If your employees need remote access from home, and you are providing
the laptop, consider a Linux-based laptop. No spyware, adware, viruses,
email worms, etc. to worry about (assuming you
have it properly secured of course...). They may complain they can't run the
latest games and so on, but you're calling the shots, so tough - they
were hired to do work for you. They'll probably be more productive for
this reason alone, which is a second advantage.
I use pens and pencils a lot for marking things up, making notes, and
even scribbling rought drafts when I'm inspired away from a computer.
No one seems to discuss this much, but anyway here are my personal
preferences.
I've tried dozens of different kinds of pens over my lifetime, and the
one that I've settled on and now insist on is the inexpensive Pilot
EasyTouch Medium Point ball-point (the Fine Point is good too, but not
quite as smooth). It is the smoothest writing instrument I've found,
whether ball-point, roller-ball, gel, fountain pen, or whatever. And it
always just seems to work; it doesn't dry on me and require those
scribbles to get the ink flowing after several days of non-use, like
other ball-points. Strangely it doesn't seem to be a standard stock
item and I have to special order it from Staples. The blue color seems
slightly smoother than red or black, but that may be subjective.
As for pencils, for years I used to use a Pentel P205.5mm, but recently
I've come to prefer the Staedtler 9505.5mm. An advantage is that it
doesn't have that frustrating slippage in the last 1/4" of lead that you
end up throwing away. I also like a very soft lead (2B) because it
writes dark with little effort. But that's just me - it takes getting
used to because the lead is so fragile, and other people sometimes get
frustrated when I lend it to them, breaking the lead over and over
because they're used to pressing hard.
Thank you for writing this. I understand all the usual reasons for
using NAT. However, a few years ago I configured a Linux transparent firewall as the main
firewall for our small company (with iproute2/iptables) and have used it
for several years without a single problem. (The historical reason was
that we needed to connect to a VPN that used IP protocol 47, which at
the time wasn't easily NAT'able, plus we have plenty of unused static
IP's anyway.) It had an uptime of almost 2 years until a long power
failure defeated the UPS.
Anyway over and over I have to defend myself against the naysayers
who say NAT is inherently more secure, but when pinning them down can
never provide a logical reason. Recently my boss ordered me to change
everything to NAT, "because it's more secure - it just is, everyone
knows that", burdening me with yet another pointless thing to do. I'll
show your post to him.
BTW iproute2 is simply an amazing program. If you're into firewalls and
routing on Linux and haven't heard about it, you should look into it. It
lets you do almost anything (transparent firewalls with ARP proxy, for
example).
In Brazil the cashew fruit juice is made into a somewhat
mouth-puckering, pale yellow beverage called cajuada that is very
popular. The juice is greatly watered down and heavily sugared, like
making lemonade; it is typically sold in open diners from those lemonade
dispensers that show the beverage constantly being circulated like a
fountain. I was told that the caju (cashew) fruit is poisonous unless
it is cooked first. (Other popular beverages are freshly pressed sugar
cane juice served with ice, and the juice from freshly cut immature
coconuts, usually drank from the coconut itself.)
As for the original topic, on a trip to St. Kitts I
toured a large sugar-processing factory that was entirely
self-sufficient simply out of necessity (electicity and oil supplies
were unreliable). They generated the steam and electricity they needed
by burning the hulks of the spent sugar cane after it was pressed. I
saw the actual furnace - it was huge (and very hot) and fed directly
from the conveyor belt that carryed the sugar cane through its various
processing stages. The factory was quite old and apparently this was
nothing novel; I think they had been doing this for decades as a matter
of course. The factory as a whole was a sweltering, miserable place to
work at in the tropical heat.
Frivolous? I think that the laywer, who will get his percentage cut of
the $52 million settlement, would strongly disagree with you.
Definitely no more frivolous than the stable of Ferraris he needs to
support his lifestyle.
