Dear Jezus! They've figured out a way of doing something in the world ****more efficiently****. The world is going to come to an end! Oh woe is me!!! We're doomed!!!
For me it comes down to a few things that *are* defensible. Please bear with me.
I don't like the way the content producers use and spend our money on advertising and marketing.
I don't like the way they price their products.
I don't like the length of the exclusive term they have on the information (aka entertainment) they have produced. (Yes, the $100 million spent creating a movie probably deserves more/longer protection than the 2 sentence poem..)
I don't like the fact that it SHOULD according to technoligical advancements cost near to zero to send the content from their production room to my screen, yet it's still not being done AT ANY PRICE (except in porn, in porn you can do that, they offer tons of porn online live with price competition). Not only that, they insist on forcing me to pay 90% overhead on their 10% production costs.
I don't like the territorial exclusion zones in where products are offered (I'm in Canada, and I CAN NOT IN ANY WAY get Battlestar Galactica).
I don't like being fed 80 channels of goo - I want on demand and I want a copy I can go back and watch again and again WHEN I WANT TO.
I don't want $200 Billion dollars a year spent on the global movie industry.
*IF* I spend $1000 per year (arbitrary choice on my part) supporting content producers (those that I think deserve my money), I don't see why I should be limited to a tiny subset of the INFORMATION that humanity is generating.
I especially don't like all of the above when CLEARLY due to technological advances it costs absolutely NOTHING to bring the data to me exactly when I want it.
Finally we have to face the following - someday (oh about 50-100 years from now) there will be enough movies and music in existence such that EVERYONE will be able to watch old movies and tv and listen to old music for their entire natural life - and not purchase a single new product.
What will we do then?
My solution to all of this is simple. Keep spending my $1000 a year on artists (Guardians of the Earth), in the way that I choose, and is most effective as far as I am concerned - and yet access whatever information I want, whenever I want.
Technology and the math means I will be able to do this. Short of an ultra-nazi state putting 20,000,000 of us in concentration camps.
Yes, I am advocating a move from pure capitalistic method of determining who produces what product, to a more socialist method. And I am aware of the possibilities of abuse and failure. The good news is that it's working, and so far none of the content producing industries are failing or under stress.
The odd thing is that it's going to happen whether anyone likes it or not. In 10 years I'm going to be able to handy any friend of mine a $100 piece of media that has almost every song ever recorded on it. And no-one will be able to stop us.
. Herns was ordered to pay restitution for the damage he caused and will have limited access to computers for the next three years. After the judge outlined the terms of Herns' restricted computer use, Levine pointed out how hard those conditions will be for a man who does everything online, including paying his bills.
"He's going to get to learn," Brown said. "There are other ways to live."
The Canadian government has declared internet connectivity to be (I forget the exact term) a "necessity" or something.
If you rob a bank, do they forbid you from walking into any type of business establishment for the entire duration of your parole? No! It would be idiotic - everyone needs a bank account or groceries in today's society, and there are already tons of other perfectly good laws to deal with the individual should they commit a crime in a bank or other "place of business" again.
If you commit a traffic violation, do they forbid you from getting into any vehicle on any road? No! They might prevent you from driving, but they still let you get in as a passenger in other people's vehicles or take the bus.
Judges are going to eventually have to stop throwing out blanket "computer bans" as minor parole conditions - and realize that they have to handle it differently. PCs may/can be the basis of entire home entertainment centers, your library, your photo album, your telephone, etc etc.
What they should do (and what would be more effective) is to ban the user from say spending more than 30 minutes at a time on a PC, or making an IP connection to a class of third parties, or posessing any tools or software that could be used for illicit purposes - and then have the parole officers make unannounced audits and/or taps.
This goes along the lines of what kind of an effect would it have on you and your life if the police seized your computer in the midst of an investigation (not even an investigation into you, say your webcam caught some images of a crime). My PC is all of the things I listed above and more. And remember, saying "make backups" doesn't cut it, they always take your backups too and withholding those could get you in even worse trouble.
To put it another way - the police need to develop methods that don't "deny you use of your entire house just to check the window for fingerprints".
If they want to ghost the drive and look at the inside of the system before they leave, that's fine. But taking the entire thing for an indefinite period - unacceptable. (I'm talking about when I'm not the suspected murder or something:| )
Re:So why the US don't follow Canada's steps...
on
NYT on EA Games
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· Score: 1
I'm confused, the page you link to DOES fuck over high tech employees.
