You're absolutely right! What I find so staggering (at least at MY company), is how little interest management has in enforcing "computer responsibility" rules like this. Users do all manner of deliberately stupid and occasionally destructive things to/with their computers (getting infected, mangling the OS, deleting the share folders because they "don't need them anymore", and this doesn't include the physical damage to equipment) and management doesn't seem to care how much time or money it takes to fix it.
I'm actually a peon manager myself and when I've actually *tried* to have meetings employees' managers and I'm amazed at the amount of disregard for deliberate, repeated behavior like this among these people's managers. They just don't give a shit.
I once asked our HR manager what she would do if an employee deliberately broke a window or cubicle, repeatedly; she told me they'd probably get fired THE FIRST TIME if the damage threatened someone's health, defintely the second time. I told her that an employee had repeatedly done something stupid with their computer that was as expensive and time-consuming as a broken window, and she said "Well, I guess you'll just have to work out something with their supervisor."
I don't know what the unintended consequences of a "fuck your computer up and you're fired" policy would be (perhaps as destructive as a fear-based rollback of automation, productivity and information management gains), but it would certainly be nice if there was a concrete set of punishments including termination for at least the most eggreigious offenders. One good firing for computer malfeasance per year might just teach them some responsibility.
We've owned three bought-new Hondas and put about 80,000 miles on two of them and have had exactly one problem with them.
The 99 V6 Accord LX had two situations where the driver's side power window wouldn't roll up within about three months of each other. We took it to the dealer under warranty and they tore both the passenger and driver's side doors apart and couldn't find a problem, but the problem never repeated itself, either (I kind of wonder if the taking apart and putting together didn't fix some minor track/sensor misalignment).
Besides solid mechanical reliability, they hold their value well. I sold the '01 CR-V for $15k three weeks ago after we bought an '04 Pilot (wife got a car bennie from work and the Pilot actually costs us less than the CR-V with the bennie).
Another poster in this thread said they cost more than USA cars; this may be true, but when you consider that you have a good chance of driving a Honda for 200,000 miles with almost no maintenance (5-10 years with no car payment, either), its value proposition increases dramatically. I don't know anyone with an American car that can get that kind of mileage with only scheduled maintenance and consumables.
Beyond that, there's just knowing you're pretty much guaranteed to not be fscking around with a broken car. That alone is worth something.
I wonder how accurate it can be, especially if the music being analyzed represents a soundalike cover of a song. I've had the (mis)fortune of hearing some "tribute" bands that sound remarkably like the originals, occasionally so much so that if you weren't aware it was a cover band you'd swear it was the real thing.
Even the musicbrainz site says in their faq that signiture colliisions are possible (but doesn't say how common).
I use three different proxy settings depending on where I am and what network I'm on, or in some cases (like auth for hotel/airport high speed access), no proxy; it's annoying as hell to change these settings, as they're buried deep in the preferences.
At a minimum, it'd be great to have a "Proxy..." menu item that went to the proxy settings directly. At best, perhaps a proxy manager with associated easy UI access (sidebar, hierarchical menu item) that would allow you to switch proxy profiles on the fly without wading into a preferences dialog.
To be fair to Mozilla, it's at least less buried than IE, but unfortunately not much less.
There was an article in the Thursday business section in the "Economic Scene" column trying to debunk the idea that a shift in jobs and income to the third world is a zero sum game and that US citizens (which I presume includes all first-world citizens) must lose income for the third world to gain.
The article was comparing the income gains in the US Deep South over the past century. The graph showd the percentage gains and losses by region -- ALL regions of the US showed double-digit income losses over this time period and the South and ONLY the South showed gains.
Yet despite the obvious evidence that the lowest income region gained and the higher income regions lost, they tried to say that high-income regions won't lose income while low-income regions gain.
I've become convinced that the media just can't report the reality of immigration and offshoring properly.
I think that the academic/left insists on seeing third world gains and first world losses as well as unchecked third world immigration as partly a pro-minority issue (gains for browns vs. losses for whites), and partly as neo-socialism (gains for poor peoples, losses for rich peoples).
The business/conservatives tend to see it as good for consumers (since some goods become cheaper) and good for business (which generally means good for a small percentage of capitalists), which is usually explained as being the source of new, unexplained, opportunities for workers.
Neither of them care about the too-rapid-to-manage erosion in income and opportunity for workers.
