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User: argent

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  1. Yes! Bring back the joy of Tablespoons! on Google Shooting For Smartphone Universal Translator · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Tablespoons, by an Apple Newton

    or [allegedly] what happens when you run Jabberwocky through a handwriting recognition program.... :-)

    -----------

    Teas Willis, and the sticky tours
    Did gym and Gibbs in the wake.
    All mimes were the borrowers,
    And the moderate Belgrade.

    'Beware the tablespoon my son,
    The jaws that bite, the Claus that catch.
    Beware the Subjects bird, and shred
    The serious Bandwidth!'

    He took his Verbal sword in hand:
    Long time the monitors fog he sought,
    So rested he by the Tumbled tree,
    Long time the monitors fog he sought,

    And as in selfish thought he stood,
    The tablespoon, with eyes of Flame,
    Came stifling through the trigger wood,
    And troubled as it came!

    One, two! One, two! And through and through,
    The Verbal blade went thicker shade.
    He left it dead, and with its head,
    He went gambling back.

    'And host Thai slash the tablespoon?
    Come to my arms my bearish boy.
    Oh various day! Cartoon! Cathay!'
    He charted in his joy.

    Teas Willis, and the sticky tours
    Did gym and Gibbs in the wake.
    All mimes were the borrowers,
    And the moderate Belgrade.

  2. Mac Faithful have a different question... on Mozilla Puts Tiger Out To Pasture · · Score: 1

    But if you ask about whether Firefox should feel more like a "native" Mac app, you'd get a lot of Mac faithful saying "ditch Tiger if that's standing in the way".

    How about "replace all that XUL [expletive] with the Camino shell"?

    I wouldn't be using FF at all, except that there's a problem with proxy URL handling that's worse in Camino than Firefox.

  3. REAL link to original article on New Material Transforms Car Bodies Into Batteries · · Score: 4, Informative
  4. Online gambling on Steam? on Push To End Online Gambling Ban Gains Steam · · Score: 3, Funny

    What the Hell is Valve thinking...

    Oh, what?

    Nevermind...

  5. What are you smoking on Google Airs Super Bowl Ad · · Score: 1

    The "Paris" ad was sweet and thoughtful, the "Tiger" ad was just nasty and mean-spirited.

  6. Re:Canary in the coal mine on Tritium Leak At Vermont Nuclear Plant Grows · · Score: 1

    I guess you mean 16N (half life ~7.13s).

  7. Three strikes on AU Gov't Still Wants ISPs To Solve Illegal Downloads · · Score: 1

    So, does he think they should lose their driver's license for buying pirated CDs?

  8. Mod parent up informative on New Rules May Raise Cost of Buying Gadgets Online · · Score: 1

    Thanks for the research. Glad to see my feeling that something was fishy with the original article is confirmed.

    Too bad your clarification is too late to get any traction. Slashdot time runs even faster than Internet time.

  9. Two great tastes that taste good together? on An Interview With F# Creator Don Syme · · Score: 1

    nothing beats the uses of F# to implement statistical machine learning algorithms as part of the Bing advertisement delivery machinery

    Are you SURE you want to promote that as a productive use of the language? Bring together two things that people love to hate? Even Google's ads are merely tolerated at best.

    What's next, "F# for spammers"?

  10. Calling spam email UGC is... disingenuous. on 95% of User-Generated Content Is Bogus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I would say that 95% of email is commercial in nature, and not "user generated content". To me "UGC" is something that people who are actually active users (consumers as well as creators) of a service generate... not something injected into the service from outside by predators.

  11. Re:I want a room with a view on International Space Station Cupola Video Released · · Score: 4, Funny

    Seals are so heavy, They would have saved a bunch of weight by using sea otters holding hands.

  12. Re:Precedent on Internet Nominated For 2010 Nobel Peace Prize · · Score: 1

    The alternative would be to award the prize to DARPA, which is probably not really in keeping with the spirit of the award.

    "Peace through superior firepower"

  13. Canary in the coal mine on Tritium Leak At Vermont Nuclear Plant Grows · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If the reactor doesn't produce much tritium, then wouldn't that imply that tritium would be a small proportion of the radioactive material released when a leak occurs... but it is detected early because it IS so mobile and easy to detect.

    That is, the tritium itself is not the direct cause for concern, but rather an indicator that will lead to locating the real problem.

  14. Re:Quoting the regulations from TFA on New Rules May Raise Cost of Buying Gadgets Online · · Score: 1

    You can find 172.102 at 172.102 Special provisions.

    It reads, in part:

    130 For other than a dry battery specifically covered by another entry in the 172.101 Table, "Batteries, dry" are not subject to the requirements of this subchapter when they are securely packaged and offered for transportation in a manner that prevents the dangerous evolution of heat (for example, by the effective insulation of exposed terminals) and protects against short circuits.

