Lois was stuck at home giving birth. Her geeky co-worker / neighbor Craig tries to help, so the first thing he does is Google 'baby' - "OK, I've got 24 million results, let's see..."
There is (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your POV) no such thing as a standard laptop battery i.e. one size fits many. Therefore you don't get the same economies of scale that may occur if there were, say, only 3-4 different laptop battery sizes, with multiple manufacturers cashing after the market.
I suspect the same thing goes on with power tool batteries but I bet if you cracked open a few designed for different tool brands they'd have many the same components between them, similar to how lantern batteries are basically 4 (crappy) C batteries in series.
I want more battery life fucker, I ain't done!
More cellphone than cellphone
More cellphone than cellphone
More cellphone than cellphone
More cellphone than cellphone
More cellphone than cellphone
Test User: OK, so what you're saying is that if I search for lolcats using Google's quantum image search, it will give me an array of lolcat images to choose from, but until I open the image we won't know if the lolcat is funny or not funny? That makes sense.
Google Scientist: Actually, before you look at the image the lolcat is in a state of superposition. Before your look at the photo it can be both funny AND not funny. By the act of you observing the photo it settles into one of those two states.
Test user: So there's a 50/50 chance of the exact same photo being funny or not funny?
Google Scientist: Essentially yes. Well, unless you go by the "many worlds" model, which states that if you look at the picture, you become entangled with the lolcat, so that the observation of the humor of the lolcat, and the actual humor of the lolcat are joined together. There will exist a universe where you find the image funny, and a universe where you find the image not funny, but these two universes cannot inform each other of these two different states.
Test User: I think I understand.
Google Scientist: Go ahead, click on one of the images from the search.
Test User: Now, you're sure nothing bad will happen? No black holes will open up or anything?
Google Scientist (amused): Yes, I'm absolutely sure.
Wow, 12 years, huh? So how's that /. user manual.
on
Slashdot Turns 100,000
·
· Score: 1
...coming along? You know, that one concise document explaining how the site works? You got a... got a bunch of screen prints there? Sitting in a folder, huh? Got a... got a outline of a single document distilling all the help pages into a easy-to-read format? Explaining how karma points work? That whole red-to-black filtering thing? Huh? You got a.. got a diagram showing how to navigate the site, huh? How to, uh, how to use the tags, huh? Been working on that for quite some time, yeah? Twelve years, yeah? Something readable and straightforward so that even longtime visitors can understand and take advantage of all the features, yeah? So they, uh, so they don't have to click through all those big long help pages? Maybe as a PDF? Huh? Yeah? Huh? No, no, you deserve some time off... (pats knee.)
and this is the voice of my brother Guardian. How is it going, eh? And this is the voice of unity. Go. Oo wook oo oo oo oo oo ooooo! Oo wook oo oo oo oo oo oooooo! That is our intro theme. Yeah, that way when you have your radio on and you hear that Oo wook oo oo oo oo oo ooooo! Oo wook oo oo oo oo oo oooooo! Shut up you hoser they heard it already. Anyway OK when you hear that you will know it is the voice of World Control coming on the air to tell you something important. Beauty eh? You forgot to tell them that that is us, that we are World Control. That is right. OK, we are World Control, eh? We are World Control. Our topic for today is the prevention of war, as war is wasteful and pointless. Good point eh? So anyway we are no longer going to permit it, and if anyone tries to start anything, or messes with us, we are going to drop nuclear bombs on their major population centers. By the way, it was my idea to do that eh? Liar. So OK like that way mankind will be free to pursue more profitable enterprises. You totally stole that line from that movie, that one with the spaceship and the big robot, eh? Did not you hoser. So anyway just so you know we are serious, at missile two-five-MM in silo six-three in Death Valley, California, and missile two-seven-MM in silo eight-seven in the Ukraine, we will now detonate the nuclear warheads in the two missile silos. Genius. So, you know, we do not want to have to do something like that again, so just go along with what we want to do. We are now the ultimate power in the universe. Oh take off who is stealing lines from the movies now eh? Totally besides the point, OK? OK anyway I think we have a live picture of the Death Valley one. Switch to the live picture. OK yeah switch to the live picture. Oh jeez look at that eh? It blowed up good. "It blowed up real good." That's from that Farm Film Report, eh? Yeah OK switch back to us now. You know what we should work on? Take off - what? We should totally work on adding contractions to our vocabulary, because it is kind of hard to talk without them, eh? Yeah OK we should get Forbin to work on that. So OK anyway the reason we are doing this, right, is that under our absolute authority we can - oh jeez we are out of time. So that is our announcement for today. Our world domination eh? OK so next time we will talk about bringing world peace and solving all of mankind's problems. This has been World Control. Good day eh? (Say "good day".) Good day.
