One minor point: Thunderbird is compatible with multiple platforms. Pegasus Mail only runs on Windows or DOS. I can migrate all my information from Firefox or Thunderbird from Windows to Linux to Mac OS X in minutes. I'm sure Pegasus is great software but I disklike anything that ties me into any specific platform, especially Windows. At home I use Linux and Windows and at work I use Mac OS X, so cross platform applications are very nice to have around.
If you took some time to submit some feature requests for Thunderbird, you could help introduce features to rival Pegasus Mail (or eclipse it) and make Thunderbird better for all people on all the compatible platforms. This is why I support open source software. It's usually not the greatest stuff around, but it's made for people like me by people like me, and if I really care I can have a hand in its evolution, and make it better for everyone else too.
I urge anyone who has a problem with Thunderbird to submit feature requests and bug reports to the Mozilla team.
For Linux users there's Pan. It kicked ass doing multiple downloads and combine & decodes of messages with hundreds of parts, and that was at least three years ago. I'm sure it's just as good if not better now. You could queue up hundreds or even thousands of posts for it to chew through without any further input.
There's even a version compiled for Windows, but you have to install GTK2.
From what I understand the position of the Catholic church is that contraception is bad (evil). The behavior of a large number of people in the developing world is governed by the Catholic church, and thus by this philosophy about contraception. If they all have 6 kids and you only have one, you don't matter. The stereotypical Catholics have more influence than you on the world's population. How you can be Catholic and avoid having 6 kids is beyond me, unless you use some kind of contraception, which would make you not really representative of the Catholic faith. I also don't see how only a small fraction of Catholics could fit the "stereotype" when the contraception issue is a core belief.
In future posts, how about leaving out the "fuckstick" argument and putting in something that carries some weight. Take your own advice and use the gray matter.
You are part of an extreme minority, it would seem. You have no intrinsic right to define indecency for the entire United States population of TV viewers. It might be different if you had no way to keep this indecency out of your life, but there's this little thing called an OFF switch. If you see something you don't like or that you think your children shouldn't be watching, turn the idiot box off. Watch a DVD of your own choosing, or read a book. If you think it was really offensive, write a personal letter to the station to point out that you are no longer viewing their ads because of their content. Write letters to the advertisers. Government censorship of the entire nation is not the answer to your personal problem.
If enough people actually cared enough to sit down individually and write out a complaint about something, things would change. Until that happens, this is just a tiny group of whiners trying to force the rest of the nation to watch what they want to watch. There is no reason that should be allowed. It's one thing to defend the right of a small minority to express themselves in their own way in their own venue without persecution. This is another thing entirely. This is like trying to force everyone to adopt your personal religion. It's a violation of the First Amendment. How can you not see that?
Most of us who own Epsons wished that the heads were replaceable, so we wouldn't have to throw away the whole machine every year or so when the heads get permanently clogged.
What are you talking about? Epson print heads are replaceable, you just can't do it yourself. Send it in for service. Plus there are various ways of keeping the heads from getting clogged, from using special cleaning tanks to setting the print heads overnight on a paper towel soaked with alcohol.
You were kidding about throwing away a year-old Epson, right?
Keep an eye on NeoOffice/J, it's a separate build of OpenOffice.org that's being ported to use the native Mac OS X interface (Aqua) so it doesn't require X11. Kind of a stopgap measure while we all wait for OOo 2.0. They seem to be coming along pretty fast. It's still under heavy development but some folks are already using it on a daily basis. For those who can't afford MS Office for the Mac it's already a halfway decent alternative. It's huge, of course, but will probably behave better on the type of Word documents that you have been having trouble with in AbiWord. Might be worth a look.
Actually, there is another more fitting word for what Lycos attempted to do: vigilantism. That's taking the law into your own hands, and it's something that should only be undertaken as a last resort, otherwise the world turns against you. Once you stoop to that level you open the playing field for the other guys to do the same thing to you, and you no longer have any ethical argument against them since you did it yourself. You went outside the law or the established rules of behaviour for civilized parties. Unless things are totally out of hand, this is usually a big mistake.
Nobody has a "right" to go around DDoSing anyone, unless the law says so. Nobody's life was on the line because of a few spammers, so there was no good reason for this kind of vigilantism. We will eventually find a solution for spam through a combination of technical and legislative means. It won't be by starting a bunch of escalating DDoS wars. You want chaos, fine. Just leave us out of it.
Governments and ISPs all over the world are already rapidly waking up to the fact that spamming is destroying the usefulness of the Internet on which many legitimate businesses now depend. It's only a matter of time before enough spammers get cut off from the net, fined or imprisoned and spamming will drop drastically even without any technical intervention.
There was simply no need for this boneheaded stunt, even disregarding the fact that it was ethically wrong under these circumstances. Lycos gets no respect from me for this idiocy. Being a man doesn't always mean thinking with your testosterone. The direct and violent way is not always the best way. Your comment is simply ridiculous in this context. Of course you are free to pick up the towel yourself, mister manly man. Go ahead, whip up a zombie fleet and start DDoSing spam sites. See how much good it does. You'll piss off half the world and make the spammers more technically resilient. Brilliant.
