In this case Congress deserves the blame for passing a law without thinking of the consequences. They demanded that all phones make it clear to blind people that they had dialed 911, and the only way to do that on phones without a Braille interface is a loud noise of some form.
How would that work given in China it's 119? Something about the Chinese government hates the US that stupidly.
Yes, I agree that it's a good idea to know the local emergency number. But I disagree that having a different emergency number than 911 should indicate that you hate the US. In fact, most of the countries of the world, do not have 911 as emergency number.. Moreover, many countries still "unofficially" route 911 to the local emergency number to take care of idiots, american tourists, and people raised on Hollywood movies (some of these categories may overlap).
Actually, the TFA didn't say that. It said an oxygen-rich environment was one possible explanation. Another explanation was that it was simply a result of a size-race which pretty commonly occurs in a stable ecosystem, where both predators and prey increase in size to compete with each other. Either way, they just don't fucking know yet, and perhaps never will, as the thing is certainly extinct by now.
I did not say that I actually bothered to fix their computers again.
That service is reserved for the ones who take advice, and don't try to take advantage.
Ah, but herein lies the trouble.
You ARE offering help
You CAN'T KNOW whether someone takes advantage of you before you've offered them help at least once
You SEEM to ENJOY helping them since you came the first time, and talked so enthusiastically about Internet security
You SEEM to put PRIDE into helping, since your help is "reserved for the ones who take advice"
I'm talking out of experience here. The simple answer when someone asks you for help with their computer is: "No." You don't need to justify it. People who won't accept that isn't your friends anyway. Unless you've already fallen into the trap of already helping them (or other friends). In which case your answer should be "No. I've stopped fixing friends computers. It wasn't fun, and it isn't my hobby. Besides, I'm sitting with computers all day at work". Alternatively, you could answer "google this and that keyword, and you'll probably find some sort of guide".
I can understand where you're coming from. You want to reform the stupid users of the earth into competent users. When you realize your friends are stupid users, you want to reform them. Your friends doesn't care about your "internet morality". You get frustrated. Repeat. The simple answer is to never offer more help than pointing them at the right keywords in google. And never, ever, try to "reform" them as users. Unless they've asked to be reformed, it won't work.
Even if their computer is totally bonzi-buddy'ed, your reply should simply be: "try a google search for ad-aware". If they are interested, they will be able to also understand why they have this problem, instead of just downloading and running the program. (And if it fails, it's not your fault, since you never told them to download and run ad-aware). It's simply NOT YOUR PROBLEM!
Basing security on assumptions of human behavior, from people that you don't know at all sounds really stupid to me. That's like going into a south-african brothel and ask everyone if they have AIDS and only pick those who answer Yes, because you assume they would also say Yes when asked for using a condom. What a laughably stupid idea.
It was a fine idea, but poorly presented. What the author had in mind, was to make your secure site try to install an ActiveX-control, which would pop up a dialog box: "Do you want to install SuperSecureConnection, published by MySecureSite.Inc?" Since only idiots would click Yes to install SuperSecureConnection as an activeX control to perform a simple transaction, it would work. If the user was an idiot, the ActiveX control would then be a "trojan" who infected the computer to perform a secure transaction without interference from all the other malware.
If you absolutely want a South African brothel analogy, you should instead ask the "user" whether he wants to "fuck the lucky-girl without a condom first, because it will protect him from AIDS". If the user answers "yes", the hooker should use at least three condoms and only suck him off. If not, the hooker can continue with normal brothel service.
No. They might be to stupid to operate a computer, or to stupid to operate a computer connected to Internet without getting infected in less than 30 seconds. But I believe even most primates are intelligent enough to own one. What that requires, is simply an understanding of private property.
I have given up trying to educate some friends of friends who need their computers fixed again.
Why were you trying to educate them in the first place? Did they ask you to educate them? Did they seem particulary interested in Internet security? Or was there some other reason that focused more on your needs than theirs?
What you should do is to stop fixing friends (of friends) computers for free. If they have to pay (not necessarily you) for support, they will learn about Internet security by necessity.
