Firefox and Opera both make it easy to automatically delete cookies.
In Firefox, go to Tools->Options* and select Privacy. In the Cookies section, change "Keep until:" to "I close Firefox." Voila! All cookies will be deleted automatically whenever you close Firefox. Plus, by clicking on the "Exceptions..." button, you can set a list of sites for which you want to remember your cookies. Alternatively, you can use the Clear Private Data feature, but wipes all cookies, even the ones you've listed under Exceptions.
In Opera, go to Tools->Preferences and select Advanced. Then choose Cookies. Select "Delete new cookies when exiting Opera." Then clear out any cookies you want to get rid of. From that point on, cookies set before you turned on the checkbox will stay until they expire, but cookies set afterward will be dropped when you close the browser. You can add more semi-permanent cookies by unchecking the box, visiting a site, then checking it again.
I disable them all because I hate any innovation of the web past 1991.
Hmm. Animated GIFs? Check. Blink? Check. Scrolling status bar? Check. Background MIDI files? Check. Pop-ups? Check. Flash ads with full video and sound? Check. Garish color schemes? Double-check.
Come on, mods. If you're going to edit my submission beyond recognition and destroy its grammatical integrity while you're at it, at least don't attribute the submission to me.
Hmm, I wonder if we'll start seeing stories with this byline:
Except, you know, in Farscape it was a wormhole, and I am fairly certain there was no time travel.
Yeah, the setup for Farscape was more like The Wizard of Oz. The lead gets pulled into a swirly storm-like phenomenon, taken from the ordinary world, dropped in a fantastical place where s/he accidentally causes the death of some probably-nasty character. The deceased's nasty sibling then declares revenge and pursues the lead across the region. And for all the adventures the lead has, s/he just wants to get back home.
In Crichton's own words: "I am not Kirk, Spock, Luke, Buck, Flash or Arthur frelling Dent. I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas."
This reminds me of something that happened back in college.
I was living on campus that year, in student housing. Early in the year, figuring some sort of file-sharing was useful within the house, I set up two public shares, one read-only and one write-only. A folder where I could post things and a dropbox. Within a few months I'd forgotten about the dropbox.
Sometime the following year I was cleaning up the system and stumbled across the folder. Embarrassingly, I discovered two very large MPEG files containing the movie, Entrapment. Apparently someone had found a writable share, uploaded it with the intent to transfer it somewhere else, and discovered they couldn't get the file back. (This was exactly why I made it write-only in the first place -- so it couldn't be used as a transfer point).
I told my brother about this, and he laughed and said, "At the very least they could have pirated a good movie!"
The article doesn't make it clear, but from the description, it sounds like he posted the.torrent files somewhere and either ran the tracker or put the whole mess on a site that would run it.
If this actually applied to simply seeding the file as a peer (i.e. downloading via BitTorrent and leave the client running), then there's more of a potential chilling effect, as it sets a precedent for downloading-via-BT being the equivalent of distribution.
Perhaps it's time to start seriously thinking about withdrawing the penny from circulation. You can't buy anything with a penny anymore. You only really use them for two reasons:
1. Stores like the $X.99 price point, because it subtly makes people think they're paying $X rather than $X+1. $X.95 is also popular, and could work with only nickels. 2. Sales tax is based on percentage, so even if you have a round price like $1.00, you may end up with something like $1.07.
OK, 3 reasons if you're paying for gas with cash. But note that gas stations already advertise prices to the thousandth of a dollar -- as far as I know, the US has never actually minted a mil -- and they already get rounded up to the nearest penny. I'm sure gas stations would be quite happy to round to the nearest nickel instead.
Of course, given how many transactions are electronic these days, withdrawing the penny wouldn't necessarily alter credit or debit transactions.
No, there are leaks as well. Just about every point release from 1.5.0.1 onward has fixed some. Look up the release notes and you'll find them.
It's not one big leak. It's not just a feature. It's not just extensions.
