I've had a similar bad experience with Comcast contractors. They came to my house in an unmarked pickup truck, wearing baggy jeans and Roc-A-Wear shirts (unprofessional, IMHO). They they proceeded to start drilling a hole through my living room floor to run the cable without checking what their drill was going to hit. I stopped them before they drilled a hole right into my heating duct.
When I tried to get cable at my new place, the cheapest option was $63 a month. I told them to screw off and I've lived without cable since. Honestly I don't miss it. Luckily I can borrow wireless from my neighbors (with their permission!) so I don't have to deal with Comcast at all.
Firstly, If you have representatives, its not a democracy, its a republic.
Representatives in a republic do face the difficult choice of doing what they think is right versus doing what the majority of their constituents want. It's a fine line to walk between doing what is right and doing what is popular.
However, simply voting based on your perception of the majority of your constituents desires is essentially reverting back to mob rule. Sometimes a representative must vote for what they personally think is right, even if it goes against the will of the majority. To blindly state "do what the majority wants or resign" is a bit simplistic, IMHO.
If all representatives did was parrot their majority of their constituents, then the US would never have passed women's suffrage, civil rights legislation, etc.
The check on this is that, ultimately, its up to the people to decide whether to re-elect a representative that votes contrary to the desires of the majority.
I'll second that; I'm also a T-Mobile customer (for 7 years now) and their customer service is excellent. I sometimes get slightly irritated on the phone with them because they are SO overly nice and friendly. It's almost sickeningly sweet.
Problem is that you need to inform the user of locked records and give them options on how to handle them, requiring you to inject some awareness and handling of locking into your application layer.
Ticket scalping isn't exactly a proper analogy either. There's a limited number of tickets to an event, so someone snapping them all up and then selling them for a profit means that some people aren't going to be able to go. The scarcity of tickets is the issue.
There's an unlimited amount of domain names, however, so there's no scarcity in that sense. It really is more like real estate...there's plenty to go around, but if you can snap up the "best" properties early, then you stand to make a profit. If someone doesn't want to pay, there's always other real estate to purchase, although it might not be as nice.
It's not even as serious as real estate squatting, since, as an earlier poster pointed out, a good domain name is becoming less and less important since most people are just going to type search terms into google and find your site that way. I rarely remember URLs anymore, but instead remember the search terms that I used to find a particular page.
The problem with Active Desktop wasn't the Javascript language, it was the mixing of the OS and the Browser and the security problems that came from that mixing. Javascript had nothing to do with it; in fact, many of the malware related to ActiveDesktop was written with VBScript, not JS.
The article is talking about using Javascript as a scripting language to help build GTK applications. This is no different than using any other scripting language, such as Perl or Python. Just because it's Javascript doesn't mean it has anything to do with a web browser or the DOM.
I built my country wrong? I was born in 1983, so the country was already built wrong by the time I came around.
I agree, that the US was designed with the assumption that cheap fuel was going to last forever and that only now are we realizing the errors of that assumption. Hopefully higher gas prices will lead to better investment in public transport and less urban/suburban sprawl as people move back into cities. However, for now, things are as they are. I'm not saying that all the "whiners" are completely in the right (all the people who bought huge SUVs that get 15MPG brought the situation on themselves).
All I'm saying is that I wish you would try to realize the situation "on the ground" so to speak in the US and that the rise in fuel costs is really hitting alot of people HARD.
You know, I'm really tired of Europeans telling me to "stop whining" about high gas prices. Have you ever BEEN to the US? We don't live the same way as most people in Europe do. We're less densely populated, have to commute farther to work, and many of us (unless we live in a big city) have very little to nothing in the way of public transportation options (Since our gas isn't taxed to fund public transportation as it is in Europe).
This isn't to say that the US couldn't benefit from some adjustments in the way we commute, but for now the reality is that although in many places in the world a car is a luxury, in most parts of the US it's a necessity.
So please get off your high horse and realize that the situation is different over here and we are much more affected by the price of gas than you are.