I have a friend who is a cook, and I don't expect him to cook me free food (if he always did, I would never learn to cook). Nor do I expect my friend who is a debt-collector, to collect debt for me either.
The reason idiots ask you to fix their computer, is (a) because you actually do it, and (b) because you always says yes, they assume you enjoy it. If you say no, they will (a) respect that, and (b) not stop being friends with you. Unless they are psychopaths, in which case you are better off anyway.
Hiding extensions and allowing programs to masquerade as benign files is an interface issue. There is no reason Microsoft can't design the interface to ensure that EXE icons have a special signifier indicating the nature of using the icon (Linux might improve here too).
Unfortunately,.EXE isn't the only file-extension that can contain malicious executable code in windows. These days, just about any format includes a macro-extension of some sort. If you warn about.EXE, you need to warn about.DOC too!
A lot of people always click allow or always click block when ZoneAlarm pops up a warning.
Which is a good reason for you to never use or recommend zonealarm. To maintain the zonealarm ruleset properly is extremely difficult. Even I had to give up on it after a while.
Isn't this just a math problem? {Calories In} - {Calories Burned} = {Weight Gained/Lost}? Does anyone really still have a problem with this?
The body is quite adaptable, and will not gain 200 gram, simply because you ate that chocolate bar. If the body was this bad at regulating itself, every single person on the planet would have to start counting calories. They don't, so obviously this isn't true.
What you eat can lead to other health problems, metabolism factors in, but in the end, how much you eat, in calories, determines how much you weigh. Yes?
No. A regular diet means the body doesn't have to conserve fat. Conserving fat is something the body does to be able to survive periods of hunger. It's not simply a matter of gaining the calories through the mouth, the body has to actively do something with those calories in order to build fat and store it somewhere in the body.
There are plenty of people (including me) who can eat just about anything, and won't get fat. On the other side of the scale are people who seem to be constantly on a diet, who are really fat. If metabolism was the only other issue, those people should still be thinner than me, because my metabolism can't possibly be *that* much higher.
There are several factors involved, including exercise, metabolism, regular eating habits, and genetics. Calories in minus calories burned is a much to simple model.
So what you are saying is that exercise increases your muscles appetite for fuel, or in other words your metabolism... fascinating, you really turned that conventional wisdom on it's head!
Actually, that is the conventional wisdom. By not eating enough food, your body will condition itself to save energy, which means you will become fat whenever you end your diet (as the fat allows you to survive longer the next time you must survive with too little (or no) food). By eating regularly, you body will not need to conserve fat, since it never experiences extended hunger periods.
By exercising, your body will build muscle. Muscle increases metabolism. By exercising, and eating regularly, you get both benefits.
Some people however, have the "fat-gene", which means they will have to exercise, eat regularly, and still count calories. But that doesn't mean they should starve themselves, only that they need to find a suitable caloric intake that they can maintain without getting hungry, and without getting fat.
People who are always on a diet, are the best proof that eating too little doesn't work. And those magazine-diets are written by people who want to sell you magazines, not nutritionists.
Humans are not omnivores, herbivores, or carnivores
An omnivore is someone who eats food from both plants and animals. We are omnivores by definition, so your statement is simply absurd.
Their food processing mechanisms do not neatly fit into any of those categories.
Few things in nature fit neatly into categories. Birds can fly, but the ostrich (or the penguin) can't. Lizards have four legs, but certain snake-like lizards don't. Mammals live on land, but the whales don't. Fish can't breathe on land, but the lung-fish can. If you insist on categorizing animals into herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores, based on their food-processing mechanisms, instead of what they actually eat, you are doomed for failure. Some plants eat insects, but their food-processing mechanisms doesn't look much like a typical carnivore to me.
We're cook-the-damn-food-and-eat-it-ivores
No, we aren't. While cooking is common, and lots of food tastes well when cooked, we are perfectly capable of eating uncooked food. Last night I had a beef tartar sandwich (actually three), and it tasted great! Other things that are commonly eaten raw by humans includes fruit, vegetables, milk, egg, blood, nuts, seeds, maggots, etc... (not all of them typical in a typical western civilization diet)
To be fair about it, predators also eat the bone, blood, organs, entrails and even the ruminate inside. They need to since flesh (muscle and skin) doesn't have the mineral and vitamin content an animal needs to survive.