Regardless of its ethics or legality, I think it is a bad idea to
fileshare RIAA-connected music. I think that (contrary to what the RIAA
would have you believe) by increasing exposure to it, you actually help
the RIAA by effectively marketing their music, just like radio does.
Anyway, whether my theory is right or not, I propose that we offer
massive amounts of non-RIAA, legal-to-download music on PHP. I mean
massive amounts - thousands and thousands of song, gigabytes and
gigabytes worth - saturate P2P with it. Not just stuff you like
personally but all kinds of stuff that potentially someone might like.
And of course it would all be perfectly legal.
If everyone were to donate spare disk and bandwidth they're not using
anyway, it might make a difference. Start a movement to swamp out
RIAA songs. The independent artists will only benefit from it and
thank us in the end.
If you agree with this theory, what are some good sources of
freely-downloadable music you would recommend?
Something like 2048 RSA is for all practical purposes unbreakable, so
currently there is no real practical advantage to using quantum
cryptography (or more precisely quantum key exchange) for material you
want to protect for the next decade or so. The fear is that in the
future, when quantum computation becomes feasible, huge numbers will
become factorable very quickly, rendering any size RSA useless. In a
sense quantum cryptography and quantum computation are "competing" on
parallel paths, and it is good that the cryptography path is much
further ahead, otherwise cryptographic communication in general would
become endangered.
This is probably the kind of thing the military is worried about for
communicating ultrasensitive material that they never want exposed. An
eavesdropper could record an RSA transmission that is currently
unbreakable, but put it in storage hoping that in a couple of decades
they will be able to break the RSA key exchange with a quantum
computer. A couple of decades might sound like forever - why would the information still be
valuable? - but look at how long top secret documents can take to become declassified.
They would want to protect the information at least
that long.
Now I would guess that they probably did register it, unless
they were unaware of this little-known quirk in the copyright law.
But I find it interesting this quirk exists, and probably a huge
number of unpublished works became public domain at the beginning
of this year.
I don't understand why the authors, who made this
statement, didn't quantify it by including Microsoft's own software products in their table. Then it would be much
more meaningful.
On a personal note I have had several
occasions when a corrupted.doc has refused to
open at all in Word '97 but opened in
StarOffice, with the corrupted place highlighted
in red. I thought that was nice. (This particular
version of Word had a tendency to corrupt its own
documents occasionally, when we used a certain template imposed on us by our customer.)
It would also would have been interesting to note whether the alternatives have Word's awful feature of formatting pages slightly differently as a function of what printer is currently active.
A few years ago this caused us to postpone a telephone conference because everyone's page numbers were different; we faxed a hard copy to
everyone to correct the problem. If the open source alternatives don't have this "feature" I would call that a significant plus.
I have a 12-year-old son. He has certainly heard his share of "bad" words in movies etc. But I have
never had to punished him for using "bad"
words, because he knows the rules, respects me, and wants my approval.
He knows that in and of themselves a combination of letters is no more
than that, but certain combinations can evoke certain (sometimes
undesirable) reactions from others. When you raise kids, you want to
teach them reasonable behaviors that allow them to function well in
society. You want to give them the training and tools that allow them
to do that. Then when they're adults, they will know what society's
expectatations are, and they can make your own informed judgment as to
how to behave. They'll know what to expect when they behave in certain
ways, and perhaps they will choose to behave or not behave in certain
ways in certain situations in order to be funny, shock, express anger,
or whatever. You also teach them manners - when it is appropriate to eat
with a fork, and when you can shove food into you mouth with your hands,
so they won't embarrass themselves by looking like pigs when they're on
their own. What is important is to teach them when it is appropriate to
use "bad" words and when it is not. If you teach them well, they will
have to tools to achieve what they want out of life.