Two concerns: Resale and housing code
on
DIY HVAC
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
While there's no good reason I can think of that retrofitted zoning would be a zoning problem, sometimes what's permissable and what's not isn't always self-evident.
It would royally suck to need something inspected later on, such as when selling a house, only to be told it wasn't code and had to come out or be expensively upgraded to meet code. I've done a ton of electrical work (some in conjunction with remodeling which was heavily inspected) and nobody said boo, but it was all code-compliant.
And speaking of resale, even though a zoned hvac system would be nice, one that's more complicated than your grandma can operate will actually lower your resale value to most people since it will be seen as a maintenance liability. I put in a Honeywell 7 day programmable thermostat and my wife hated me for a couple of months until she figured out how to work it. I can only imagine what she would do with something that made one room cold and another warm without being totally obvious (like a 15" LCD touch screen with a floor plan of the house and car-type heat controls).
Both this and the Belkin leave me confused on how it hooks to the iPod.
The design of the 40 hour unit appears about right, except that I'd make it more of a holster type attachment that held the iPod at its sides, and a dock connector at the base, similar in design to the way some car cell phone holders hold a cell phone.
This way you get a solid, single unit when connected together instead of two units loosely connected. I've often thought that the iPod should have a few threaded sockets on the back and two on the bottom for secure attachment to other devices.
I think the real reason many people double-press elevator buttons is that many are poorly lighted and don't give a good indication that that have been pressed.
However, I wish that double pressing an elevtor button *would* have a function -- "disabling" the stop at that floor.
In our building and I'm sure others, a couple of elevators go to "mystery" floors and hence have more buttons than others, which means that the "user interface" is non-standard across all elevators. Which means that people tend to automatically push the button at grid position x,y where their floor normally is -- leading to frequent empty stops and slow elevator rides.
A way to unselect a floor would be great and would lead to faster elevator rides and no more empty stops.
If you've been into tech like I have for the past 20 years, you've got a box of cables, power supply blocks and odd bits most of which you're not sure what they go to, if you still have it and are afraid to throw them out. This box, above all my worldly things, will be my legacy.
Yes! I have the same box; usually I can match up the PSU bricks with something that can use them by the power output ratings on them. Although I've been disturbed latetly by some newer electronics that don't list the input power specs on the device, nor do they list the output specs on the brick.
This, and a series of confusion with confusion with some serial cables and APC UPS control cables (which have some circuits buried in the ends) has led me to use one of those labeling machines you can buy at Office Depot. I put labels on the PSUs and devices and on the serial cables to denote usage, voltage, etc. It helps, but there's still a backlog of mystery junk.
And general society is pig-ignorant when it comes to computers and technology. A reasonable percentage can do the obvious things with technology that corporations have spent billions making as easy as plug and play, but by and large they remain totally ignorant when it comes to even the most basic explanations of how technology works.
Furthermore, there's a significant number of people who hold the notion that knowing "how things work" somehow makes you some kind of commoner or blue collar schmuck, and unfortunately many of these people are in high-visibility leadership positions and they pass these attitudes down to their followers, spreading the misguided notion that ignorance of technology -- ANY technology -- somehow is evidence of your superior social or economic standing.
So I actually can't blame newspapers, other than that they're just reflecting the general ignorance of the general population (plus all the usual problems with in-depth facts and information gathering daily news media have).
I think it's up to us or some geek advocacy group to work the PR hard on this so that the news media gets a better idea of what's actually happening and how it hurts the internet. We know that Verisign will be more than willing to work THEIR PR resources to get their side of the story out.
Social interaction is vital, but it's not all mentally healthy. I used to be a regular bus commuter, and I was forced to interact with all kinds of people on the bus and at the bus stop, many of whom were unpleasant to be forced into close proximity.
A good Walkman was *vital* for my mental health.
And when I was in college walking to/from class or wherever, a good walkman made the walk more enjoyable. It's not like I was going to have a social interaction with 99.9999% of the strangers I walked past in the first place.
What I dislike about MDI applications is that they are hostile to multiple monitor setups. You can manually resize an MDI app to cover the entire display area on two monitors (but then it covers the entire display area on two montiors...), but I haven't found an MDI yet that knows how to sanely handle the fact that there are two monitors and the MDI desktop is merely stretched over both.
In other words, when you open or resize a window when the MDI window is zoomed over both displays, you get a stretched window. OK, I can manually resize these, but it's such a hassle to go back 10 years in time to fully manual window management.