A typical answer. You can't really find an answer in the Bible, so you get to make one up out of thin air based on the way you subjectively feel God should behave. You come up with an answer that makes you feel good and then move on. To me the question is far too large and too important for that to be acceptable.
This is a good point that most people don't seem to take into account. It's natural selection at work. Those who have an overall genetic structure that doesn't allow them to handle living more than 100 years will die out. The genetic makeup of the remaining population will favor more of a balanced person that will have no problem with living as long as a redwood tree. Those prone to accidents, depression and disease will be slowly weeded out over time. We'll be left with nothing but shiny, happy people.
Of course this natural selection process is going to take several million years to get everything worked out... so let's get started!
I'm reminded of a story I read once where an ultra-rich guy was at a hospital getting his ultra-expensive immortality treatment that nobody else in the world could afford. Of course when he walked out through the lobby somebody shot him. If you think the ultra-rich are despised now, just imagine if they could also be immortal. Poor people hate rich people already, but at least they know that money can't buy immortality. Eventually, rich people die too, and they can't take the money with them.
Now imagine the treatment is cheap enough to provide to everyone. Cool, except that the new immortals are going to be just as stupid as they were before they were immortal. All the Catholics and uneducated third-worlders will continue to have as many children as possible, either because that's what God told them to do (Catholics) or just because that's what they've always done.
Other religious types will form groups that start killing off anyone who has taken the immortality treatment, because trying not to die is obviously going against God's wishes. Overpopulation would skyrocket and war and conflict would be more rampant than at any time in history. There's only so much space, and there's plenty of hateful, fanatical religions to go around.
Sure, immortality sounds great, and I'm sure we'll soon be working on getting people past 150 on a routine basis, but it's going to cause an amazing amount of problems on various levels if it ever really gets off the ground.
Of course, that won't keep me from standing in line for my shot.;)
Sure, you could have created the sig in TB itself and saved it as text, but that is just as far beyond most people as creating it in Notepad. You still have to decide where to save the file on your drive (on the desktop, of course) and then enter the preferences and browse to that location. That "browsing to a file they've just saved" thing seems to be a real challenge for a lot of people too. I haven't really figured out why that is.
That multiple identities thing just appeared in TB recently, and it's not a real answer to the signature problem. One shouldn't have to change their whole identity just to insert a different sig. Definitely kludgier than it should ever have been.
All in all there are a lot of things about TB that haven't been very well thought out. Yet. Here's to the future. And it's not going to keep me from recommending it to Windows users as a free replacement for OE.
People are inherently condemned to hell already because all people sin. That's the beauty of it: God doesn't send anyone to hell (because we're already heading that way) - he only provides a way for them to be saved through Christ.
Ever since I grasped this concept, I've had a huge problem with it. All humans are automitically going to Hell, and the only way to be saved is to hear about this "Christ" character. Huh. What if I'm one of the millions of humans who never heard of Christ because I didn't live near where Christ lived? Because of my ignorance I am to be automatically condemned to a lake of fire for all eternity? Really, I'd like to know. I've never gotten a clear answer on this one. What happens to all those people who live their entire lives and never hear about this Christ person and how he can "save" us all?
From what I can see, this has a couple different possible answers. One is, yes, all those ignorant savages go to Hell automatically. In which case, how could you possibly believe in or worship a God who would allow that to happen. That's unbelievably monstrous.
The other possible answer is that being ignorant of Christ they get a sort of free pass. In which case why would you send out missionaries to inform them of Christ, thus stripping them of this shield of ignorance that protects them from the wrath of God? That's cruel, since a lot of them would either not accept Christ or fail to live by the rules, and end up going to Hell. Why would you do that to people?
In the olden days of course I would have been burned or imprisoned as a heretic for asking questions like this. I think it's a perfectly rational question that deserves an answer.
I get a lot of email from corporate clients that I wouldn't be able to read (either partially or entirely), and it's not appropriate for me to tell them it's their problem.
I would think it would always be appropriate to tell the people you are communicating with that they are sending you something that you can't read. If they sent you a snail-mail letter written in binary, wouldn't you say something about that, or would you go looking for a binary-to-english dictionary? If enough people speak up, things change. Sometimes it only takes one person to explain the problem before it gets fixed.
That signature issue in particular is a good indicator, I think, of the general reason why Thunderbird (and Mozilla Mail before it) never really "spread like wildfire". I'm not sure what somebody was thinking. I mean, come on. You have to create some kind of text file outside of Mozilla with Notepad or something, save it somewhere (no default location), and then go in to the preferences and browse to the location of that text file that you somehow figured out how to create. And you can only have that one text file, so only one signature unless you go through that process again. And it's either there or it isn't.
The whole process is totally nonsensical to your average user. Other email clients will just let you choose a signature to insert from a list. That's the kind of thing people like. Thunderbird and Mozilla Mail have just been kind of rough in spots until now. Built in mail filtering not withstanding, it just hasn't had anything special to pull people away from Eudora, OE, Pegasus or Opera Mail.
And yes, we are talking about the average Windows user here, the 95% of the population that this software is supposedly being marketed to. In that world there are a lot of users who do not know how to create a simple plain text file with Notepad.