I agree it's a terrible deal for the stockholders. For example, its
price/sales ratio is only 0.76 (compared to say 4 for Amazon, 17.5 for
Yahoo, 21.41 for Ebay). I bought 3700 shares on 8/29/02 at $1.04
expecting to hold them a long time and to appreciate considerably, since
my research at that time indicated it was severely undervalued. Now I'm
forced to sell, against my will, at $1.05 a share. So even though
I'm making a $37.00 profit before commissions, I'm actually losing
$39.98 - $37.00 = $2.98 after commissions are taken into account. At least I won't have to pay taxes.
Ironically even though the stockholders got
screwed, they screwed themselves by voting for this, or
more likely by not voting at all (I voted against it). Apparently it
was 37.8 million in favor versus 8.1 million against; the rest of
the 91 million shares didn't vote. Now of the 37.8 million in favor, 23
million were controlled by Vector, who is now laughing all the way to
the bank. Moral: always vote your shares. You may think it
won't make much difference, but this is what happened when everyone
thought that way.
The only reason X is installed is because Oracle has no command-line
installer anymore, so I have to do a remote X session for the
installs.
How the world seems to regress. To me, this was a big advantage of
installing (and using) Oracle on Linux, vs. the pointy-clicky Windows
version. I could write a script to automate the install and just let it
run, vs. a painful morning's worth of click-and-wait on Windows. I
could easily experiment with different installation options. And a script
lets you painlessly rebuild a system from scratch, if need be, whereas
it's always "did I click this, or click that the last time I did this?"
with Windows, trying to recover from hand-written scribbles.
Fortunately we're moving to PostgreSQL for
some things (noncritical ones that don't scare
the PHBs) - I find PG to be cleaner, simpler, and more pleasant to
use. It's actually not that hard to convert the
database, even stored procedures.
Some people, especially young children, seem to have a difficult time
grasping that although nothing physical is taken, theft has still
occurred.
Perhaps there is a reason for this. Do you recall the tale,
"The Emperor Has No Clothes"? Sometimes it takes the eyes of a child
to see the truth. Now as for copyright infringement, that is a different matter; you
have teach the child about the government-sponsored "limited" monopoly on
information, and that indeed is a difficult
concept, one that even now I am still trying to grasp fully.
With some programming, it may be that Microsoft's present USB Notebook
Optical Mouse could do this, I think. The reason is that if you scroll
without pressing, the "middle" button seems not to be activated,
wherease if you scroll while pressing, the "middle" button does seem to
be activated. The reason I believe this is that Adobe Acrobat sometimes
crashes when I press the scroll wheel while scrolling, whereas it never
does if I scroll with light pressure, indicating there are two different
modes.
This is not to say I would recommend that mouse, even though when it
works it's very pleasant to use. I am on my third one. The first
developed a problem where the cursor would jump to the corner of the
screen too frequently. The second just stopped working completely.
Both were replaced for free by CompUSA. All of them had or have a
problem where the cursor jumps to a corner of the screen on dark
surfaces or when the surface isn't just right. (I would much prefer
that they were instead programmed just to refuse move under these
marginal conditions - corner jumping is a pain when you're say trying to
edit an image in GIMP or Photoshop.) My third unit now sometimes just
dies, even if I unplug and plug the USB connector, until I reboot my
VAIO laptop. I'm not sure if it's a hardward or software problem, but
it does seem to be more prone to dying when XP starts to otherwise decay
(you know, frozen programs that can't be killed etc.), requiring a
reboot anyway (actually a hard power down
reboot,
because the programs can't be killed
so it will never
shut down).
As a self-employed and reasonably healthy person, I get catastrphic-only insurance.
I used to think this, and in theory this is how it should be. The
problem is that insurance companies have negotiated DEEP discounts with
the doctors under their plans, and as an individual you can't do that.
In other words, you will get raked through the coals (until your deductible
is met).
I just went to my file cabinet and looked up the actual insurance
company's bills (that normally are not sent to me, but were as part of a
response to a payment issue I had). These are from the past year, in
Massachusetts.