So all the GUI manipulations and bitmap editing GIMP is capable of require the use of GTK to create the UI?
I should have expected my other question would get modded down by the slashbots -- it's not flamebait, anymore than expecting Mozilla to use a platforms native UI elements would be.
When the Minneapolis offices of the Federal Reserve moved, they opened up the building and had a furniture/office junk sale. A friend and I went down there simply for the opportunity to wander through a landmark modern building that had been otherwise closed to the public -- you could even trapse through the vaults and marvel at the bulletproof glass in the cash loading areas, etc.
Anyway, they were selling a bunch of junk office stuff for astronomical prices. It was amazing to see what they were charging. I couldn't get anyone to give me a price on the raised flooring system in one of the data centers, either...
They didn't open the *whole* building officially, but we figured out pretty easily how to get to the roof (unlocked access door, had heliport). I regret to this day not stealing the sign from the door to the top-floor weapons range -- yes, there was a gun range on the top floor with a great large engraved sign that said something like "FIREARMS TRAINING FACILITY, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. EYE AND EAR PROTECTION REQUIRED."
My guess is that any time you have a bunch of "DEALS", you get the class of idiot that's pennywise pound-foolish and willing to pay $1 less for used than new even if it's otherwise inferior. These people always end up paying *just* under new retail for used, and are attracted to "auctions" and "surplus sales" like flies to shit and will always drive up prices.
Janet Jackson flashing everubody at the halftime show was an expression of "sexuality in a constructive way"?
Nudity in an artistic performance is entirely legitimate. Whether you find the performance artisticly valid is an entirely seperate debate.
Birth control is NOT universally taught in schools or made available. President Bush has made "abstinence-only" sex ed a cornerstone of his domestic policies. Conservative groups *regularly* attack school programs that teach birth control and/or make birth control available in the school.
Parental expectations? As a parent, I expect that programming explicitely stated as children's programming will be acceptable to children; nothing more. I find it somewhat confusing and comical that these parents so offended by Janet Jackson feel that a game oriented around adult violence is somehow appropriate for their children.
The fuss is about America's cultural inability to deal with sexuality in a constructive way. We use it to sell products, but ban its direct "consumption". We can't teach about birth control, but we don't like abortion or feeding indigent children. The list of contradictions is endless.
The whole matter is made further confused by the fact that millions of people get cable/satellite channels like HBO and see explicit nudity and sexual behavior all the time. You can't possibly tell me that the mere techical detail between broadcast and cable/satellite warrants public outrage.
The biggest problem, however, is that politicans love these issues -- they can be on the "right" side easily and they don't have to work/think/talk about real issues.
Does the patent then cover the mechanism of desktop switching more so than the act of desktop switching? I haven't seen an application that does what you describe above, but I also haven't been a heavy user of any of the X pagers; just an occasional user of the nVidia nView product.
I've always thought that multiple desktops with the ability to "zoom out" to see more than one of them at a time would be a great management tool.
Rap originally had some creativity and hence acceptance by the entrenched music critics (Grandmaster Flash, etc), but generally slid down into the gutter and out of favor with many mainstream music critics.
Hip-hop was a slight stylistic variation of rap which was given a new name by politically correct rock critics who wanted to add street cred and "diversity" to the music establishment that, since the evolution of punk rock in the mid 1970s, had largely abandoned black music. It also served as a temporary and largely imaginary dividing line between a more politically conscious style of rap and the more corrosive gangsta rap.
Basically it boils down to a bunch of liberal white guys writing for alternative papers and magazines wanting to do something "diverse" and "politically correct" for a style of music that was largely ignored by the underground/alternative music scenes in the 1980s.
I don't know what the rules are, but when I've been in Orange County I always see those little boxes on people's dashboards or otherwise in plain sight.
Maybe riding solo without one visible is grounds for getting pulled over and getting a ticket, even if you have one in your car.
Of course this begs the question, "What if it's disabled, er, malfunctioning and in plain view?" I can see just gutting the box and leaving it on the dash as if it were a legit box. Perhaps the CHiPs have a wand or something that beeps around a valid box.
Re:Good read
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
No, it's number *5* that EVERYONE needs to remember to follow. I see way too many people (including myself in a hurry) changing more than one thing at a time and then immediately wondering what fixed or why it didn't get fixed.
This is especially important when changing a second variable can actually mask the fix of the change of the first variable or cause a second failure that appears to be the same as the initial failure.