No, its pretty unlikely that using your cell phone will cause any problems.. Banning cell phone use is mostly a safety precaution "just in case" the spectrum your phone is using interferes with the planes avionics. Mythbusters did a test where they jacked up the power of a cell phone over 1000 times and it had no effect on the cockpit instruments. Check out http://kwc.org/mythbusters/2006/04/episode_49_cell phones_on_plane.html
Now they may ban you from using your phone since they want you to pay for THEIR service, but that's a different story altogether.
Forgot to mention, that $7 a month and 10c per minute comes out of the $99 value of the card. So $99 and you're set for the whole year, no extra money to spend.
Check out Virgin Mobile. They offer a $99 card that activates your phone for 1 year. Plan is $7 a month and minutes cost 10 cents each. Their phones start at $15 or so.I got one for my Aunt and Uncle for emergency use after they had their baby. I'm gonna get one for my mother too. Great for emergencies/occasional calling.
So because PHP has a templating language that many developers don't use means that it doesn't have a templating language? WTF? There IS a templating language for PHP. Whether developers choose to use it is up to them. You can still mix code with HTML using Java/JSP or even ASP.NET...does that mean they haven't separated into programming and templating languages?
I find the ability to mix code and HTML can be advantageous at times. I agree, on large projects it can get messy. But if you're throwing together some quick web forms for a simple CMS, it can work pretty well. Exactly the kinds of apps for which using JSP is overkill.
I guess the problem is that PHPs heritage as a "simple" web scripting language lets beginning developers get away with bad programming practices. PHP is going through some growing pains right now...butn don't dismiss it outright. It may not be right for every project, but neither is Java or any other language. It's just another tool in your toolbox.
Does PHP now have namespaces avoiding all the nonsense with naming variables and functions? I believe this feature is being discussed for version 6.0. You need to remember that PHP is still maturing...it didn't even have protection levels on fields until 5.0. For now, I've seen alot of developers prepending their class/function names. For example, instead of a function called foo(), you'd call it cmsFoo(), or whatever. All the functions/class related to your CMS would start with cms. I agree this is a big defecit and should be remedied ASAP
Has PHP been separated into a programming language and a templating language? Embedding code in HTML is so 90's. The MVC pattern is much more manageable, especially for a group of developers. Yes. Alot of people don't use it, but that's not the fault of PHP.
Has PHP done away with the configuration file, a major source of headaches in deploying applications on shared hosting? I assume you mean the php.ini file? If your app needs some special settings and you can't access the php.ini file, you can always override the settings in your pages. I'm not sure this a huge issue...
Has PHP done away with "magic quotes"? Prepared statements. That's all I'm going to say. magic quotes can (and usually are) turned off in the php.ini file. PHP 5 introduced PDO, which has prepared statements and removed the need to manually escape strings from $_POST and $_GET
Does PHP now handle Unicode (UTF-8) text transparently in all its built-in functions? You know, like Perl 5.8, coincidentally released in 2002. This is another feature that's being added to PHP 6.
PHP has changed alot since 2002. It's still got a ways to go, but to see it's made no progress is misleading.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage people to create works that can eventually enter the public domain, not allow copyright holders to horde their work and suck every penny they can from them. I was looking through iTunes today and saw Dumbo available for download for $14.99. Dumbo was made in 1941.
$14.99??? That's the price of a new release DVD at Best Buy, and this way I don't even get a physical object! Its just 800MB of (really old) data. This could be given away for free or a nominal charge (couple of dollars) for the encoding and download service. Disney has long since made up their investment and millions from this movie.
If they had their way they'd still be selling it and making pure profit from in 50 years.
These guys are a bit extreme. In addition to shredding your drive into tiny little peices, they will also degauss the drive beforehand for an additional fee. I don't think even the most secret levels of DOD classification need this kind of destruction of data. Does anyone think that someone is going to attempt to reassemble the tiny shredded bits of their hard drive platters in order to reconstruct the data on them? I can maybe see someone doing that with shredded paper if they were really desperate to get to your info, but with a hard drive? It's just not feasible.