On Mac OS X the case for TB is pretty hopeless. Apple Mail integrates with the rest of the OS like clockwork and is a hell of a lot prettier. I'm actually kind of surprised to see Thunderbird getting to 1.0 so fast. In my opinion it still needs a lot of usability enhancements and beautifying to really compete with other email clients the way Firefox can compete on level ground with all the other browsers. Maybe a miracle has happened since 0.9, but I doubt it.
Of course I'll still be forcing my users to use it anyway, since it's a hell of a lot better than OE on Windows.
Thank you! That was driving me crazy. I activated that option on Mac OS X hoping it would allow me to finally get into drop-down selectors on web forms by tabbing into them. Still doesn't work. Anyone know why? On Windows I've always been able to tab into any form field in any browser. On the Mac I keep having to move to the mouse to select the state and other such things that use a drop-down selection list. Very annoying.
That pulling the power plug from the wall trick was one of the things the BeOS developers would do at conferences and demos to demonstrate the robustness of the BFS journaled filesystem created by Dominic Giampaolo, who now works at Apple. It was one of the first true journaled filesystems, certainly the first available in a desktop operating system. They would unplug the machine in the middle of heavy read-write activity and show how it came right back up just as fast as when it booted clean. This was around 8 years ago, I believe, so it was a pretty big deal. A few years later Linux finally got ReiserFS, Ext3, XFS and a couple other journaling filesystems. MacOS X got journaling in version 10.2.3, if I remember right. Supposedly NTFS has been journaled for a while now, but I don't know the details on that.
The rest of the computing world has finally almost caught up to long-dead BeOS in terms of robustness and speed. I still haven't seen anything boot nearly as fast as BeOS though. If your needs are simple it's still a bitchin' OS. The original BeOS is dead but you can still find the Free BeOS 5 Personal Edition download if you look around, or you can buy an updated commercial version from these guys who bought the IP from Be, Inc. before they folded up shop. The free version was kind of cool, it was a 45MB download that expanded into a 500MB drive "image" and let you boot up BeOS from Windows. Pretty neat way to test drive a new operating system. Too bad it never stood a chance in the market against uno-hoo.
Here's a link to that free version. Scroll down a bit for the "Windows" version. Be aware that it probably won't run on newer computers with anything more advanced than a P-III. The patches for newer processors have been integrated into the commercial version, I'm sure.
Whether you love someone or not is a subjective issue, like asking whether or not FDR was a good president. God existing or not is an objective issue, like asking whether or not FDR used a wheelchair.
Wait, what? You're saying that you can point to God and say, "Look, there he is, he exists," just like you can point to FDR's physical wheelchair?
It is not possible for god to both exist and not exist, so that is NOT a subjective issue.
Your thinking appears to be rather limited. If there is-isnot a God entity that created this entire fiasco we call a universe, it would be quite possible for this creator to both exist and not exist. It could exist entirely or partially outside the universe in various ways, such that we will never be able to scientifically interact with or prove its "existence". Who are you to tell the creator of the universe what it can do, if such creator exists-notexists? Just because we don't have a word for a state of combined existence/nonexistence doesn't mean it can't be part of this universe. Never heard of quantum mechanics?
So, they pick out indivdual wheat plants with genetic defects and make sure they propogate? I don't think so.
I don't believe that you can make a blanket statement that it is cool for every person with genetic defects to pass on their genes. There are many people who physically can't have children, because of some genetic defect, who use science to get around that problem and have children anyway, even though they often have a good chance of passing on that defect to the child. I would say that in most cases people like that are weakening the gene pool, not strengthening it.
Obviously each case will be different, but when your offspring have a good chance of being nonsurvivable without massive medical help, you should be rethinking adoption. It's just as likely that any random adopted child will have those magical genes that you refer to, that should be coddled and passed on. If you adopt outside your race you are even bringing more genetic diversity into it. Somehow I don't think we have too much of a problem with diversity anyway, what with 6 bajillion of us hanging around. Soon to be 12 bajillion.
If it is proven that people are born homosexual, then the church should be FORCED to accept them, because that's how God created them.
That's pretty amusing. Apparently you don't understand how religions work. It's faith-based, not logic-based. If anything, "proving" that homosexuality results from some gene or hormone imbalance during gestation would cause certain sects to become even more radical towards gays than they already are. At this point, most Christian types think that being gay is a choice so they feel compelled to help those poor lost souls change their lives and become hetero through the power of prayer.
If it's proven that being gay is not a choice, there are a great many religious nutcases that would feel justified in murdering gays henceforth, since "obviously" they are children of Satan from the day they are born and don't belong in this world. Since children of Satan don't have souls they can't be saved, and since they are demons it won't really be murder if we kill them. Yes, there are actually people who think like this. A lot of them. At least 55 million in this country alone, I'd say.
That's how it works. God doesn't create bad things, Satan does, or at least he manipulates the good things to turn them bad. God can never be blamed for any bad thing that happens. That's blasphemy. If something bad happens to you, obviously you deserved it since God doesn't make mistakes. Or maybe you didn't deserve it, but it was all part of some grand mysterious plan and everything will work out in the End of All Things. Which will come tomorrow. I mean in 100 years. I mean 2,000 years from now. I mean...