I guess they should have added a rule 10: be patient and systematic. Obvious problems usually have non-obvious solutions, and a thorough examination of the situation is time consuming. Don't take short cuts or you might miss the problem.
Why not just buy/build an inverter setup used by motorhomes? Dad's is essentially home built using a Trace RV inverter/charger that takes input from shore, a generator, or the engine. Dad uses 6V golf cart batteries in his bus and I'm pretty sure there's a wide range of batteries you can use with these inverters. *And* it will switch automagically between the input sources depending on power availability.
Stick 'er in the garage or wherever and then you only need your dinky UPS to handle cutovers. Dad's is powerful enough to handle a side-by-side fridge, misc. lights and the satellite and TV for several days without charging.
It's more expensive than jury-rigging a cheapie UPS, but it's a hell of a lot safer.
Most of the software licenses (BSD, GPL, etc) debated here have their basic origins in copyright and ideas about intellectual property that are distinctly American/European in origin.
Is there any such thing or is anyone aware of software licensing schemes that are more organically based on non-Western ideas of intellectual property or copyright concepts?
The western bias of these licenses makes sense in that they're primarily issued and used in western countries, and hence, need to be oriented towards western IP and copyright models.
But as software development and usage grows in places like China and India, will we see PPL (People's Public License) or IPL (Indian Public License) with terms or concepts different than GPL/BSD, etc?
Some of it can also be used to improve work, but usually its not.
It's used by call center line management to justify their performance, or to bully employees. The latter is the worst -- show weak "numbers" to the employees, withhold performance pay, your costs are lower, you get a bigger bonus.
You could use the Slashdot personal forum/blog space. When you load the main page, click on the link for your username. This will open your own personal page (messages, prefs, etc.) There's also a Journal section which acts like your own personal Slashdot -- you can post "news" and people can post followups, just like a REAL slashdot story.
The hard part is publicizing it; I'd wager if you sent a message to one of the editors they'd put up a main page story linking to it. If you do, at least reply to my post so I know about it! I have some job questions I'd like answered..
Slashdot Mirror
You're absolutely right! What I find so staggering (at least at MY company), is how little interest management has in enforcing "computer responsibility" rules like this. Users do all manner of deliberately stupid and occasionally destructive things to/with their computers (getting infected, mangling the OS, deleting the share folders because they "don't need them anymore", and this doesn't include the physical damage to equipment) and management doesn't seem to care how much time or money it takes to fix it.
I'm actually a peon manager myself and when I've actually *tried* to have meetings employees' managers and I'm amazed at the amount of disregard for deliberate, repeated behavior like this among these people's managers. They just don't give a shit.
I once asked our HR manager what she would do if an employee deliberately broke a window or cubicle, repeatedly; she told me they'd probably get fired THE FIRST TIME if the damage threatened someone's health, defintely the second time.
I told her that an employee had repeatedly done something stupid with their computer that was as expensive and time-consuming as a broken window, and she said "Well, I guess you'll just have to work out something with their supervisor."
I don't know what the unintended consequences of a "fuck your computer up and you're fired" policy would be (perhaps as destructive as a fear-based rollback of automation, productivity and information management gains), but it would certainly be nice if there was a concrete set of punishments including termination for at least the most eggreigious offenders. One good firing for computer malfeasance per year might just teach them some responsibility.
I'll endorse your Honda purchase.
We've owned three bought-new Hondas and put about 80,000 miles on two of them and have had exactly one problem with them.
The 99 V6 Accord LX had two situations where the driver's side power window wouldn't roll up within about three months of each other. We took it to the dealer under warranty and they tore both the passenger and driver's side doors apart and couldn't find a problem, but the problem never repeated itself, either (I kind of wonder if the taking apart and putting together didn't fix some minor track/sensor misalignment).
Besides solid mechanical reliability, they hold their value well. I sold the '01 CR-V for $15k three weeks ago after we bought an '04 Pilot (wife got a car bennie from work and the Pilot actually costs us less than the CR-V with the bennie).
Another poster in this thread said they cost more than USA cars; this may be true, but when you consider that you have a good chance of driving a Honda for 200,000 miles with almost no maintenance (5-10 years with no car payment, either), its value proposition increases dramatically. I don't know anyone with an American car that can get that kind of mileage with only scheduled maintenance and consumables.