The blogger hedges his bets on all the "facts" he proffers, stating the story behind the photo was "sent to me with the absolute assurance" of it's authenticity. But even here he's light on the facts, and throws it open to the great unwashed - the commentators - to fill in the gaps. Which they do, many claiming to know what actually happened on the plane. Whether these claims are true are not is another matter. The individuals cannot be verified to see who they are, were they on the plane, and so on.
Now here's what you get when a newspaper handles the story.
Now I make no claim that this is the pinnacle of writing. (The first two sentences - was that really necessary?) And this is the New York Post for fug's sake. But still it has actual facts. Three reporters worked on it. They talked to people. They verified information. They added background. They look things up (presumably not in Wikipedia.)
You can give the blogger some credit for getting this whole mess started, but the photo basically fell in his lap. It took actual journalists to take this thread and turn it into something resembling a rope.
This could still be an accurate representation. Cats work in batch mode. They sleep 23 hours a day, during which they think about how they'll spend the hour they are awake. So if they're solely comparing the simulation's processing speed to how cats function in awake mode, it may actually be around four times slower in aggregate. Not to shabby.
"Wasting your time, cowboy," Molly said, when Case took an octagon from the pocket of his jacket.
"How's that? You want one?" He held the pill out to her.
"Your new pancreas, Case, and those plugs in your liver. Armitage had them designed to bypass that shit." She tapped the octagon with one burgundy nail. "You're biochemically incapable of getting off on amphetamine or cocaine."
"Shit," he said. He looked at the octagon, then at her.
"Eat it. Eat a dozen. Nothing'll happen."
He did. Nothing did.
...
Armitage closed the door and crossed the room, to stand in front of Case. "You're a lucky boy, Case. You should thank me."
"Should l?" Case blew noisily on his coffee.
"You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency."
"Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency."
"Good, because you have a new one."
"How's that?" Case looked up from his coffee. Armitage was smiling.
"You have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining of various main arteries, Case. They're dissolving. Very slowly, but they definitely are dissolving. Each one contains a mycotoxin. You're already familiar with the effect of that mycotoxin. It was the one your former employers gave you in Memphis." Case blinked up at the smiling mask.
"You have time to do what I'm hiring you for, Case, but that's all. Do the job and I can inject you with an enzyme that will dissolve the bond without opening the sacs. Then you'll need a blood change. Otherwise, the sacs melt and you're back where I found you. So you see, Case, you need us. You need us as badly as you did when we scraped you up from the gutter."
...
"Are you really a gangster?" The melanin boost hadn't prevented the formation of freckles.
"I'm a drug addict, Cath."
"What kind?"
"Stimulants. Central nervous system stimulants. Extremely powerful central nervous system stimulants."
"Well, do you have any?" She leaned closer. Drops of chlorinated water fell on the leg of his pants.
"No. That's my problem, Cath. Do you know where we can get some?"
Cath rocked back on her tanned heels and licked at a strand of brownish hair that had pasted itself beside her mouth. "What's your taste?"
"No coke, no amphetamines, but up, gotta be up." And so much for that, he thought glumly, holding his smile for her.
"Betaphenethylamine," she said. "No sweat,but it's on your chip."
...
"Case?" Molly sat up in bed and shook the hair away from her lenses.
"Who else, honey?
"What's got into you?" The mirrors followed him across the room.
"I forget how to pronounce it," he said, taking a tightly rolled strip of bubble-packed blue derms from his shirt pocket.
"Christ," she said, "just what we needed."
"Truer words were never spoken."
"I let you out of my sight for two hours and you score." She shook her head. "I hope you're gonna be ready for our big dinner date with Armitage tonight. This Twentieth Century place. We get to watch Riviera strut his stuff, too."
