Ultimately most religions boil down to a person or group saying there is this invisible being (or beings) who'll get very, very cross and punish you in some awful way unless you perform ceremonies and obey commands written down and in the care of that religion. If you DO follow these ceremonies and commands you'll be rewarded, obviously not now, but in the afterlife.
Short of evidence for this invisible being, or the afterlife, or that said invisible being has issued commands to be obeyed it stands that everything that follows is delusional nonsense. The religion is delusional nonsense, the people practicing it are deluded. Usually said religion
Becoming an "expert" on religion teachings is like becoming an expert on gibberish. Someone might study gibberish and be able to quote it on demand, or be able to "interpret" it to justify their lifestyle. It does not make that person smarter or wiser than a person who chose not to accept the evidence lite premise in the first place. Quite the opposite in fact.
It would be funny if it weren't for the fact that some people are dumb enough to kill or be killed over their pet deity.
Romney isn't just a moron. He's sociopathic amoral doofus who has built a career out of siphoning cash out ailing companies, laying off staff and squirrelling the proceeds in offshore accounts and funds for tax avoidance purposes. Perhaps this is all perfectly acceptable and expected from some asshole investor. It's not acceptable for a presidential candidate.
GNOME shell is an engine running a bunch of scripts. If someone really wants different behaviour or to add a new icon or to change an existing action they can write or install an extension. I don't think the extensions website is much good but the capability in GNOME 3 is extremely good.
How good can be gauged when people say "don't use GNOME use Mint". Mint is Gnome shell extensions and demonstrate the fact that you can change the shell to resemble pretty much anything you like including a classic GNOME 2 style desktop.
Personally I think the GNOME 3 behaviour is mostly very good and far better than GNOME 2. It's discoverable, it's clean, it's task centric, it's extensible. While there is plenty of valid criticism there is also much which is irrational from people being used to the old way and being unable to countenance change of any sort. It's certainly not perfect and I could cite half a dozen gripes of my own but nothing which would make me want to switch desktops.
Large displays too. Look how much space Windows 8 wastes on a 20 inch monitor rendering overly large tiles. People with large monitors and mice and keyboards should be able to zoom out and see more tiles at once if they so wish.
Moratoriums / embargos are put in place for the reasons I cited, to stop news and media or individuals involved with the elections from interfering with an election in progress. It's also why certain actions might be criminal offences in the context of an election that otherwise would just be garden variety civil law, e.g. making a false statement about a candidate's character or behaviour could be a criminal offence instead of slander.
Can't speak of all companies but in the UK and Ireland it's not the government that imposes these laws. Rather, there are independent electoral and law commissions which make recommendations on law, electoral boundaries etc which are accepted by all parties. Countries would also have broadcast authorities which issue guidelines for election coverage for the placement of embargos and so forth.
I didn't apply any great thought to it. I bought a mix of Tesco and Philips spiral bulbs and they all turn pretty much straight on. I must have about 6 them around the house for about 3 years now. One started flickering and was replaced but that's about it.
I do actually have some bulbs which take a while that I forgot about until thinking just now about it - I bought some candle screw bulbs from IKEA which take about 2 mins to get to full brightness. I'd agree this would be annoying but fortunately I got them for my kids' bedrooms and as I might have to go in there while they're asleep it's actually beneficial that they don't come on full blast.
Many countries legally impose a moratorium or broadcasters impose a code of conduct prior to an election to ensure it is as free and fair as possible. So as to provide voters with a period of reflection prior to the vote and to stop last minute electioneering and underhanded tactics that could adversely affect the outcome. e.g. one candidate tweets that another has dropped out the race, or is a child molestor etc. But oh its censorship so it's bad right?
I don't measure my light in lumens, I measure it in bright enough and CFL bulbs that I use are bright enough. It's not hard to find CFLs which offer the sort of lumens you demand though. The 26W bulbs on that page claim to offer 1800 lumens and there are brighter bulbs. Rule of thumb is 1/5-1/4 wattage is roughly equivalent to the incandescent output.
That's not true. Most of the hanging lights in my house are CFL and are virtually instant on. I have a few older CFLs which take a while to warm up but that is not the norm and I assume the packaging would say it's instant on if it is.
CFLs work just fine and if you need really bright light there are higher wattage ones which will provide it for 1/5th the power of an incandescent.
