I was also getting tired of paying $.15 to receive and $.15 to send. I have probably sent a total of 6 text messages in over three years. But then I found an actual use for keeping it.
My wife and I both have our cell phones with area codes near where a significant disaster struck last year. We no longer live in that area (we moved 1,000 miles from that area 3 years ago) though we opted to keep our cell numbers where they were. When said disaster happened, I was unable to call my wife, because our calls were routed through that area.
In desperation, I found that text messages still went through fine. Of course neither of us were personally affected, I still wanted her to know so she could check on her relatives in a timely manner. I expect that the messages went through because they use so much less bandwidth than a phone call, though I'm not 100% sure. I somehow doubt it had anything to do with the $.15 per message charge, though.
So I found once in three years that I had a use for text messaging. And just in case I should encounter another situation where the mobile networks are overloaded and I need to get through, I'll keep text messaging around for that.
The people are the people, same people as the first, fouth, etc. amendments.
Then why start by discussing militias and the state?
Its the security of being Free from a tyrannical government
That is an interesting interpretation, but I have yet to see a good argument to back it up. And which tyrannical government would that be? Domestic or foreign tyrannical governments? And if that is the purpose, then why would we need to be able to carry concealed arms in public?
All of your questions are answered, if you choose to listen.
That is the decision of the courts. That is how they chose to interpret the constitution. As best I know, the court did not travel back in time to ask the writers of the constitution to clarify the message they were trying to convey when they wrote it.
So thank you, but your link does not answer my question. It only provides a current supreme court decision on what it might mean. It really is not an authoritative answer on what the second amendment is necessarily adressing.
It's good to see that the Constitution still means something.
Really? I think that all depends on how one chooses to interpret the second amendment. Let's take a look at the text of the second amendment, shall we?
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Exactly which people are to keep and bear Arms? Is it only the people of the Militia? For that matter, what Arms are they to bear? And for what purpose? It specifically mentions the "security of a free State". To whom would this security be against?
Often you are exactly the type of help that we so badly need in bioinformatics and proteomics. You know how to deal with the data in a non-biased manner.
As a biochemist myself, I know that it is far to easy to approach a data set knowing what a given m/z corresponds to, and then chose the data grooming strategy that most favors that peak. And being as we don't really have truly "standard" algorithms for approaching proteomics mass spec data, we need people who know the fundamentals of the techniques well enough to keep us researchers from falling into our own pits.
Another change over time...
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 1
Is that whether we like it or not, our lifestyles have made air travel into a necessity for many. Sure, you can drive from New York to LA, but would that make sense if you're going there for a business trip?
While it is true that flight used to be a privilege for the wealthy elite, there is a lot more expected out of everyone now. My wife has already flown three times for business this year, and myself once. And our combined income doesn't reach six figures before taxes. Add to that flights to visit family (within very narrow vacation schedules), and you see that our lives have come to be dependent on the ability to fly to our destination.
Lastly I will add that some airlines provide a very reasonable level of service for the dollar. Others, of course, treat customers like cattle. Oddly enough, one of the ones that does not treat me like cattle comes from a state that raises a lot of cattle - and the converse also applies. I had a 1.5 hour layover in EWR two weeks ago, and the airline even gave the waiting passengers free soda and pretzels for our inconvenience. Of course that didn't cost them much, but I would say it helped quite a bit in calming the masses.
Airline passengers were the very wealthy elites, now they're not.
As were the airline executives. Funny, only part of the equation has changed over the years...
Wow, I haven't gotten any pirate spam. I feel left out.
Just in case you aren't making a joke, I will clarify that by pirate spam I mean spam that is selling obviously pirated software. In particular, all the "downloadable software" sites that are selling software that clearly has license terms prohibiting such sales by third parties.
Of course, most reasonable people would also suspect this when they see that the same sites are claiming to be selling Adobe and Microsoft products at 80% off retail.
As if their total lack of real control over domain registration wasn't bad enough already, now they want to sell TLDs? Come on, we're close enough to arbitrary mish-mash as it is.