I have wanted something like that for a long, long time. Somehow the software development world has never seemed to grasp the fact that it isn't the instability of the computer that pisses off the users so bad. It's the fact that when it does crash, you often end up losing everything you've accomplished for the last day, week, month or year. Tell me you haven't heard of or seen cases where a file that someone has been working on for weeks or months has been totally corrupted. It happens. It happens entirely too often. Sure, there's no substitute for backups, but you know you've lost entire files because you just created it that morning and hadn't done your daily backup yet. There are limits to the reasonable usefulness of backups.
If a computer crashed a dozen times a day and then always came back right where it stopped with all open documents fully recoverable, it would merely be an annoyance. Most people wouldn't care that the system was unstable. Those crashes would just give them a chance to stretch their legs for a minute while the computer comes back up. But instead, their computer crashes once every 3 months and they all too often wind up with documents that are completely unrecoverable, or a totally unbootable computer. Half a day's wasted work that must be rebuilt from scratch. That's the kind of thing that makes a guy pick up his keyboard and start beating on his monitor until it falls off his desk. We've all seen the video, and we've all felt exactly like that guy at least once in our computing career.
If someone would just take the time to come up with properly implemented full-data journaling for some common applications, they would make a fortune the likes of which Microsoft has never seen. I don't understand why common data loss is still acceptable. This is the 21st century after all. Computers have been around for half a century. Yet the closest I've seen is Word's auto-save and recover feature, which more often than not seems to fail to recover your file. Many times I've seen it "recover" on line or even nothing from a document that was many pages long. Not cool.
I tried to pitch an idea for application-level journaling on a BeOS developers' mailing list a few years back and got nothing but blank stares. As far as regular users are concerned, it would be the ultimate advancement in desktop computing, yet they (the developers) couldn't conceive any reason you'd want to do such a thing. "Get rid of one of the biggest annoyances of the whole computing experience? Why would we want to do that?"
I'm an electrical engineer serving in Baghdad w/ US forces. I've seen firsthand the detonator circuits they use for these IED's. I can tell you that I have seen MANY R/C toy systems being used as the detonator for remotely-detonated IED's.
So why aren't you transmitting all possible R/C codes and frequencies throughout the area on a regular basis, to trigger the IEDs before you enter an area, or before the bad guys have a chance to put them in place? What is the problem if an R/C truck with a camera on it trundles up to a possible bomb while you're behind a building 150 yards away, and it "accidently" blows up the IED? You were going to blow it up anyway, so if anything you just lost a $1,000 R/C truck. If these things are remotely triggerable, why aren't you remotely triggering them with a $50 R/C transmitter instead of sending in a robot that costs a quarter of a million dollars? I'm not really seeing the problem with the R/C vehicle. I don't think I'm alone. Make it more clear for us. Is it like police forensics where you want to be able to check out the device in detail before you kill it?
You may have some good points, but if the whole point of this device is to drop a charge of C4 and blow up the UXO anyway, what difference does it make if the ordnance is triggered by the RF signal of the truck when it gets too close? You lose a $1,000 RC truck. You can buy 249 more for the price of one of those Talon gizmos. The ordinance could just as easily have a magnetic detector that may be triggered by the approach of the $250,000 robot, and then you just lost a $250,000 robot. Even with stringent requirements there is really no reason that a robot with one arm, two tracks and a landline should be costing us that kind of money.
I'd bet that in 99% of battlefield situations, some little recon/destroy vehicle like this would do just fine and save lives. I'd also bet it's a hell of a lot more mobile than the $250,000 version, too. Mobile in terms of one guy being able to carry it in a backpack, like that cool surveillance plane I read about. That means even people on foot can have one of these one standby.
Something else to think about: At the price level of this RC truck it doesn't even need to be adopted by the military for it to be useful. Soldiers are already buying their own $1,000 bullet proof vests, I'm sure there are a lot of families who wouldn't mind shipping something like this over there on their own dollar if it might help keep their soldier alive long enough to get home. Hell, a typical platoon could get together and afford one even on their current meager salaries. This kind of solution has its place.
The freedom to own firearms in the United States is not solely about your own personal self defense, although that is an important aspect. Its main purpose for being in the Constitution was to make sure that the citizens had the right to choose to defend the country against attackers, both foreign and domestic. In other places the military has a tendency to form an alliance with some political group and stage a coup, often to set up a dictatorship. One of the many reasons that keeps that from happening here is that a large portion of the population is armed and willing to use those arms even against our own military or police to defend freedom against tyranny. The police, the military and the government are here to serve us, not the other way around.
Going back to personal self defense, it is actually an untruth that arming yourself will result in some sort of "arms race" with the criminal element. Most criminals are just out to make a quick buck. In an armed society they do exactly what you would do, they avoid people who are known to be armed and instead go after those who can be identified as being unarmed. Instead of coming into your house while you and your family are at home, they will go to an empty house or wait until you're on vacation. In a society where weapons are banned, there is absolutely nothing to make the criminal think twice about entering an occupied home. After all, he probably has an illegally obtained firearm, and he can be fairly certain that you have nothing equivalent to defend yourself or your family with.
I've never quite understood how anyone can think having guns at home won't make you safer. Some have a strange idea that the attacker has a good chance of taking your gun away and using it against you. Again, in real life this is shown to be bullshit. There are literally a million or so incidents every year when someone successfully defends themselves and/or others with a firearm, and in the vast majority of those incidents no shot is ever fired! The bottom line is, the police cannot protect you in 99% of situations, mostly because they simply can't be physically present and they aren't going to stop a bullet for you. If you aren't armed or at least have the right to be, you are simply giving the criminals the upper hand in your society.
