That's funny, my 3-year old HP notebook gives me the choice to turn VT on or off, right there in the otherwise useless System Config.
Sony didn't just make it "harder" to enable, they've purposely removed the choice to do so. Enjoy your nerfed laptop, because Sony wants to protect the people buying $2500 laptops from their own rampant ignorance.
That sort of mentality is partially why so many geeks hate Sony with a passion. Sure, they make shiny products (that don't last), but the pervasive attitude is that they seem to think their customers are mind-blowingly stupid. Don't get me wrong, people are mostly dumb, but not THAT dumb.
I, for one, welcome our Visual Basic robot overlords.
Either some really dense guy is trolling for venture capital, or the New Scientist editor got majorly trolled. Since every single robot is completely different, there is little sense in having a common operating system. All it would do is "boot" and give you an API to talk to all your serial devices, and that API would inevitably be tailored to certain uses and wholly inadequate for others.
Binary logic is only applicable to law if you use a qubit.
There is such a thing as "I know you fucking did it, but the legal system has loopholes that force me to let you go free". Ever heard of a little nobody called O.J. Simpson ? Now I have nothing against O.J., and in my own twisted way, I can almost sympathize with his situation, but I digress...
Unless one can define a perfect system where you can be 100% sure someone did the crime or not, you will always have a big fuzzy gap between guilty and innocent. Lawyers exist solely to play within that gap and try to stretch it in the client's advantage.
I like the idea some have suggested, that this is to stimulate discussion and get the student to test or challenge their ideology, but I think we're putting too much faith (ba-dum-TSS!) into this prof's motivations.
What really concerns me is how they use the word "hostile". This engenders the dirty old "US vs THEM" mentality, an exclusionary attitude that has been the driving force behind holy wars since the dawn of humanity. By labeling us sane scientific folks as "hostile", they are planting the seeds of cult mentality into these fertile minds, like subliminal programming. For all intents and purposes, I don't give a flying fuck what people choose to call their imaginary friend in the clouds. I just have a problem with them using those perceptual differences as an excuse to attack each other.
When calling one's ideas "hostile", it is very easy to slide down into calling the entire person "hostile", and that's how we wind up with death cults, suicide bombers, Fred Phelps... The world doesn't need this silly Creationism fad to become another gay-bashing troupe of inbreds and micro-fascists.
You're right, it's a full-featured PC being used as a dumb terminal using HTML and XML over TCP instead of ASCII over serial.
The whole web app fad caught on largely because people are too dumb to care. The things people think of as web "apps", are really just bastardizations of offline apps that don't benefit at all from being web-based. Photoshop in flash ? Who gives a shit!? The idea behind a network, any network, is to enable collaboration. If all you're doing is going to a single-service web site to do something completely isolated, you are not using a "web app", you're using a shitty app with only a web UI. There's a huge difference!
Facebook is an example of a web app. Basecamp is another. Even Bugmenot and Ratemyrack are proper web apps. You could recreate those as binary, installed apps on your PC, but they would still depend on a network and it would make them less open. A web-based image resizer, on the other hand, is a stripped-down half-assed tool whose Javascript footprint is larger than the 30k binary it's trying to imitate, and it adds nothing to the network. In a sense, it is almost parasitic.
This is less about timesharing, and more about buzzword hysteria. This retarded mentality that everything should be on the web, for no reason other than everyone else is doing it.
The difference between your attitude and the parent's, is that you're advocating a "sell out at any cost" kind of whoring, while the other guy is proposing an equal-footing type of relationship.
If you're starving and are willing to take any shitty job that comes your way, by all means kiss ass and ask brown "questions" whose answer you don't actually care for. If instead you're looking for a satisfying career where your skills can flourish in a healthy way, being a "difficult" candidate is the way to go. If looking out for yourself makes you look bad to a potential employer, chances are you wouldn't like working there anyway. A job can be so much more than just a paycheque, but if you're only shopping for the latter, then that's all you'll get.