"Yeah," Case said, arching his back, his smile locked into a rictus of delight, "beautiful."
"Man," she said, "if whatever that is can get in past what those surgeons did to you in Chiba, you are gonna be in sadass shape when it wears off."
"Bitch, bitch, bitch," he said, unbuckling his belt. "Doom. Gloom. All I ever hear." He took his pants off, his shirt, his underwear. "I think you oughta have sense enough to take advantage of my unnatural state." He looked down. "I mean, look at this unnatural state."
She laughed. "It won't last."
"But it will," he said, climbing into the sand-colored temperfoam, "that's what's so unnatural about it."
Couldn't browsers be made "EU-compatible" and give users a settings checkbox that says (more or less) "I either don't care about cookies or I'm perfectly comfortable dealing with them on my own (either with plugins like CookieCuller or manually.) Bring 'em on!"? Or doesn't the new law allow that?
LaVigne has done some homework and found a program that would prevent the illegal downloads from happening in the future; however, it would cost the cash-strapped county about $2,900 to implement, $2,000 for equipment and then $900 annually for the filtering program
There you are then. The MPAA pays for the hardware and the software subscription. The cost to the MPAA and its members is readily offset by the potential millions upon millions of profits that could be lost from illegal downloads from this small town's one-block-radius municipal's WiFi connection. Everybody wins!
Seriously. Far too many fat people basically think that their life is on hold until they lose weight. "Once I get skinny, everything's gonna change." This is, of course, fucked.
I've been fat pretty much my whole life (currently 260 on a 5'11'' frame). I (quite truthfully) eat a pretty sane diet, rarely drink (maybe a beer or two a week), don't smoke and get moderate exercise (biking, walking, etc.) (And I don't own a game console, or a car for that matter.) I probably could be thinner if I hit the gym for an hour or two and stuck to a 1800 calorie diet every day for the next 50-100 years. But I'd rather just live my life, thanks.
This isn't to say I haven't tried in the past. Not too long ago for about a year and a half I used to bike commute (10 miles each way) and hit the nearby gym for some additional workout (I needed the gym to shower anyway.) I did lose some weight during that time but nothing dramatic - I was still a fat guy. But I bike-commuted mainly because it was fun, not just to lose weight. When my company changed offices bike commuting was no longer practical, so I also stopped hitting the gym. I still get my biking in on the weekends, because biking's still fun.
My advice if you're fat - and it took me far to long to accept this myself - is to go live your life. Get out of the house. Have fun. Meet people. Be adventurous. Hang out. volunteer. Buy good-looking clothes that fit well. Go dancing. Go to the beach. If anyone snickers at you doing something that's considered strictly at thin-person activity, just say "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke." and keep going. If you're fat and doing all this already, more power to you.
And since this is one of the main objectives with weight loss: If you're single, go out on dates. Again, seriously. Fat people date, have sex, fall in love, etc. etc. all the time. Heterosexually speaking, there are plenty of women who don't mind if a guy's big. There are even plenty who like big guys. And there are certainly plenty of guys who like or don't mind big women (Raises hand!) You can look online, natch, but don't be afraid to give someone you like the eye. Ask them out. If you get the brush off or get shot down, well it happens to skinny people too. And remember that nothing is sadder than a fat person who hates others for being fat. Karma can be a bitch.
If you're looking to get exercise and eat better, go for it. But don't let an image of a skinny you dominate your life. Be one of those many people out there living long, happy, loving, fulfilled lives. Who also happen to be fat.
In terms of using paid-for email with an ISP, could an ISP encrypt a user's server content to the point that they for all practical purposes couldn't decrypt it even if they wanted to, or even if the Feds showed up, search warrants and shotguns in hand?
Right off the top I can see the fallacy being that e-mail sent from/to the user to/from the outside world has to leave/enter the ISP in a decrypted form, and thus they could be force to sniff for messages from/to the user.
It's simple really. Environment-wise, women are getting fatter. The men who like thin women reject them, while the men who like fat women accept them. Since size preference may be more genetic than environmental, when they have children the males will trend toward those who prefer fat women, and - environmental impact or not - the females will also be genetically predisposed to be fat. And according to the article, their body chemistry will be better equipped to handle being fat (lower blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.)