The only good that could potentially come from this would be if the spammers found it worthwhile to start placing all their spamvertised domains under TLDs like.viagra and.pirate, so it would be easier to screen them.
I can say from my own experience with spam that there are plenty of bad registrars in China, even when only considering which ones are spammer-friendly. Most of the spam email that I receive as advertising for illegal sales of drugs or pirated software is sent on behalf of domains sold by Chinese registrars.
A few Chinese bad apples:
HKDND
yesnic
easydns
paycenter
And these are just a few bad registrars that I find by searching through a short collection of my spam.
It's ironic that they want domain owners to provide valid contact information in the belief that this will stop spam.
No, actually it really isn't ironic at all. The mechanism makes sense when one considers how many more internet users there are than internet domains. The purpose of requiring valid contact information is so that there is a valid mechanism for contacting the owners of domains that are being spamvertised. The reasoning behind this is simple - if the companies that benefit from spam are required to make their true contact information known, then a mechanism to take action against them is available.
Which is where the problem lies with the registrar mentioned by the article (as well as many others). If you don't know where a company is actually located, you have no mechanism to try to take action against them.
while 22 nanometer resolution may give insight into the structure of a virus, that would be awfully lousy resolution for a macromolecule (say, a protein)
You hit the nail on the head, there. Indeed, protein structures generally need to be solved at a resolution of 8 angstroms or less to be taken seriously. And of course there are 10 Angstroms to a nanometer, so 22 nanometer resolution is equal to 220 Angstroms.
Useful for a virus superstructure, but with a protein you wouldn't be able to distinguish one end from another.
Any issues with ports and connectors wearing out? On my 2003-era R40 I have lost the rear USB port, the side one is flaky, the LAN port is non-op.
I've never had a port problem on my R32. You may want to consider replacing your motherboard would be my guess. I've also found the guys in the forums at thinkpads.com (no relation to lenovo or IBM) to be very helpful - they might be familiar with your problem.
Also, the case is experiencing cracking.
That was exactly what lead me to take my R32 apart. I had a crack on the back of the LCD bezel that was working its way to a point I was no longer comfortable with. Those parts are easily found on ebay through various dealers that sell parts from 2nd-hand laptops. I ended up needing a couple parts by the time I was done as not all the parts for my R32 came out quite as planned.
That's not to say it wasn't a good investment for you, but to compare it to a new laptop and claim it's a bargain is a little silly.
Well, being as I don't need more speed or better video, the only functional difference with the new one would be DVD burning capability (which I could add to my existing one) and more maximum ram (which I don't need at the moment).
So I would say its a fair comparison.
Now, if I wanted to run vista or play doom 3, then I would probably be more concerned about the rest of the hardware differences between my current laptop and a new one. But neither vista nor any new game have any value to me whatsoever.
My punch cards never stopped working also, so like you I never saw the sense in upgrading.
Ahh, yes. I see your humor. I should have added:
My 7-year-old thinkpad still runs everything I need.
It already has 1 gb of RAM, an 80 gb HD, wired and wireless networking, and can burn CDs (or even better, write to my USB flash drive).
I don't need a blazing fast system for presentations and email. I have a desktop that does the heavy number-crunching (and a cluster for even heavier). I don't care about windows vista, it is completely irrelevant to me. Same with Doom 3, Half-Life of any iteration, or any other popular game released in the past 3 years.
Maybe when Duke Nukem Forever comes out, I'll then consider buying a new laptop. Or maybe I'll just run it on our cluster instead...
I am a cheapskate that also owns a thinkpad R-series (an R32, to be more specific). I just dropped about $60-70 in parts (more when you include shipping) to replace a crack in the LCD bezel.
I almost gave up on it, and replaced it with a new unit, until I realized just how well my 7-year-old thinkpad still runs. I've seen my colleagues replace numerous dell, apple, and HP laptops in this time. This notebook has been in 4 countries, 3 provinces, and over a dozen US states with me. Its on its third battery, but thats not bad for its age. I bought it when I was finishing my 4-year degree, and its still with me now, over halfway into my PhD.
