That would definitely make prolonged Emacs sessions a bit more comfortable...
I don't understand why people complain about this. Using CTRL in the lower left corner is perfectly comfortable to me, and it's painful for me to use a Sun keyboard where CTRL is in the caps lock position.
What gives, do I have a weird bone structure in my hand or something?
Sacrilege! We all know that all true emacs functions require at least three modifier keys! We'll have none of this stupid single keypress to perform a simple function crap!
Ctrl-Alt-Meta-RightShift-Tab-W is what I use for "Submit Slashdot Post."
OTOH, it may be a different class of Russians we're talking about.
The ones I'm familiar with are all Russian Jews, most of whom spent significant time in Israel. Her immediate family was in Uzbekistan when she was born, and according to her her accent is somewhat "country" and very different than the way a person from Moscow would speak.
They are also highly educated, mostly PhD's in physical sciences. Heavy accents but huge vocabularies.
Something else interesting to note: sometimes I kid with her about the confusion with 'v' and 'w', and she swears she can't tell the difference between the sounds! I say, "So, you're telling me you can't tell the difference between 'vuh' and 'wuh'" and she looks at me like I'm crazy... "What difference?"
The 'w' sound is so foreign to Russian speakers that apparently they conflate it with 'v' and interchange them on some subconscious level. I can only guess at what it must be like for her.
you could trawl a few shots of PC users doing "one handed typing" and then threaten to send the images to all of their email address book, you'd have a pretty good blackmail setup...
Yeah, we wouldn't want anyone to find out that we masturbate. After all, we all know that masturbation is only performed by a small minority of extremely sick individuals, right?
Sheesh, this isn't much of a "blackmail" plan.
Idiot: "Give me money, or I'll... I'll... embarrass you!"
What I have a problem with is their refusal to pay the costs involved, but instead requiring the entire rate base to pay the cost of the wiretaps that they want to use instead of having to pay for them out of their own budget.
In other words, you want me to pay for it, even though I don't use VoIP? Where exactly do you think federal money comes from?
Harassing a 78 year old, who's about to die because he might suddenly pull off his rubber face mask and turn into a combat-trained terrorist...
Alternative situation: 78 years old, about to die, has a grudge against the US because the IRS took away his family farm. A terrorist organization offers him and his family $100,000 dollars if he'll agree to carry a bomb on board a plane.
Do you actually think that is so far-fetched?
Only in the movies folks.
Yeah. Only in the movies could something completely implausible happen, like say, a dozen or so men taking control of airplanes and crashing them into the World Trade Center. Only in the movies, folks.
Commmon sense would tell you to screen all people with arabic ethnicity.
If you limit the scope of people you take under consideration, the people with true terrorist motives will simply switch to those types of people to carry out their operations. These people are insane, not stupid.
Imagine if that 78-year-old grandfather was dying, in pain, and had a grudge against the United States. Suppose further that a terrorist organization offered his family $100,000 if he agreed to sacrifice himself as a suicide bomber. He's going to die either way, and he hates the US for whatever reason. Being old and white doesn't prove anything.
Come on, it's not that hard to think of plausible scenarios. We've been very lucky so far but eventually the right combination of evil and intelligence will cause a major disaster.
Why do you people complain about this, but not about traditional wiretaps on traditional phones? You seem to think the government is eager to listen to your communications, yet the vast majority of people continue to use the telephone system regardless. Are you being purposefully inconsistent, or just stupid?
Are you trying to say the government should never be allowed to eavesdrop on criminal communications even with a warrant?! I can't distinguish between that and anarchy. Can somebody please help me?
Ah, no. Their 'V' is just like our 'V', but generally pronounced harshly. 'W' is a very different sound that they lack. They would have said "nuclear vessel", but pronounced "where" as "vhere".
Well, it really depends how long the Russian has been speaking English. I know many Russian immigrants to the US, and they invariably confuse the 'v' and 'w' sounds, and what's more, it seems like the ones who speak English better are more likely to get them confused!
It is true that in Russian there is no 'w' sound, but a Russian speaking English does have the tendency to transpose the two sounds. Why this is, I'm not exactly sure, but as I said, there seems to be a correlation with how long they've been speaking English.
Thus silliness like W's instead of V's entered as a common idea of a Russian accent.