I really don't understand who these hoarders might be. Perhaps some people do have sockets which don't fit the somewhat larger CFLs or circuits which don't work with CFLs (despite there being dimmable CFLs), or other edge cases but these are a minority. Otherwise it seems like stupidity to want to stick with incandescents. They cost a lot more money to run and blow a lot faster. Seems like a completely false economy to me.
The purpose of slow hashes and salts is not to make passwords crack proof but to force the attacker to spend an inordinate amount of time extracting each and every password. The salt prevents reverse hash lookups. The slow hash imposes a penalty on every lookup in a dictionary / brute force attack. It's about damage limitation and buying time to warn users about the break.
Hashes like bcrypt are configurable too so the number of rounds is a parameter to the power of two so it can be made more secure / slower if necessary as time progresses. With 2^10 rounds it's approximately 8000x slower to make a hash than SHA1 which server side isn't a big deal but it is for someone running through a dictionary.
It's so bad that attackers would probably only bother to try a subset of common passwords (e.g. top 1000 passwords) before moving onto the next one. Enforcing password quality during signup would probably block these from hitting too.
RIM are always running promotions and draws. I got my Playbook for nothing. I expect if a dev wanted to they could acquire a tablet. Another way to look at it is it doesn't cost anything to list apps on the Blackberry store so a one time cost for a $180 tablet isn't a huge investment, certainly not for some of the larger app development teams. Cost of the hardware is probably the least concern anyway, the cost of porting, testing and supporting an app once it's released on that platform would be considerably more and it's a question of if its viable to do or not. I think it could be but it obviously varies based on a lot of factors.
Android has keyboard and mouse events, it's just that some apps are very slapdash in their support for them and what the OS provides isn't very refined. E.g. a mouse is treated more like a virtual finger than a mouse which means the pointer doesn't change shape over links, doesn't select text like a mouse, doesn't have context menus etc.
Keyboard support is better and a number of devices with hardware keyboards attest to that. I suspect keyboard is adequate for phones with keyboards although I know from experience it's not good enough to emulate a PC keyboard.
I think Windows Phone will stand a better chance when Windows RT and 8 release.
While Android is an excellent OS, it really sucks in some ways too. In particular it sucks with mouse and keyboard support. The experience of my Asus TF300 wouldn't hold a candle against a $200 netbook. Stuff like tabbing and cursor navigation / selection is horribly inconsistent and sometimes even missing from some apps (e.g. Polaris Office). I can easily imagine that Windows 8/RT is going to take off in offices because it won't suck with mouse and keyboard. Managers like these things because they're portable but they can be dropped into a cradle / dock / whatever and they act like traditional PCs. On top of that they'll have a proper office suite instead of the crappy offerings seen on Android and iOS at present.
Windows Phone 8 will get a bounce from that if nothing else.
I have a Playbook and the app store is pretty desperate. It's not hugely difficult to port apps to the Playbook - it has an Android runtime, QT, Java, C, HTML APIs etc but not many devs bother and those that do stick a premium on to cover their efforts.
It's actually a very robust device and barring some annoyances (some of which are very annoying) the OS is attractive, intuitive and the hardware is great. But it's not Android and lack of apps kills it.
I personally think RIM's future should be on Android. Dump QNX and Playbook OS. Produce a Playbook / BB 10 OS runtime for Android and then move house over to it. Make money by selling security hardened Android devices and value added apps that sit on top.
It's already annoying that Ubuntu wastes half of the dash suggesting apps that I *don't* have installed on my machine without showing ads too. Stick all that shit in a tab of its own where people are more likely to accept the ads anyway.
Putting them anywhere else is inviting people to use another distribution.
I don't know about this system, but use of NFC does not preclude ticket inspectors. The Dublin Luas for example has NFC cards for commuters. The card holds a cash value but the value is held centrally and the card is just some dumb RFID. There are special points at each station and you wave in before you board and you wave out when you disembark and the cost of the trip is deducted from your balance. There are no ticket barriers or gates so the system is enforced quite heavily by inspectors armed with portable readers who board randomly and check if people waved in or not.
Tampering with the card isn't going to get you anywhere because the funds are held centrally. The only way you could ride for free is if you could clone someone else's card. The Luas is naturally a target rich environment so its not inconceivable that an NFC app could be developed that harvested nearby card ids. Then the fraudster could potentially check the balances out on station machine and produce cloned cards.