And when I realized that I would spend over $1,000 to get a new thinkpad with the options I wanted, I realized that my repair was a great investment. And of course the IBM (lenovo) website has all the documents you need to completely disassemble your laptop (and put it back together, too).
Unless you have extra money - and I'm guessing you don't, since you bought an R-series - you would be wise to put some money into refurbishing your laptop. You'll be glad you did.
At least McCain has been in the senate long enough that he has a real voting record. Obama's a complete unknown, and you can bet he's going to work his hardest to stay that way.
A complete unknown? Which talking points are you reading from? Obama was elected to the US senate in the 2004 elections, and therefore has over 3 years of voting experience in the senate. The US Senate even tracks the voting records for senators, and you can read Barack Obama's voting record if you really want to.
Not sure how you can call that a "complete unknown", when its right out there in plain view for the whole world to read.
At least this vote will make it painfully clear which politicians should stay and which should be removed post-haste.
Unfortunately, only half of the US house is up for re-election this year. And in all likelihood, we'll find that of that half, the ones that vote yes for this bill will come from the states most paranoid of terrorism (and other such political fairy tales).
In revenge, I've hooked up the transmitter to a cheap dvd player and leave anime porn running on a loop just before going to work, every few days
Be careful not to leave the porn running too loudly, or you may find yourself knowing your neighbors a little more than you wanted: loud porn consequences.
I previously lived in MN, where "no-fault" insurance was the norm (perhaps even the law).
I would say it was perhaps the only scam going that was bigger than auto insurance itself. Basically, any claim you made, no matter what the basis was for it, was automatically made your fault. No matter how obviously it was someone else's fault, your rate would go up.
Even if you were rear ended, you own rate would go up. And of course if you hit an animal on the road, your rate goes up for that, too. Really, it seemed like the only people who benefit from "no-fault" insurance are the insurance companies (surprise!). And of course, since the "no-fault" policy means that your rate goes up with any claim whatsoever, drivers hesitate to place claims. Which of course benefits the insurance company as well.
I would almost prefer to have an option for "self-insured" rather than forced to take "no-fault". I could have done a lot with the 5+ years of insurance payments that I made in MN that I never saw any claims from.
Slashdot Mirror
I was also getting tired of paying $.15 to receive and $.15 to send. I have probably sent a total of 6 text messages in over three years. But then I found an actual use for keeping it.
My wife and I both have our cell phones with area codes near where a significant disaster struck last year. We no longer live in that area (we moved 1,000 miles from that area 3 years ago) though we opted to keep our cell numbers where they were. When said disaster happened, I was unable to call my wife, because our calls were routed through that area.
In desperation, I found that text messages still went through fine. Of course neither of us were personally affected, I still wanted her to know so she could check on her relatives in a timely manner. I expect that the messages went through because they use so much less bandwidth than a phone call, though I'm not 100% sure. I somehow doubt it had anything to do with the $.15 per message charge, though.
So I found once in three years that I had a use for text messaging. And just in case I should encounter another situation where the mobile networks are overloaded and I need to get through, I'll keep text messaging around for that.
Damn MS Office cartoon character, always in the way. Just let me do my work is all I ask...
If he's promoting freedom in clouds, maybe he's been hanging out with this annoying character?
It wasn't that long ago that ICANN voted against allowing the much-requested .xxx domain. Now they want to open up to allow custom TLDs?
As if the internet didn't have enough arbitrary hodge-podge already.
Then why start by discussing militias and the state?
Its the security of being Free from a tyrannical government
That is an interesting interpretation, but I have yet to see a good argument to back it up. And which tyrannical government would that be? Domestic or foreign tyrannical governments? And if that is the purpose, then why would we need to be able to carry concealed arms in public?
All of your questions are answered, if you choose to listen.