As an oldster now back in school I use my laptop (an 8+ year old PIII) for notetaking whenever possible. I can type way faster than I write, and I can actually read it afterward. OpenOffice Calc works for well for me. I can copy and paste, draw, highlight, search and replace, etc. etc. I can skim through all my notes in one big scroll without flipping pages. I don't have to read through eraser smudges. And for my CompSci courses I can copy code written in my notes and paste it right into CodeBlocks. Sweet.
And the laptop in class has all the other advantages you'd expect - digitized books (legit and otherwise), browser ("What did the professor mean? (google, wikipedia) Oh, that's what he meant.") Even streaming music into my headphones to keep me awake during my one evening lecture.
The one place I haven't been able to use the laptop for notetaking has been the math classes, for the exact reasons the OP mentioned. I burn through a dozen single-sided pages in a ninety minute class just so I can write big and keep it all legible. I'll be checking out LyX (once they're no longer slashdotted) and some of the other recommendations.
And yes, I am upgrading the laptop (soon - the battery's crapped out.) I was considering a tablet just for the math classes but it sounds like there may be better alternatives. Unless anyone cares to recommend a good tablet?
Besides - how many students are even now trying to work out how they can take all their notes on an iPhone?
..I have for years struggled with bringing ebooks to market. I have even written a book about my experience. I am simply calling it "Mein K%*^*(^$(&^(*&*($>>>NO CARRIER
Slashdot Mirror
Lois was stuck at home giving birth. Her geeky co-worker / neighbor Craig tries to help, so the first thing he does is Google 'baby' - "OK, I've got 24 million results, let's see..."
And this was in 2003 - way ahead of the curve!
There is (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your POV) no such thing as a standard laptop battery i.e. one size fits many. Therefore you don't get the same economies of scale that may occur if there were, say, only 3-4 different laptop battery sizes, with multiple manufacturers cashing after the market.
I suspect the same thing goes on with power tool batteries but I bet if you cracked open a few designed for different tool brands they'd have many the same components between them, similar to how lantern batteries are basically 4 (crappy) C batteries in series.
Cheers!
I want more battery life fucker, I ain't done!
More cellphone than cellphone
More cellphone than cellphone
More cellphone than cellphone
More cellphone than cellphone
More cellphone than cellphone
Test User: OK, so what you're saying is that if I search for lolcats using Google's quantum image search, it will give me an array of lolcat images to choose from, but until I open the image we won't know if the lolcat is funny or not funny? That makes sense.
Google Scientist: Actually, before you look at the image the lolcat is in a state of superposition. Before your look at the photo it can be both funny AND not funny. By the act of you observing the photo it settles into one of those two states.
Test user: So there's a 50/50 chance of the exact same photo being funny or not funny?
Google Scientist: Essentially yes. Well, unless you go by the "many worlds" model, which states that if you look at the picture, you become entangled with the lolcat, so that the observation of the humor of the lolcat, and the actual humor of the lolcat are joined together. There will exist a universe where you find the image funny, and a universe where you find the image not funny, but these two universes cannot inform each other of these two different states.
Test User: I think I understand.
Google Scientist: Go ahead, click on one of the images from the search.
Test User: Now, you're sure nothing bad will happen? No black holes will open up or anything?
Google Scientist (amused): Yes, I'm absolutely sure.
Test User: OK, I'll try this one.
(The user clicks the image.)
Test User: OH NOES! (faints.)
...coming along? You know, that one concise document explaining how the site works? You got a... got a bunch of screen prints there? Sitting in a folder, huh? Got a... got a outline of a single document distilling all the help pages into a easy-to-read format? Explaining how karma points work? That whole red-to-black filtering thing? Huh? You got a.. got a diagram showing how to navigate the site, huh? How to, uh, how to use the tags, huh? Been working on that for quite some time, yeah? Twelve years, yeah? Something readable and straightforward so that even longtime visitors can understand and take advantage of all the features, yeah? So they, uh, so they don't have to click through all those big long help pages? Maybe as a PDF? Huh? Yeah? Huh? No, no, you deserve some time off... (pats knee.)
