We have a very old deadbolt on our garage door. Once we had to get a locksmith out to open it (long story involving me being dumb and leaving the key in the garage) -- it took the locksmith about half an hour to open. A newer lock, for which he had tools, would have taken a few minutes.
This isn't a blanket endorsement of old locks, just an interesting observation.
Some breeds may be more agressive than others, but the big problem is vicious owners. I think you're right when you describe the problem by stereotyping the owners of these dogs as "your average English football hooligan... a skinhead, tattooed & scared psychopath with a demon dog at the end of a leash.". If you abuse and torment a dog, you will have a fearful, vicious animal.
Dogs that bite often do it from a fear reflex. A dog that is sufficiently abused will bite at strangers, and will look impressive snarling on your chain, and will make you feel like a big man walking your beast around. But a sibling of that dog, raised in a caring environment by good owners, will be a sweet and hefty lapdog.
Some breeds are made for fighting. Changes are made to the breed to make the dog harder to damage (more muscular necks, etc), but the personality needed to fight is usually brought about by abusing the puppies. A pit bull raised as a family dog usually behaves as a loving member of the family.
For more information on the innate nature of Pit Bulls, see http://www.badrap.org/rescue/myths.cfm.
(In a recent study of 122 dog breeds by the American Temperament Testing Society (ATT), pit bulls achieved a passing rate of 83.9%. That's as good or better than beagles... 78.2%, and golden retrievers... 83.2%.)
For information on links between animal abuse and spousal/family abuse, see here.
Woke up Tuesday to an alarming email from Aunt Margaret. (Apparently, so did quite few of you, as evidenced by the many "I think your aunt has completely lost it" messages I received.)
It took several hours to finally get a hold of Aunt M on the phone. Before I could say a word about the "odd behavior cry for help," she had her own email question for me:
Did I have any idea why all of her Hotmail would disappear overnight?
I logged in as ladybee777 to check out the damage. Old password worked fine. But no mail in any of the folders...? Weird. (Where was the concerned reply I had sent her that morning?)
Wrote a quick test message and sent it off to myself. Nothing shows up in my gmail inbox. Try again, this time to an older account. Check there: Nothing. Again. Rinse. Repeat. Nothing. Like a little Maxwell's Demon siphoning off all ingoing and outgoing messages. (And apparently sending out its own.)
So Aunt Margaret's email appears to have gone the way of the China countdown. Hijacked. Repurposed.
My first instinct: ask Hotmail to kill the account entirely. But then someone calling him (her?) self "xnbomb" sent me a very persuasive email that made me rethink things. Read for yourself:
It seems that snippets of various emails that have been sent to you by my colleagues have been reassembled and sent back, apparently originating from your aunt's hotmail address. I'm not really sure what it means at this point. But it tells us that we can communicate with these entities using email. In the absence of having a clear idea of just what is going on, the first priority is to communicate, that is how we can learn more. It's at least possible that we've stumbled across something extraordinary here, and our first priority must be to learn all that we can about it.
It's for that reason that I'm going to suggest that you take no further action that interferes with what's going on at ilovebees.com. There's another reason too, one slightly more disturbing. Consider this passage from the end of the tale hidden in the images:
"The day will break and the sun will rise when the Queen returns to rule, and further let it be known that retribution on any who hinder the return of the Queen will be swift and terrible.
This is a significant warning, namely that any interference with that process will be regarded as a hostile act, and will be responded to accordingly. I don't know what the SPDR is capable of, but I'm not sure I want to find out.It's for this reason that I suggest that you don't do anything else to get in the way of this business. If your aunt's business needs a functioning web site immediately, purchase her a new and similarly named domain and get her web site going there. But let this follow its course... while it could just be some hackers being jerks, there is at least a chance that this is something unique and important and wonderful, a window on a world that we may have never seen before, nor will ever see again.
Optimistic and curious, yet with the good sense to be terrified. This seems like a pretty good fix on the situation -- thanks, xnbomb.
I am, of course, wildly nervous about letting the bug(s) continue wreaking havoc entirely unimpeded. But nothing, and I mean nothing, I was doing on the tech side seemed to make a damn bit of difference anyway. So it seems like a good plan to switch gears from active damage control to... well, what?
(ideas?)
P.S. Have decided to try to shield Aunt M from the latest development, so for now I'm telling her it's a widespread Hotmail glitch. I hope I'm doing the right thing.