It's a bunch of small, intermittent leaks that occur under specific, hard-to-identify circumstances, plus leaks in extensions, plus memory-hungry features, all of which add up together to the problems that depend on individual use patterns and sites, such that some people see high memory usage and others don't.
If you were to believe what people say/now/, the show must have had more viewers than any other show in history, and that just isn't true.
Oddly, another of Joss Whedon's shows brought up this very issue:
Spike: If every vampire who said he was at the crucifixion was actually there, it would have been like Woodstock. I was actually at Woodstock. That was a weird gig. I fed off a flower person and spent the next six hours watching my hand move.
I saw a 15-minute clip of the pilot episode at a convention. It must have been the wrong 15 minutes, because it left me with no interest in watching the show when it aired. A year or two down the line, I got talked into watching it on DVD. It took a couple of episodes, but I was hooked. Soon I wanted to get my own copy of the DVDs. This happened all over the place, hence the post-broadcast fan buildup and successful DVD sales.
What's interesting is that the fan base that drove the Firefly DVD sales didn't translate to Serenity movie tickets. It did OK, but wasn't the massive success people were expecting. But I recall hearing somewhere that Serenity also did fairly well on DVD.
The Puzzle Pirates client is written in Java, and I think the server is as well. They don't have WoW-level numbers of players, but the game seems to do all right performance-wise (with the notable exception of glitches with the Mac client, due to differences in Apple's Java VM).
It's not a rule that can be invoked like "Whoever finishes the TP must install the new roll.", it's a law in the sense of "E=MC^2".
Thank you! Ever since I found the original phrasing, I've wondered how it mutated to the point that people say that a post invokes Godwin's law rather than demonstrates it. It's sort of like saying that a falling apple invokes the law of gravity, or that the observer invokes it by describing the falling apple.
My favorites are the ones that references DLL's or windows-specific conditions, and sometimes manage to pop-up on my linux system.
One side effect of running Linux is that the fake dialogs are virtually guaranteed to not match your actual UI, whether they're imitating Luna, Windows Classic, or Mac OS X. Heck, I sometimes see Mac Classic style fake dialogs. Mostly in banners, though, since there are very few sites I visit that manage to get their pop-ups past Firefox these days, and I only block ads that are actively annoying. (Pop-ups are, by their very nature, actively annoying.)
My favorite is still "Your computer is broadcasting an IP address!"
It suggests that the anti-spyware law is defined broadly enough to cover related offenses.
It reminds me of the way the term "computer virus" has expanded, at least in general use, to cover worms, trojans, and other sorts of malware that don't technically fall under the original definition. This has happened concurrently with antivirus programs expanding their mandate to cover various types of computer security threats.
Similarly, going the other way, you have "spam" incorporating email-based phishing attempts, 419 scams, etc., even though they're not necessarily "unsolicited commercial email" or, in some cases, technically "bulk" -- not to mention applying to newsgroups, forums, comment threads, etc. in addition to email.
As far as the law goes, it's always tricky to find the right balance. You don't want to make the law apply in too specific a case, or it stops applying after a while. A law requiring all Model T drivers to use headlights at night would be useless today, but a law requiring all automobile drivers to use headlights will still be useful if we're all using Mr. Fusion-powered hovercars in 20 years. On the other hand, you don't want to be too broad, or you end up doing things like making MP3 players illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
The only game I can think of at the moment that really makes use of a windowing environment is Angband. Ironically, most versions use ASCII graphics.
The basic versions I've seen tend to have one 80x24 window for the map, another for the inventory, etc.
Firefox and Opera both make it easy to automatically delete cookies.
In Firefox, go to Tools->Options* and select Privacy. In the Cookies section, change "Keep until:" to "I close Firefox." Voila! All cookies will be deleted automatically whenever you close Firefox. Plus, by clicking on the "Exceptions..." button, you can set a list of sites for which you want to remember your cookies. Alternatively, you can use the Clear Private Data feature, but wipes all cookies, even the ones you've listed under Exceptions.