Beyond that, there's just knowing you're pretty much guaranteed to not be fscking around with a broken car. That alone is worth something.
I wonder how accurate it can be, especially if the music being analyzed represents a soundalike cover of a song. I've had the (mis)fortune of hearing some "tribute" bands that sound remarkably like the originals, occasionally so much so that if you weren't aware it was a cover band you'd swear it was the real thing.
Even the musicbrainz site says in their faq that signiture colliisions are possible (but doesn't say how common).
I use three different proxy settings depending on where I am and what network I'm on, or in some cases (like auth for hotel/airport high speed access), no proxy; it's annoying as hell to change these settings, as they're buried deep in the preferences.
At a minimum, it'd be great to have a "Proxy..." menu item that went to the proxy settings directly. At best, perhaps a proxy manager with associated easy UI access (sidebar, hierarchical menu item) that would allow you to switch proxy profiles on the fly without wading into a preferences dialog.
To be fair to Mozilla, it's at least less buried than IE, but unfortunately not much less.
..and neither does the NY Times.
There was an article in the Thursday business section in the "Economic Scene" column trying to debunk the idea that a shift in jobs and income to the third world is a zero sum game and that US citizens (which I presume includes all first-world citizens) must lose income for the third world to gain.
The article was comparing the income gains in the US Deep South over the past century. The graph showd the percentage gains and losses by region -- ALL regions of the US showed double-digit income losses over this time period and the South and ONLY the South showed gains.
Yet despite the obvious evidence that the lowest income region gained and the higher income regions lost, they tried to say that high-income regions won't lose income while low-income regions gain.
I've become convinced that the media just can't report the reality of immigration and offshoring properly.
I think that the academic/left insists on seeing third world gains and first world losses as well as unchecked third world immigration as partly a pro-minority issue (gains for browns vs. losses for whites), and partly as neo-socialism (gains for poor peoples, losses for rich peoples).
The business/conservatives tend to see it as good for consumers (since some goods become cheaper) and good for business (which generally means good for a small percentage of capitalists), which is usually explained as being the source of new, unexplained, opportunities for workers.
Neither of them care about the too-rapid-to-manage erosion in income and opportunity for workers.
While there's no good reason I can think of that retrofitted zoning would be a zoning problem, sometimes what's permissable and what's not isn't always self-evident.
It would royally suck to need something inspected later on, such as when selling a house, only to be told it wasn't code and had to come out or be expensively upgraded to meet code. I've done a ton of electrical work (some in conjunction with remodeling which was heavily inspected) and nobody said boo, but it was all code-compliant.
And speaking of resale, even though a zoned hvac system would be nice, one that's more complicated than your grandma can operate will actually lower your resale value to most people since it will be seen as a maintenance liability. I put in a Honeywell 7 day programmable thermostat and my wife hated me for a couple of months until she figured out how to work it. I can only imagine what she would do with something that made one room cold and another warm without being totally obvious (like a 15" LCD touch screen with a floor plan of the house and car-type heat controls).
Are there better pictures of this anywhere?
Both this and the Belkin leave me confused on how it hooks to the iPod.
The design of the 40 hour unit appears about right, except that I'd make it more of a holster type attachment that held the iPod at its sides, and a dock connector at the base, similar in design to the way some car cell phone holders hold a cell phone.
This way you get a solid, single unit when connected together instead of two units loosely connected. I've often thought that the iPod should have a few threaded sockets on the back and two on the bottom for secure attachment to other devices.
I think the real reason many people double-press elevator buttons is that many are poorly lighted and don't give a good indication that that have been pressed.
However, I wish that double pressing an elevtor button *would* have a function -- "disabling" the stop at that floor.
In our building and I'm sure others, a couple of elevators go to "mystery" floors and hence have more buttons than others, which means that the "user interface" is non-standard across all elevators. Which means that people tend to automatically push the button at grid position x,y where their floor normally is -- leading to frequent empty stops and slow elevator rides.
A way to unselect a floor would be great and would lead to faster elevator rides and no more empty stops.
If you've been into tech like I have for the past 20 years, you've got a box of cables, power supply blocks and odd bits most of which you're not sure what they go to, if you still have it and are afraid to throw them out. This box, above all my worldly things, will be my legacy.
Yes! I have the same box; usually I can match up the PSU bricks with something that can use them by the power output ratings on them. Although I've been disturbed latetly by some newer electronics that don't list the input power specs on the device, nor do they list the output specs on the brick.
