Some time ago the Canadian Feds set up a program where all communities would have free net access through public libraries and the such. So the small prairie town (800 people) my Mom lives in ended up with a computer and dial up access (that's with horrific long distance charges) being paid for from federal/provincial grants.
Now a few years later that computer is hopelessly out of date. I just found out that they are now getting a brand new $5000 CDN system loaded with software. I was *quite* pleased.
But then I found out who was paying for it, and it was the same feeling as.. what's the line?.. "watching a lawyer go over the cliff in a sports car"(*)
Yes, that's right, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is paying for it.
I'll bet a hundred bucks that $3500 of that $5000 computer is "charitably donated" software from Microsoft, "costed" using retail prices, actually costing Microsoft zero dollars, for which they get a big huge fat tax writeoff.
Doesn't that make you feel all warm inside?
(*) - my apologies to the lawyers, my friend is a lawyer, but the phrase fit the purpose...
Oh I don't know, but it got past me! When I 'read' (scanned) it, the sentence may have been "pixels per sq inch" but my brain said "ooh thats twice the dpi than my current monitor!".
>> Those people voted Buchanan, period. If it was a mistake, I'm sorry but they blew it.
> I hope you're not in the business of designing computer interfaces.
Or worse, airport ground traffic control systems and proceedures.
I like these arguments about as much as the guys who say people who suffer misfortune "deserve it", or a woman "was asking for it".
So stupid people shouldn't be allowed to vote? Just how stupid? I mean, just how hard should we make this stupidity test?
What the rest of us are saying is that we don't necessarily think that stupid people should be banned from voting, or randomly denied their vote. At the very least this stupidity test is not acceptable.
Not only that, but human beings make simple mistakes, and complexity increases the rate at which that occurs. It's a simple fact. And we're saying that the error rate here is simply too high for average human beings, whom we believe should have a right to have their vote heard.
> where traffic coming from slashdot is automatically let into a story,
>... and in exchange for not having everyone here mess with their marketing department
Too late. If their DB is accurate, I'm a female orthopedic surgeon from Botswanna living in Zaire making $99 a year.
> I myself was looking to Paul Martin to lead the party.
I would have been happy with him as well! (Which is strange, the old axiom being that finance ministers can never make it to being Prime Minister, seeing as everyone learns to associate them with taxes...)
Hmmmm. I guess if/when Chretien goes belly up this year or the next we can all get on board and make sure Mr. Martin makes a good run for the leadership of the party!
If she can figure out how to store the energy of her fall (instead of wasting it on heat and kinetic energy transfer) a 31 km high fall should give her 1.21 GW for 1/50th of a second.
POOF
(I'm guessing that a flux capacitor is capable of sapping and storing one's kinetic energy, and the optimal thrust curve naturally leads up to a "terminal velocity" of ~88 mph. At least for a Delorian.)
Chretien should have stepped down and let Roy Romanow take over leadership of the Liberal party. I'd be a *lot* happer with that than Mr. Chretien. I'd be voting for someone other than Chretien if it wasn't for Stockwell Day and the Alliance.
The Liberal party had better spend the next four years looking for Jean's replacement, or we're screwed in the next one.
As long as all the moderators are aware of who "Bob Abooey" is and what he does, and no-body pays any attention to him (no-one mods him up or down), we'll all be fine.
Ok, my initial gut reaction was to stop drinking Guiness in protest, and to complain as such to Guiness LLC. But then my second reaction was to follow Jamie's hyperlink to the WIPO ruling and actually read it.
My conclusion?
Jamie sucks.
He's made a snap decision without very much regard to the facts of this individual case. Ok, maybe there are cases where the WIPO is doing bad things that we wouldn't agree with. But in this case some SOB domain squatter with a rap sheet five miles long got his bluff called by Guinness LLC, didn't respond to the WIPO's notification nor submit a defence. AKA "he didn't show up" in 'court' to respond to the accusations.
Even after all that, the WIPO apponited someone who had to look through all the evidence and decide whether or not this SOB was squatting.
Now go read the ruling for yourself. Especially the last half of section 5 and section 6.
AFAIK John Zuccarini is a hoser and he deserved to have is domains siezed.
Sure. Companies have lawyers. Companies lose a lot of money if they are "put out of business" by the police even for a small time.
If they did to a decent sized Company what they did to dilinger and they were as incorrect about the Company as they are about dilinger, the police department would be liable for a huge sum of money.
But if dilinger's stuff is confiscated for a couple years, what's the real financial loss (as far as they are concerned)? Even if he does sue and win, it'll be a penny or two compared to the Departments budget.
> Do not carry the floppy around loose in your back pocket... A floppy disk is not a book mark.