And now I do a tiny bit of research and find out that sometime in the recent past Ontario has also excluded *all* "IT professionals" from overtime and hours-of-work provisions. This puts us in the same class as the farmers and fisherman, cause you know, our work is so seasonal and unpredictable. (can you smell my super thick sarcasm?)
"Many workers are excluded from all hours of work and overtime provisions, including: agricultural workers, homemakers, residential care workers, information technology professionals, workers in commercial fishing, commission salespeople who normally operate away from their employer's place of business, most people involved in farming and horticulture, Crown employees, high school students on approved work experience programs and police officers."
Just why the FUCK are we excluded? What's the fucking difference between 80 hours in a week of exertion on a factory floor and 80 hours a week of mental exertion in front of a computer screen that leads anyone to conclude that 'the factory worker deserves time and a half while the IT guy does not and should be "left to market forces"'?
"the limits of that range are very wide, from 8,000 to 194,000"
Their uncertainty range is from NEAR ZERO to double the average number. And they make NO MENTION WHATSOEVER about the entire families that Sadaam killed, which of course have no survivors left to report their deaths.
The third thing I would fault not in it's methodology - but everyone else's "conclusion".
"roughly 60% is due directly to violence".
I would argue that a huge fraction (no idea how much) of that is flat out-right non-war-related iraqi-on-iraqi murder. The same kind you'd find in the streets of LA. The kind that doesn't happen nearly as much as under a totalitarian dictator.
It's quite difficult to become certified in the US if you are trained as a doctor overseas, so your statement that "Places like india and south africa end up supplying plenty doctors to western countries" is disingenuous at best.
I don't think so. I lived in rural Saskatchewan between 1970 and 1990, we were *entirely* servied by immigrant doctors, especially South Africans. I think Canada would have a MASSIVE shortage of family doctors if we didn't have said immigration. Heck we still do have a shortage...
None of that implies that there aren't stringint controls/processes in place to filter/certify incoming physicians. Heck those very certification processes have been criticized repeatedly as being too labourious and extensive (although I do want to make sure I'm not seeing some kook with ancient out of date training and experience...)
I've seen dpreview.com of course. I don't remember anything standing out. But, on your word, I'll go back and check what it's like these days.
[goes away, comes back 15 minutes latter]
Hmmm, ok, I like their "buying guide" that allows you to choose features you want then list all camera's side by side. However - the table is missing a few things (like start-up-time, inter-picture delay, shutter-lag, etc), and the camera I had pointed out is given 4 stars out of 5 despite the massively poor picture quality of this camera, in fact ALL the 10 cameras have 4 stars out of 5 - the star rating is user driven. ONLY 2 of the 10 cameras have in-depth reviews by the dpreview site staff themselves.
They do have a page where they rank cameras by their own review rankings, but it's all mixed together, it'd be a huge pain in the ass to figure out which are the ones I'm interested in and which are on the market, price differences, etc etc. They need to review a larger fraction of the cameras on the market, and add this data to the comparison table.
One thing that is impressive is the last two rows in the comparison table, where they show a resolution chart snapshot and color chart snapshot. The color chart snapshot clearly shows the horrific quality of the camera I was talking about. Unfortunately like the reviews, they are only there for some of the listed cameras.
I give dpreview.com 6 stars out of 10. Steve's digicams gets 4 stars out of 10.
What I want to see is 8-10 stars out of 10 for a rewview site. Isn't this the information age? Where the FUCK ins the information? It's supposed to SAVE me time, not consume my time, and it's supposed to DECREASE the odds of crappy products thriving. .
. Why does his "the best cameras" aka "pick of the litter" page have 10 (ten) cameras listed for each of the 12 categories? He says the "cameras are not listed in order of preference":
Note the "pre-printed form letter" the one guy gets back from his warranty servicing with the check mark beside the following paragraph:
"Your camera is operating according to factory specification in all modes. The phenomenon you have experienced (an orange halo visible in the bckground after taking some pictures) is not a defect in operation of your camera. It is a function of the geometry of the lens optics. Under certain lighting conditions this effect may be noticeable. Darker backgrounds will minimize or eliminate this effect."
You can no longer find the S3 or anything like it on the market, Casio has probably quietly removed it due to huge numbers of returns and warranty servicing costs. You can only find a few on eBay, and ALL are "open return" or "used return, not tested". NONE sold by happy users.
AFAIAC, digital camera reviews are nearly worthless, no matter who is doing the review. .
My grandfather came off the farm in the 30's on the plains of Saskatchewan to work in a blacksmith shop, which turned into a car garage that very decade.