No, I think they meant burglarized, just like they said. It's perfectly good English on this side of the pond, as is "buglary". English has rules but they aren't always set in stone. If you want a language that makes perfect sense go check out Lojban, previously known as Loglan.
this is only with Colour Laser Printers. Typically, only businesses can afford these types of products, as they generally range from 15,000 to 500,000Cdn. (cheaper ones)
Um, where I work we just bought a pretty hefty color laser printer for around $1,600. I think the cheapest ones are just a few hundred. That's color, not monochrome. I don't know where you get your prices. The Canadian dollar isn't quite that far below the US dollar.
It really is no big deal, its not like someone is actually trying to track your prints on a regular basis.
I will never understand this reasoning. Hey, I just tracked you down through your IP address and installed a remote keylogger on your computer. But that's OK with you, right, because you're not doing anything illegal, right? Oh don't worry, I'll only be checking it once a week or so. Not on a regular basis. That makes it OK, right? Remember that anonymous letter you're writing to expose your employer's illegal money laundering activities? I'm sure you won't mind if I insert a unique serial number in that file so that document can be traced back to you. Right? I won't be telling you about this serial number, naturally, and that's OK too. You'll find out about it when Vinny the Wrench comes to see you this Thursday evening. He'll know exactly where you are because the police installed a tracking device in your car without your knowledge, for no particular reason, despite the amazing fact that you've always been an honest, law abiding citizen, and your employer is given access to this tracking information. But that's OK, right, because you aren't doing anything illegal with your car either, and you have no reason not to let your employer know where you are at all times. Right?
Bah.
Is all that pretty unlikely? Yeah, but it's not like it's never happened to anyone. It has and it will.
So, to wrap this up, if anyone really feels paranoid, and Bush is checking every piece of paper and tracing it back to huge CorpX - then use an inkjet.
If you aren't paranoid about things like this, you don't understand how government works, or human nature, or history. Power corrupts, information is abused. That's the way the world works. You have to fight tooth and nail just to maintain the status quo, to keep the few freedoms you do have. Sure, use an inkjet, if you're aware of the fact that your hardware is allowing you to be tracked. What about those situations where you don't have a choice to use some other type of device? And who's to say that inkjets don't also have a similar chip that prints a unique serial number on everything you print? Up until today, most of us didn't think our color laser printers had anything like that inside. Inkjet printers already have either hardware or software to detect counterfitting. How easy it would be to print the printer's serial number in a nearly invisible microscopic pattern of dots.
NOBODY is trying to support counterfitting by opposing this sort of thing. Get over yourself, Mr. Law Abiding Citizen. Guess what? The rest of the world doesn't necessarily obey the law. That includes your employer, your local government, and even law enforcement personnel. I know, shocking.
drop the hubub about privacy.
We'll drop it when we think it's not important anymore. Thanks.
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One minor point: Thunderbird is compatible with multiple platforms. Pegasus Mail only runs on Windows or DOS. I can migrate all my information from Firefox or Thunderbird from Windows to Linux to Mac OS X in minutes. I'm sure Pegasus is great software but I disklike anything that ties me into any specific platform, especially Windows. At home I use Linux and Windows and at work I use Mac OS X, so cross platform applications are very nice to have around.
If you took some time to submit some feature requests for Thunderbird, you could help introduce features to rival Pegasus Mail (or eclipse it) and make Thunderbird better for all people on all the compatible platforms. This is why I support open source software. It's usually not the greatest stuff around, but it's made for people like me by people like me, and if I really care I can have a hand in its evolution, and make it better for everyone else too.
I urge anyone who has a problem with Thunderbird to submit feature requests and bug reports to the Mozilla team.
For Linux users there's Pan. It kicked ass doing multiple downloads and combine & decodes of messages with hundreds of parts, and that was at least three years ago. I'm sure it's just as good if not better now. You could queue up hundreds or even thousands of posts for it to chew through without any further input.
There's even a version compiled for Windows, but you have to install GTK2.
From what I understand the position of the Catholic church is that contraception is bad (evil). The behavior of a large number of people in the developing world is governed by the Catholic church, and thus by this philosophy about contraception. If they all have 6 kids and you only have one, you don't matter. The stereotypical Catholics have more influence than you on the world's population. How you can be Catholic and avoid having 6 kids is beyond me, unless you use some kind of contraception, which would make you not really representative of the Catholic faith. I also don't see how only a small fraction of Catholics could fit the "stereotype" when the contraception issue is a core belief.
In future posts, how about leaving out the "fuckstick" argument and putting in something that carries some weight. Take your own advice and use the gray matter.
You are part of an extreme minority, it would seem. You have no intrinsic right to define indecency for the entire United States population of TV viewers. It might be different if you had no way to keep this indecency out of your life, but there's this little thing called an OFF switch. If you see something you don't like or that you think your children shouldn't be watching, turn the idiot box off. Watch a DVD of your own choosing, or read a book. If you think it was really offensive, write a personal letter to the station to point out that you are no longer viewing their ads because of their content. Write letters to the advertisers. Government censorship of the entire nation is not the answer to your personal problem.