Haha, heh. Sorry, I had to laugh. Your advice is good. It's just that I've been transporting my Netscape Bookmarks file (and a dozen other zipped 'info' text files) back and forth between work and home every day for two years now.
On a floppy.
In my jeans pocket.
Squished between my wallet and my thigh.
Through the heat and humidity of summer, and the deep freeze of a Canadian winter.
Have only had one disk failure so far. Of course this is just temporary transport.
There was once a time when I was storing lots of data to hundreds of floppies, back when hard drives were very expensive. No, it wasn't important information. But I used around 300 floppies, all bought new, back when they cost 40-60 cents each. The cheap kind.
Of those 300, approximately 5-10 had a few bad blocks right out of the packaging. After a full year and a half of storage, another 5 disks had bad blocks.
So what's that, a 5% failure rate?
When I do back up important things to floppy (which I still occasionally do, for things like passwords and pgp key files and other small important files I'll need if my entire HD goes kaput), I put 3 copies of the same thing per disk, on at least two disks. And then I make sure and schedule a 'check' day every year or so, where I verify that all copies are still working, and make new copies when necessary.
> Software that sells for 100k a copy doesn't mess around with wimpy licenses like the one at issue.
The company I work for sells it's software for 100-500k per installation, and we don't have any of that obscene crap in our legal agreements. You have to have hardass marketdroids and 3leet managers to end up with shit like that.
> Upon entering the premises, representatives of our company may help themselves...
>...That's pretty much the only way they could be bigger bastards.
I disagree.
.... and if there shall be an individual there-upon whom we ascertain to be of beauty or grace or strength or ruggedness, we may upon our discretion partake of carnal acts, whether the individual is of high morals or not, whether the individual is agreeable or not. Amen.
> The article says: In technical terms, "BIOS Update" is a hidden
> (i.e. barely documented at all outside of Intel) feature...
I agree with you, it's no where near 'hidden' or 'barely documented'. I'm a software developer, and during a couple hours research that I did a month ago before buying a replacement for my burnt out CPU, I easily came across this fact, and I figured, hey, that's innovative!
> On the way to Rob's house after the purchase, we drove by the Best Buy we
> were going to camp at, just to check it out. At 12:30am, there were
> 36 people we counted lined up outside - 9 and 1/2 hours before the store opened.
And you didn't feel the urge to slowly drive by holding the box up in the window honking your horn?
No no, not in a snotty way, rather with a big smile and a thumbs up triumphant, but sharing your score!
Re:Another reason to hate my PC
on
D&D Trailer
·
· Score: 1
> www.quicktime.com
I hate that damn software. Quicktime subverts so much shit on your computer and does such a slow bloated job of it that it's not funny.(*) By default it wants to become the app that plays wav files in your browser. So there you go, you want to play a little 10k wav file on your DSL connection on your PIII 600, and you have to wait four seconds for Quicktime to boot within your browser. Brilliantly stupid you bastards.
After all the trouble I went through re-habilitating my system's file associations after Quicktime was on it, to the point now where I click on a wav link and instantly it plays, my conscience will just kill me if I succumb and try and install it again. Hope they've got more/better/clearer "please may I subvert your ass" choices on the installation.
(*) Gotta feel bad for those poor SOBs who aren't smart enough to figure out how to disentangle things like Quicktime and your browser/file-associations. They're simply screwed by whomever takes advantage of them.
1) unknown
2) story text, supporting story info in stories, and visited slashbox links
3) dates on older stories slashbox and number of comments in each older story
4) titles in main screen stories
5) outside background
6) main area background
7) background in slashboxes
8) hyperlinks in stories and story titlebars
Next you'll need an html form of rbg.txt (watch out, the ones with numbers appended to the end don't seem to work).
Or better yet, take a look at my favorite (repair the broken hyperlink, otherwise you'll think my favorite is stupid!)(*). Notice that I've used a HEX VALUE. Yes, raw hex values are legal. Much nicer. No more hunting for the closest named color!
Now all you need to do is customize one of those 'ad interceptor' software to grok slashdot urls inside incoming pages and tack your custom colorblock onto all the hyperlinks in your incoming slashdot pages!
Or better yet, we need to get Taco to add a 'Customize' feature where we can add our own custom colorblock! (Of course, I'd rather have faster slashdot pages than prettier slashdot pages;)
- ckE
(*) Does anyone know how to prevent this line wrapping from ocurring in URLs? It's damn annoying.
Slashdot Mirror
Some time ago the Canadian Feds set up a program where all communities would have free net access through public libraries and the such. So the small prairie town (800 people) my Mom lives in ended up with a computer and dial up access (that's with horrific long distance charges) being paid for from federal/provincial grants.