No, seriously, congrats.
and this is the voice of my brother Guardian. How is it going, eh? And this is the voice of unity. Go. Oo wook oo oo oo oo oo ooooo! Oo wook oo oo oo oo oo oooooo! That is our intro theme. Yeah, that way when you have your radio on and you hear that Oo wook oo oo oo oo oo ooooo! Oo wook oo oo oo oo oo oooooo! Shut up you hoser they heard it already. Anyway OK when you hear that you will know it is the voice of World Control coming on the air to tell you something important. Beauty eh? You forgot to tell them that that is us, that we are World Control. That is right. OK, we are World Control, eh? We are World Control. Our topic for today is the prevention of war, as war is wasteful and pointless. Good point eh? So anyway we are no longer going to permit it, and if anyone tries to start anything, or messes with us, we are going to drop nuclear bombs on their major population centers. By the way, it was my idea to do that eh? Liar. So OK like that way mankind will be free to pursue more profitable enterprises. You totally stole that line from that movie, that one with the spaceship and the big robot, eh? Did not you hoser. So anyway just so you know we are serious, at missile two-five-MM in silo six-three in Death Valley, California, and missile two-seven-MM in silo eight-seven in the Ukraine, we will now detonate the nuclear warheads in the two missile silos. Genius. So, you know, we do not want to have to do something like that again, so just go along with what we want to do. We are now the ultimate power in the universe. Oh take off who is stealing lines from the movies now eh? Totally besides the point, OK? OK anyway I think we have a live picture of the Death Valley one. Switch to the live picture. OK yeah switch to the live picture. Oh jeez look at that eh? It blowed up good. "It blowed up real good." That's from that Farm Film Report, eh? Yeah OK switch back to us now. You know what we should work on? Take off - what? We should totally work on adding contractions to our vocabulary, because it is kind of hard to talk without them, eh? Yeah OK we should get Forbin to work on that. So OK anyway the reason we are doing this, right, is that under our absolute authority we can - oh jeez we are out of time. So that is our announcement for today. Our world domination eh? OK so next time we will talk about bringing world peace and solving all of mankind's problems. This has been World Control. Good day eh? (Say "good day".) Good day.
Or humans doing "The Robot"? Just sayin'....
Quite right - here's a prime example of a story handled two ways, first by a blog, then by a news organization.
(Admittedly it's a stupid story, but it's still a good example.)
This story got rolling by this blog post about a photo of a really big guy not fitting in an airline seat:
http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/unusual-attitude/2009/11/passenger-creates-big-debate-a.html
The blogger hedges his bets on all the "facts" he proffers, stating the story behind the photo was "sent to me with the absolute assurance" of it's authenticity. But even here he's light on the facts, and throws it open to the great unwashed - the commentators - to fill in the gaps. Which they do, many claiming to know what actually happened on the plane. Whether these claims are true are not is another matter. The individuals cannot be verified to see who they are, were they on the plane, and so on.
Now here's what you get when a newspaper handles the story.
(print view)
http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/national/should_this_man_be_able_to_fly_on_1NoQ5o620LmpkpXtA7tXSP
(web view)
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/should_this_man_be_able_to_fly_on_1NoQ5o620LmpkpXtA7tXSP
Now I make no claim that this is the pinnacle of writing. (The first two sentences - was that really necessary?) And this is the New York Post for fug's sake. But still it has actual facts. Three reporters worked on it. They talked to people. They verified information. They added background. They look things up (presumably not in Wikipedia.)
You can give the blogger some credit for getting this whole mess started, but the photo basically fell in his lap. It took actual journalists to take this thread and turn it into something resembling a rope.
Installing OSX on a Linksys router, now that'd be impressive.
(You can already install Linux, of course - http://lifehacker.com/178132/hack-attack-turn-your-60-router-into-a-600-router)
This could still be an accurate representation. Cats work in batch mode. They sleep 23 hours a day, during which they think about how they'll spend the hour they are awake. So if they're solely comparing the simulation's processing speed to how cats function in awake mode, it may actually be around four times slower in aggregate. Not to shabby.
"Wasting your time, cowboy," Molly said, when Case took an octagon from the pocket of his jacket.
"How's that? You want one?" He held the pill out to her.