It's a common idea because it's correct. You must listen to different Russians than I do, because they confuse 'v' in 'w', in both directions, all the time. My girlfriend, whose accent is so slight as to be barely noticeable, often substitutes 'w' for 'v', and 'v' for 'w' as well. Interestingly, she only confuses the sounds for words that she isn't familiar with. For example, she would never pronounce "very" as "wery," since it is such a common word, but she might pronounce "voluptuous" as "woluptuous" since she doesn't use that word very often. The confusion goes both ways: once she asked me if I would like to go "vale vatching" this weekend. How do you defend against cuteness like that?
I agree that the Russians have no 'w' sound but for some reason they do sometimes pronounce English 'v' as 'w'. I've heard it a thousand times, at least.
No real Russian sounds like Mr. Chekov
According to several Russians, his accent, although fake, is much better than some of the crap that is passed off as "Russian" in modern movies. According to the Russians I know, the Russian speech in The Hunt For Red October was particularly atrocious to the point of not being comprehensible.
Er, if the region is disputed by both India and Pakistant, how is coloring them differently than undisputed India and Pakistan a wrong thing to do?
Because on the rest of the map, differences in color are used to indicate distinct political regions, i.e., nations. I think you're just digging for a way to weasel out of this, here.
The appropriate thing to do if they wanted to appear unbiased would have been to omit India, Pakistan, and the disputed territory from the map entirely. The message: "If you want to appear on a map of world powers, don't act like silly bitches."
I'm sorry, but I think letter writing, phone calls, and sewing circles are going to have to be combined with numerous loud, noisy protests in the streets of American cities.
Recall that the votes for PATRIOT etc were almost unanimous.
Had our representatives received massive negative input from us, a.k.a. letters, faxes, emails, and public protests, maybe they would have voted otherwise.
Either way, the burden of responsibility is still ours.
As a hundred people have already mentioned, with a digital camera you can erase pictures that you don't like or came out badly and take better ones. Since most people can't take a decent photograph, this preview feature is easily worth the extra money because it virtually guarantees you'll have good pictures.
Unless you're a person who is literally incapable of taking good photographs, even on accident...
There are people who have gained some amount of sight after living the majority of their lives without it.
They don't go crazy, but they do find it nearly impossible to make sense of what they are seeing. Rather than seeing a scene composed of individual objects, they witness a jumble of light and color which is hard to interpret.
When a human is born, the vision system is not yet fully finished. Both the brain and the retina (which is part of the brain) have to learn how to process and interpret the visual information into a more abstract symbolic form.
People who gain sight after a lifetime without it usually never learn to fully "see" things as normally sighted people do.
How much of a profit? The parts might *cost* as much as $100 to buy in small quantity, but I doubt it, and apart from the LCD they have pretty much zero resale value.
Well, think about what's in there: LCD, maybe $20 right there. CCD, perhaps another $20, but the market for CCD arrays is small, restricted to hobbyists, etc. Focusing mechanism, you might have a $3 servo in there. Lenses, another $5 maybe. Power regulator, another couple bucks. The battery alone is probably worth a couple bucks. 64 megabytes of nonvolatile storage has got to be worth at least a few bucks, maybe $10.
(And I'm talking about prices you might fetch on Ebay, not prices from the manufacturer, which would be higher.)
I think you underestimate the market for loose electronic parts:-)
Sorry, but I'm not willing to sacrifice my time and money to take legal action against somebody who is little more than an annoyance.
He's not costing me money, and because my spam filters work very well, he's not costing me time, either. It would be nice if it stopped altogether, but am I going to plonk down a retainer fee to a lawyer and go through that entire process just to avoid receiving a few emails each day that end up filtered into a spam folder anyway? Of course not.
There are things in this world worth being idealistic about. This is not one of them.
Since there is apparently less than 100 people worldwide responsble for sending out the spam, just find them and shoot say, half of them as a warning to others.
I realize that you are, at some level, joking here, but this cry of "Kill the spammers" is really getting tiresome.
Aren't there worse things in the world than spam? I could name specific examples, but that isn't my point: my point is, calling for the deaths of people who do nothing more than create a nuisance for everyone is quite childish. Whether joking or not. It's just stupid.
It shows a lack of rational perspective on the world, the degree of which is monumental, and actually quite frightening.
That allows the people who have been spammed to identify and track the spammer.
This assumes they give a shit.
Only basement-dwelling dorks like yourself are interested in "tracking down" spammers. The vast majority of people just want it to stop. It's an annoyance, not a national security threat for fuck's sake.