Now a few years later that computer is hopelessly out of date. I just found out that they are now getting a brand new $5000 CDN system loaded with software. I was *quite* pleased.
But then I found out who was paying for it, and it was the same feeling as.. what's the line?.. "watching a lawyer go over the cliff in a sports car"(*)
Yes, that's right, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is paying for it.
I'll bet a hundred bucks that $3500 of that $5000 computer is "charitably donated" software from Microsoft, "costed" using retail prices, actually costing Microsoft zero dollars, for which they get a big huge fat tax writeoff.
Doesn't that make you feel all warm inside?
(*) - my apologies to the lawyers, my friend is a lawyer, but the phrase fit the purpose...
You do realize that if you post to a slashdot article that you had moderated against, all your moderation is undone?
But if we ever get those neutrino beams figured out, it will only be 8,000 / 300,000 = 26ms.
"Elect me and I'll donate $100M to education/housing."
Would that be legal?
Oh I don't know, but it got past me! When I 'read' (scanned) it, the sentence may have been "pixels per sq inch" but my brain said "ooh thats twice the dpi than my current monitor!".
> I hope you're not in the business of designing computer interfaces.
Or worse, airport ground traffic control systems and proceedures.
I like these arguments about as much as the guys who say people who suffer misfortune "deserve it", or a woman "was asking for it".
So stupid people shouldn't be allowed to vote? Just how stupid? I mean, just how hard should we make this stupidity test?
What the rest of us are saying is that we don't necessarily think that stupid people should be banned from voting, or randomly denied their vote. At the very least this stupidity test is not acceptable.
Not only that, but human beings make simple mistakes, and complexity increases the rate at which that occurs. It's a simple fact. And we're saying that the error rate here is simply too high for average human beings, whom we believe should have a right to have their vote heard.
> where traffic coming from slashdot is automatically let into a story,
>
Too late. If their DB is accurate, I'm a female orthopedic surgeon from Botswanna living in Zaire making $99 a year.
> I myself was looking to Paul Martin to lead the party.
I would have been happy with him as well! (Which is strange, the old axiom being that finance ministers can never make it to being Prime Minister, seeing as everyone learns to associate them with taxes...)
Hmmmm. I guess if/when Chretien goes belly up this year or the next we can all get on board and make sure Mr. Martin makes a good run for the leadership of the party!
> Why are NASA's pics so small and low quality..
You are mistaken sir. It's CNN and CBS who are the bandwidth cheapskates.
NASA's pics are huge.
If she can figure out how to store the energy of her fall (instead of wasting it on heat and kinetic energy transfer) a 31 km high fall should give her 1.21 GW for 1/50th of a second.
POOF
(I'm guessing that a flux capacitor is capable of sapping and storing one's kinetic energy, and the optimal thrust curve naturally leads up to a "terminal velocity" of ~88 mph. At least for a Delorian.)
Chretien should have stepped down and let Roy Romanow take over leadership of the Liberal party. I'd be a *lot* happer with that than Mr. Chretien. I'd be voting for someone other than Chretien if it wasn't for Stockwell Day and the Alliance.
The Liberal party had better spend the next four years looking for Jean's replacement, or we're screwed in the next one.
As long as all the moderators are aware of who "Bob Abooey" is and what he does, and no-body pays any attention to him (no-one mods him up or down), we'll all be fine.
Ok, my initial gut reaction was to stop drinking Guiness in protest, and to complain as such to Guiness LLC. But then my second reaction was to follow Jamie's hyperlink to the WIPO ruling and actually read it.
My conclusion?
Jamie sucks.
He's made a snap decision without very much regard to the facts of this individual case. Ok, maybe there are cases where the WIPO is doing bad things that we wouldn't agree with. But in this case some SOB domain squatter with a rap sheet five miles long got his bluff called by Guinness LLC, didn't respond to the WIPO's notification nor submit a defence. AKA "he didn't show up" in 'court' to respond to the accusations.
Even after all that, the WIPO apponited someone who had to look through all the evidence and decide whether or not this SOB was squatting.
Now go read the ruling for yourself. Especially the last half of section 5 and section 6.
AFAIK John Zuccarini is a hoser and he deserved to have is domains siezed.
> I know a company in BC...
Sure. Companies have lawyers. Companies lose a lot of money if they are "put out of business" by the police even for a small time.
If they did to a decent sized Company what they did to dilinger and they were as incorrect about the Company as they are about dilinger, the police department would be liable for a huge sum of money.
But if dilinger's stuff is confiscated for a couple years, what's the real financial loss (as far as they are concerned)? Even if he does sue and win, it'll be a penny or two compared to the Departments budget.
As long as you present your case using that language, I am absolutely certain I could confuse the hell out of a jury into convicting your ass.