Frankly, I think people should ask their employers more difficult questions. If they make excuses or are ashamed to answer truthfully, that's just the tip of the iceberg and you should probably jump ship. I don't even care what the question is, if it's something that matters to you, it should matter to them too, and if it doesn't then you will never see eye-to-eye.
This reminds me of a funny T-shirt I often wear, it says "Everytime you see a rainbow, god is having gay sex". The reason I love it is because the only people who find it offensive, well I find THEM offensive (overly religious and/or homophobic wackos). Everyone else thinks it's hilarious and witty. Tough interview questions are just like that - they smoke out the people you don't want in your work environment, while flattering the ones you do.
Has no one grabbed these people by the ears and told them : "What you are trying to do is stupid by design" ? I've eviscerated clients over far milder offences.
Yes, the latency issue is obvious. Even if they can get it down to 30ms round-trip (perfectly feasible in the U.S.), it's still too much. Why ? Well let's assume 30 fps progressive display, that means every single action will be at least three frames behind. Why ? Because games already work on a precisely synced loop. The input will get there 15ms late, so it misses "its" rendering cycle and has to wait for the next pass. Then the video result needs to be compressed and sent back with another 15ms delay. Even assuming instant video compression (yeah right!), by the time you see the result of your action, the game engine is processing the 3rd frame ahead. In reality the video compression probably adds another 15 to 20ms at the very least, so you're now four frames behind - IF you're lucky.
Then there's the infrastructure to deliver this remote gaming experience. You need: big honkin' game machines (one per simultaneous client), big honkin' top-tier bandwidth, big honkin' support crew. None of these things are cheap, and since your servers need to be physically close to the customer base, everyone's going to be playing around the same time slots, and your game servers will sit idle about 2/3rds of the time. How can that be profitable ?
I think from an conceptual/philosophical perspective, instant anywhere gaming is a futuristic ideal. From a practical standpoint, it doesn't fly due to the damning technological limitations. It is a service that could be far better delivered by individual ISPs, just a hop or two away from the client, and that might be a good partnership strategy for this company, but to self-deliver the service like any other web service, that's suicide.
Please don't make unverified claims. I have seen this happen first-hand on several residential switches (5/8 port Linksys/Acer/whatever). It's how they can get away with crapping 8 ports on an underpowered processor with piddly amounts of memory.
There's basically 3 ways a switch can deal with ARP overload:
1. Ditch the least recently seen address (annoying and laggy but relatively clean) 2. Slow down, panic, and stop forwarding packets altogether (hello Linksys) 3. Ignore ARP entirely and revert to being a dumb hub, at least temporarily until everyone shuts up
You'd be surprised how many A+ asshats have daisy-chained those cheap switches to save a buck. I remember one guy who had a cage full of shitty old gear going into a bunch of $40 Aopen switches, because he figured it was cheaper to cram a few U's with those tiny 8-port toys than to drop real money on a bunch of FSM750s. His latency was pretty bad for 100mbit, but his brain was even slower so he cared not. Then one day he added one device too many and a true packet storm ensued, which caused his entire network to seize within minutes. One switch barfed, then another, and another... he had four or five of them per rack, times maybe ten racks. I tried to explain how retarded he was for trying to save maybe $1000 per rack, when each rack had at least 50k worth of gear, but they say ignorance is bliss.
The nearly 20'C difference is too much to be true. In particular, there is no mention of the ambient room temperature, and since the tests were performed on different days, it is a pretty important discrepancy.
Had the tests all been performed in quick succession, the results would be far more representative. For all we know, the Arctic Silver measurement may have been taken in the summer, inside a closed and poorly chassis while dinner was cooking, while the diamond measurement might have been taken in the middle of winter with the window open.
Pulling numbers out of my ass, I would realistically expect no more than a 4-5'C improvement with diamond paste over the regular stuff.