AT&T is in the process of switching over from TDMA to GSM (I believe they're almost done), as is Cingular. I heard somewhere that there's some agreement between the two of them that AT&T will build GSM network on the East coast while Cingular builds it on the west, and they'll "meet in the middle". I dont know if this is true, but I know Cingular doesn't yet have GSM service on the East Coast (at least not in the Baltimore/Washington region).
Sprint and Verizon both use CDMA (Sprint uses 1900mhz frequency, while Verizon uses 800, I believe. This is one reason why Sprint service sucks indoors, the higher frequency has trouble penetrating the walls).
Nextel uses a hacked up version of TDMA to support their walkie-talkie feature. I dont know if they have any plans to switch to some other type of network. But apparently Spring is going to release phones in the future that have the walkie-talkie feature as part of their 3G network, so Nextel may have a hard time coming up....
Actually you can get a paper receipt to sign on at Best Buy. If the cashier doesn't know how, just tell them to hit "cancel" when you are supposed to sign on the pad. The register will spit out your receipt and then another receipt for you to sign on (which they keep).
I recently found the need for a region free player (mostly to import stuff from Europe/Japan). I wanted something cheap that would play a variety of formats. Did a little research, and came across the APEX AD-1500. APEX players have a long history of being region-hackable, but many of the older units are difficult to find. I purchased an AD-1500 from Circuit City (you can also get it at Amazon.com), then applied the hack I found here
It's now region free, and the hack had the added the benefit of removing macrovision. Not bad.
The player plays pretty much anything (DVD, VCD, SVCD, MP3, CDR/RW), and also does NTSC/PAL conversion. Not bad for a unit I picked up for $80 US.
An x-10 ad window popped up on my screen, with the message -
"We have suspended our service out of sympathy to the victims and families of this National tragedy. Our heartfelt thoughts and prayers go out to them.
We have either feel hopeless or powerless or we can take action. (Most of us will do all 3!) Make the call or click on the links to find your local support center."
Below it has some links to the Red Cross and blood donation information.
When I first read the headline, I thought it said high speed pornography. I saw a link to pictures, and the phrase "I didn't realize a tennis ball deformed that much".
Slashdot Mirror
I've had a similar bad experience with Comcast contractors. They came to my house in an unmarked pickup truck, wearing baggy jeans and Roc-A-Wear shirts (unprofessional, IMHO). They they proceeded to start drilling a hole through my living room floor to run the cable without checking what their drill was going to hit. I stopped them before they drilled a hole right into my heating duct.
When I tried to get cable at my new place, the cheapest option was $63 a month. I told them to screw off and I've lived without cable since. Honestly I don't miss it. Luckily I can borrow wireless from my neighbors (with their permission!) so I don't have to deal with Comcast at all.
Firstly, If you have representatives, its not a democracy, its a republic.
Representatives in a republic do face the difficult choice of doing what they think is right versus doing what the majority of their constituents want. It's a fine line to walk between doing what is right and doing what is popular.
However, simply voting based on your perception of the majority of your constituents desires is essentially reverting back to mob rule. Sometimes a representative must vote for what they personally think is right, even if it goes against the will of the majority. To blindly state "do what the majority wants or resign" is a bit simplistic, IMHO.
If all representatives did was parrot their majority of their constituents, then the US would never have passed women's suffrage, civil rights legislation, etc.
The check on this is that, ultimately, its up to the people to decide whether to re-elect a representative that votes contrary to the desires of the majority.
I'll second that; I'm also a T-Mobile customer (for 7 years now) and their customer service is excellent. I sometimes get slightly irritated on the phone with them because they are SO overly nice and friendly. It's almost sickeningly sweet.
Problem is that you need to inform the user of locked records and give them options on how to handle them, requiring you to inject some awareness and handling of locking into your application layer.
They'd better understand "Get off my lawn!" or there's going to be trouble.
I could be remembering incorrectly, but I'm pretty sure the baby Praun said "Fuel goes here" at one point.
>>It's still too large to fit comfortably in a not too big shoulder bag.