That is the decision of the courts. That is how they chose to interpret the constitution. As best I know, the court did not travel back in time to ask the writers of the constitution to clarify the message they were trying to convey when they wrote it.
So thank you, but your link does not answer my question. It only provides a current supreme court decision on what it might mean. It really is not an authoritative answer on what the second amendment is necessarily adressing.
Really? I think that all depends on how one chooses to interpret the second amendment. Let's take a look at the text of the second amendment, shall we?
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Exactly which people are to keep and bear Arms? Is it only the people of the Militia? For that matter, what Arms are they to bear? And for what purpose? It specifically mentions the "security of a free State". To whom would this security be against?
Often you are exactly the type of help that we so badly need in bioinformatics and proteomics. You know how to deal with the data in a non-biased manner.
As a biochemist myself, I know that it is far to easy to approach a data set knowing what a given m/z corresponds to, and then chose the data grooming strategy that most favors that peak. And being as we don't really have truly "standard" algorithms for approaching proteomics mass spec data, we need people who know the fundamentals of the techniques well enough to keep us researchers from falling into our own pits.
Is that whether we like it or not, our lifestyles have made air travel into a necessity for many. Sure, you can drive from New York to LA, but would that make sense if you're going there for a business trip?
While it is true that flight used to be a privilege for the wealthy elite, there is a lot more expected out of everyone now. My wife has already flown three times for business this year, and myself once. And our combined income doesn't reach six figures before taxes. Add to that flights to visit family (within very narrow vacation schedules), and you see that our lives have come to be dependent on the ability to fly to our destination.
Lastly I will add that some airlines provide a very reasonable level of service for the dollar. Others, of course, treat customers like cattle. Oddly enough, one of the ones that does not treat me like cattle comes from a state that raises a lot of cattle - and the converse also applies. I had a 1.5 hour layover in EWR two weeks ago, and the airline even gave the waiting passengers free soda and pretzels for our inconvenience. Of course that didn't cost them much, but I would say it helped quite a bit in calming the masses.
As were the airline executives. Funny, only part of the equation has changed over the years...
Sorry, but we're talking about C++ here. You may have this confused with an earlier slashdot story.
Perhaps that (mis)-spelling was chosen because you can't spell despair without "spair".
Which of course is what oh-so-many IT jobs are - a source of despair.
Arr, would that be a pieces-of-eight joke?
Just in case you aren't making a joke, I will clarify that by pirate spam I mean spam that is selling obviously pirated software. In particular, all the "downloadable software" sites that are selling software that clearly has license terms prohibiting such sales by third parties.
Of course, most reasonable people would also suspect this when they see that the same sites are claiming to be selling Adobe and Microsoft products at 80% off retail.
As if their total lack of real control over domain registration wasn't bad enough already, now they want to sell TLDs? Come on, we're close enough to arbitrary mish-mash as it is.
.viagra and .pirate, so it would be easier to screen them.
The only good that could potentially come from this would be if the spammers found it worthwhile to start placing all their spamvertised domains under TLDs like
But we all know how likely that is..
A few Chinese bad apples:
- HKDND
- yesnic
- easydns
- paycenter
And these are just a few bad registrars that I find by searching through a short collection of my spam.No, actually it really isn't ironic at all. The mechanism makes sense when one considers how many more internet users there are than internet domains. The purpose of requiring valid contact information is so that there is a valid mechanism for contacting the owners of domains that are being spamvertised. The reasoning behind this is simple - if the companies that benefit from spam are required to make their true contact information known, then a mechanism to take action against them is available.
Which is where the problem lies with the registrar mentioned by the article (as well as many others). If you don't know where a company is actually located, you have no mechanism to try to take action against them.
You hit the nail on the head, there. Indeed, protein structures generally need to be solved at a resolution of 8 angstroms or less to be taken seriously. And of course there are 10 Angstroms to a nanometer, so 22 nanometer resolution is equal to 220 Angstroms.
Useful for a virus superstructure, but with a protein you wouldn't be able to distinguish one end from another.