This, and a series of confusion with confusion with some serial cables and APC UPS control cables (which have some circuits buried in the ends) has led me to use one of those labeling machines you can buy at Office Depot. I put labels on the PSUs and devices and on the serial cables to denote usage, voltage, etc. It helps, but there's still a backlog of mystery junk.
And general society is pig-ignorant when it comes to computers and technology. A reasonable percentage can do the obvious things with technology that corporations have spent billions making as easy as plug and play, but by and large they remain totally ignorant when it comes to even the most basic explanations of how technology works.
Furthermore, there's a significant number of people who hold the notion that knowing "how things work" somehow makes you some kind of commoner or blue collar schmuck, and unfortunately many of these people are in high-visibility leadership positions and they pass these attitudes down to their followers, spreading the misguided notion that ignorance of technology -- ANY technology -- somehow is evidence of your superior social or economic standing.
So I actually can't blame newspapers, other than that they're just reflecting the general ignorance of the general population (plus all the usual problems with in-depth facts and information gathering daily news media have).
I think it's up to us or some geek advocacy group to work the PR hard on this so that the news media gets a better idea of what's actually happening and how it hurts the internet. We know that Verisign will be more than willing to work THEIR PR resources to get their side of the story out.
Social interaction is vital, but it's not all mentally healthy. I used to be a regular bus commuter, and I was forced to interact with all kinds of people on the bus and at the bus stop, many of whom were unpleasant to be forced into close proximity.
A good Walkman was *vital* for my mental health.
And when I was in college walking to/from class or wherever, a good walkman made the walk more enjoyable. It's not like I was going to have a social interaction with 99.9999% of the strangers I walked past in the first place.
What I dislike about MDI applications is that they are hostile to multiple monitor setups. You can manually resize an MDI app to cover the entire display area on two monitors (but then it covers the entire display area on two montiors...), but I haven't found an MDI yet that knows how to sanely handle the fact that there are two monitors and the MDI desktop is merely stretched over both.
In other words, when you open or resize a window when the MDI window is zoomed over both displays, you get a stretched window. OK, I can manually resize these, but it's such a hassle to go back 10 years in time to fully manual window management.
So all the GUI manipulations and bitmap editing GIMP is capable of require the use of GTK to create the UI?
I should have expected my other question would get modded down by the slashbots -- it's not flamebait, anymore than expecting Mozilla to use a platforms native UI elements would be.
When the Minneapolis offices of the Federal Reserve moved, they opened up the building and had a furniture/office junk sale. A friend and I went down there simply for the opportunity to wander through a landmark modern building that had been otherwise closed to the public -- you could even trapse through the vaults and marvel at the bulletproof glass in the cash loading areas, etc.
Anyway, they were selling a bunch of junk office stuff for astronomical prices. It was amazing to see what they were charging. I couldn't get anyone to give me a price on the raised flooring system in one of the data centers, either...
They didn't open the *whole* building officially, but we figured out pretty easily how to get to the roof (unlocked access door, had heliport). I regret to this day not stealing the sign from the door to the top-floor weapons range -- yes, there was a gun range on the top floor with a great large engraved sign that said something like "FIREARMS TRAINING FACILITY, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. EYE AND EAR PROTECTION REQUIRED."
My guess is that any time you have a bunch of "DEALS", you get the class of idiot that's pennywise pound-foolish and willing to pay $1 less for used than new even if it's otherwise inferior. These people always end up paying *just* under new retail for used, and are attracted to "auctions" and "surplus sales" like flies to shit and will always drive up prices.
That doesn't carry a bunch of GTK baggage with it and a slew of warnings and gotchas?
Janet Jackson flashing everubody at the halftime show was an expression of "sexuality in a constructive way"?
Nudity in an artistic performance is entirely legitimate. Whether you find the performance artisticly valid is an entirely seperate debate.
Birth control is NOT universally taught in schools or made available. President Bush has made "abstinence-only" sex ed a cornerstone of his domestic policies. Conservative groups *regularly* attack school programs that teach birth control and/or make birth control available in the school.
Parental expectations? As a parent, I expect that programming explicitely stated as children's programming will be acceptable to children; nothing more. I find it somewhat confusing and comical that these parents so offended by Janet Jackson feel that a game oriented around adult violence is somehow appropriate for their children.
FCC regulations was just a red herring.