The first 10 generations of semi-sentient robots are going to take a lot of skilled people to direct their efforts, I look forward to a never ending set of technical careers. Yes, perhaps I won't be shoeing horses all my life, but I'm not worried none the less. It's not like the need for blacksmiths is going to go away in a flick of the wrist nor present a natural opportunity for me to move on.
For now, I'm comfortable and happy. And I don't expect to have to *PPANNNICCCC* (OMG FFS HAX0RZ!! LAMER!) at any time in my life.
Props to anyone who is facing a wall at the moment, I didn't say it would be *pleasant* figuring out where else to go or what to do. But at least this isn't 700 years ago, you won't just up and starve.
The town had a *few* phones in various volunteers houses, and the housewives (yes, way back in the 70's) were trained to take the emergency calls. There was a red button beside the phones. It set off the big-ass siren on the top of the fire-hall that could be heard by farmers in their fields 3 miles outside town.
In the late 80's and 90's, before cellphones in Rural Saskatchewan really took off, all the firefighters carried big-ass radio's, the type police used to carry. And yes, if youg forgot to charge it or forgot to put it on in the morning, you'd occasioanlly miss a call. Which really pissed you off because "action" and a real emergency was so rare in a town of 800 people.
I think they still use those instead of cell-phones. Can't rely on cell phones, and the radios double as the actual on-site communication system.
> or a large singles community for dating > or marriage opportunities
Vastly more of the people I know who stayed in small towns are married than the people I know here in the metropolis.
In a small town, you KNOW 1000 women by name, and if ONE more moves to town, someone tells you and you meet them within days. And you get to see them over and over, as opposed to once walking in opposite directions in the street or for 3 minutes at a speed dating event.
In a small town, your friends go way way WAY out of their way to set you up with girls from nearby towns that they know - because they realize just how important that is. In the city, your friends rarely talk about their own girlfriends, let alone other girls they know that are single - shit it's almost like they're "hoarding" them.
> a) This could easily been done as a sheduled task in windows 2000.
Uh, no, no it could not.
Scheduled Tasks in Microsoft Windows have never been reliable. Quite frequently mine have their security credentials "screwed up" somehow and stop working until I notice and "touch" them so I'm forced to re-enter a user/pwd.
I have never EVER heard of Solaris cron failing to run on time.
> and not some poor person manually initiating it every night?
It's windows, you have to have a person present to ensure that the system actually a) goes down b) comes back up as intended.
I've done a half year consulting gig and spent a month walking 5 blocks through the downtown core of San Francisco at 5am every single FUCKING morning to hit the power button on a 4 way 400 MHz $50,000 Compaq windows box at one of the biggest banks in the world. Database held holdings information on around half a trillion dollars in equities.
> including intering your dorm room at any time for any reason. They can > also kick you off campus pretty much at any time at their discretion
Most Canadian provinces have explicit laws that state certain things that can NOT be done if you are paying in any form for a defacto "residence".
Two of them are "enter at any time" (they MUST provide 24 hours notice) and "deny access/evict" (they MUST go through the appropriate procedures and bureaucracy).
Uh, no, not all your rights. You can not legally consent to be physically assaulted. No matter what "permission" or "consent" you give, the police can still charge and convict the person that assaulted you.
It also begs the question, could they not accomplish it technically in a more cost efficient manner? There is always another way to skin the cat.
At least if the police or the telephone companies have to foot the bill we a) get to see the cost all in one place instead of 25 cents at a time where it doesn't look as big, and b) there is a huge incentive for them to do it cost effectively.
Uhh, the Arrow was 40+ years ago, and the Soviet Union and it's massive bomber fleets still existed and flew along our coasts back then.
What the hell do you think we spent all that money on US built INTERCEPTORS for - like the POS Starfighter and the 160 or so F-18's? We were expected to pull our share of continental defence and in NORAD for a reason.
See all the waving flags on their website and his proud "United States Veteran - Top Secret Clearance" at the top of his bio page?
Yeah, there's no way in hell these guys are delivering jack shit to the marketplace in the next 20 years, let alone the next 5.
And who the hell is physorg.com anyways?
Registrant:
Alexander Pol
Metallistov 63
St-Petersburg,
Uh huh. Some amateur "science/tech news site". It is NOT a respected authority on ANYTHING.
According to google, there are ZERO websites in the world that link to physorg.com, and the first 4 pages of google "pages that contain the term" show zero references to physorg.com from anyone in the physics or real world technology industry.
But then, it requires a quality that's sadly in severe decline in the technlogy industry: personal integrity.
Fuck personal integrity if it means that hundreds of people have to quit their acceptably nice jobs at a half-rate company just because of one complete asshole that management tolerates.