Physical exam - $256.00
Blue Shield payment - $104.53
Blue Shield "adjustment" - $136.47
My co-pay - $15.00
In other words, you would have had to pay $256, but the insurance co.
only had to pay $104.53. From the doctor's point of view, still not a
bad income for 15 minutes of actual work (plus scrawling a signature on
a routine letter the secretary typed up about the blood test).
The blood test associated with the exam was billed at $474.00. The
Blue Shield payment was $114.62, the "adjustment" was $359.38, and my
co-pay was $0. So in addition, with your catastrophic insurance you would
have paid $474, whereas the insurance co. paid $114.62.
Now, perhaps you still come out ahead - stuff like this quickly adds up
to your $1500 deductible. I don't know how much my company pays for my insurance.
It wouldn't surprise me if this does get published in Foundations of
Physics Letters - we'll wait and see - but here is why.
The Foundations of Physics (and the Letters companion) is a journal that
seems to be a catch-all for articles on the fringe of physics. (By "fringe" I don't necessarily mean "new-age" garbage - that would be rejected outright - but I mean stuff that sometimes really pushes the envelope.) While
the articles are peer-reviewed, the articles are sometimes speculative and
many of them would have been (and were) rejected elsewhere. For
example, there was a paper in the 1980s IIRC reporting on evidence for
psi phenomena (and a theory connecting it to quantum mechanics) whose
results have never been duplicated. The articles tend to be on the
hairy borderline of real and pseudo-scientific, and whatever you read
there (although often quite interesting, and for the most part
scientifically correct, but not always) you have to take with a grain of salt and use informed
judgment to evaluate the papers.
I found it puzzling that MIT's Science Library,
which has about every physics journal imaginable, ended its subscription
to FoP and Letters in the early 90s, although I never pursued why -
perhaps some faculty member complained that its quality wasn't up to
snuff. So while I use to enjoy reading it, it's way too expensive for
me to subscribe to - perhaps another local U. carries it, don't know.
I myself have published a paper in FoP on an obscure topic (in my case not wrong
or controversial, just too obscure for the mainstream physics journals
to find a referee who thought it interesting or significant), that had
been rejected elsewhere.
There are thousands of hardworking men and women serving in Coast Guard
ships off our coasts, monitoring land border crossings, inspecting
imported cargo containers, and serving as airport security inspectors
and skymarshals, all to keep your bloody arses safe behind your monitors
as you make fun of them.
Well, it seems they spend an awful lot of time
seizing boats and putting fishermen out of business because
a crew member had a joint in his pocket. How exactly does this
help Homeland Security?
I may want to reserve the battery for use somewhere else where there
is no convenient AC. I may have to stay in the car longer than the battery
life, which although 2 hrs at first, dwindles to 45 min until I'm
willing to shell out $200 for the next replacement. I may want
to have the car charge the laptop battery for later use, even
though I'm not using the car. I also have
a solar-charged car battery that won't work with this device,
when I'm in a remote cottage with no electricity. Once there was a power failure in our neighborhood and I wanted to use the car battery to finish
an urgent project, but couldn't without running the engine, wasting gas. There are many
reasons.
Are you trying to tell me this device has no design flaw
and that the fault is all mine? Do the
above situations not "seem too hard" to you?
How would you solve them?
The input rating of 10V to 26V may cause the computer to die when
starting the engine, so don't depend on this to run anything critical.
Do these guys even understand car battery specs? A good design should work
at least down to 7.2V:
"Today's batteries are rated in cold cranking amps. This represents the
current that the battery can produce for 30 seconds at 0 degrees before
the battery voltage drops below 7.2 volts." Better designs such as the power supply in this
ECU device will work down to 6.5V.
This design error seems to be common. Out of three laptop 12V
adapters I've purchased, only one worked with an old battery (that was still good
enough to start the car). The worst is my most recent Xtend PowerXtender,
which is rated 12-16V and often refuses to work unless the engine is running -
very annoying when I'm waiting in the car and want to use my laptop.