Most of the studies I've read suggest that the detection range is usually less than a month for the occasional smoker
That's still about, oh, 29.5 days too broad. So what if someone enjoys a joint over the weekend, or in the evening ? As long as they're not stoned at work, I couldn't care less. Why is marijuana more evil than alcohol ? Yesterday's partying was hella crazy, yet I'm perfectly capable of doing my job today because the booze has run its course and I've had plenty of time to sober up. My BAC is probably zero or very close to it, and I'm at no risk of getting in trouble for boozing 24 hours ago, so why should a pot smoker be treated any worse ?
The problem of course is that the police is not necessarily interested in a fair assessment of someone's driving habits. It will greatly reduce "income" since they will no longer be able to arrest anyone anywhere for any drug or alcohol related excuse.
If the police system cared about the people and not the money, they'd stop trying to control crime with fines.
Bell fucks with DNS, Rogers hijacks web traffic to insert little messages about your bandwidth usage. Those two are just bad netizens all around.
The simplest solution to Bell's DNS mongling is to not use their DNS. If you can't set up your own recursive DNS server (bind), well try to find an open DNS you can mooch off of. Maybe Bell's corporate side doesn't do this kind of bullshit, just a guess...
No, eventually you will migrate to a cheaper ISP that's not being blackmailed by all these content providers. Switching ISPs, for most residential users, is extremely easy. You call up the new guy, give him your credit info, then call the old one and cancel your service. There is no loyalty in the ISP business, people jump ship all the time to score a better deal or faster service.
Internet service providers will not be able to 'block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade' access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device
No, Mr Markey, you don't fucking get it. Back to the drawing board, please!
IANAL, but I am wise enough to know that the bolded words are a LOOPHOLE. Every single bit of data should be transmitted without obstruction by the ISP. If they can't be trusted as judge, they certainly can't be trusted as executioner either. Let law enforcement do what law enforcement does, and keep the ISP out of it. The only thing this bill will cause, if succesfully passed into law, will be to spur the introduction of many more bills to codify a slew of "unlawful" things the telcos want to police. It's not like they have any shortage of lobbyists and contribution money. Take the whole thing out of their grasp.
If a highway construction guy barricaded a highway, by his own whim, because he suspects "his" highway might be used by drug traffickers, is he legally permitted to do so ? Or is that considered vigilante behaviour ? Then why should we allow ISPs to be vigilante internet cops ?
They still do this, AFAIK. It's always for the "catalog list", or in one rather entertaining case it was "a 50 dollar draw". Sometimes they'll give the customer tons of grief until you give out the info.
As a fun-loving asshole, when I have the time to burn, I take a few minutes to tell the manager exactly why and how much I despise the practice. In the one incident where they lied about a random cash drawing, I insisted to see the contest documentation specifying the closing date and eligibility requirements (as per law here in Canada, probably similar in the states). It took about 10 minutes until the manager finally admitted "there is no draw, HQ wants your info for the database".
Another time, the cashier refused to let me pay and leave until I gave him my vitals. Cue another 10-minute debate, including a phone call to the regional manager. They still wouldn't let me buy the damned thing (some TV gadget that was on sale). I wound up sending the consumer protection hounds after them, which I believe is somewhat unique to Quebec as they are a provincial org like a super-BBB with legal powers, which fined the store pretty heavily and sure enough, they stopped asking for PII shortly thereafter. But that's just the one store...
Back to the topic, I'm rather glad they're renaming to "The Shack". That just makes them even easier to forget. I'm eager to see them fall into bankruptcy, because that means their dozens of locations will be replaced with something else... oooh maybe a Taco hut !
The stores were terrible long before the name change / acquisition. Radio Shack in Canada has pretty much always sucked. It's nothing like the American chain.
Gripes:
- Everything costs 8 times more than your average no-name electronic supply store - they even make Active look good, that's a feat! - They don't stock the things a real electronics hobbyist would need. They have two choice of "assorted packs" for resistors, no caps, no inductors, no log pots, ONE V-reg. - The things they do stock, no one ever buys, the blister packs are all yellowed from being on a peg for 10 years. - Yet they have two dozen alarm clock radios, a bunch of cheap chinese RC toys, white-box self-branded PC accessories, and over 9000 universal remotes - And their sales people are completely utterly useless. Sometimes well-meaning, but they couldn't tell a D-Cell from a buttplug.