The fuss is about America's cultural inability to deal with sexuality in a constructive way. We use it to sell products, but ban its direct "consumption". We can't teach about birth control, but we don't like abortion or feeding indigent children. The list of contradictions is endless.
The whole matter is made further confused by the fact that millions of people get cable/satellite channels like HBO and see explicit nudity and sexual behavior all the time. You can't possibly tell me that the mere techical detail between broadcast and cable/satellite warrants public outrage.
The biggest problem, however, is that politicans love these issues -- they can be on the "right" side easily and they don't have to work/think/talk about real issues.
Does the patent then cover the mechanism of desktop switching more so than the act of desktop switching? I haven't seen an application that does what you describe above, but I also haven't been a heavy user of any of the X pagers; just an occasional user of the nVidia nView product.
I've always thought that multiple desktops with the ability to "zoom out" to see more than one of them at a time would be a great management tool.
Rap originally had some creativity and hence acceptance by the entrenched music critics (Grandmaster Flash, etc), but generally slid down into the gutter and out of favor with many mainstream music critics.
Hip-hop was a slight stylistic variation of rap which was given a new name by politically correct rock critics who wanted to add street cred and "diversity" to the music establishment that, since the evolution of punk rock in the mid 1970s, had largely abandoned black music. It also served as a temporary and largely imaginary dividing line between a more politically conscious style of rap and the more corrosive gangsta rap.
Basically it boils down to a bunch of liberal white guys writing for alternative papers and magazines wanting to do something "diverse" and "politically correct" for a style of music that was largely ignored by the underground/alternative music scenes in the 1980s.
My guess is spot checks by law enforcement.
I don't know what the rules are, but when I've been in Orange County I always see those little boxes on people's dashboards or otherwise in plain sight.
Maybe riding solo without one visible is grounds for getting pulled over and getting a ticket, even if you have one in your car.
Of course this begs the question, "What if it's disabled, er, malfunctioning and in plain view?" I can see just gutting the box and leaving it on the dash as if it were a legit box. Perhaps the CHiPs have a wand or something that beeps around a valid box.
No, it's number *5* that EVERYONE needs to remember to follow. I see way too many people (including myself in a hurry) changing more than one thing at a time and then immediately wondering what fixed or why it didn't get fixed.
This is especially important when changing a second variable can actually mask the fix of the change of the first variable or cause a second failure that appears to be the same as the initial failure.
I guess they should have added a rule 10: be patient and systematic. Obvious problems usually have non-obvious solutions, and a thorough examination of the situation is time consuming. Don't take short cuts or you might miss the problem.
Why not just buy/build an inverter setup used by motorhomes? Dad's is essentially home built using a Trace RV inverter/charger that takes input from shore, a generator, or the engine. Dad uses 6V golf cart batteries in his bus and I'm pretty sure there's a wide range of batteries you can use with these inverters. *And* it will switch automagically between the input sources depending on power availability.
Stick 'er in the garage or wherever and then you only need your dinky UPS to handle cutovers. Dad's is powerful enough to handle a side-by-side fridge, misc. lights and the satellite and TV for several days without charging.
It's more expensive than jury-rigging a cheapie UPS, but it's a hell of a lot safer.
This is off-topic, but...
Most of the software licenses (BSD, GPL, etc) debated here have their basic origins in copyright and ideas about intellectual property that are distinctly American/European in origin.
Is there any such thing or is anyone aware of software licensing schemes that are more organically based on non-Western ideas of intellectual property or copyright concepts?
The western bias of these licenses makes sense in that they're primarily issued and used in western countries, and hence, need to be oriented towards western IP and copyright models.
But as software development and usage grows in places like China and India, will we see PPL (People's Public License) or IPL (Indian Public License) with terms or concepts different than GPL/BSD, etc?
Some of it can also be used to improve work, but usually its not.
It's used by call center line management to justify their performance, or to bully employees. The latter is the worst -- show weak "numbers" to the employees, withhold performance pay, your costs are lower, you get a bigger bonus.
You could use the Slashdot personal forum/blog space. When you load the main page, click on the link for your username. This will open your own personal page (messages, prefs, etc.) There's also a Journal section which acts like your own personal Slashdot -- you can post "news" and people can post followups, just like a REAL slashdot story.
The hard part is publicizing it; I'd wager if you sent a message to one of the editors they'd put up a main page story linking to it. If you do, at least reply to my post so I know about it! I have some job questions I'd like answered..