Owning part of a company does not give you the right to control the
assets of the company. That's what the whole shareholder voting system
is for, to decide what the company will do.
Convince the majority of shareholders to vote to allow shareholders
access to the company's copyrights (which in effect the
shareholders already partly own anyway). Perhaps on some prorated basis
depending on the number of shares owned; haven't worked out the details.
The reason the shareholders would want to do this is the following.
Once this took effect, everyone would want a share, and the stock price
would skyrocket. It would feed on itself: as the stock price went up, people would in effect feel they were being paid to download, causing even more greedy people to buy in. Existing shareholders (the ones who voted this in) could sell out at a huge profit.
Long term the price might not sustain itself after the majority of
the population buys in, causing the company's sales to diminish, but all
people care about these days are short-term profits anyway.
I think a flaw in all of this is: if essentially everyone is
unemployed, they will have no money to buy the products that are
automatically produced. There will be no market. It will become
self-defeating. It is in the interest of the producers to maintain a
market for their products.
Instead, what I think will happen is that the typical workweek will
slowly get shorter and shorter, in part because there will be so many leisure activities and
interesting things to do outside of work and that's what people will
demand. Our quality of life will increase dramatically. Actual human
labor will become very expensive, and we will only need to work a few
hours a week to earn enough to reap the rewards of all the automation.
Of course, there will be those who will still work 80 hours a week, if they
want, and they'll probably become richer than most.
I guess there are alterate distopian possibilities, such as a massive
imbalance of wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer people, which they
article seems to be predicting. We should be wary to try to take steps,
whatever they might be, to help prevent that from happening. Without
draconian government measures that trample on freedom.
We have done so much for so long with so little
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
This seems vaguely reminiscent of an old joke about specialists, that goes something like this:
"A specialist is someone who has learned more and more about less and less until
eventually [s]he knows everything about nothing."
A generalist, of course, can be defined conversely.
Using this principle, we can now set forth
the "IT Manager's Creed", whose details are
left to the reader.
So why not some falling ASCII characters in the background with some unique, slashdotty-style text on the front?
Because the MPAA will sue your *** off.
One thing I hate is a certain kind of cheap extension cord, I don't know
if it has a name or brand, maybe it's a generic thing sold under
different store brands. It works fine for some kinds of plugs that have
a spring-like folded thin metal blades at the end, but it can be hell to
get it to connect with the kind of plug that AC adapters and some
appliances have with flat, thick metal blades. You have to do
experiments bending the blades in or out to get them to connect. And
then they tend to be intermittent. I believe they are a fire hazard
because of this. Once I had one of them completely melt and fuse due to
an intermittent connection to a heater (although no actual fire in my
case).
Does anyone else know what I'm talking about, and had this
experience? These cords are clearly labeled "UL-approved". I wonder
what kind of testing was actually done.
Slashdot Mirror
If your employees need remote access from home, and you are providing the laptop, consider a Linux-based laptop. No spyware, adware, viruses, email worms, etc. to worry about (assuming you have it properly secured of course...). They may complain they can't run the latest games and so on, but you're calling the shots, so tough - they were hired to do work for you. They'll probably be more productive for this reason alone, which is a second advantage.
I've tried dozens of different kinds of pens over my lifetime, and the one that I've settled on and now insist on is the inexpensive Pilot EasyTouch Medium Point ball-point (the Fine Point is good too, but not quite as smooth). It is the smoothest writing instrument I've found, whether ball-point, roller-ball, gel, fountain pen, or whatever. And it always just seems to work; it doesn't dry on me and require those scribbles to get the ink flowing after several days of non-use, like other ball-points. Strangely it doesn't seem to be a standard stock item and I have to special order it from Staples. The blue color seems slightly smoother than red or black, but that may be subjective.