  15. Are you referring to the same proposal? on New Rules May Raise Cost of Buying Gadgets Online · · Score: 1

    Googling the quoted text got one hit, Hazardous Materials: Revision to Requirements for the Transportation of Batteries and Battery-Powered Devices, etc.; Correction .

    I don't speak bureaucrat well enough to be sure, but this seems to be a year old rule, one that is already in force.

  16. It probably depends on the product... on Red Hat Exchange Is Dead · · Score: 1

    When you've got marketplaces that offer buyers the choice of buying in the marketplace or directly from the vendor themselves, which is what our marketplace was, there isn't a real efficient marketplace.

    It depends on the product, I guess. Palmgear seems to be staying in business even though there's always been the option of going direct to the vendor. When I've bought handheld software I've sometimes bought it from an "app store" like Palmgear, and sometimes from the vendor. Once or twice I've even found it through Palmgear and then bypassed them because I needed to research the product more.

    It's not just that Palmgear sells software suited for casual impulse buys (though of course you're more likely to just "click buy" for Bejeweled than for several hundred dollars worth of database engine) because when I've bought software for the company I'm as likely to go through "the usual reseller" as go direct to Microsoft or Symantec, because that's what the purchasing department is set up for.

    But those are still pretty much standalone products. You don't need to have a relationship with Symantec to roll out another 50 copies of antivirus. Are there really any products like that for Linux?

  17. Re:H.274 on Oh, What a Lovely Standards War · · Score: 1

    By that time H.666 will be ready.

  18. What does "stopping support" mean? on Xbox Live For Original Xbox Games Shutting Down · · Score: 1

    Does "stopping support" mean that your Windows 98, 2000, or XP box stops working? That any functionality stops working? All it means is... you have to go to someone like WindizUpdate for your driver updates and patches instead of Microsoft.

    That's the problem with software that depends on a service. When they pull the plug, it stops working right then and there. Poof. It's gone.

    At least you can still use your XBox offline.

    Now... keep THAT in mind when you get ready to plonk down thirty bucks on one of the new games that are coming along that require you to connect to the server just to play locally.

  19. Re:ObCarAnalogy on How Infighting Hampers Innovation At Microsoft · · Score: 1

    It was my "early '90s". The first usable version of Windows was 3.1 in 1992.

  20. Re:ObCarAnalogy on How Infighting Hampers Innovation At Microsoft · · Score: 1

    OK, it's the past because the responsiveness and user experience you got on a 20 MHz 386 in 1992 was not even comparable to the responsiveness and user experience I got on my 7 MHz 68000 in 1985. It wasn't until Windows 98 SE that Windows really pulled ahead of the best of the "legacy" systems, even with Moore's Law helping.

    Windows NT kicked all their butts, including the Dark Horse BeOS, but by that time most of the enthusiasts had switched to Free UNIX of one kind or another.

  21. ObCarAnalogy on How Infighting Hampers Innovation At Microsoft · · Score: 1

    The internal combustion engine is the future! It's like Science Fiction!

    Something that has been in common use for more than half a decade isn't "the future".

  22. Re:There are four planets. on Pluto — a Complex and Changing World · · Score: 2, Informative

    I checked a number of sources and it put it at 0.14% of the crust, and about 0% of the mantle and core. The crust is about 0.015% of the volume of the Earth (and less than that by mass). Multiply it out, you get 0.0021%. My bad for forgetting the oceans. Still, it's really a negligible percentage either way.

  23. Re:Let's do the math. on Murdoch Says E-Book Prices Will Kill Paper Books · · Score: 1

    Of course raising the price of eBooks will cut down on rip-offs like that, right? Right? :)

  24. Re:There are four planets. on Pluto — a Complex and Changing World · · Score: 1

    Now you want to change the definition of what a "planet" is while the actual meaning of the word hasn't changed.

    Not me, it was the IAU. Well, some of the IAU.

    Imagine "planets" were called "wanderer stars" and then I told you that the definition of a "wanderer star" has nothing to do with movement but with size and whether the object produces hydrogen.

    Oh, oh, oh, let's add that to the table!

    Jupiter: 89% Hydrogen
    Saturn: 96% Hydrogen
    Uranus: 83% Hydrogen
    Neptune: 80% Hydrogen
    Sun: 75% Hydrogen
    Typical star: 70-80% Hydrogen
    Earth: 0.0021% Hydrogen

    OK, I'll go along with that.

  25. Re:Let's do the math. on Murdoch Says E-Book Prices Will Kill Paper Books · · Score: 1

    My paperbacks last decades too. eBooks only last as long as the DRM server.

    Now if you want to talk about reading comfort, eBooks win hands down, then paperbacks, then hardcovers.