> Think about it
Arrh! Damn it, that's what I really want! A STABLE Windows 98! With integrated skinning capabilities! For nearly free!
Either that or a version of Windows 2000 that will play all the games. For nearly free.
I've given them my share of the 100 billion dollars! Where's my fucking software!?!? What's with this shit I'm currently stuck with!!!?
> A Small, cheap adapter to let you use a CompactFlash memory card as a plain IDE drive.
That's spectacular! I didn't know that! I've got an extra IDE channel and a 48MB CF card that goes with my Camera. Interesting.
However, being a straight through IDE thing, I bet you it doesn't take well to hot-swapping :)
Haha, heh. Sorry, I had to laugh. Your advice is good. It's just that I've been transporting my Netscape Bookmarks file (and a dozen other zipped 'info' text files) back and forth between work and home every day for two years now.
On a floppy.
In my jeans pocket.
Squished between my wallet and my thigh.
Through the heat and humidity of summer, and the deep freeze of a Canadian winter.
Have only had one disk failure so far. Of course this is just temporary transport.
There was once a time when I was storing lots of data to hundreds of floppies, back when hard drives were very expensive. No, it wasn't important information. But I used around 300 floppies, all bought new, back when they cost 40-60 cents each. The cheap kind.
Of those 300, approximately 5-10 had a few bad blocks right out of the packaging. After a full year and a half of storage, another 5 disks had bad blocks.
So what's that, a 5% failure rate?
When I do back up important things to floppy (which I still occasionally do, for things like passwords and pgp key files and other small important files I'll need if my entire HD goes kaput), I put 3 copies of the same thing per disk, on at least two disks. And then I make sure and schedule a 'check' day every year or so, where I verify that all copies are still working, and make new copies when necessary.
> Software that sells for 100k a copy doesn't mess around with wimpy licenses like the one at issue.
The company I work for sells it's software for 100-500k per installation, and we don't have any of that obscene crap in our legal agreements. You have to have hardass marketdroids and 3leet managers to end up with shit like that.
> Upon entering the premises, representatives of our company may help themselves...
>
I disagree.
> (i.e. barely documented at all outside of Intel) feature...
I agree with you, it's no where near 'hidden' or 'barely documented'. I'm a software developer, and during a couple hours research that I did a month ago before buying a replacement for my burnt out CPU, I easily came across this fact, and I figured, hey, that's innovative!
> On the way to Rob's house after the purchase, we drove by the Best Buy we
> were going to camp at, just to check it out. At 12:30am, there were
> 36 people we counted lined up outside - 9 and 1/2 hours before the store opened.
And you didn't feel the urge to slowly drive by holding the box up in the window honking your horn?
No no, not in a snotty way, rather with a big smile and a thumbs up triumphant, but sharing your score!
I hate that damn software. Quicktime subverts so much shit on your computer and does such a slow bloated job of it that it's not funny.(*) By default it wants to become the app that plays wav files in your browser. So there you go, you want to play a little 10k wav file on your DSL connection on your PIII 600, and you have to wait four seconds for Quicktime to boot within your browser. Brilliantly stupid you bastards.
After all the trouble I went through re-habilitating my system's file associations after Quicktime was on it, to the point now where I click on a wav link and instantly it plays, my conscience will just kill me if I succumb and try and install it again. Hope they've got more/better/clearer "please may I subvert your ass" choices on the installation.
(*) Gotta feel bad for those poor SOBs who aren't smart enough to figure out how to disentangle things like Quicktime and your browser/file-associations. They're simply screwed by whomever takes advantage of them.
First you'll need the mapping of what controls what:
1) unknown
2) story text, supporting story info in stories, and visited slashbox links
3) dates on older stories slashbox and number of comments in each older story
4) titles in main screen stories
5) outside background
6) main area background
7) background in slashboxes
8) hyperlinks in stories and story titlebars
Next you'll need an html form of rbg.txt (watch out, the ones with numbers appended to the end don't seem to work).
Or better yet, take a look at my favorite (repair the broken hyperlink, otherwise you'll think my favorite is stupid!)(*). Notice that I've used a HEX VALUE. Yes, raw hex values are legal. Much nicer. No more hunting for the closest named color!
Now all you need to do is customize one of those 'ad interceptor' software to grok slashdot urls inside incoming pages and tack your custom colorblock onto all the hyperlinks in your incoming slashdot pages!
Or better yet, we need to get Taco to add a 'Customize' feature where we can add our own custom colorblock! (Of course, I'd rather have faster slashdot pages than prettier slashdot pages ;)
- ckE
(*) Does anyone know how to prevent this line wrapping from ocurring in URLs? It's damn annoying.