The Source is essentially a mall-parasitic version of the tiny "a/v accessories" row in a Future Shop / Best Buy or Wal-Mart. They exist solely to cash in on meandering suckers. Anyone with half a brain would drive or even walk across the street to the big box store and buy the same thing (or better) for half the price.
Except for the fact that if you're a slow/weak walker, you'd rather be seated than have to stand on this contraption.
I see the Segway as an excellent indoor or limited-range vehicle, e.g. in museums, malls, factories, big dumb mansions, maybe golf courses ? The submitter's example of mall guards is perfect, IMO. They have to make their rounds a gazillion times, where the increased mobility is greatly welcome.
For everyday commuting, however, the Segway is far too restrictive and simply unusable in many cities due to pedestrian volume, regardless of bylaws. Even in my relatively quiet Ottawa, I couldn't see myself using this on the sidewalks, and with all the idiot gov't drivers I wouldn't trust the streets either.
I hardly ever handwrite anymore. I can go for months without using a pen, and most of the time it's only for my signature. Mind you, I am a technology worker. I spend most of my waking hours at or near a computer.
My handwriting has always been crap throughout my school years, but now it's absolutely horrendous. I never write in cursive form anymore, only detached letters, and to be frank I always thought cursive was weird and counter-productive - why make it "pretty" if you're not doing it for show? To me, handwriting is a fallback, for when a keyboard is not available or convenient. I can type at least 5 to 8 times faster than I can write, and frankly if we'd had laptops in high school, I probably would have fared better in regurgitation-heavy classes such as history and geography, simply because I couldn't keep up with all the boring writing.
Slashdot Mirror
That's funny, my 3-year old HP notebook gives me the choice to turn VT on or off, right there in the otherwise useless System Config.
Sony didn't just make it "harder" to enable, they've purposely removed the choice to do so. Enjoy your nerfed laptop, because Sony wants to protect the people buying $2500 laptops from their own rampant ignorance.
That sort of mentality is partially why so many geeks hate Sony with a passion. Sure, they make shiny products (that don't last), but the pervasive attitude is that they seem to think their customers are mind-blowingly stupid. Don't get me wrong, people are mostly dumb, but not THAT dumb.
I, for one, welcome our Visual Basic robot overlords.
Either some really dense guy is trolling for venture capital, or the New Scientist editor got majorly trolled. Since every single robot is completely different, there is little sense in having a common operating system. All it would do is "boot" and give you an API to talk to all your serial devices, and that API would inevitably be tailored to certain uses and wholly inadequate for others.
Binary logic is only applicable to law if you use a qubit.
There is such a thing as "I know you fucking did it, but the legal system has loopholes that force me to let you go free". Ever heard of a little nobody called O.J. Simpson ? Now I have nothing against O.J., and in my own twisted way, I can almost sympathize with his situation, but I digress...
Unless one can define a perfect system where you can be 100% sure someone did the crime or not, you will always have a big fuzzy gap between guilty and innocent. Lawyers exist solely to play within that gap and try to stretch it in the client's advantage.
I like the idea some have suggested, that this is to stimulate discussion and get the student to test or challenge their ideology, but I think we're putting too much faith (ba-dum-TSS!) into this prof's motivations.
What really concerns me is how they use the word "hostile". This engenders the dirty old "US vs THEM" mentality, an exclusionary attitude that has been the driving force behind holy wars since the dawn of humanity. By labeling us sane scientific folks as "hostile", they are planting the seeds of cult mentality into these fertile minds, like subliminal programming. For all intents and purposes, I don't give a flying fuck what people choose to call their imaginary friend in the clouds. I just have a problem with them using those perceptual differences as an excuse to attack each other.
When calling one's ideas "hostile", it is very easy to slide down into calling the entire person "hostile", and that's how we wind up with death cults, suicide bombers, Fred Phelps... The world doesn't need this silly Creationism fad to become another gay-bashing troupe of inbreds and micro-fascists.