Even better. You might be able to turn "free" into "profit" if you can sell the constituent parts for more than the $20 purchase price.
Who the hell is interested in "hacking" these things anyway? The picture quality sucks. Sure, it's a cheap camera, but I'm far more interested in the profit potential.
Imagine if you could buy a "disposable car." The catch is, you can't refill the tank. However, you legally bought the car so there's nothing stopping you from taking it apart and selling the parts. I don't know about you, but I'm more interested in reselling the parts than in "hacking" the car to be able to refill the gas tank. Especially because the car is a Yugo.
If enough people do this it will destroy the disposable digicam business model, but that's okay. It's a fucked up business model anyway. They'll have to move to a true rental system.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand why people complain about this. Using CTRL in the lower left corner is perfectly comfortable to me, and it's painful for me to use a Sun keyboard where CTRL is in the caps lock position.
What gives, do I have a weird bone structure in my hand or something?
Sacrilege! We all know that all true emacs functions require at least three modifier keys! We'll have none of this stupid single keypress to perform a simple function crap!
Ctrl-Alt-Meta-RightShift-Tab-W is what I use for "Submit Slashdot Post."
We already have these. They're called "function keys." Why people refuse to use them is totally beyond me.
The ones I'm familiar with are all Russian Jews, most of whom spent significant time in Israel. Her immediate family was in Uzbekistan when she was born, and according to her her accent is somewhat "country" and very different than the way a person from Moscow would speak.
They are also highly educated, mostly PhD's in physical sciences. Heavy accents but huge vocabularies.
Something else interesting to note: sometimes I kid with her about the confusion with 'v' and 'w', and she swears she can't tell the difference between the sounds! I say, "So, you're telling me you can't tell the difference between 'vuh' and 'wuh'" and she looks at me like I'm crazy... "What difference?"
The 'w' sound is so foreign to Russian speakers that apparently they conflate it with 'v' and interchange them on some subconscious level. I can only guess at what it must be like for her.
Not really, but I wouldn't pay money to prevent somebody from doing it, either.
Yeah, we wouldn't want anyone to find out that we masturbate. After all, we all know that masturbation is only performed by a small minority of extremely sick individuals, right?
Sheesh, this isn't much of a "blackmail" plan.
Idiot: "Give me money, or I'll... I'll... embarrass you!"
Me: "Oooh, I'm so scared."
In other words, you want me to pay for it, even though I don't use VoIP? Where exactly do you think federal money comes from?
Your inability to grasp why these sorts of methods should be absolutely unacceptable in any ethical society, is truly horrifying.
You are not insightful. You are a hateful individual who justifies his morally corrupt position with statistics.
Alternative situation: 78 years old, about to die, has a grudge against the US because the IRS took away his family farm. A terrorist organization offers him and his family $100,000 dollars if he'll agree to carry a bomb on board a plane.
Do you actually think that is so far-fetched?
Only in the movies folks.
Yeah. Only in the movies could something completely implausible happen, like say, a dozen or so men taking control of airplanes and crashing them into the World Trade Center. Only in the movies, folks.
If you limit the scope of people you take under consideration, the people with true terrorist motives will simply switch to those types of people to carry out their operations. These people are insane, not stupid.
Imagine if that 78-year-old grandfather was dying, in pain, and had a grudge against the United States. Suppose further that a terrorist organization offered his family $100,000 if he agreed to sacrifice himself as a suicide bomber. He's going to die either way, and he hates the US for whatever reason. Being old and white doesn't prove anything.
Come on, it's not that hard to think of plausible scenarios. We've been very lucky so far but eventually the right combination of evil and intelligence will cause a major disaster.
Are you trying to say the government should never be allowed to eavesdrop on criminal communications even with a warrant?! I can't distinguish between that and anarchy. Can somebody please help me?
Well, it really depends how long the Russian has been speaking English. I know many Russian immigrants to the US, and they invariably confuse the 'v' and 'w' sounds, and what's more, it seems like the ones who speak English better are more likely to get them confused!
It is true that in Russian there is no 'w' sound, but a Russian speaking English does have the tendency to transpose the two sounds. Why this is, I'm not exactly sure, but as I said, there seems to be a correlation with how long they've been speaking English.
Thus silliness like W's instead of V's entered as a common idea of a Russian accent.