If a company and the individuals that it employes in management do not themselves have the "integrity" to deal with things, why the fuck do we owe them any "integrity" back to them in the form of complete and utter personal disruption that is a job change just to "send them a message"? Why not force the one asshole to go through the utterly deserved "personal disruption" that is a job change in order to "send management a message".
> The man just said it is not an accident if you contribute directly to it
And he was factually incorrect. It is a term that describes the entire incident, the term itself does not infer nor assign who the victim is or the level of blame for the person who caused "the accident".
Furthermore making the poor SOB who is the cause of this "accident" 100,000 times more remorseful does absolutely nothing in terms of making any of us any less likely to cause "an accident" like that.
Making ALL OF US feel like shit, would. Making ALL OF US realize that we need to be more careful, would. Making ALL OF US introduce more numerous checks and balances to prevent accidents, would.
The Japanese have a huge "cult of guilt" and ritual suicide... and almost everyone knows that it doesn't do damn fuck all in terms of making their society work any better. In fact it makes their society worse, because no-one else typically learns from other people's mistakes.
The only thing that making that guy feel 100,000 times worse about "the accident" would do is make some assholes feel all warm and fuzzy and invulnerable, because hey, *they'd* never end up in his shoes, he *deserves* to feel 100,000 times worse than he does now. So let's all shame *him* some more. That'll solve everything.
I want the Mozilla group to evaluate the possible mis-use of a "mailto:" link in general, and decide whether setting up that handler is safe and/or necessary in general considering the variety of handlers out there. At that point it becomes the responsibility of the people writing all the different handlers.
OR
I want to be asked for what to use for the handler. At that point it becomes entirely my responsibility for choosing a secure handler.
I do NOT want to miss out on having someone I trust evaluating the general safety of a class of handlers. I don't trust anyone else. I trust Mozilla's developers, and I trust me. No one else, certainly not my OS vendor.
It's *EXACTLY* like deciding how to deal with various binary objects. I do NOT under any circumstance want a 3rd party program (like the OS) deciding what to do with raw chunks of data. Either it comes whitelisted, or it's not configured by default and I have to add it in.
Likewise I do not want 3rd party programs deciding on what to do with various protocols. Either it comes whitelisted, or it's not configured by default and I have to add it in.
It's Mozilla's problem because Mozilla allows arbitrary unknown handlers to be registered by third party software (aka MS Windows) that they and the user do not control or have an up front choice about.
Mozilla shouldn't trust arbitrary data coming in from the net, and Mozilla shouldn't trust arbitrary interface-configuration-requests coming in from automated 3rd party software internally.
hand off unknown protocols to the local system to see if you have helper applications
An equivalent would be handing off unknown binary files to the OS to see if it knows what to do with them - which every single human can easily see is utterly stupid and entirely the fault of the browser.
Someone else said The Mozilla developer's shouldn't be babysitting the Windows OS.
BULLSHIT, it's not babysitting, it's preventing the OS and any internal 3rd party application from becoming an interface without explicit knoledge by the Mozilla and/or Users themselves.
Someone else said It's an operating system protocol handler, just like any other registered helper app.
Don't register every tom dick and harry fucking handler that you don't know a fucking thing about, not without explicit permission from the user.
Someone else said What do you recommend happen if Flash has an exploit?
Someone installed the Flash plugin/handler, consciously and willingly. It's not a fucking submarine job. ALLOWING submarine jobs is irresponsible.
The key question is - who set up the interface? Did a user or 3rd party install software say "hey, Mozilla, do this when this occurrs", or did Mozilla say "hey, I don't know what to do with this, let's just throw it against the wall and hope it works".
Mozilla set up the interface, Mozilla bears the responsibility of possible mis-use.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Jezus! They've figured out a way of doing something in the world ****more efficiently****. The world is going to come to an end! Oh woe is me!!! We're doomed!!!
[ what a bunch of fucking retards ]
For me it comes down to a few things that *are* defensible. Please bear with me.
I don't like the way the content producers use and spend our money on advertising and marketing.
I don't like the way they price their products.
I don't like the length of the exclusive term they have on the information (aka entertainment) they have produced. (Yes, the $100 million spent creating a movie probably deserves more/longer protection than the 2 sentence poem..)
I don't like the fact that it SHOULD according to technoligical advancements cost near to zero to send the content from their production room to my screen, yet it's still not being done AT ANY PRICE (except in porn, in porn you can do that, they offer tons of porn online live with price competition). Not only that, they insist on forcing me to pay 90% overhead on their 10% production costs.