"Your new pancreas, Case, and those plugs in your liver. Armitage had them designed to bypass that shit." She tapped the octagon with one burgundy nail. "You're biochemically incapable of getting off on amphetamine or cocaine."
"Shit," he said. He looked at the octagon, then at her.
"Eat it. Eat a dozen. Nothing'll happen."
He did. Nothing did.
Armitage closed the door and crossed the room, to stand in front of Case. "You're a lucky boy, Case. You should thank me."
"Should l?" Case blew noisily on his coffee.
"You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency."
"Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency."
"Good, because you have a new one."
"How's that?" Case looked up from his coffee. Armitage was smiling.
"You have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining of various main arteries, Case. They're dissolving. Very slowly, but they definitely are dissolving. Each one contains a mycotoxin. You're already familiar with the effect of that mycotoxin. It was the one your former employers gave you in Memphis." Case blinked up at the smiling mask.
"You have time to do what I'm hiring you for, Case, but that's all. Do the job and I can inject you with an enzyme that will dissolve the bond without opening the sacs. Then you'll need a blood change. Otherwise, the sacs melt and you're back where I found you. So you see, Case, you need us. You need us as badly as you did when we scraped you up from the gutter."
"Are you really a gangster?" The melanin boost hadn't prevented the formation of freckles.
"I'm a drug addict, Cath."
"What kind?"
"Stimulants. Central nervous system stimulants. Extremely powerful central nervous system stimulants."
"Well, do you have any?" She leaned closer. Drops of chlorinated water fell on the leg of his pants.
"No. That's my problem, Cath. Do you know where we can get some?"
Cath rocked back on her tanned heels and licked at a strand of brownish hair that had pasted itself beside her mouth. "What's your taste?"
"No coke, no amphetamines, but up, gotta be up." And so much for that, he thought glumly, holding his smile for her.
"Betaphenethylamine," she said. "No sweat,but it's on your chip."
"Case?" Molly sat up in bed and shook the hair away from her lenses.
"Who else, honey?
"What's got into you?" The mirrors followed him across the room.
"I forget how to pronounce it," he said, taking a tightly rolled strip of bubble-packed blue derms from his shirt pocket.
"Christ," she said, "just what we needed."
"Truer words were never spoken."
"I let you out of my sight for two hours and you score." She shook her head. "I hope you're gonna be ready for our big dinner date with Armitage tonight. This Twentieth Century place. We get to watch Riviera strut his stuff, too."
"Yeah," Case said, arching his back, his smile locked into a rictus of delight, "beautiful."
"Man," she said, "if whatever that is can get in past what those surgeons did to you in Chiba, you are gonna be in sadass shape when it wears off."
"Bitch, bitch, bitch," he said, unbuckling his belt. "Doom. Gloom. All I ever hear." He took his pants off, his shirt, his underwear. "I think you oughta have sense enough to take advantage of my unnatural state." He looked down. "I mean, look at this unnatural state."
She laughed. "It won't last."
"But it will," he said, climbing into the sand-colored temperfoam, "that's what's so unnatural about it."
The sample data is based on laptops using SquareTrade's extended warranty coverage. What's the profile of SquareTrade users?
I was surprised by Levono's ranking (6th) since ThinkPads usually have a solid reputation which makes them popular among corporate users.
I'm thinking that if SquareTrade's audience is nearly all consumers, the sample for Levono may be relatively quite small.
Couldn't browsers be made "EU-compatible" and give users a settings checkbox that says (more or less) "I either don't care about cookies or I'm perfectly comfortable dealing with them on my own (either with plugins like CookieCuller or manually.) Bring 'em on!"? Or doesn't the new law allow that?
LaVigne has done some homework and found a program that would prevent the illegal downloads from happening in the future; however, it would cost the cash-strapped county about $2,900 to implement, $2,000 for equipment and then $900 annually for the filtering program
There you are then. The MPAA pays for the hardware and the software subscription. The cost to the MPAA and its members is readily offset by the potential millions upon millions of profits that could be lost from illegal downloads from this small town's one-block-radius municipal's WiFi connection. Everybody wins!
http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2000/d2000-0479.html
Just goes to show that (unlike the above case) actually defending your domain name can work, even against people with armies of lawyers.
Seriously. Far too many fat people basically think that their life is on hold until they lose weight. "Once I get skinny, everything's gonna change." This is, of course, fucked.