If enough people actually cared enough to sit down individually and write out a complaint about something, things would change. Until that happens, this is just a tiny group of whiners trying to force the rest of the nation to watch what they want to watch. There is no reason that should be allowed. It's one thing to defend the right of a small minority to express themselves in their own way in their own venue without persecution. This is another thing entirely. This is like trying to force everyone to adopt your personal religion. It's a violation of the First Amendment. How can you not see that?
Most of us who own Epsons wished that the heads were replaceable, so we wouldn't have to throw away the whole machine every year or so when the heads get permanently clogged.
What are you talking about? Epson print heads are replaceable, you just can't do it yourself. Send it in for service. Plus there are various ways of keeping the heads from getting clogged, from using special cleaning tanks to setting the print heads overnight on a paper towel soaked with alcohol.
You were kidding about throwing away a year-old Epson, right?
Keep an eye on NeoOffice/J, it's a separate build of OpenOffice.org that's being ported to use the native Mac OS X interface (Aqua) so it doesn't require X11. Kind of a stopgap measure while we all wait for OOo 2.0. They seem to be coming along pretty fast. It's still under heavy development but some folks are already using it on a daily basis. For those who can't afford MS Office for the Mac it's already a halfway decent alternative. It's huge, of course, but will probably behave better on the type of Word documents that you have been having trouble with in AbiWord. Might be worth a look.
Actually, there is another more fitting word for what Lycos attempted to do: vigilantism. That's taking the law into your own hands, and it's something that should only be undertaken as a last resort, otherwise the world turns against you. Once you stoop to that level you open the playing field for the other guys to do the same thing to you, and you no longer have any ethical argument against them since you did it yourself. You went outside the law or the established rules of behaviour for civilized parties. Unless things are totally out of hand, this is usually a big mistake.
Nobody has a "right" to go around DDoSing anyone, unless the law says so. Nobody's life was on the line because of a few spammers, so there was no good reason for this kind of vigilantism. We will eventually find a solution for spam through a combination of technical and legislative means. It won't be by starting a bunch of escalating DDoS wars. You want chaos, fine. Just leave us out of it.
Governments and ISPs all over the world are already rapidly waking up to the fact that spamming is destroying the usefulness of the Internet on which many legitimate businesses now depend. It's only a matter of time before enough spammers get cut off from the net, fined or imprisoned and spamming will drop drastically even without any technical intervention.
There was simply no need for this boneheaded stunt, even disregarding the fact that it was ethically wrong under these circumstances. Lycos gets no respect from me for this idiocy. Being a man doesn't always mean thinking with your testosterone. The direct and violent way is not always the best way. Your comment is simply ridiculous in this context. Of course you are free to pick up the towel yourself, mister manly man. Go ahead, whip up a zombie fleet and start DDoSing spam sites. See how much good it does. You'll piss off half the world and make the spammers more technically resilient. Brilliant.
A typical answer. You can't really find an answer in the Bible, so you get to make one up out of thin air based on the way you subjectively feel God should behave. You come up with an answer that makes you feel good and then move on. To me the question is far too large and too important for that to be acceptable.
This is a good point that most people don't seem to take into account. It's natural selection at work. Those who have an overall genetic structure that doesn't allow them to handle living more than 100 years will die out. The genetic makeup of the remaining population will favor more of a balanced person that will have no problem with living as long as a redwood tree. Those prone to accidents, depression and disease will be slowly weeded out over time. We'll be left with nothing but shiny, happy people.
Of course this natural selection process is going to take several million years to get everything worked out... so let's get started!
I'm reminded of a story I read once where an ultra-rich guy was at a hospital getting his ultra-expensive immortality treatment that nobody else in the world could afford. Of course when he walked out through the lobby somebody shot him. If you think the ultra-rich are despised now, just imagine if they could also be immortal. Poor people hate rich people already, but at least they know that money can't buy immortality. Eventually, rich people die too, and they can't take the money with them.
;)
Now imagine the treatment is cheap enough to provide to everyone. Cool, except that the new immortals are going to be just as stupid as they were before they were immortal. All the Catholics and uneducated third-worlders will continue to have as many children as possible, either because that's what God told them to do (Catholics) or just because that's what they've always done.
Other religious types will form groups that start killing off anyone who has taken the immortality treatment, because trying not to die is obviously going against God's wishes. Overpopulation would skyrocket and war and conflict would be more rampant than at any time in history. There's only so much space, and there's plenty of hateful, fanatical religions to go around.
Sure, immortality sounds great, and I'm sure we'll soon be working on getting people past 150 on a routine basis, but it's going to cause an amazing amount of problems on various levels if it ever really gets off the ground.
Of course, that won't keep me from standing in line for my shot.
Sure, you could have created the sig in TB itself and saved it as text, but that is just as far beyond most people as creating it in Notepad. You still have to decide where to save the file on your drive (on the desktop, of course) and then enter the preferences and browse to that location. That "browsing to a file they've just saved" thing seems to be a real challenge for a lot of people too. I haven't really figured out why that is.
That multiple identities thing just appeared in TB recently, and it's not a real answer to the signature problem. One shouldn't have to change their whole identity just to insert a different sig. Definitely kludgier than it should ever have been.