In Opera, go to Tools->Preferences and select Advanced. Then choose Cookies. Select "Delete new cookies when exiting Opera." Then clear out any cookies you want to get rid of. From that point on, cookies set before you turned on the checkbox will stay until they expire, but cookies set afterward will be dropped when you close the browser. You can add more semi-permanent cookies by unchecking the box, visiting a site, then checking it again.
*Or equivalent on Mac or Linux.
Hmm. Animated GIFs? Check. Blink? Check. Scrolling status bar? Check. Background MIDI files? Check. Pop-ups? Check. Flash ads with full video and sound? Check. Garish color schemes? Double-check.
I think you're on to something!
Hmm, I wonder if we'll start seeing stories with this byline:
Alan Smithee writes...
It's an island in the Mediterranean. Right next to Geese.
Yeah, the setup for Farscape was more like The Wizard of Oz. The lead gets pulled into a swirly storm-like phenomenon, taken from the ordinary world, dropped in a fantastical place where s/he accidentally causes the death of some probably-nasty character. The deceased's nasty sibling then declares revenge and pursues the lead across the region. And for all the adventures the lead has, s/he just wants to get back home.
In Crichton's own words: "I am not Kirk, Spock, Luke, Buck, Flash or Arthur frelling Dent. I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas."
There was a time when you could count on people to at least read the summary, even if they didn't read the article.
And yes, I had to walk ten miles to school, uphill, both ways, through the snow, without shoes, in the dark.
This reminds me of something that happened back in college.
I was living on campus that year, in student housing. Early in the year, figuring some sort of file-sharing was useful within the house, I set up two public shares, one read-only and one write-only. A folder where I could post things and a dropbox. Within a few months I'd forgotten about the dropbox.
Sometime the following year I was cleaning up the system and stumbled across the folder. Embarrassingly, I discovered two very large MPEG files containing the movie, Entrapment. Apparently someone had found a writable share, uploaded it with the intent to transfer it somewhere else, and discovered they couldn't get the file back. (This was exactly why I made it write-only in the first place -- so it couldn't be used as a transfer point).
I told my brother about this, and he laughed and said, "At the very least they could have pirated a good movie!"
"Get that cheese to sickbay!"
Didn't read the summary, didja?
The article doesn't make it clear, but from the description, it sounds like he posted the .torrent files somewhere and either ran the tracker or put the whole mess on a site that would run it.
If this actually applied to simply seeding the file as a peer (i.e. downloading via BitTorrent and leave the client running), then there's more of a potential chilling effect, as it sets a precedent for downloading-via-BT being the equivalent of distribution.
Wait... how did you get from "The Crusades were evil" to "The Muslim conquests were good?"
I don't see anything in the parent post that suggests that the muslims were "innocent victims" or that their conquests were "just ducky."
Perhaps it's time to start seriously thinking about withdrawing the penny from circulation. You can't buy anything with a penny anymore. You only really use them for two reasons:
1. Stores like the $X.99 price point, because it subtly makes people think they're paying $X rather than $X+1. $X.95 is also popular, and could work with only nickels.
2. Sales tax is based on percentage, so even if you have a round price like $1.00, you may end up with something like $1.07.
OK, 3 reasons if you're paying for gas with cash. But note that gas stations already advertise prices to the thousandth of a dollar -- as far as I know, the US has never actually minted a mil -- and they already get rounded up to the nearest penny. I'm sure gas stations would be quite happy to round to the nearest nickel instead.
Of course, given how many transactions are electronic these days, withdrawing the penny wouldn't necessarily alter credit or debit transactions.
Funny, the actual website for the alpha pointed me here: http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefo x/releases/granparadiso/alpha1/
Note that it's not the same as the latest trunk build. The name aside, it's dated December 7, not December 13.
No, there are leaks as well. Just about every point release from 1.5.0.1 onward has fixed some. Look up the release notes and you'll find them.