They'd still have to clone the card and however it were done would still have to pass random inspection. I suppose if a card's RFID could be disabled and if you had some kind of weird ass wallet / phone holder you could put the dummy into the wallet next to a phone and the phone would spoof a response but it would be tricky and I'm sure if the fraud became popular the inspectors would quickly wise up and start removing cards for a closer look.
Calc's is a perfectly serviceable spreadsheet app and more than sufficient for most uses people would have for one. Sadly it and LibreOffice in general could really do with one release that concentrates on usability because the product is littered with annoyances which make the app harder to use than it should be.
The one that gets me in calc is drag and drop. I still don't know what makes it work or not. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. There are very few visual clues to say what's going to happen. Excel isn't great either but at least there are some visual clues in pointer shape over the border which indicate that clicking there will start a drag. It would be nice to be able to hold down the mouse to initiate a drag, or have a little hover icon which appeared next to the selection which could be grabbed to move. This sort of refinement and attention to detail throughout is what separates a great app from a merely so-so one.
No not in the past, but according to Eurogamer they're selling a dedicated 250GB drive for the 12GB model. So the immediate question is whether the model is expandable at all by 3rd parties or not. Maybe all it means is it comes preinstalled in a tray that you just pop a hatch and slam in, but it maybe it means something else.
I have a slim and Wipeout and haven't seen any issues in any game. I suppose it's possible that the redesign changed something in some subtle almost imperceptible way, e.g. some minor difference in HDD seek times or memory latency which makes a game drop frames it would otherwise have managed to catch but I can't say since I've not noticed it.
Sell the block for a billion or whatever it's worth, and use the money to build an IPv6 backbone for UK government services. That in turn would free up more blocks which they could continue to sell and continue to fund the transition with. Or they could sit on them and do nothing until the world switches to IPv6 and there is a glut of IPv4 addresses that nobody is interested in buying.
Office is a very powerful word processor, spreadsheet and presentation system. If you're writing big long documents with piles of annotations or macros, or complex spreadsheets with protected cells and scripts, or want your presentations to whoosh and stuff. Then it might be worth using.
But most people just want something to knock together a letter, or a short essay, or to track out their insurance / tax claims. I don't see much reason at all for using office in those situations. In many businesses it makes little sense either, being packed with features that aren't used and the functionality it does provide can be had elsewhere for nothing.
Libreoffice has been mentioned lots of times and it's a perfectly functional suite of apps. It's free, cross platform and comes with some useful stuff like print to pdf it works great for every day needs. I think the biggest sore point for the suite is usability and it really needs to work on this. It superficially looks okay but its filled with lots of annoyances which add up to give a crappy experience. e.g. I was copy and pasting text into a spreadsheet with coloured regions and everytime I did it wiped out the background colours and cell borders. That sort of thing happens throughout.
I also think with tablets becoming ever more popular that a concerted effort needs to be made to support that format. That probably means junking much of the UI or writing a simplified suite around the same document format and supporting it as Libreoffice Portable. But however it's achieved that also needs to be addressed because it's the next battleground.
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Short of evidence for this invisible being, or the afterlife, or that said invisible being has issued commands to be obeyed it stands that everything that follows is delusional nonsense. The religion is delusional nonsense, the people practicing it are deluded. Usually said religion
Becoming an "expert" on religion teachings is like becoming an expert on gibberish. Someone might study gibberish and be able to quote it on demand, or be able to "interpret" it to justify their lifestyle. It does not make that person smarter or wiser than a person who chose not to accept the evidence lite premise in the first place. Quite the opposite in fact.
It would be funny if it weren't for the fact that some people are dumb enough to kill or be killed over their pet deity.
Romney isn't just a moron. He's sociopathic amoral doofus who has built a career out of siphoning cash out ailing companies, laying off staff and squirrelling the proceeds in offshore accounts and funds for tax avoidance purposes. Perhaps this is all perfectly acceptable and expected from some asshole investor. It's not acceptable for a presidential candidate.
How good can be gauged when people say "don't use GNOME use Mint". Mint is Gnome shell extensions and demonstrate the fact that you can change the shell to resemble pretty much anything you like including a classic GNOME 2 style desktop.