I don't like the territorial exclusion zones in where products are offered (I'm in Canada, and I CAN NOT IN ANY WAY get Battlestar Galactica).
I don't like being fed 80 channels of goo - I want on demand and I want a copy I can go back and watch again and again WHEN I WANT TO.
I don't want $200 Billion dollars a year spent on the global movie industry.
*IF* I spend $1000 per year (arbitrary choice on my part) supporting content producers (those that I think deserve my money), I don't see why I should be limited to a tiny subset of the INFORMATION that humanity is generating.
I especially don't like all of the above when CLEARLY due to technological advances it costs absolutely NOTHING to bring the data to me exactly when I want it.
Finally we have to face the following - someday (oh about 50-100 years from now) there will be enough movies and music in existence such that EVERYONE will be able to watch old movies and tv and listen to old music for their entire natural life - and not purchase a single new product.
What will we do then?
My solution to all of this is simple. Keep spending my $1000 a year on artists (Guardians of the Earth), in the way that I choose, and is most effective as far as I am concerned - and yet access whatever information I want, whenever I want.
Technology and the math means I will be able to do this. Short of an ultra-nazi state putting 20,000,000 of us in concentration camps.
Yes, I am advocating a move from pure capitalistic method of determining who produces what product, to a more socialist method. And I am aware of the possibilities of abuse and failure. The good news is that it's working, and so far none of the content producing industries are failing or under stress.
The odd thing is that it's going to happen whether anyone likes it or not. In 10 years I'm going to be able to handy any friend of mine a $100 piece of media that has almost every song ever recorded on it. And no-one will be able to stop us.
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:| )
Herns was ordered to pay restitution for the damage he caused and will have limited access to computers for the next three years. After the judge outlined the terms of Herns' restricted computer use, Levine pointed out how hard those conditions will be for a man who does everything online, including paying his bills.
"He's going to get to learn," Brown said. "There are other ways to live."
The Canadian government has declared internet connectivity to be (I forget the exact term) a "necessity" or something.
If you rob a bank, do they forbid you from walking into any type of business establishment for the entire duration of your parole? No! It would be idiotic - everyone needs a bank account or groceries in today's society, and there are already tons of other perfectly good laws to deal with the individual should they commit a crime in a bank or other "place of business" again.
If you commit a traffic violation, do they forbid you from getting into any vehicle on any road? No! They might prevent you from driving, but they still let you get in as a passenger in other people's vehicles or take the bus.
Judges are going to eventually have to stop throwing out blanket "computer bans" as minor parole conditions - and realize that they have to handle it differently. PCs may/can be the basis of entire home entertainment centers, your library, your photo album, your telephone, etc etc.
What they should do (and what would be more effective) is to ban the user from say spending more than 30 minutes at a time on a PC, or making an IP connection to a class of third parties, or posessing any tools or software that could be used for illicit purposes - and then have the parole officers make unannounced audits and/or taps.
This goes along the lines of what kind of an effect would it have on you and your life if the police seized your computer in the midst of an investigation (not even an investigation into you, say your webcam caught some images of a crime). My PC is all of the things I listed above and more. And remember, saying "make backups" doesn't cut it, they always take your backups too and withholding those could get you in even worse trouble.
To put it another way - the police need to develop methods that don't "deny you use of your entire house just to check the window for fingerprints".
If they want to ghost the drive and look at the inside of the system before they leave, that's fine. But taking the entire thing for an indefinite period - unacceptable. (I'm talking about when I'm not the suspected murder or something
I'm confused, the page you link to DOES fuck over high tech employees.
And now I do a tiny bit of research and find out that sometime in the recent past Ontario has also excluded *all* "IT professionals" from overtime and hours-of-work provisions. This puts us in the same class as the farmers and fisherman, cause you know, our work is so seasonal and unpredictable. (can you smell my super thick sarcasm?)
And I quote from workrights.ca:
"Many workers are excluded from all hours of work and overtime provisions, including: agricultural workers, homemakers, residential care workers, information technology professionals, workers in commercial fishing, commission salespeople who normally operate away from their employer's place of business, most people involved in farming and horticulture, Crown employees, high school students on approved work experience programs and police officers."
Just why the FUCK are we excluded? What's the fucking difference between 80 hours in a week of exertion on a factory floor and 80 hours a week of mental exertion in front of a computer screen that leads anyone to conclude that 'the factory worker deserves time and a half while the IT guy does not and should be "left to market forces"'?
It's clearly time to unionize.
From the very article you reference, and I quote:
"the limits of that range are very wide, from 8,000 to 194,000"
Their uncertainty range is from NEAR ZERO to double the average number. And they make NO MENTION WHATSOEVER about the entire families that Sadaam killed, which of course have no survivors left to report their deaths.