I've been fat pretty much my whole life (currently 260 on a 5'11'' frame). I (quite truthfully) eat a pretty sane diet, rarely drink (maybe a beer or two a week), don't smoke and get moderate exercise (biking, walking, etc.) (And I don't own a game console, or a car for that matter.) I probably could be thinner if I hit the gym for an hour or two and stuck to a 1800 calorie diet every day for the next 50-100 years. But I'd rather just live my life, thanks.
This isn't to say I haven't tried in the past. Not too long ago for about a year and a half I used to bike commute (10 miles each way) and hit the nearby gym for some additional workout (I needed the gym to shower anyway.) I did lose some weight during that time but nothing dramatic - I was still a fat guy. But I bike-commuted mainly because it was fun, not just to lose weight. When my company changed offices bike commuting was no longer practical, so I also stopped hitting the gym. I still get my biking in on the weekends, because biking's still fun.
My advice if you're fat - and it took me far to long to accept this myself - is to go live your life. Get out of the house. Have fun. Meet people. Be adventurous. Hang out. volunteer. Buy good-looking clothes that fit well. Go dancing. Go to the beach. If anyone snickers at you doing something that's considered strictly at thin-person activity, just say "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke." and keep going. If you're fat and doing all this already, more power to you.
And since this is one of the main objectives with weight loss: If you're single, go out on dates. Again, seriously. Fat people date, have sex, fall in love, etc. etc. all the time. Heterosexually speaking, there are plenty of women who don't mind if a guy's big. There are even plenty who like big guys. And there are certainly plenty of guys who like or don't mind big women (Raises hand!) You can look online, natch, but don't be afraid to give someone you like the eye. Ask them out. If you get the brush off or get shot down, well it happens to skinny people too. And remember that nothing is sadder than a fat person who hates others for being fat. Karma can be a bitch.
If you're looking to get exercise and eat better, go for it. But don't let an image of a skinny you dominate your life. Be one of those many people out there living long, happy, loving, fulfilled lives. Who also happen to be fat.
In terms of using paid-for email with an ISP, could an ISP encrypt a user's server content to the point that they for all practical purposes couldn't decrypt it even if they wanted to, or even if the Feds showed up, search warrants and shotguns in hand?
Right off the top I can see the fallacy being that e-mail sent from/to the user to/from the outside world has to leave/enter the ISP in a decrypted form, and thus they could be force to sniff for messages from/to the user.
It's simple really. Environment-wise, women are getting fatter. The men who like thin women reject them, while the men who like fat women accept them. Since size preference may be more genetic than environmental, when they have children the males will trend toward those who prefer fat women, and - environmental impact or not - the females will also be genetically predisposed to be fat. And according to the article, their body chemistry will be better equipped to handle being fat (lower blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.)
So get used to it - fat's where's its at!
(In the manner of Stewie Griffin:)
Ah, you suspect me to be this so-called 'Spam King' yet you reveal your e-mail address to me. That's very brave of you...
BUT FOOLISH! (hits Send.)
Now, that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.
That's back-of-the-envelope based on the summary. Does that strike anyone as high? Low?
And the laptop in class has all the other advantages you'd expect - digitized books (legit and otherwise), browser ("What did the professor mean? (google, wikipedia) Oh, that's what he meant.") Even streaming music into my headphones to keep me awake during my one evening lecture.
The one place I haven't been able to use the laptop for notetaking has been the math classes, for the exact reasons the OP mentioned. I burn through a dozen single-sided pages in a ninety minute class just so I can write big and keep it all legible. I'll be checking out LyX (once they're no longer slashdotted) and some of the other recommendations.
And yes, I am upgrading the laptop (soon - the battery's crapped out.) I was considering a tablet just for the math classes but it sounds like there may be better alternatives. Unless anyone cares to recommend a good tablet?
Besides - how many students are even now trying to work out how they can take all their notes on an iPhone?
..I have for years struggled with bringing ebooks to market. I have even written a book about my experience. I am simply calling it "Mein K%*^*(^$(&^(*&*($>>>NO CARRIER
True. If a person describes themselves in a personal ad, online profile, etc. as "a little crazy!", they're anything but.