You're right, it's a full-featured PC being used as a dumb terminal using HTML and XML over TCP instead of ASCII over serial. The whole web app fad caught on largely because people are too dumb to care. The things people think of as web "apps", are really just bastardizations of offline apps that don't benefit at all from being web-based. Photoshop in flash ? Who gives a shit!? The idea behind a network, any network, is to enable collaboration. If all you're doing is going to a single-service web site to do something completely isolated, you are not using a "web app", you're using a shitty app with only a web UI. There's a huge difference! Facebook is an example of a web app. Basecamp is another. Even Bugmenot and Ratemyrack are proper web apps. You could recreate those as binary, installed apps on your PC, but they would still depend on a network and it would make them less open. A web-based image resizer, on the other hand, is a stripped-down half-assed tool whose Javascript footprint is larger than the 30k binary it's trying to imitate, and it adds nothing to the network. In a sense, it is almost parasitic. This is less about timesharing, and more about buzzword hysteria. This retarded mentality that everything should be on the web, for no reason other than everyone else is doing it.
The difference between your attitude and the parent's, is that you're advocating a "sell out at any cost" kind of whoring, while the other guy is proposing an equal-footing type of relationship. If you're starving and are willing to take any shitty job that comes your way, by all means kiss ass and ask brown "questions" whose answer you don't actually care for. If instead you're looking for a satisfying career where your skills can flourish in a healthy way, being a "difficult" candidate is the way to go. If looking out for yourself makes you look bad to a potential employer, chances are you wouldn't like working there anyway. A job can be so much more than just a paycheque, but if you're only shopping for the latter, then that's all you'll get. Frankly, I think people should ask their employers more difficult questions. If they make excuses or are ashamed to answer truthfully, that's just the tip of the iceberg and you should probably jump ship. I don't even care what the question is, if it's something that matters to you, it should matter to them too, and if it doesn't then you will never see eye-to-eye. This reminds me of a funny T-shirt I often wear, it says "Everytime you see a rainbow, god is having gay sex". The reason I love it is because the only people who find it offensive, well I find THEM offensive (overly religious and/or homophobic wackos). Everyone else thinks it's hilarious and witty. Tough interview questions are just like that - they smoke out the people you don't want in your work environment, while flattering the ones you do.
Grr... stupid code mode. Why can't we have the drop-down like old slashdot ?
Has no one grabbed these people by the ears and told them : "What you are trying to do is stupid by design" ? I've eviscerated clients over far milder offences.
Yes, the latency issue is obvious. Even if they can get it down to 30ms round-trip (perfectly feasible in the U.S.), it's still too much. Why ? Well let's assume 30 fps progressive display, that means every single action will be at least three frames behind. Why ? Because games already work on a precisely synced loop. The input will get there 15ms late, so it misses "its" rendering cycle and has to wait for the next pass. Then the video result needs to be compressed and sent back with another 15ms delay. Even assuming instant video compression (yeah right!), by the time you see the result of your action, the game engine is processing the 3rd frame ahead. In reality the video compression probably adds another 15 to 20ms at the very least, so you're now four frames behind - IF you're lucky.
Then there's the infrastructure to deliver this remote gaming experience. You need: big honkin' game machines (one per simultaneous client), big honkin' top-tier bandwidth, big honkin' support crew. None of these things are cheap, and since your servers need to be physically close to the customer base, everyone's going to be playing around the same time slots, and your game servers will sit idle about 2/3rds of the time. How can that be profitable ?
I think from an conceptual/philosophical perspective, instant anywhere gaming is a futuristic ideal. From a practical standpoint, it doesn't fly due to the damning technological limitations. It is a service that could be far better delivered by individual ISPs, just a hop or two away from the client, and that might be a good partnership strategy for this company, but to self-deliver the service like any other web service, that's suicide.
# apt-get install gentoo-amd64
Segmentation fault
Please don't make unverified claims. I have seen this happen first-hand on several residential switches (5/8 port Linksys/Acer/whatever). It's how they can get away with crapping 8 ports on an underpowered processor with piddly amounts of memory.