It's not one big leak.
It's not just a feature.
It's not just extensions.
It's a bunch of small, intermittent leaks that occur under specific, hard-to-identify circumstances, plus leaks in extensions, plus memory-hungry features, all of which add up together to the problems that depend on individual use patterns and sites, such that some people see high memory usage and others don't.
Oddly, another of Joss Whedon's shows brought up this very issue:
I saw a 15-minute clip of the pilot episode at a convention. It must have been the wrong 15 minutes, because it left me with no interest in watching the show when it aired. A year or two down the line, I got talked into watching it on DVD. It took a couple of episodes, but I was hooked. Soon I wanted to get my own copy of the DVDs. This happened all over the place, hence the post-broadcast fan buildup and successful DVD sales.
What's interesting is that the fan base that drove the Firefly DVD sales didn't translate to Serenity movie tickets. It did OK, but wasn't the massive success people were expecting. But I recall hearing somewhere that Serenity also did fairly well on DVD.
The Puzzle Pirates client is written in Java, and I think the server is as well. They don't have WoW-level numbers of players, but the game seems to do all right performance-wise (with the notable exception of glitches with the Mac client, due to differences in Apple's Java VM).
Thank you! Ever since I found the original phrasing, I've wondered how it mutated to the point that people say that a post invokes Godwin's law rather than demonstrates it. It's sort of like saying that a falling apple invokes the law of gravity, or that the observer invokes it by describing the falling apple.
AFAIK, Germany has no codified freedom of speech clause. Certainly there's quite a bit of censorship -- bans on nazi propaganda, for instance.
In Germany, if a bill like this passes, it's probably enforceable. Whereas here in the US, it would be challenged on first amendment grounds.
Or maybe suing the guy who told you where you could find the drug dealer and/or drove you there.
The spyware claim (keeping the shared folder shared even after uninstalling Kazaa), if valid, is the only one that might have any merit.
Everything else, though, smacks of "Look what you made me do!" blame-deflection.
One side effect of running Linux is that the fake dialogs are virtually guaranteed to not match your actual UI, whether they're imitating Luna, Windows Classic, or Mac OS X. Heck, I sometimes see Mac Classic style fake dialogs. Mostly in banners, though, since there are very few sites I visit that manage to get their pop-ups past Firefox these days, and I only block ads that are actively annoying. (Pop-ups are, by their very nature, actively annoying.)
My favorite is still "Your computer is broadcasting an IP address!"
It suggests that the anti-spyware law is defined broadly enough to cover related offenses.
It reminds me of the way the term "computer virus" has expanded, at least in general use, to cover worms, trojans, and other sorts of malware that don't technically fall under the original definition. This has happened concurrently with antivirus programs expanding their mandate to cover various types of computer security threats.
Similarly, going the other way, you have "spam" incorporating email-based phishing attempts, 419 scams, etc., even though they're not necessarily "unsolicited commercial email" or, in some cases, technically "bulk" -- not to mention applying to newsgroups, forums, comment threads, etc. in addition to email.
As far as the law goes, it's always tricky to find the right balance. You don't want to make the law apply in too specific a case, or it stops applying after a while. A law requiring all Model T drivers to use headlights at night would be useless today, but a law requiring all automobile drivers to use headlights will still be useful if we're all using Mr. Fusion-powered hovercars in 20 years. On the other hand, you don't want to be too broad, or you end up doing things like making MP3 players illegal.
Or maybe it's a communist plot!
A communist plot to bilk people out of money.
Through capitalism.
OK, maybe not.
Um... maybe from a red state?
No, New York and Washington.
Hmm... maybe their marketing people wear make-up?
Which might be a valid complaint if he was still talking about the date and not THE MATH.
"It's old and wrong!"
"It's not old, that's yesterday's date."
"My bad, it's just wrong."
But please, don't let that stop you from enjoying your knee-jerk reaction.