Personally I think the GNOME 3 behaviour is mostly very good and far better than GNOME 2. It's discoverable, it's clean, it's task centric, it's extensible. While there is plenty of valid criticism there is also much which is irrational from people being used to the old way and being unable to countenance change of any sort. It's certainly not perfect and I could cite half a dozen gripes of my own but nothing which would make me want to switch desktops.
Large displays too. Look how much space Windows 8 wastes on a 20 inch monitor rendering overly large tiles. People with large monitors and mice and keyboards should be able to zoom out and see more tiles at once if they so wish.
"Can't speak of all companies", Countries. God I hate making typos.
Can't speak of all companies but in the UK and Ireland it's not the government that imposes these laws. Rather, there are independent electoral and law commissions which make recommendations on law, electoral boundaries etc which are accepted by all parties. Countries would also have broadcast authorities which issue guidelines for election coverage for the placement of embargos and so forth.
I do actually have some bulbs which take a while that I forgot about until thinking just now about it - I bought some candle screw bulbs from IKEA which take about 2 mins to get to full brightness. I'd agree this would be annoying but fortunately I got them for my kids' bedrooms and as I might have to go in there while they're asleep it's actually beneficial that they don't come on full blast.
Good censorship = censorship. Fuck you.
Many countries legally impose a moratorium or broadcasters impose a code of conduct prior to an election to ensure it is as free and fair as possible. So as to provide voters with a period of reflection prior to the vote and to stop last minute electioneering and underhanded tactics that could adversely affect the outcome. e.g. one candidate tweets that another has dropped out the race, or is a child molestor etc. But oh its censorship so it's bad right?
I don't measure my light in lumens, I measure it in bright enough and CFL bulbs that I use are bright enough. It's not hard to find CFLs which offer the sort of lumens you demand though. The 26W bulbs on that page claim to offer 1800 lumens and there are brighter bulbs. Rule of thumb is 1/5-1/4 wattage is roughly equivalent to the incandescent output.
That's not true. Most of the hanging lights in my house are CFL and are virtually instant on. I have a few older CFLs which take a while to warm up but that is not the norm and I assume the packaging would say it's instant on if it is.
I really don't understand who these hoarders might be. Perhaps some people do have sockets which don't fit the somewhat larger CFLs or circuits which don't work with CFLs (despite there being dimmable CFLs), or other edge cases but these are a minority. Otherwise it seems like stupidity to want to stick with incandescents. They cost a lot more money to run and blow a lot faster. Seems like a completely false economy to me.
Hashes like bcrypt are configurable too so the number of rounds is a parameter to the power of two so it can be made more secure / slower if necessary as time progresses. With 2^10 rounds it's approximately 8000x slower to make a hash than SHA1 which server side isn't a big deal but it is for someone running through a dictionary.
It's so bad that attackers would probably only bother to try a subset of common passwords (e.g. top 1000 passwords) before moving onto the next one. Enforcing password quality during signup would probably block these from hitting too.
RIM are always running promotions and draws. I got my Playbook for nothing. I expect if a dev wanted to they could acquire a tablet. Another way to look at it is it doesn't cost anything to list apps on the Blackberry store so a one time cost for a $180 tablet isn't a huge investment, certainly not for some of the larger app development teams. Cost of the hardware is probably the least concern anyway, the cost of porting, testing and supporting an app once it's released on that platform would be considerably more and it's a question of if its viable to do or not. I think it could be but it obviously varies based on a lot of factors.
Android has keyboard and mouse events, it's just that some apps are very slapdash in their support for them and what the OS provides isn't very refined. E.g. a mouse is treated more like a virtual finger than a mouse which means the pointer doesn't change shape over links, doesn't select text like a mouse, doesn't have context menus etc. Keyboard support is better and a number of devices with hardware keyboards attest to that. I suspect keyboard is adequate for phones with keyboards although I know from experience it's not good enough to emulate a PC keyboard.
Pakistan, just because you enshrine pig ignorance and superstition into your national laws doesn't mean everyone else should.