There's basically 3 ways a switch can deal with ARP overload:
1. Ditch the least recently seen address (annoying and laggy but relatively clean)
2. Slow down, panic, and stop forwarding packets altogether (hello Linksys)
3. Ignore ARP entirely and revert to being a dumb hub, at least temporarily until everyone shuts up
You'd be surprised how many A+ asshats have daisy-chained those cheap switches to save a buck. I remember one guy who had a cage full of shitty old gear going into a bunch of $40 Aopen switches, because he figured it was cheaper to cram a few U's with those tiny 8-port toys than to drop real money on a bunch of FSM750s. His latency was pretty bad for 100mbit, but his brain was even slower so he cared not. Then one day he added one device too many and a true packet storm ensued, which caused his entire network to seize within minutes. One switch barfed, then another, and another... he had four or five of them per rack, times maybe ten racks. I tried to explain how retarded he was for trying to save maybe $1000 per rack, when each rack had at least 50k worth of gear, but they say ignorance is bliss.
The nearly 20'C difference is too much to be true. In particular, there is no mention of the ambient room temperature, and since the tests were performed on different days, it is a pretty important discrepancy.
Had the tests all been performed in quick succession, the results would be far more representative. For all we know, the Arctic Silver measurement may have been taken in the summer, inside a closed and poorly chassis while dinner was cooking, while the diamond measurement might have been taken in the middle of winter with the window open.
Pulling numbers out of my ass, I would realistically expect no more than a 4-5'C improvement with diamond paste over the regular stuff.
There is a manufacturer: http://www.innovationcooling.com/
Do not taunt happy fun wife.
Most of the studies I've read suggest that the detection range is usually less than a month for the occasional smoker
That's still about, oh, 29.5 days too broad. So what if someone enjoys a joint over the weekend, or in the evening ? As long as they're not stoned at work, I couldn't care less. Why is marijuana more evil than alcohol ? Yesterday's partying was hella crazy, yet I'm perfectly capable of doing my job today because the booze has run its course and I've had plenty of time to sober up. My BAC is probably zero or very close to it, and I'm at no risk of getting in trouble for boozing 24 hours ago, so why should a pot smoker be treated any worse ?
The problem of course is that the police is not necessarily interested in a fair assessment of someone's driving habits. It will greatly reduce "income" since they will no longer be able to arrest anyone anywhere for any drug or alcohol related excuse.
If the police system cared about the people and not the money, they'd stop trying to control crime with fines.
Bell fucks with DNS, Rogers hijacks web traffic to insert little messages about your bandwidth usage. Those two are just bad netizens all around.
The simplest solution to Bell's DNS mongling is to not use their DNS. If you can't set up your own recursive DNS server (bind), well try to find an open DNS you can mooch off of. Maybe Bell's corporate side doesn't do this kind of bullshit, just a guess...
Are you mad ? Violent criminals are *gasp* VIOLENT!
How many times have you heard about a cop getting shot in the face by an Xbox modder ?
(for those readers who fail english)
No, eventually you will migrate to a cheaper ISP that's not being blackmailed by all these content providers. Switching ISPs, for most residential users, is extremely easy. You call up the new guy, give him your credit info, then call the old one and cancel your service. There is no loyalty in the ISP business, people jump ship all the time to score a better deal or faster service.
Internet service providers will not be able to 'block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade' access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device
No, Mr Markey, you don't fucking get it. Back to the drawing board, please!
IANAL, but I am wise enough to know that the bolded words are a LOOPHOLE. Every single bit of data should be transmitted without obstruction by the ISP. If they can't be trusted as judge, they certainly can't be trusted as executioner either. Let law enforcement do what law enforcement does, and keep the ISP out of it. The only thing this bill will cause, if succesfully passed into law, will be to spur the introduction of many more bills to codify a slew of "unlawful" things the telcos want to police. It's not like they have any shortage of lobbyists and contribution money. Take the whole thing out of their grasp.