As for pencils, for years I used to use a Pentel P205 .5mm, but recently
I've come to prefer the Staedtler 9505 .5mm. An advantage is that it
doesn't have that frustrating slippage in the last 1/4" of lead that you
end up throwing away. I also like a very soft lead (2B) because it
writes dark with little effort. But that's just me - it takes getting
used to because the lead is so fragile, and other people sometimes get
frustrated when I lend it to them, breaking the lead over and over
because they're used to pressing hard.
Anyway over and over I have to defend myself against the naysayers who say NAT is inherently more secure, but when pinning them down can never provide a logical reason. Recently my boss ordered me to change everything to NAT, "because it's more secure - it just is, everyone knows that", burdening me with yet another pointless thing to do. I'll show your post to him.
BTW iproute2 is simply an amazing program. If you're into firewalls and routing on Linux and haven't heard about it, you should look into it. It lets you do almost anything (transparent firewalls with ARP proxy, for example).
As for the original topic, on a trip to St. Kitts I toured a large sugar-processing factory that was entirely self-sufficient simply out of necessity (electicity and oil supplies were unreliable). They generated the steam and electricity they needed by burning the hulks of the spent sugar cane after it was pressed. I saw the actual furnace - it was huge (and very hot) and fed directly from the conveyor belt that carryed the sugar cane through its various processing stages. The factory was quite old and apparently this was nothing novel; I think they had been doing this for decades as a matter of course. The factory as a whole was a sweltering, miserable place to work at in the tropical heat.
Frivolous? I think that the laywer, who will get his percentage cut of the $52 million settlement, would strongly disagree with you. Definitely no more frivolous than the stable of Ferraris he needs to support his lifestyle.
Anyway, whether my theory is right or not, I propose that we offer massive amounts of non-RIAA, legal-to-download music on PHP. I mean massive amounts - thousands and thousands of song, gigabytes and gigabytes worth - saturate P2P with it. Not just stuff you like personally but all kinds of stuff that potentially someone might like. And of course it would all be perfectly legal.
If everyone were to donate spare disk and bandwidth they're not using anyway, it might make a difference. Start a movement to swamp out RIAA songs. The independent artists will only benefit from it and thank us in the end.
If you agree with this theory, what are some good sources of freely-downloadable music you would recommend?
This is probably the kind of thing the military is worried about for communicating ultrasensitive material that they never want exposed. An eavesdropper could record an RSA transmission that is currently unbreakable, but put it in storage hoping that in a couple of decades they will be able to break the RSA key exchange with a quantum computer. A couple of decades might sound like forever - why would the information still be valuable? - but look at how long top secret documents can take to become declassified. They would want to protect the information at least that long.
Now I would guess that they probably did register it, unless they were unaware of this little-known quirk in the copyright law. But I find it interesting this quirk exists, and probably a huge number of unpublished works became public domain at the beginning of this year.
On a personal note I have had several occasions when a corrupted .doc has refused to
open at all in Word '97 but opened in
StarOffice, with the corrupted place highlighted
in red. I thought that was nice. (This particular
version of Word had a tendency to corrupt its own
documents occasionally, when we used a certain template imposed on us by our customer.)
It would also would have been interesting to note whether the alternatives have Word's awful feature of formatting pages slightly differently as a function of what printer is currently active. A few years ago this caused us to postpone a telephone conference because everyone's page numbers were different; we faxed a hard copy to everyone to correct the problem. If the open source alternatives don't have this "feature" I would call that a significant plus.
I have a 12-year-old son. He has certainly heard his share of "bad" words in movies etc. But I have never had to punished him for using "bad" words, because he knows the rules, respects me, and wants my approval. He knows that in and of themselves a combination of letters is no more than that, but certain combinations can evoke certain (sometimes undesirable) reactions from others. When you raise kids, you want to teach them reasonable behaviors that allow them to function well in society. You want to give them the training and tools that allow them to do that. Then when they're adults, they will know what society's expectatations are, and they can make your own informed judgment as to how to behave. They'll know what to expect when they behave in certain ways, and perhaps they will choose to behave or not behave in certain ways in certain situations in order to be funny, shock, express anger, or whatever. You also teach them manners - when it is appropriate to eat with a fork, and when you can shove food into you mouth with your hands, so they won't embarrass themselves by looking like pigs when they're on their own. What is important is to teach them when it is appropriate to use "bad" words and when it is not. If you teach them well, they will have to tools to achieve what they want out of life.