If it isn't big enough to hold a MacBook Air, you're don't have a "shoulder bag". You have a purse.
Ticket scalping isn't exactly a proper analogy either. There's a limited number of tickets to an event, so someone snapping them all up and then selling them for a profit means that some people aren't going to be able to go. The scarcity of tickets is the issue.
There's an unlimited amount of domain names, however, so there's no scarcity in that sense. It really is more like real estate...there's plenty to go around, but if you can snap up the "best" properties early, then you stand to make a profit. If someone doesn't want to pay, there's always other real estate to purchase, although it might not be as nice.
It's not even as serious as real estate squatting, since, as an earlier poster pointed out, a good domain name is becoming less and less important since most people are just going to type search terms into google and find your site that way. I rarely remember URLs anymore, but instead remember the search terms that I used to find a particular page.
The problem with Active Desktop wasn't the Javascript language, it was the mixing of the OS and the Browser and the security problems that came from that mixing. Javascript had nothing to do with it; in fact, many of the malware related to ActiveDesktop was written with VBScript, not JS.
The article is talking about using Javascript as a scripting language to help build GTK applications. This is no different than using any other scripting language, such as Perl or Python. Just because it's Javascript doesn't mean it has anything to do with a web browser or the DOM.
I built my country wrong? I was born in 1983, so the country was already built wrong by the time I came around.
I agree, that the US was designed with the assumption that cheap fuel was going to last forever and that only now are we realizing the errors of that assumption. Hopefully higher gas prices will lead to better investment in public transport and less urban/suburban sprawl as people move back into cities. However, for now, things are as they are. I'm not saying that all the "whiners" are completely in the right (all the people who bought huge SUVs that get 15MPG brought the situation on themselves).
All I'm saying is that I wish you would try to realize the situation "on the ground" so to speak in the US and that the rise in fuel costs is really hitting alot of people HARD.
You know, I'm really tired of Europeans telling me to "stop whining" about high gas prices. Have you ever BEEN to the US? We don't live the same way as most people in Europe do. We're less densely populated, have to commute farther to work, and many of us (unless we live in a big city) have very little to nothing in the way of public transportation options (Since our gas isn't taxed to fund public transportation as it is in Europe).
This isn't to say that the US couldn't benefit from some adjustments in the way we commute, but for now the reality is that although in many places in the world a car is a luxury, in most parts of the US it's a necessity.
So please get off your high horse and realize that the situation is different over here and we are much more affected by the price of gas than you are.
No, its pretty unlikely that using your cell phone will cause any problems.. Banning cell phone use is mostly a safety precaution "just in case" the spectrum your phone is using interferes with the planes avionics. Mythbusters did a test where they jacked up the power of a cell phone over 1000 times and it had no effect on the cockpit instruments. Check out http://kwc.org/mythbusters/2006/04/episode_49_cell phones_on_plane.html
Now they may ban you from using your phone since they want you to pay for THEIR service, but that's a different story altogether.
Forgot to mention, that $7 a month and 10c per minute comes out of the $99 value of the card. So $99 and you're set for the whole year, no extra money to spend.
Check out Virgin Mobile. They offer a $99 card that activates your phone for 1 year. Plan is $7 a month and minutes cost 10 cents each. Their phones start at $15 or so.I got one for my Aunt and Uncle for emergency use after they had their baby. I'm gonna get one for my mother too. Great for emergencies/occasional calling.
As opposed to the spend-and-spend "conservatives" we've had lately?
So because PHP has a templating language that many developers don't use means that it doesn't have a templating language? WTF? There IS a templating language for PHP. Whether developers choose to use it is up to them. You can still mix code with HTML using Java/JSP or even ASP.NET...does that mean they haven't separated into programming and templating languages?
I find the ability to mix code and HTML can be advantageous at times. I agree, on large projects it can get messy. But if you're throwing together some quick web forms for a simple CMS, it can work pretty well. Exactly the kinds of apps for which using JSP is overkill.