All in all there are a lot of things about TB that haven't been very well thought out. Yet. Here's to the future. And it's not going to keep me from recommending it to Windows users as a free replacement for OE.
People are inherently condemned to hell already because all people sin. That's the beauty of it: God doesn't send anyone to hell (because we're already heading that way) - he only provides a way for them to be saved through Christ.
Ever since I grasped this concept, I've had a huge problem with it. All humans are automitically going to Hell, and the only way to be saved is to hear about this "Christ" character. Huh. What if I'm one of the millions of humans who never heard of Christ because I didn't live near where Christ lived? Because of my ignorance I am to be automatically condemned to a lake of fire for all eternity? Really, I'd like to know. I've never gotten a clear answer on this one. What happens to all those people who live their entire lives and never hear about this Christ person and how he can "save" us all?
From what I can see, this has a couple different possible answers. One is, yes, all those ignorant savages go to Hell automatically. In which case, how could you possibly believe in or worship a God who would allow that to happen. That's unbelievably monstrous.
The other possible answer is that being ignorant of Christ they get a sort of free pass. In which case why would you send out missionaries to inform them of Christ, thus stripping them of this shield of ignorance that protects them from the wrath of God? That's cruel, since a lot of them would either not accept Christ or fail to live by the rules, and end up going to Hell. Why would you do that to people?
In the olden days of course I would have been burned or imprisoned as a heretic for asking questions like this. I think it's a perfectly rational question that deserves an answer.
I get a lot of email from corporate clients that I wouldn't be able to read (either partially or entirely), and it's not appropriate for me to tell them it's their problem.
I would think it would always be appropriate to tell the people you are communicating with that they are sending you something that you can't read. If they sent you a snail-mail letter written in binary, wouldn't you say something about that, or would you go looking for a binary-to-english dictionary? If enough people speak up, things change. Sometimes it only takes one person to explain the problem before it gets fixed.
That signature issue in particular is a good indicator, I think, of the general reason why Thunderbird (and Mozilla Mail before it) never really "spread like wildfire". I'm not sure what somebody was thinking. I mean, come on. You have to create some kind of text file outside of Mozilla with Notepad or something, save it somewhere (no default location), and then go in to the preferences and browse to the location of that text file that you somehow figured out how to create. And you can only have that one text file, so only one signature unless you go through that process again. And it's either there or it isn't.
The whole process is totally nonsensical to your average user. Other email clients will just let you choose a signature to insert from a list. That's the kind of thing people like. Thunderbird and Mozilla Mail have just been kind of rough in spots until now. Built in mail filtering not withstanding, it just hasn't had anything special to pull people away from Eudora, OE, Pegasus or Opera Mail.
And yes, we are talking about the average Windows user here, the 95% of the population that this software is supposedly being marketed to. In that world there are a lot of users who do not know how to create a simple plain text file with Notepad.
On Mac OS X the case for TB is pretty hopeless. Apple Mail integrates with the rest of the OS like clockwork and is a hell of a lot prettier. I'm actually kind of surprised to see Thunderbird getting to 1.0 so fast. In my opinion it still needs a lot of usability enhancements and beautifying to really compete with other email clients the way Firefox can compete on level ground with all the other browsers. Maybe a miracle has happened since 0.9, but I doubt it.
Of course I'll still be forcing my users to use it anyway, since it's a hell of a lot better than OE on Windows.
Thank you! That was driving me crazy. I activated that option on Mac OS X hoping it would allow me to finally get into drop-down selectors on web forms by tabbing into them. Still doesn't work. Anyone know why? On Windows I've always been able to tab into any form field in any browser. On the Mac I keep having to move to the mouse to select the state and other such things that use a drop-down selection list. Very annoying.
Thanks again!
That pulling the power plug from the wall trick was one of the things the BeOS developers would do at conferences and demos to demonstrate the robustness of the BFS journaled filesystem created by Dominic Giampaolo, who now works at Apple. It was one of the first true journaled filesystems, certainly the first available in a desktop operating system. They would unplug the machine in the middle of heavy read-write activity and show how it came right back up just as fast as when it booted clean. This was around 8 years ago, I believe, so it was a pretty big deal. A few years later Linux finally got ReiserFS, Ext3, XFS and a couple other journaling filesystems. MacOS X got journaling in version 10.2.3, if I remember right. Supposedly NTFS has been journaled for a while now, but I don't know the details on that.
The rest of the computing world has finally almost caught up to long-dead BeOS in terms of robustness and speed. I still haven't seen anything boot nearly as fast as BeOS though. If your needs are simple it's still a bitchin' OS. The original BeOS is dead but you can still find the Free BeOS 5 Personal Edition download if you look around, or you can buy an updated commercial version from these guys who bought the IP from Be, Inc. before they folded up shop. The free version was kind of cool, it was a 45MB download that expanded into a 500MB drive "image" and let you boot up BeOS from Windows. Pretty neat way to test drive a new operating system. Too bad it never stood a chance in the market against uno-hoo.
Here's a link to that free version.
Scroll down a bit for the "Windows" version. Be aware that it probably won't run on newer computers with anything more advanced than a P-III. The patches for newer processors have been integrated into the commercial version, I'm sure.