Ironically even though the stockholders got screwed, they screwed themselves by voting for this, or more likely by not voting at all (I voted against it). Apparently it was 37.8 million in favor versus 8.1 million against; the rest of the 91 million shares didn't vote. Now of the 37.8 million in favor, 23 million were controlled by Vector, who is now laughing all the way to the bank. Moral: always vote your shares. You may think it won't make much difference, but this is what happened when everyone thought that way.
How the world seems to regress. To me, this was a big advantage of installing (and using) Oracle on Linux, vs. the pointy-clicky Windows version. I could write a script to automate the install and just let it run, vs. a painful morning's worth of click-and-wait on Windows. I could easily experiment with different installation options. And a script lets you painlessly rebuild a system from scratch, if need be, whereas it's always "did I click this, or click that the last time I did this?" with Windows, trying to recover from hand-written scribbles.
Fortunately we're moving to PostgreSQL for some things (noncritical ones that don't scare the PHBs) - I find PG to be cleaner, simpler, and more pleasant to use. It's actually not that hard to convert the database, even stored procedures.
Perhaps there is a reason for this. Do you recall the tale, "The Emperor Has No Clothes"? Sometimes it takes the eyes of a child to see the truth. Now as for copyright infringement, that is a different matter; you have teach the child about the government-sponsored "limited" monopoly on information, and that indeed is a difficult concept, one that even now I am still trying to grasp fully.
Thanks to Disney(!), apparently Photoshop now runs on Wine. (I haven't tried it myself.)
This is not to say I would recommend that mouse, even though when it works it's very pleasant to use. I am on my third one. The first developed a problem where the cursor would jump to the corner of the screen too frequently. The second just stopped working completely. Both were replaced for free by CompUSA. All of them had or have a problem where the cursor jumps to a corner of the screen on dark surfaces or when the surface isn't just right. (I would much prefer that they were instead programmed just to refuse move under these marginal conditions - corner jumping is a pain when you're say trying to edit an image in GIMP or Photoshop.) My third unit now sometimes just dies, even if I unplug and plug the USB connector, until I reboot my VAIO laptop. I'm not sure if it's a hardward or software problem, but it does seem to be more prone to dying when XP starts to otherwise decay (you know, frozen programs that can't be killed etc.), requiring a reboot anyway (actually a hard power down reboot, because the programs can't be killed so it will never shut down).
Other than that, I like this little mouse.
I used to think this, and in theory this is how it should be. The problem is that insurance companies have negotiated DEEP discounts with the doctors under their plans, and as an individual you can't do that. In other words, you will get raked through the coals (until your deductible is met).
I just went to my file cabinet and looked up the actual insurance company's bills (that normally are not sent to me, but were as part of a response to a payment issue I had). These are from the past year, in Massachusetts.
Physical exam - $256.00
Blue Shield payment - $104.53
Blue Shield "adjustment" - $136.47
My co-pay - $15.00
In other words, you would have had to pay $256, but the insurance co. only had to pay $104.53. From the doctor's point of view, still not a bad income for 15 minutes of actual work (plus scrawling a signature on a routine letter the secretary typed up about the blood test).
The blood test associated with the exam was billed at $474.00. The Blue Shield payment was $114.62, the "adjustment" was $359.38, and my co-pay was $0. So in addition, with your catastrophic insurance you would have paid $474, whereas the insurance co. paid $114.62.
Now, perhaps you still come out ahead - stuff like this quickly adds up to your $1500 deductible. I don't know how much my company pays for my insurance.