The newer Blackberry models are cell phones, in addition to data devices. I got one so I no longer have to carry my (5-year-old) Blackberry and separate voice phone.
Yes there is, there are plenty of 100% guarantees. "We guarantee that we will provide service X, with quality of service Y. If we fail, you are entitled to financial compensation Z by the terms of this guarantee."
That is a 100% guarantee, but is not unlimited liability.
Unlimited liability (in case of failure) is not something any business is eager to provide.
From a quick and dirty search, there seems to be 3,936,246 miles of road in the US. At 45MPH, driving 12 hours a day, you have about 20 years to cover all of them.
Actually, the longer this drags out, the more SCO spends in legal fees, and the quicker their ultimate financial demise takes place.
Uh, the longer it takes, the quicker it will go? I'm a little confused.
So, if the lawsuits take ten years to resolve, then SCO will be gone in six months, but if the lawsuits take six months to resolve (to the total humilation and destruction of SCO), then SCO will linger for a decade?
The cost to the customer (the banks) and the supplier (liability, and perhaps lost sales) is much higher per incident for ATMs than for voting machines, so it makes bottom-line sense to inspect and test the hell out of ATMs. There is much less motivation to test voting machines to the same degree of rigor.
If you want to lower the value of the WiFi brand, put the stickers in dead zones. People will lose trust in AMD HotSpots if they tend to contain no WiFi.
A comet is a veriety of single-tail goldfish. The "typical" goldfish that you get at the fair for throwing a ping-pong ball into a bowl is a litle comet.
A comet is a nice fish. It can be a little agressive if your other fish are fancy and slow varieties, but in general goldfish are much nicer to each other than tropical fish. When I had goldfish, they would huddle down on the bottom together at night.
The H2 is an intermediate stage. Think of this instead as an Ethanol-powered generator that is much more efficient than current models. The H2 allows use of a fuel cell, instead of the conventional (fire -> rotation -> rotating magnets -> electricity) technique.
The old coal plants near here burn sulphur and mercury-laden coal, and thanks to obscene 'grandfathering' rules they pretty much don't have to filter it out of the waste stream. Carbon Dioxide is the least of your troubles in the Ohio River Valley.
If this is slightly less efficient than an internal combustion engine, I'd be very pleased, because it would still be an electricity source that is much more efficient and nicer for the environment than the coal-fired power plants that currently produce for my home and office.
They're waiting so long because the first console release will be the release. For PC software, they can just slide out a 2.01 to cover up anythign that showed up after release. This is much more akward for a console game, the hame has to be right the first time.
If you are like me, every time you see an article like this one, where the author claims that video games are training our nations youth to kill you get angry. The media seems intent on perpetuating the myth that gamers are ticking time bombs just waiting to go off. I know for a fact that gamers are good people. I have had the opportunity on multiple occasions to meet hundreds of you at conventions all over the country. We are just regular people who happen to love video games.
With that in mind we have put together a little something we like to call "Child's Play". Penny Arcade is working with the Seattle Children's Hospital and Amazon.com to make this Christmas really special for a lot of very sick kids. With the help of the Children's Hospital we have created an Amazon Wish List for the kids. It's full of video games, movies and toys. Some of these kids are in pretty bad shape and just having a Game Boy would really raise their spirits.
Please take some time to browse the Wish List. Maybe all you can afford is a package of batteries or maybe you want to go in with your entire office and get the kids a GameCube. Every single contribution will help out the Children's Hospital and the 190,000 kids they treat each year.
All the toys and games will be delivered to us and we will in turn deliver them to the Children's Hospital. As soon as the toys start arriving I'll set up a web site and post as many pictures as I can. We will be making a trip over to one of the hospitals next week and we'll bring you back stories from some of the kids along with more pictures.
Penny Arcade has a readership of something like 150,000 gamers across the world. We are arguably the largest community of gamers on the internet. The important word there being community. This isn't IGN, this isn't Gamespy, we are not a faceless corporation, you are not just a number tracked by a database and then relayed to hungry advertisers. You guys have proven yourselves to be a powerful force when stirred into action. Here is your opportunity to use that power to do some real good.
Let's give these kids the Christmas that they deserve and let's give the news papers a different kind of story to write about gamers.