Total bullshit. Predators eat the bone, blood, organs, entrails and ruminate because they are hungry, and/or it tastes good, and/or they just don't want anyone else to eat it. Predators are as unlikely to think "hmm, my diet needs a bit more of vitamin D and iron, so I better eat that liver", as humans are.
While it's likely that animals (and human) taste is targeted towards food that is healthy (e.g. humans like sugar, which is healthy for hunter-gatherers who unlike us get it mostly from fruit or honey, and not from processed food), there is also an important mechanism that works in the opposite direction: The nutrients you get through your food, your body doesn't need to synthesize, so through gazillion years of evolution, you might also lose the ability to synthesize it. Humans traditionally live on a varied diet, and therefore has lost the ability to synthesize a lot of important nutrients.
If lions need to eat the ruminate from gaselles, it's because through years of evolution, they've already eaten it, so they've lost the ability to generate certain nutrients found there themselves.
Honestly, you'll get farther eating like the omnivore you are: meat, vegetables, herbs, fruit and few processed carbs and sugars.
Here we agree. We are omnivores, and need to eat like omnivores. While it's possible to live healthy on e.g. a vegan diet, or an all-meat diet, or a processed food diet (?), it takes a bit more planning (or luck, or tradition) than to live healthy on a balanced diet with all the different food groups.
It sounds to me like you should put your CD-player into the CD-input on your amplifier, and the gramophone into the phono-input before you complain too much about wonky eq from the producers. If you were able to hear a difference (apart from vinyl cracks and pops) when recording both sources to ordinary cassette tape, there must be something seriously wrong about your setup. Even reel-to-reel doesn't come close to the quality of vinyl or CD when you stick to the prosumer price-range.
Back then, I used to work in a small radio-station where we had some pretty ok (but certainly not over-the-top) equipment, and let me tell you, when we got a DAT-player it just blew the five times more expensive (and regularly maintained) reel-to-reel out of the window in terms of audio-quality. Not that we really cared, the DAT was more cumbersome to use, so it mostly ended up collecting dust.
Correct up to a point. I quickly stopped buying AAD (Analog Mastering, Analog Mixing, Digital Recording) and only bought those that were DDD.
Why? It's not like those letters had anything to do with quality. As a matter of fact, I never understood why they put them there in the first place. It's not like they gave the consumer any choice to buy the same album recorded and mixed in different ways. And even if they did that, I would find much more interesting ways to do that, than to simply change recording and mixing equipment, which I'm sure was pretty high-end either way. Such as using different producers, etc...
Eg: Japan "Tin Drum" is wholly much better on vinyl than the CD version of it, especially the bass. And who wants another copy of Dark Side of the Moon when you've got a master cut on vinyl!
I'll take your word for the "Tin Drum" statement, although I doubt that was the common case. Back then, CD releases weren't usually compressed to death, like they are today, but would be exactly like their vinyl counterparts.
But vinyl loses quality each time it's played, and DSofM is such a good record, that I would certainly prefer to have it in a format that doesn't deteriorate as easily.
He thinks that if the record labels just give everybody music pre-made in the formats that they want, even if it comes saddled with DRM and even if consumers need to buy the same music over and over, that they will buy it as long as it's easy and convenient enough for them to get it.
I'm not entirely convinced he is wrong about this. People seem to be happy to spend money on ringtones, even though most cell-phones can record their own ringtones by holding them up against a speaker. If the price is right, I can easily see consumers buying the same content over and over again. As a matter of fact, many of us already have. First on LP or MC, then on CD, and then later on DVD, or a collectors box, or whatever.
He's totally missing the point, which is that if I have a CD, or a DRM-free digital download, I buy the music once and can then put it anywhere I want to. I can listen to it, my wife can listen to it, I can make a ringtone out of it, I can put it on my iPod or make a mix CD. His idea is still to sell you multiple copies of the same tracks in all these different places, and he thinks where his company went wrong was in not doing that early enough. That's just as wrongheaded as Warner ever has been.