The third thing I would fault not in it's methodology - but everyone else's "conclusion".
"roughly 60% is due directly to violence".
I would argue that a huge fraction (no idea how much) of that is flat out-right non-war-related iraqi-on-iraqi murder. The same kind you'd find in the streets of LA. The kind that doesn't happen nearly as much as under a totalitarian dictator.
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I wonder if you can use Daemon Tools or something similar to mount a "Virtual CDRW", write the audio CD to that, then rip from there...
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It's quite difficult to become certified in the US if you are trained as a doctor overseas, so your statement that "Places like india and south africa end up supplying plenty doctors to western countries" is disingenuous at best.
I don't think so. I lived in rural Saskatchewan between 1970 and 1990, we were *entirely* servied by immigrant doctors, especially South Africans. I think Canada would have a MASSIVE shortage of family doctors if we didn't have said immigration. Heck we still do have a shortage...
None of that implies that there aren't stringint controls/processes in place to filter/certify incoming physicians. Heck those very certification processes have been criticized repeatedly as being too labourious and extensive (although I do want to make sure I'm not seeing some kook with ancient out of date training and experience...)
I've seen dpreview.com of course. I don't remember anything standing out. But, on your word, I'll go back and check what it's like these days.
[goes away, comes back 15 minutes latter]
Hmmm, ok, I like their "buying guide" that allows you to choose features you want then list all camera's side by side. However - the table is missing a few things (like start-up-time, inter-picture delay, shutter-lag, etc), and the camera I had pointed out is given 4 stars out of 5 despite the massively poor picture quality of this camera, in fact ALL the 10 cameras have 4 stars out of 5 - the star rating is user driven. ONLY 2 of the 10 cameras have in-depth reviews by the dpreview site staff themselves.
They do have a page where they rank cameras by their own review rankings, but it's all mixed together, it'd be a huge pain in the ass to figure out which are the ones I'm interested in and which are on the market, price differences, etc etc. They need to review a larger fraction of the cameras on the market, and add this data to the comparison table.
One thing that is impressive is the last two rows in the comparison table, where they show a resolution chart snapshot and color chart snapshot. The color chart snapshot clearly shows the horrific quality of the camera I was talking about. Unfortunately like the reviews, they are only there for some of the listed cameras.
I give dpreview.com 6 stars out of 10. Steve's digicams gets 4 stars out of 10.
What I want to see is 8-10 stars out of 10 for a rewview site. Isn't this the information age? Where the FUCK ins the information? It's supposed to SAVE me time, not consume my time, and it's supposed to DECREASE the odds of crappy products thriving.
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s amples.html
a chmentid=118010&stc=1 3 1193&page=7&pp=15 a chmentid=180976&stc=1 a chmentid=221673&stc=1
Why does his "the best cameras" aka "pick of the litter" page have 10 (ten) cameras listed for each of the 12 categories? He says the "cameras are not listed in order of preference":
http://www.steves-digicams.com/best_cameras.html
I can see 2-4 choices per, but 10?
Digital camera reviews are no where near as technical and detailed as they need to be to be useful, compare this:
http://www.steves-digicams.com/2003_reviews/exs3_
with this:
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/attachment.php?att
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/attachment.php?att
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/attachment.php?att
Note the "pre-printed form letter" the one guy gets back from his warranty servicing with the check mark beside the following paragraph:
"Your camera is operating according to factory specification in all modes. The phenomenon you have experienced (an orange halo visible in the bckground after taking some pictures) is not a defect in operation of your camera. It is a function of the geometry of the lens optics. Under certain lighting conditions this effect may be noticeable. Darker backgrounds will minimize or eliminate this effect."
You can no longer find the S3 or anything like it on the market, Casio has probably quietly removed it due to huge numbers of returns and warranty servicing costs. You can only find a few on eBay, and ALL are "open return" or "used return, not tested". NONE sold by happy users.
AFAIAC, digital camera reviews are nearly worthless, no matter who is doing the review.
.
. ...Roboticist. (Or something.)
My grandfather came off the farm in the 30's on the plains of Saskatchewan to work in a blacksmith shop, which turned into a car garage that very decade.
The first 10 generations of semi-sentient robots are going to take a lot of skilled people to direct their efforts, I look forward to a never ending set of technical careers. Yes, perhaps I won't be shoeing horses all my life, but I'm not worried none the less. It's not like the need for blacksmiths is going to go away in a flick of the wrist nor present a natural opportunity for me to move on.