If I read that right, it appears to say that an electronic mail message sent by or on behalf of one or more lawful owners of copyright, patent, publicity, or trademark rights to an innocent person is SPAM. Fascinating. What is the RIAA's error rate, and what is the fine for repeated violations?
So Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, or Star Wars Boy, would be able get anyone jailed who hosts their.MPGs, just by claiming that the movie is "intended for commercial distribution"? (Later, of course, they could change their minds. As long as they intend to release it when charges are being pressed...)
The threat of a three-year prison term kicks in when anyone makes an illicit copy of a movie "available on a computer network accessible to members of the public," when the film "was intended for commercial distribution but had not been so distributed at the time." Once the film is commercially distributed, the felony penalties appear to no longer apply.
Slashdot Mirror
The organization that was conducting the fraud was largely paid for by the GOP. This was in no way 'independent'.
This isn't a blanket endorsement of old locks, just an interesting observation.
Dogs that bite often do it from a fear reflex. A dog that is sufficiently abused will bite at strangers, and will look impressive snarling on your chain, and will make you feel like a big man walking your beast around. But a sibling of that dog, raised in a caring environment by good owners, will be a sweet and hefty lapdog.
Some breeds are made for fighting. Changes are made to the breed to make the dog harder to damage (more muscular necks, etc), but the personality needed to fight is usually brought about by abusing the puppies. A pit bull raised as a family dog usually behaves as a loving member of the family.
For more information on the innate nature of Pit Bulls, see http://www.badrap.org/rescue/myths.cfm. (In a recent study of 122 dog breeds by the American Temperament Testing Society (ATT), pit bulls achieved a passing rate of 83.9%. That's as good or better than beagles ... 78.2%, and golden retrievers ... 83.2%.)
For information on links between animal abuse and spousal/family abuse, see here.
Reducing tech pocket litter is a plus!
That is a 100% guarantee, but is not unlimited liability. Unlimited liability (in case of failure) is not something any business is eager to provide.
They may need more vans.
Bleach breaks down pretty quickly. It dramatically alters the local PH, but doesn't tend to persist.
Uh, the longer it takes, the quicker it will go? I'm a little confused.
So, if the lawsuits take ten years to resolve, then SCO will be gone in six months, but if the lawsuits take six months to resolve (to the total humilation and destruction of SCO), then SCO will linger for a decade?
The cost to the customer (the banks) and the supplier (liability, and perhaps lost sales) is much higher per incident for ATMs than for voting machines, so it makes bottom-line sense to inspect and test the hell out of ATMs. There is much less motivation to test voting machines to the same degree of rigor.
literally true in all applications. They are there to aid understanding.
Extrordinary claims require extrordinary proof, and this is a very extrordinary claim.
If you want to lower the value of the WiFi brand, put the stickers in dead zones. People will lose trust in AMD HotSpots if they tend to contain no WiFi.
A comet is a nice fish. It can be a little agressive if your other fish are fancy and slow varieties, but in general goldfish are much nicer to each other than tropical fish. When I had goldfish, they would huddle down on the bottom together at night.
They are friendly and social animals.
Use electricity for things that need the refined power (like lights, TV, hair dryers, AC). Use whatever energy source is cheapest per BTU for heat.
The H2 is an intermediate stage. Think of this instead as an Ethanol-powered generator that is much more efficient than current models. The H2 allows use of a fuel cell, instead of the conventional (fire -> rotation -> rotating magnets -> electricity) technique.
The old coal plants near here burn sulphur and mercury-laden coal, and thanks to obscene 'grandfathering' rules they pretty much don't have to filter it out of the waste stream. Carbon Dioxide is the least of your troubles in the Ohio River Valley.
If this is slightly less efficient than an internal combustion engine, I'd be very pleased, because it would still be an electricity source that is much more efficient and nicer for the environment than the coal-fired power plants that currently produce for my home and office.
They're waiting so long because the first console release will be the release. For PC software, they can just slide out a 2.01 to cover up anythign that showed up after release. This is much more akward for a console game, the hame has to be right the first time.
What date are you using as the Internet's creation date when you say "The internet was created before Al Gore was even in office"?
If I read that right, it appears to say that an electronic mail message sent by or on behalf of one or more lawful owners of copyright, patent, publicity, or trademark rights to an innocent person is SPAM. Fascinating. What is the RIAA's error rate, and what is the fine for repeated violations?
Someone hasn't thought this through.