Sure, that's what I want. And it's what many others want. But if the music companies make it cheap enough, and convenient enough, to shop music legally, but in restricted formats, I'm not entirely convinced that it's going to happen. The consumer demand might not be large enough, even though both you and I want it.
Evidently, you are still reading slashdot. And yes, "ipod" is a more recognized brand-name than "zune". And yes, I'm not a big fan of Microsoft. Or Apple. Or Ipod. Or Zune. Or people who wrongly accuse me of having certain motives.
Ok, just to toss this out there, but, why do you need a theory that links gravity into the standard model when there is, as of yet, no known force that actually effects gravity
I believe you just answered that one yourself. If you have a testable theory that links gravity into the standard model, you also have a known force that effects gravity. Happy?
There's no battery operated anti-gravity machine, so, why unify something that isn't?
See above. Apart from that, we still need a theory that makes sense, so even if you can't make a battery-operated anti-gravity machine, we still need a theory that works well for all cases. Today, you have to look at the scale of the problem, and decide which theory to apply. That is not very elegant, and can't cover every case.
Sounds to me like all this is a just some mathemeticians tacking on a few extra dimensions, making it internally consistent, and calling that new.
Even the slashdot summary made it clear that this is not about string-theory, so why are you still talking about it?
I think if you sat down and worked it out though, there's probably an infinite number of theories of everything that can actually intersect all the data out there, so its really not like there's just "one".
The trouble with having an infinite number of theories, is that (a) either they're all similar to each other, but with different wording, or (b) an infinite number of them are wrong (and at most one of them correct). Theories of everything is like the Highlander, there can only be one!
we had a friend who kept a police whistle next to the phone (the metal kind) and when a telemarketer was especially annoying they would use it on them... VERY effective...
Huh? Your friend threw the whistle long distance and managed to hit the person on the far end of the call? With a throwing arm like that, your friend should have a good career in baseball.
Given the context of this discussion (great grand parent post was about telemarkters adjusting outgoing volume level annoyingly high), I'd say you have quite an impressive talent for deliberately misunderstanding things.
Most of these ghost calls arrive because the automated dial systems telemarketers use dial several calls at once, and the first one that answers gets patched to the telemarketing stooge, while others that answer a few seconds later give that spooky silence for 5-10 seconds before they are hung up. The system logs the fact that you answered. Don't worry -- they'll call back to give you some love later.
Seriously? Not only are telemarketers annoying, but the systems they use *routinely* dials random people only to hang up on them? On purpose? My. God. This is beyond insane, and I want to kill---someone---now!
Slashdot Mirror
Vibration. Blind people can feel.
Actually, the TFA didn't say that. It said an oxygen-rich environment was one possible explanation. Another explanation was that it was simply a result of a size-race which pretty commonly occurs in a stable ecosystem, where both predators and prey increase in size to compete with each other. Either way, they just don't fucking know yet, and perhaps never will, as the thing is certainly extinct by now.
Ah, but herein lies the trouble.
I'm talking out of experience here. The simple answer when someone asks you for help with their computer is: "No." You don't need to justify it. People who won't accept that isn't your friends anyway. Unless you've already fallen into the trap of already helping them (or other friends). In which case your answer should be "No. I've stopped fixing friends computers. It wasn't fun, and it isn't my hobby. Besides, I'm sitting with computers all day at work". Alternatively, you could answer "google this and that keyword, and you'll probably find some sort of guide".
I can understand where you're coming from. You want to reform the stupid users of the earth into competent users. When you realize your friends are stupid users, you want to reform them. Your friends doesn't care about your "internet morality". You get frustrated. Repeat. The simple answer is to never offer more help than pointing them at the right keywords in google. And never, ever, try to "reform" them as users. Unless they've asked to be reformed, it won't work.
Even if their computer is totally bonzi-buddy'ed, your reply should simply be: "try a google search for ad-aware". If they are interested, they will be able to also understand why they have this problem, instead of just downloading and running the program. (And if it fails, it's not your fault, since you never told them to download and run ad-aware). It's simply NOT YOUR PROBLEM!