For now, I'm comfortable and happy. And I don't expect to have to *PPANNNICCCC* (OMG FFS HAX0RZ!! LAMER!) at any time in my life.
Props to anyone who is facing a wall at the moment, I didn't say it would be *pleasant* figuring out where else to go or what to do. But at least this isn't 700 years ago, you won't just up and starve.
> 3. That cell phones cannot cause explosions at gas stations. They did this by
;) ]
And everyone in "science" knows that by trying something a half dozen times yourself proves that something that didn't happen can't in fact happen.
I mean, the idea of cell phones causing gas station fires is as stupid as the idea of cell phones exploding or deadly fires caused by simply touching the nozzle as it fills your car.
[end pseudo-sarcasm
Heh - sounds like an entertaining show, but I strongly object to portraying it as "good science" or something that joe blow should rely on for advice.
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t ry.html
It's worth looking into, others have proposed it before and done preliminary
work - and that was before the last 40 years of materials science!
http://yarchive.net/space/launchers/personal_reen
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I remember when I was little.
The town had a *few* phones in various volunteers houses, and the housewives (yes, way back in the 70's) were trained to take the emergency calls. There was a red button beside the phones. It set off the big-ass siren on the top of the fire-hall that could be heard by farmers in their fields 3 miles outside town.
In the late 80's and 90's, before cellphones in Rural Saskatchewan really took off, all the firefighters carried big-ass radio's, the type police used to carry. And yes, if youg forgot to charge it or forgot to put it on in the morning, you'd occasioanlly miss a call. Which really pissed you off because "action" and a real emergency was so rare in a town of 800 people.
I think they still use those instead of cell-phones. Can't rely on cell phones, and the radios double as the actual on-site communication system.
> or a large singles community for dating
> or marriage opportunities
Vastly more of the people I know who stayed in small towns are married than the people I know here in the metropolis.
In a small town, you KNOW 1000 women by name, and if ONE more moves to town, someone tells you and you meet them within days. And you get to see them over and over, as opposed to once walking in opposite directions in the street or for 3 minutes at a speed dating event.
In a small town, your friends go way way WAY out of their way to set you up with girls from nearby towns that they know - because they realize just how important that is. In the city, your friends rarely talk about their own girlfriends, let alone other girls they know that are single - shit it's almost like they're "hoarding" them.
> a) This could easily been done as a sheduled task in windows 2000.
Uh, no, no it could not.
Scheduled Tasks in Microsoft Windows have never been reliable. Quite frequently mine have their security credentials "screwed up" somehow and stop working until I notice and "touch" them so I'm forced to re-enter a user/pwd.
I have never EVER heard of Solaris cron failing to run on time.
> and not some poor person manually initiating it every night?
It's windows, you have to have a person present to ensure that the system actually a) goes down b) comes back up as intended.
I've done a half year consulting gig and spent a month walking 5 blocks through the downtown core of San Francisco at 5am every single FUCKING morning to hit the power button on a 4 way 400 MHz $50,000 Compaq windows box at one of the biggest banks in the world. Database held holdings information on around half a trillion dollars in equities.
> including intering your dorm room at any time for any reason. They can
> also kick you off campus pretty much at any time at their discretion
Most Canadian provinces have explicit laws that state certain things that can NOT be done if you are paying in any form for a defacto "residence".
Two of them are "enter at any time" (they MUST provide 24 hours notice) and "deny access/evict" (they MUST go through the appropriate procedures and bureaucracy).
> And YES- you can sign away your rights-
Uh, no, not all your rights. You can not legally consent to be physically assaulted. No matter what "permission" or "consent" you give, the police can still charge and convict the person that assaulted you.
Now *THAT* is an insightful comment.
It also begs the question, could they not accomplish it technically in a more cost efficient manner? There is always another way to skin the cat.
At least if the police or the telephone companies have to foot the bill we a) get to see the cost all in one place instead of 25 cents at a time where it doesn't look as big, and b) there is a huge incentive for them to do it cost effectively.
> My bet is on "investment scam".
:-)
Hee hee, no way, investment scams usually have *way* better websites and slicker people behind them.
At least, successful investment scams...
Uhh, the Arrow was 40+ years ago, and the Soviet Union and it's massive bomber fleets still existed and flew along our coasts back then.
What the hell do you think we spent all that money on US built INTERCEPTORS for - like the POS Starfighter and the 160 or so F-18's? We were expected to pull our share of continental defence and in NORAD for a reason.
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An analysis of the "company" "ColossalStorage" and it's founder "Michael E Thomas".