While Android is an excellent OS, it really sucks in some ways too. In particular it sucks with mouse and keyboard support. The experience of my Asus TF300 wouldn't hold a candle against a $200 netbook. Stuff like tabbing and cursor navigation / selection is horribly inconsistent and sometimes even missing from some apps (e.g. Polaris Office). I can easily imagine that Windows 8/RT is going to take off in offices because it won't suck with mouse and keyboard. Managers like these things because they're portable but they can be dropped into a cradle / dock / whatever and they act like traditional PCs. On top of that they'll have a proper office suite instead of the crappy offerings seen on Android and iOS at present.
Windows Phone 8 will get a bounce from that if nothing else.
It's actually a very robust device and barring some annoyances (some of which are very annoying) the OS is attractive, intuitive and the hardware is great. But it's not Android and lack of apps kills it.
I personally think RIM's future should be on Android. Dump QNX and Playbook OS. Produce a Playbook / BB 10 OS runtime for Android and then move house over to it. Make money by selling security hardened Android devices and value added apps that sit on top.
Putting them anywhere else is inviting people to use another distribution.
How would anyone ever catch you?
I don't know about this system, but use of NFC does not preclude ticket inspectors. The Dublin Luas for example has NFC cards for commuters. The card holds a cash value but the value is held centrally and the card is just some dumb RFID. There are special points at each station and you wave in before you board and you wave out when you disembark and the cost of the trip is deducted from your balance. There are no ticket barriers or gates so the system is enforced quite heavily by inspectors armed with portable readers who board randomly and check if people waved in or not.
Tampering with the card isn't going to get you anywhere because the funds are held centrally. The only way you could ride for free is if you could clone someone else's card. The Luas is naturally a target rich environment so its not inconceivable that an NFC app could be developed that harvested nearby card ids. Then the fraudster could potentially check the balances out on station machine and produce cloned cards.
They'd still have to clone the card and however it were done would still have to pass random inspection. I suppose if a card's RFID could be disabled and if you had some kind of weird ass wallet / phone holder you could put the dummy into the wallet next to a phone and the phone would spoof a response but it would be tricky and I'm sure if the fraud became popular the inspectors would quickly wise up and start removing cards for a closer look.
The one that gets me in calc is drag and drop. I still don't know what makes it work or not. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. There are very few visual clues to say what's going to happen. Excel isn't great either but at least there are some visual clues in pointer shape over the border which indicate that clicking there will start a drag. It would be nice to be able to hold down the mouse to initiate a drag, or have a little hover icon which appeared next to the selection which could be grabbed to move. This sort of refinement and attention to detail throughout is what separates a great app from a merely so-so one.
And maybe it is this wholesale forking / ripoff which motivated Makerbot to close themselves off this time around.
No not in the past, but according to Eurogamer they're selling a dedicated 250GB drive for the 12GB model. So the immediate question is whether the model is expandable at all by 3rd parties or not. Maybe all it means is it comes preinstalled in a tray that you just pop a hatch and slam in, but it maybe it means something else.
I have a slim and Wipeout and haven't seen any issues in any game. I suppose it's possible that the redesign changed something in some subtle almost imperceptible way, e.g. some minor difference in HDD seek times or memory latency which makes a game drop frames it would otherwise have managed to catch but I can't say since I've not noticed it.
Sell the block for a billion or whatever it's worth, and use the money to build an IPv6 backbone for UK government services. That in turn would free up more blocks which they could continue to sell and continue to fund the transition with. Or they could sit on them and do nothing until the world switches to IPv6 and there is a glut of IPv4 addresses that nobody is interested in buying.
But most people just want something to knock together a letter, or a short essay, or to track out their insurance / tax claims. I don't see much reason at all for using office in those situations. In many businesses it makes little sense either, being packed with features that aren't used and the functionality it does provide can be had elsewhere for nothing.
Libreoffice has been mentioned lots of times and it's a perfectly functional suite of apps. It's free, cross platform and comes with some useful stuff like print to pdf it works great for every day needs. I think the biggest sore point for the suite is usability and it really needs to work on this. It superficially looks okay but its filled with lots of annoyances which add up to give a crappy experience. e.g. I was copy and pasting text into a spreadsheet with coloured regions and everytime I did it wiped out the background colours and cell borders. That sort of thing happens throughout.
I also think with tablets becoming ever more popular that a concerted effort needs to be made to support that format. That probably means junking much of the UI or writing a simplified suite around the same document format and supporting it as Libreoffice Portable. But however it's achieved that also needs to be addressed because it's the next battleground.