It was a fine idea, but poorly presented. What the author had in mind, was to make your secure site try to install an ActiveX-control, which would pop up a dialog box: "Do you want to install SuperSecureConnection, published by MySecureSite.Inc?" Since only idiots would click Yes to install SuperSecureConnection as an activeX control to perform a simple transaction, it would work. If the user was an idiot, the ActiveX control would then be a "trojan" who infected the computer to perform a secure transaction without interference from all the other malware.
If you absolutely want a South African brothel analogy, you should instead ask the "user" whether he wants to "fuck the lucky-girl without a condom first, because it will protect him from AIDS". If the user answers "yes", the hooker should use at least three condoms and only suck him off. If not, the hooker can continue with normal brothel service.
No. They might be to stupid to operate a computer, or to stupid to operate a computer connected to Internet without getting infected in less than 30 seconds. But I believe even most primates are intelligent enough to own one. What that requires, is simply an understanding of private property.
Why were you trying to educate them in the first place? Did they ask you to educate them? Did they seem particulary interested in Internet security? Or was there some other reason that focused more on your needs than theirs?
What you should do is to stop fixing friends (of friends) computers for free. If they have to pay (not necessarily you) for support, they will learn about Internet security by necessity.
I have a friend who is a cook, and I don't expect him to cook me free food (if he always did, I would never learn to cook). Nor do I expect my friend who is a debt-collector, to collect debt for me either.
The reason idiots ask you to fix their computer, is (a) because you actually do it, and (b) because you always says yes, they assume you enjoy it. If you say no, they will (a) respect that, and (b) not stop being friends with you. Unless they are psychopaths, in which case you are better off anyway.
Unfortunately, .EXE isn't the only file-extension that can contain malicious executable code in windows. These days, just about any format includes a macro-extension of some sort. If you warn about .EXE, you need to warn about .DOC too!
Which is a good reason for you to never use or recommend zonealarm. To maintain the zonealarm ruleset properly is extremely difficult. Even I had to give up on it after a while.
(assuming that "Yes means No and No means Yes" is still in effect).
The body is quite adaptable, and will not gain 200 gram, simply because you ate that chocolate bar. If the body was this bad at regulating itself, every single person on the planet would have to start counting calories. They don't, so obviously this isn't true.
No. A regular diet means the body doesn't have to conserve fat. Conserving fat is something the body does to be able to survive periods of hunger. It's not simply a matter of gaining the calories through the mouth, the body has to actively do something with those calories in order to build fat and store it somewhere in the body.
There are plenty of people (including me) who can eat just about anything, and won't get fat. On the other side of the scale are people who seem to be constantly on a diet, who are really fat. If metabolism was the only other issue, those people should still be thinner than me, because my metabolism can't possibly be *that* much higher.
There are several factors involved, including exercise, metabolism, regular eating habits, and genetics. Calories in minus calories burned is a much to simple model.
Actually, that is the conventional wisdom. By not eating enough food, your body will condition itself to save energy, which means you will become fat whenever you end your diet (as the fat allows you to survive longer the next time you must survive with too little (or no) food). By eating regularly, you body will not need to conserve fat, since it never experiences extended hunger periods.
By exercising, your body will build muscle. Muscle increases metabolism. By exercising, and eating regularly, you get both benefits.
Some people however, have the "fat-gene", which means they will have to exercise, eat regularly, and still count calories. But that doesn't mean they should starve themselves, only that they need to find a suitable caloric intake that they can maintain without getting hungry, and without getting fat.
People who are always on a diet, are the best proof that eating too little doesn't work. And those magazine-diets are written by people who want to sell you magazines, not nutritionists.
An omnivore is someone who eats food from both plants and animals. We are omnivores by definition, so your statement is simply absurd.
Few things in nature fit neatly into categories. Birds can fly, but the ostrich (or the penguin) can't. Lizards have four legs, but certain snake-like lizards don't. Mammals live on land, but the whales don't. Fish can't breathe on land, but the lung-fish can. If you insist on categorizing animals into herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores, based on their food-processing mechanisms, instead of what they actually eat, you are doomed for failure. Some plants eat insects, but their food-processing mechanisms doesn't look much like a typical carnivore to me.