The Foundations of Physics (and the Letters companion) is a journal that seems to be a catch-all for articles on the fringe of physics. (By "fringe" I don't necessarily mean "new-age" garbage - that would be rejected outright - but I mean stuff that sometimes really pushes the envelope.) While the articles are peer-reviewed, the articles are sometimes speculative and many of them would have been (and were) rejected elsewhere. For example, there was a paper in the 1980s IIRC reporting on evidence for psi phenomena (and a theory connecting it to quantum mechanics) whose results have never been duplicated. The articles tend to be on the hairy borderline of real and pseudo-scientific, and whatever you read there (although often quite interesting, and for the most part scientifically correct, but not always) you have to take with a grain of salt and use informed judgment to evaluate the papers.
I found it puzzling that MIT's Science Library, which has about every physics journal imaginable, ended its subscription to FoP and Letters in the early 90s, although I never pursued why - perhaps some faculty member complained that its quality wasn't up to snuff. So while I use to enjoy reading it, it's way too expensive for me to subscribe to - perhaps another local U. carries it, don't know.
I myself have published a paper in FoP on an obscure topic (in my case not wrong or controversial, just too obscure for the mainstream physics journals to find a referee who thought it interesting or significant), that had been rejected elsewhere.
There are thousands of hardworking men and women serving in Coast Guard ships off our coasts, monitoring land border crossings, inspecting imported cargo containers, and serving as airport security inspectors and skymarshals, all to keep your bloody arses safe behind your monitors as you make fun of them.
Well, it seems they spend an awful lot of time seizing boats and putting fishermen out of business because a crew member had a joint in his pocket. How exactly does this help Homeland Security?
Are you trying to tell me this device has no design flaw and that the fault is all mine? Do the above situations not "seem too hard" to you? How would you solve them?
This design error seems to be common. Out of three laptop 12V adapters I've purchased, only one worked with an old battery (that was still good enough to start the car). The worst is my most recent Xtend PowerXtender, which is rated 12-16V and often refuses to work unless the engine is running - very annoying when I'm waiting in the car and want to use my laptop.
Convince the majority of shareholders to vote to allow shareholders access to the company's copyrights (which in effect the shareholders already partly own anyway). Perhaps on some prorated basis depending on the number of shares owned; haven't worked out the details.
The reason the shareholders would want to do this is the following. Once this took effect, everyone would want a share, and the stock price would skyrocket. It would feed on itself: as the stock price went up, people would in effect feel they were being paid to download, causing even more greedy people to buy in. Existing shareholders (the ones who voted this in) could sell out at a huge profit.
Long term the price might not sustain itself after the majority of the population buys in, causing the company's sales to diminish, but all people care about these days are short-term profits anyway.
Instead, what I think will happen is that the typical workweek will slowly get shorter and shorter, in part because there will be so many leisure activities and interesting things to do outside of work and that's what people will demand. Our quality of life will increase dramatically. Actual human labor will become very expensive, and we will only need to work a few hours a week to earn enough to reap the rewards of all the automation. Of course, there will be those who will still work 80 hours a week, if they want, and they'll probably become richer than most.
I guess there are alterate distopian possibilities, such as a massive imbalance of wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer people, which they article seems to be predicting. We should be wary to try to take steps, whatever they might be, to help prevent that from happening. Without draconian government measures that trample on freedom.
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
This seems vaguely reminiscent of an old joke about specialists, that goes something like this:
"A specialist is someone who has learned more and more about less and less until eventually [s]he knows everything about nothing."
A generalist, of course, can be defined conversely. Using this principle, we can now set forth the "IT Manager's Creed", whose details are left to the reader.
So why not some falling ASCII characters in the background with some unique, slashdotty-style text on the front? Because the MPAA will sue your *** off.
Does anyone else know what I'm talking about, and had this experience? These cords are clearly labeled "UL-approved". I wonder what kind of testing was actually done.