It's a common idea because it's correct. You must listen to different Russians than I do, because they confuse 'v' in 'w', in both directions, all the time. My girlfriend, whose accent is so slight as to be barely noticeable, often substitutes 'w' for 'v', and 'v' for 'w' as well. Interestingly, she only confuses the sounds for words that she isn't familiar with. For example, she would never pronounce "very" as "wery," since it is such a common word, but she might pronounce "voluptuous" as "woluptuous" since she doesn't use that word very often. The confusion goes both ways: once she asked me if I would like to go "vale vatching" this weekend. How do you defend against cuteness like that?
I agree that the Russians have no 'w' sound but for some reason they do sometimes pronounce English 'v' as 'w'. I've heard it a thousand times, at least.
No real Russian sounds like Mr. Chekov
According to several Russians, his accent, although fake, is much better than some of the crap that is passed off as "Russian" in modern movies. According to the Russians I know, the Russian speech in The Hunt For Red October was particularly atrocious to the point of not being comprehensible.
Because on the rest of the map, differences in color are used to indicate distinct political regions, i.e., nations. I think you're just digging for a way to weasel out of this, here.
The appropriate thing to do if they wanted to appear unbiased would have been to omit India, Pakistan, and the disputed territory from the map entirely. The message: "If you want to appear on a map of world powers, don't act like silly bitches."
That's why "public protests" was in my list...
I consider it a service to the public, notwithstanding the obvious legal implications if somebody does something illegal using your net connection.
Had our representatives received massive negative input from us, a.k.a. letters, faxes, emails, and public protests, maybe they would have voted otherwise.
Either way, the burden of responsibility is still ours.
So the guy drank a lot. And G.W. snorted cocaine. Your point?
Unless you're a person who is literally incapable of taking good photographs, even on accident...
That's right, all that tuition, room and board I paid in school was just imaginary...
They don't go crazy, but they do find it nearly impossible to make sense of what they are seeing. Rather than seeing a scene composed of individual objects, they witness a jumble of light and color which is hard to interpret.
When a human is born, the vision system is not yet fully finished. Both the brain and the retina (which is part of the brain) have to learn how to process and interpret the visual information into a more abstract symbolic form.
People who gain sight after a lifetime without it usually never learn to fully "see" things as normally sighted people do.
Well, think about what's in there: LCD, maybe $20 right there. CCD, perhaps another $20, but the market for CCD arrays is small, restricted to hobbyists, etc. Focusing mechanism, you might have a $3 servo in there. Lenses, another $5 maybe. Power regulator, another couple bucks. The battery alone is probably worth a couple bucks. 64 megabytes of nonvolatile storage has got to be worth at least a few bucks, maybe $10.
(And I'm talking about prices you might fetch on Ebay, not prices from the manufacturer, which would be higher.)
I think you underestimate the market for loose electronic parts :-)
He's not costing me money, and because my spam filters work very well, he's not costing me time, either. It would be nice if it stopped altogether, but am I going to plonk down a retainer fee to a lawyer and go through that entire process just to avoid receiving a few emails each day that end up filtered into a spam folder anyway? Of course not.
There are things in this world worth being idealistic about. This is not one of them.
I realize that you are, at some level, joking here, but this cry of "Kill the spammers" is really getting tiresome.
Aren't there worse things in the world than spam? I could name specific examples, but that isn't my point: my point is, calling for the deaths of people who do nothing more than create a nuisance for everyone is quite childish. Whether joking or not. It's just stupid.
It shows a lack of rational perspective on the world, the degree of which is monumental, and actually quite frightening.
This assumes they give a shit.
Only basement-dwelling dorks like yourself are interested in "tracking down" spammers. The vast majority of people just want it to stop. It's an annoyance, not a national security threat for fuck's sake.
Even better. You might be able to turn "free" into "profit" if you can sell the constituent parts for more than the $20 purchase price.
Who the hell is interested in "hacking" these things anyway? The picture quality sucks. Sure, it's a cheap camera, but I'm far more interested in the profit potential. Imagine if you could buy a "disposable car." The catch is, you can't refill the tank. However, you legally bought the car so there's nothing stopping you from taking it apart and selling the parts. I don't know about you, but I'm more interested in reselling the parts than in "hacking" the car to be able to refill the gas tank. Especially because the car is a Yugo.
If enough people do this it will destroy the disposable digicam business model, but that's okay. It's a fucked up business model anyway. They'll have to move to a true rental system.