No, we aren't. While cooking is common, and lots of food tastes well when cooked, we are perfectly capable of eating uncooked food. Last night I had a beef tartar sandwich (actually three), and it tasted great! Other things that are commonly eaten raw by humans includes fruit, vegetables, milk, egg, blood, nuts, seeds, maggots, etc... (not all of them typical in a typical western civilization diet)
Total bullshit. Predators eat the bone, blood, organs, entrails and ruminate because they are hungry, and/or it tastes good, and/or they just don't want anyone else to eat it. Predators are as unlikely to think "hmm, my diet needs a bit more of vitamin D and iron, so I better eat that liver", as humans are.
While it's likely that animals (and human) taste is targeted towards food that is healthy (e.g. humans like sugar, which is healthy for hunter-gatherers who unlike us get it mostly from fruit or honey, and not from processed food), there is also an important mechanism that works in the opposite direction: The nutrients you get through your food, your body doesn't need to synthesize, so through gazillion years of evolution, you might also lose the ability to synthesize it. Humans traditionally live on a varied diet, and therefore has lost the ability to synthesize a lot of important nutrients.
If lions need to eat the ruminate from gaselles, it's because through years of evolution, they've already eaten it, so they've lost the ability to generate certain nutrients found there themselves.
Here we agree. We are omnivores, and need to eat like omnivores. While it's possible to live healthy on e.g. a vegan diet, or an all-meat diet, or a processed food diet (?), it takes a bit more planning (or luck, or tradition) than to live healthy on a balanced diet with all the different food groups.
It sounds to me like you should put your CD-player into the CD-input on your amplifier, and the gramophone into the phono-input before you complain too much about wonky eq from the producers. If you were able to hear a difference (apart from vinyl cracks and pops) when recording both sources to ordinary cassette tape, there must be something seriously wrong about your setup. Even reel-to-reel doesn't come close to the quality of vinyl or CD when you stick to the prosumer price-range.
Back then, I used to work in a small radio-station where we had some pretty ok (but certainly not over-the-top) equipment, and let me tell you, when we got a DAT-player it just blew the five times more expensive (and regularly maintained) reel-to-reel out of the window in terms of audio-quality. Not that we really cared, the DAT was more cumbersome to use, so it mostly ended up collecting dust.
Why? It's not like those letters had anything to do with quality. As a matter of fact, I never understood why they put them there in the first place. It's not like they gave the consumer any choice to buy the same album recorded and mixed in different ways. And even if they did that, I would find much more interesting ways to do that, than to simply change recording and mixing equipment, which I'm sure was pretty high-end either way. Such as using different producers, etc...
I'll take your word for the "Tin Drum" statement, although I doubt that was the common case. Back then, CD releases weren't usually compressed to death, like they are today, but would be exactly like their vinyl counterparts.
But vinyl loses quality each time it's played, and DSofM is such a good record, that I would certainly prefer to have it in a format that doesn't deteriorate as easily.
Evidently, you are still reading slashdot. And yes, "ipod" is a more recognized brand-name than "zune". And yes, I'm not a big fan of Microsoft. Or Apple. Or Ipod. Or Zune. Or people who wrongly accuse me of having certain motives.
See above. Apart from that, we still need a theory that makes sense, so even if you can't make a battery-operated anti-gravity machine, we still need a theory that works well for all cases. Today, you have to look at the scale of the problem, and decide which theory to apply. That is not very elegant, and can't cover every case.
Even the slashdot summary made it clear that this is not about string-theory, so why are you still talking about it? The trouble with having an infinite number of theories, is that (a) either they're all similar to each other, but with different wording, or (b) an infinite number of them are wrong (and at most one of them correct). Theories of everything is like the Highlander, there can only be one!It is 60 GB, which is about 0.003 LoC (assuming the standard definition that 1 LoC def= 20 TB)
Now can anyone try to work out what font-size the authors mean by "tiny"?
Mod this up! It's probably the single most insightful comment in this discussion!
Charlie Brown? Lucy? You must be getting old, and I'm above 30...