I guess the problem is that PHPs heritage as a "simple" web scripting language lets beginning developers get away with bad programming practices. PHP is going through some growing pains right now...butn don't dismiss it outright. It may not be right for every project, but neither is Java or any other language. It's just another tool in your toolbox.
Has PHP been separated into a programming language and a templating language? Embedding code in HTML is so 90's. The MVC pattern is much more manageable, especially for a group of developers. Yes. Alot of people don't use it, but that's not the fault of PHP.
Has PHP done away with the configuration file, a major source of headaches in deploying applications on shared hosting? I assume you mean the php.ini file? If your app needs some special settings and you can't access the php.ini file, you can always override the settings in your pages. I'm not sure this a huge issue...
Has PHP done away with "magic quotes"? Prepared statements. That's all I'm going to say. magic quotes can (and usually are) turned off in the php.ini file. PHP 5 introduced PDO, which has prepared statements and removed the need to manually escape strings from $_POST and $_GET
Does PHP now handle Unicode (UTF-8) text transparently in all its built-in functions? You know, like Perl 5.8, coincidentally released in 2002. This is another feature that's being added to PHP 6.
PHP has changed alot since 2002. It's still got a ways to go, but to see it's made no progress is misleading.
Mod parent up.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage people to create works that can eventually enter the public domain, not allow copyright holders to horde their work and suck every penny they can from them. I was looking through iTunes today and saw Dumbo available for download for $14.99. Dumbo was made in 1941.
$14.99??? That's the price of a new release DVD at Best Buy, and this way I don't even get a physical object! Its just 800MB of (really old) data. This could be given away for free or a nominal charge (couple of dollars) for the encoding and download service. Disney has long since made up their investment and millions from this movie.
If they had their way they'd still be selling it and making pure profit from in 50 years.
Did they bust the myth? I've got a bunch of brita filters that I'm willing to sacrifice if it works :-)
These guys are a bit extreme. In addition to shredding your drive into tiny little peices, they will also degauss the drive beforehand for an additional fee. I don't think even the most secret levels of DOD classification need this kind of destruction of data. Does anyone think that someone is going to attempt to reassemble the tiny shredded bits of their hard drive platters in order to reconstruct the data on them? I can maybe see someone doing that with shredded paper if they were really desperate to get to your info, but with a hard drive? It's just not feasible.
AT&T is in the process of switching over from TDMA to GSM (I believe they're almost done), as is Cingular. I heard somewhere that there's some agreement between the two of them that AT&T will build GSM network on the East coast while Cingular builds it on the west, and they'll "meet in the middle". I dont know if this is true, but I know Cingular doesn't yet have GSM service on the East Coast (at least not in the Baltimore/Washington region).
Sprint and Verizon both use CDMA (Sprint uses 1900mhz frequency, while Verizon uses 800, I believe. This is one reason why Sprint service sucks indoors, the higher frequency has trouble penetrating the walls).
Nextel uses a hacked up version of TDMA to support their walkie-talkie feature. I dont know if they have any plans to switch to some other type of network. But apparently Spring is going to release phones in the future that have the walkie-talkie feature as part of their 3G network, so Nextel may have a hard time coming up....
Actually you can get a paper receipt to sign on at Best Buy. If the cashier doesn't know how, just tell them to hit "cancel" when you are supposed to sign on the pad. The register will spit out your receipt and then another receipt for you to sign on (which they keep).
It's now region free, and the hack had the added the benefit of removing macrovision. Not bad.
The player plays pretty much anything (DVD, VCD, SVCD, MP3, CDR/RW), and also does NTSC/PAL conversion. Not bad for a unit I picked up for $80 US.
An x-10 ad window popped up on my screen, with the message -
"We have suspended our service out of sympathy to the victims and families of this National tragedy. Our heartfelt thoughts and prayers go out to them.
We have either feel hopeless or powerless or we can take action. (Most of us will do all 3!) Make the call or click on the links to find your local support center."
Below it has some links to the Red Cross and blood donation information.
The ad is at http://ads.x10.com/all/suspend.htm
Had me wondering for a second...