's getting to the point where women can't even do that any more.
And if she does get assaulted or killed, the same type of people who are condemning her for being too weak to simply put up with it will be condemning her for not taking the threats seriously enough. It's a no-win situation for women and victim-blaming is an easy way to avoid having any empathy for the victim, or feel the need to press for change.
It takes me 3 minutes to figure out if something will take me less than 2 minutes to do, so I get a deadlock. The only real solution is writing post-its on a whiteboard.
As with most things, people like to nitpick the fine details as a way of criticizing the whole.
As a fairly new GTD user, I've discovered that much of GTD is meant to be used as guidelines or strategies, not divine commands from on high. The important principles of GTD are:
1) Collect all of the unfinished tasks and projects in your life ("open loops" in GTD parlance).
2) Go through that collection and decide what needs to be done with each open loop:
* Can it be done right now, in 2 minutes or less? If so, do it.
* If not, can you delegate it to someone else? If so, do so.
* If not, what's the "Next Action" (more GTD jargon) that needs to be done, either to finish it or to move it to the next step?
3) Keep track of your Next Actions in a trusted system -- notebook, PDA, text files, whatever -- so you know what needs to be done when you have time to do it.
4) Once you know what all needs to be done, you are capable of making informed decisions as to what you should be doing at any given moment. (To me, this is the most significant point of GTD.)
If you can make those principles work, the details are negotiable. If it takes you more than two minutes to figure out what needs to be done and your incoming traffic and workload permits it, set the threshold to 5 minutes. The GTD book itself usually describes seveal methods of approaching a step.
This is what drives websites like Lifehacker and 43 Folders; people are sharing things that work for them or pointing out new things that can be used to implement GTD or otherwise improve personal productivity.
(Yes, I know that parent was probably just trying to be funny. But I still wanted to throw my two cents out for people who haven't tried GTD, or tried and haven't been able to make it work.)
Jay (=
The new Apple TV media extender is supposed to ship this month, perhaps even by the time you read this column, and if you are like me you are wondering what that 40-gig hard drive is doing inside. I'm guessing we won't know for sure until later this year [...]
...unless you listened to Jobs' Macworld Keynote or read the flurry of articles that flew around afterwards -- such as this Macworld article -- in which case you would know that the AppleTV is a glorified video iPod that can be synced with iTunes like any other iPod. (Sorry, that's not technically true; apparently the AppleTV can sync over a wireless network connection.)
It will be interesting to hear Apple's explanation for the hard drive.
Is he seriously unaware of the purpose of the hard drive? Can he honestly not find the AppleTV page where they discuss how the AppleTV syncs with iTunes?
Or is this simply the most egregious example of not letting the facts -- easily-obtained facts, no less -- get in the way of his "secret answer"? I know these Cringely pieces are often light on substance and heavy on BS, but this in unbelievable...
What would happen if (god forbid) Linus were in Reiser's place? Would everyone here be distancing themselves from using Linux?
This is one Linux distributor making a decision for their product; a decision which may have been in the works even before Hans' arrest, though I assume that may have made the decision an easy one.
Despite my opinion that Hans is guilty, I don't hold it against the software he created. If the remaining developers want to rename Reiser4 to avoid the ugly association, fine.
And, no, I don't think "if you aren't going to use ReiserFS because Hans killed his wife, then you should stop using electricity because Edison created the electric chair" is a legitimate question; it's a straw argument meant to elicit a specific emotional reaction. (For one, I'm pretty sure electricity existed before Thomas Edison did.)
Umm, whatever ever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
Ask José Padilla.
Snarkiness aside, the answer is simple; I'm not a member of the jury, nor am I the judge trying his case, so I have no legal obligation to assume that he is innocent until proven otherwise.
From what little I've read about the actual case, I believe he did it. If I read more that reasonably demonstrates that he did not do it -- as opposed to crackpot Slashdot theories that blood found in his car could have come from a nosebleed, or that Hans Reiser bought books on criminal investigation techniques to satisfy his curiosity -- then I will change my mind. If a jury of his peers finds him not guilty, then I will accept their verdict.
But I'm not required to think the best of Hans Reiser, and this "whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?" meme only reinforces my belief that there are a bunch of shallow, self-indulgent people on Slashdot.
No, retaining a lawyer in the face of criminal charges or a civil action makes perfect sense. Nina Reiser has been missing for over a month, so it's assumed the police have talked to Hans before about it. There's a reason why the police have to let you have access to legal representation when you're accused of a crime. (Well, up util recently anyway...)
If you want to investigate your legal rights as the accused, you buy books on criminal law (or better yet, retain a lawyer). Buying books on police procedure can be shown to have more to do with finding out how to "beat the system".
My point is, if you'd want to kill your wife, you'd obtain these books BEFORE you kill your wife, study them thoroughly for a long time and then despose them. Hans Reiser is not stupid.
Lots of criminals are caught precisely because they believe they're smarter than the people doing the investigating, and end up making that one critical mistake. Look up Ward Weaver -- he plead guilty to charges of murdering a 12- and a 13-year old girl in Oregon City. It took the FBI eight months to come up with a reason to obtain a search warrant for his property, where they ultimately found the bodies.
But go ahead, please try the "I'm a geek! I just wanted to know how the police are going to investigate me should they determine I'm a suspect!" defense, and let me know how it works. You call it "checking the documentation on a bug", but a jury is more likely to consider it obstructing justice or premeditation.
but perhaps someone who led an exemplarily life - volunteer work, good parenting, clean record - until the age of 40 shouldn't spend the rest of his/her life in prison for a single murder.
This has got to be the stupidest goddamn argument I have ever heard.
So how many people should this paragon of virtue be allowed to murder before we lock them up for life? And are you saying you're willing to allow your hypothetical murderer get off with a slap on the wrist, as long as he or she is really this great guy?
And how do we decide who gets the benefit of being let off easy for murder? Does being able to write a great filesystem rank higher than, say, being a pediatrician? How about a minister?
If Hans Reiser did in fact kill his wife, then I don't care how great Reiser4 is, or how great Reiser5 might have been. He should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. I'm sorry if the reality of that situation inconveniences your overprivileged ass, but you'll get over it eventually.
Really? So how does one do any of the following from a thin client or mobile phone?
*Edit digital video
*Edit digital audio
*Create 3d graphics and animations
*Editing large images
*Develop and compile software
As long as anyone has any interest in doing any of these, the "desktop era" will keep on keepin' on.
However, if Microsoft wants to turn towards a renting-software-over-the-network paradigm, it'll make it that much easier for me to ignore their offerings. Especially if they only run on Windows.
Wow, they actually managed to kill the product before it hit the market. Nobody will buy this.
They don't have to sell boatloads of them, at least not at first.
They'll market it through back-channels -- you'll see lots of "sign up for XXX and get a FREE Microsoft Zune!" and Zunes given away as prizes in contests. I'm sure that Microsoft has figured out how long they can lose money on Zunes before they have to pull the plug.
I think of the Zune and Zune's music service as "iPod and iTunes Music Store, if the labels got exactly what they wanted."
After hearing all the rumors of an iPod cell phone and widescreen video iPods, the actual product announcements seem quite unimpressive.
And people wonder why Steve Jobs hates the rumor sites...