I've never had a port problem on my R32. You may want to consider replacing your motherboard would be my guess. I've also found the guys in the forums at thinkpads.com (no relation to lenovo or IBM) to be very helpful - they might be familiar with your problem.
Also, the case is experiencing cracking.
That was exactly what lead me to take my R32 apart. I had a crack on the back of the LCD bezel that was working its way to a point I was no longer comfortable with. Those parts are easily found on ebay through various dealers that sell parts from 2nd-hand laptops. I ended up needing a couple parts by the time I was done as not all the parts for my R32 came out quite as planned.
Well, being as I don't need more speed or better video, the only functional difference with the new one would be DVD burning capability (which I could add to my existing one) and more maximum ram (which I don't need at the moment).
So I would say its a fair comparison.
Now, if I wanted to run vista or play doom 3, then I would probably be more concerned about the rest of the hardware differences between my current laptop and a new one. But neither vista nor any new game have any value to me whatsoever.
Ahh, yes. I see your humor. I should have added:
My 7-year-old thinkpad still runs everything I need.
It already has 1 gb of RAM, an 80 gb HD, wired and wireless networking, and can burn CDs (or even better, write to my USB flash drive).
I don't need a blazing fast system for presentations and email. I have a desktop that does the heavy number-crunching (and a cluster for even heavier). I don't care about windows vista, it is completely irrelevant to me. Same with Doom 3, Half-Life of any iteration, or any other popular game released in the past 3 years.
Maybe when Duke Nukem Forever comes out, I'll then consider buying a new laptop. Or maybe I'll just run it on our cluster instead...
I am a cheapskate that also owns a thinkpad R-series (an R32, to be more specific). I just dropped about $60-70 in parts (more when you include shipping) to replace a crack in the LCD bezel.
I almost gave up on it, and replaced it with a new unit, until I realized just how well my 7-year-old thinkpad still runs. I've seen my colleagues replace numerous dell, apple, and HP laptops in this time. This notebook has been in 4 countries, 3 provinces, and over a dozen US states with me. Its on its third battery, but thats not bad for its age. I bought it when I was finishing my 4-year degree, and its still with me now, over halfway into my PhD.
And when I realized that I would spend over $1,000 to get a new thinkpad with the options I wanted, I realized that my repair was a great investment. And of course the IBM (lenovo) website has all the documents you need to completely disassemble your laptop (and put it back together, too).
Unless you have extra money - and I'm guessing you don't, since you bought an R-series - you would be wise to put some money into refurbishing your laptop. You'll be glad you did.
A complete unknown? Which talking points are you reading from? Obama was elected to the US senate in the 2004 elections, and therefore has over 3 years of voting experience in the senate. The US Senate even tracks the voting records for senators, and you can read Barack Obama's voting record if you really want to.
Not sure how you can call that a "complete unknown", when its right out there in plain view for the whole world to read.
Unfortunately, only half of the US house is up for re-election this year. And in all likelihood, we'll find that of that half, the ones that vote yes for this bill will come from the states most paranoid of terrorism (and other such political fairy tales).
Be careful not to leave the porn running too loudly, or you may find yourself knowing your neighbors a little more than you wanted:
loud porn consequences.
I previously lived in MN, where "no-fault" insurance was the norm (perhaps even the law).
I would say it was perhaps the only scam going that was bigger than auto insurance itself. Basically, any claim you made, no matter what the basis was for it, was automatically made your fault. No matter how obviously it was someone else's fault, your rate would go up.
Even if you were rear ended, you own rate would go up. And of course if you hit an animal on the road, your rate goes up for that, too. Really, it seemed like the only people who benefit from "no-fault" insurance are the insurance companies (surprise!). And of course, since the "no-fault" policy means that your rate goes up with any claim whatsoever, drivers hesitate to place claims. Which of course benefits the insurance company as well.
I would almost prefer to have an option for "self-insured" rather than forced to take "no-fault". I could have done a lot with the 5+ years of insurance payments that I made in MN that I never saw any claims from.