See all the waving flags on their website and his proud "United States Veteran - Top Secret Clearance" at the top of his bio page?
Yeah, there's no way in hell these guys are delivering jack shit to the marketplace in the next 20 years, let alone the next 5.
And who the hell is physorg.com anyways?
Registrant:
Alexander Pol
Metallistov 63
St-Petersburg,
Uh huh. Some amateur "science/tech news site". It is NOT a respected authority on ANYTHING.
According to google, there are ZERO websites in the world that link to physorg.com, and the first 4 pages of google "pages that contain the term" show zero references to physorg.com from anyone in the physics or real world technology industry.
But then, it requires a quality that's sadly in severe decline in the technlogy industry: personal integrity.
Fuck personal integrity if it means that hundreds of people have to quit their acceptably nice jobs at a half-rate company just because of one complete asshole that management tolerates.
If a company and the individuals that it employes in management do not themselves have the "integrity" to deal with things, why the fuck do we owe them any "integrity" back to them in the form of complete and utter personal disruption that is a job change just to "send them a message"? Why not force the one asshole to go through the utterly deserved "personal disruption" that is a job change in order to "send management a message".
> The man just said it is not an accident if you contribute directly to it
And he was factually incorrect. It is a term that describes the entire incident, the term itself does not infer nor assign who the victim is or the level of blame for the person who caused "the accident".
Furthermore making the poor SOB who is the cause of this "accident" 100,000 times more remorseful does absolutely nothing in terms of making any of us any less likely to cause "an accident" like that.
Making ALL OF US feel like shit, would. Making ALL OF US realize that we need to be more careful, would. Making ALL OF US introduce more numerous checks and balances to prevent accidents, would.
The Japanese have a huge "cult of guilt" and ritual suicide... and almost everyone knows that it doesn't do damn fuck all in terms of making their society work any better. In fact it makes their society worse, because no-one else typically learns from other people's mistakes.
The only thing that making that guy feel 100,000 times worse about "the accident" would do is make some assholes feel all warm and fuzzy and invulnerable, because hey, *they'd* never end up in his shoes, he *deserves* to feel 100,000 times worse than he does now. So let's all shame *him* some more. That'll solve everything.
Retards.
I want the Mozilla group to evaluate the possible mis-use of a "mailto:" link in general, and decide whether setting up that handler is safe and/or necessary in general considering the variety of handlers out there. At that point it becomes the responsibility of the people writing all the different handlers.
OR
I want to be asked for what to use for the handler. At that point it becomes entirely my responsibility for choosing a secure handler.
I do NOT want to miss out on having someone I trust evaluating the general safety of a class of handlers. I don't trust anyone else. I trust Mozilla's developers, and I trust me. No one else, certainly not my OS vendor.
It's *EXACTLY* like deciding how to deal with various binary objects. I do NOT under any circumstance want a 3rd party program (like the OS) deciding what to do with raw chunks of data. Either it comes whitelisted, or it's not configured by default and I have to add it in.
Likewise I do not want 3rd party programs deciding on what to do with various protocols. Either it comes whitelisted, or it's not configured by default and I have to add it in.
but it wasn't registered by Mozilla.
It's Mozilla's problem because Mozilla allows arbitrary unknown handlers to be registered by third party software (aka MS Windows) that they and the user do not control or have an up front choice about.
Mozilla shouldn't trust arbitrary data coming in from the net, and Mozilla shouldn't trust arbitrary interface-configuration-requests coming in from automated 3rd party software internally.
hand off unknown protocols to the local system to see if you have helper applications
An equivalent would be handing off unknown binary files to the OS to see if it knows what to do with them - which every single human can easily see is utterly stupid and entirely the fault of the browser.
Someone else said The Mozilla developer's shouldn't be babysitting the Windows OS.
BULLSHIT, it's not babysitting, it's preventing the OS and any internal 3rd party application from becoming an interface without explicit knoledge by the Mozilla and/or Users themselves.
Someone else said It's an operating system protocol handler, just like any other registered helper app.
Don't register every tom dick and harry fucking handler that you don't know a fucking thing about, not without explicit permission from the user.
Someone else said What do you recommend happen if Flash has an exploit?
Someone installed the Flash plugin/handler, consciously and willingly. It's not a fucking submarine job. ALLOWING submarine jobs is irresponsible.
The key question is - who set up the interface? Did a user or 3rd party install software say "hey, Mozilla, do this when this occurrs", or did Mozilla say "hey, I don't know what to do with this, let's just throw it against the wall and hope it works".
Mozilla set up the interface, Mozilla bears the responsibility of possible mis-use.