If a highway construction guy barricaded a highway, by his own whim, because he suspects "his" highway might be used by drug traffickers, is he legally permitted to do so ? Or is that considered vigilante behaviour ? Then why should we allow ISPs to be vigilante internet cops ?
They still do this, AFAIK. It's always for the "catalog list", or in one rather entertaining case it was "a 50 dollar draw". Sometimes they'll give the customer tons of grief until you give out the info.
As a fun-loving asshole, when I have the time to burn, I take a few minutes to tell the manager exactly why and how much I despise the practice. In the one incident where they lied about a random cash drawing, I insisted to see the contest documentation specifying the closing date and eligibility requirements (as per law here in Canada, probably similar in the states). It took about 10 minutes until the manager finally admitted "there is no draw, HQ wants your info for the database".
Another time, the cashier refused to let me pay and leave until I gave him my vitals. Cue another 10-minute debate, including a phone call to the regional manager. They still wouldn't let me buy the damned thing (some TV gadget that was on sale). I wound up sending the consumer protection hounds after them, which I believe is somewhat unique to Quebec as they are a provincial org like a super-BBB with legal powers, which fined the store pretty heavily and sure enough, they stopped asking for PII shortly thereafter. But that's just the one store...
Back to the topic, I'm rather glad they're renaming to "The Shack". That just makes them even easier to forget. I'm eager to see them fall into bankruptcy, because that means their dozens of locations will be replaced with something else... oooh maybe a Taco hut !
So is phishing.
They both prey on synaptically-deficient suckers.
The stores were terrible long before the name change / acquisition. Radio Shack in Canada has pretty much always sucked. It's nothing like the American chain.
Gripes:
- Everything costs 8 times more than your average no-name electronic supply store - they even make Active look good, that's a feat!
- They don't stock the things a real electronics hobbyist would need. They have two choice of "assorted packs" for resistors, no caps, no inductors, no log pots, ONE V-reg.
- The things they do stock, no one ever buys, the blister packs are all yellowed from being on a peg for 10 years.
- Yet they have two dozen alarm clock radios, a bunch of cheap chinese RC toys, white-box self-branded PC accessories, and over 9000 universal remotes
- And their sales people are completely utterly useless. Sometimes well-meaning, but they couldn't tell a D-Cell from a buttplug.
The Source is essentially a mall-parasitic version of the tiny "a/v accessories" row in a Future Shop / Best Buy or Wal-Mart. They exist solely to cash in on meandering suckers. Anyone with half a brain would drive or even walk across the street to the big box store and buy the same thing (or better) for half the price.
Except for the fact that if you're a slow/weak walker, you'd rather be seated than have to stand on this contraption.
I see the Segway as an excellent indoor or limited-range vehicle, e.g. in museums, malls, factories, big dumb mansions, maybe golf courses ? The submitter's example of mall guards is perfect, IMO. They have to make their rounds a gazillion times, where the increased mobility is greatly welcome.
For everyday commuting, however, the Segway is far too restrictive and simply unusable in many cities due to pedestrian volume, regardless of bylaws. Even in my relatively quiet Ottawa, I couldn't see myself using this on the sidewalks, and with all the idiot gov't drivers I wouldn't trust the streets either.
It's an excellent niche product, end of story.
How about real cops and a real ATM ?
What ??? You think those guys are all honest ? Humans is humans.
I hardly ever handwrite anymore. I can go for months without using a pen, and most of the time it's only for my signature. Mind you, I am a technology worker. I spend most of my waking hours at or near a computer.
My handwriting has always been crap throughout my school years, but now it's absolutely horrendous. I never write in cursive form anymore, only detached letters, and to be frank I always thought cursive was weird and counter-productive - why make it "pretty" if you're not doing it for show? To me, handwriting is a fallback, for when a keyboard is not available or convenient. I can type at least 5 to 8 times faster than I can write, and frankly if we'd had laptops in high school, I probably would have fared better in regurgitation-heavy classes such as history and geography, simply because I couldn't keep up with all the boring writing.