Ah, BeOS, we hardly knew ye.
Whether you love someone or not is a subjective issue, like asking whether or not FDR was a good president.
God existing or not is an objective issue, like asking whether or not
FDR used a wheelchair.
Wait, what? You're saying that you can point to God and say, "Look, there he is, he exists," just like you can point to FDR's physical wheelchair?
It is not possible for god to both exist and not exist, so that is NOT a subjective issue.
Your thinking appears to be rather limited. If there is-isnot a God entity that created this entire fiasco we call a universe, it would be quite possible for this creator to both exist and not exist. It could exist entirely or partially outside the universe in various ways, such that we will never be able to scientifically interact with or prove its "existence". Who are you to tell the creator of the universe what it can do, if such creator exists-notexists? Just because we don't have a word for a state of combined existence/nonexistence doesn't mean it can't be part of this universe. Never heard of quantum mechanics?
So, they pick out indivdual wheat plants with genetic defects and make sure they propogate? I don't think so.
I don't believe that you can make a blanket statement that it is cool for every person with genetic defects to pass on their genes. There are many people who physically can't have children, because of some genetic defect, who use science to get around that problem and have children anyway, even though they often have a good chance of passing on that defect to the child. I would say that in most cases people like that are weakening the gene pool, not strengthening it.
Obviously each case will be different, but when your offspring have a good chance of being nonsurvivable without massive medical help, you should be rethinking adoption. It's just as likely that any random adopted child will have those magical genes that you refer to, that should be coddled and passed on. If you adopt outside your race you are even bringing more genetic diversity into it. Somehow I don't think we have too much of a problem with diversity anyway, what with 6 bajillion of us hanging around. Soon to be 12 bajillion.
If it is proven that people are born homosexual, then the church should be FORCED to accept them, because that's how God created them.
That's pretty amusing. Apparently you don't understand how religions work. It's faith-based, not logic-based. If anything, "proving" that homosexuality results from some gene or hormone imbalance during gestation would cause certain sects to become even more radical towards gays than they already are. At this point, most Christian types think that being gay is a choice so they feel compelled to help those poor lost souls change their lives and become hetero through the power of prayer.
If it's proven that being gay is not a choice, there are a great many religious nutcases that would feel justified in murdering gays henceforth, since "obviously" they are children of Satan from the day they are born and don't belong in this world. Since children of Satan don't have souls they can't be saved, and since they are demons it won't really be murder if we kill them. Yes, there are actually people who think like this. A lot of them. At least 55 million in this country alone, I'd say.
That's how it works. God doesn't create bad things, Satan does, or at least he manipulates the good things to turn them bad. God can never be blamed for any bad thing that happens. That's blasphemy. If something bad happens to you, obviously you deserved it since God doesn't make mistakes. Or maybe you didn't deserve it, but it was all part of some grand mysterious plan and everything will work out in the End of All Things. Which will come tomorrow. I mean in 100 years. I mean 2,000 years from now. I mean...
I have wanted something like that for a long, long time. Somehow the software development world has never seemed to grasp the fact that it isn't the instability of the computer that pisses off the users so bad. It's the fact that when it does crash, you often end up losing everything you've accomplished for the last day, week, month or year. Tell me you haven't heard of or seen cases where a file that someone has been working on for weeks or months has been totally corrupted. It happens. It happens entirely too often. Sure, there's no substitute for backups, but you know you've lost entire files because you just created it that morning and hadn't done your daily backup yet. There are limits to the reasonable usefulness of backups.
If a computer crashed a dozen times a day and then always came back right where it stopped with all open documents fully recoverable, it would merely be an annoyance. Most people wouldn't care that the system was unstable. Those crashes would just give them a chance to stretch their legs for a minute while the computer comes back up. But instead, their computer crashes once every 3 months and they all too often wind up with documents that are completely unrecoverable, or a totally unbootable computer. Half a day's wasted work that must be rebuilt from scratch. That's the kind of thing that makes a guy pick up his keyboard and start beating on his monitor until it falls off his desk. We've all seen the video, and we've all felt exactly like that guy at least once in our computing career.
If someone would just take the time to come up with properly implemented full-data journaling for some common applications, they would make a fortune the likes of which Microsoft has never seen. I don't understand why common data loss is still acceptable. This is the 21st century after all. Computers have been around for half a century. Yet the closest I've seen is Word's auto-save and recover feature, which more often than not seems to fail to recover your file. Many times I've seen it "recover" on line or even nothing from a document that was many pages long. Not cool.
I tried to pitch an idea for application-level journaling on a BeOS developers' mailing list a few years back and got nothing but blank stares. As far as regular users are concerned, it would be the ultimate advancement in desktop computing, yet they (the developers) couldn't conceive any reason you'd want to do such a thing. "Get rid of one of the biggest annoyances of the whole computing experience? Why would we want to do that?"
Oh, well. Maybe in another 30 years, eh?
I'm an electrical engineer serving in Baghdad w/ US forces. I've seen firsthand the detonator circuits they use for these IED's. I can tell you that I have seen MANY R/C toy systems being used as the detonator for remotely-detonated IED's.
So why aren't you transmitting all possible R/C codes and frequencies throughout the area on a regular basis, to trigger the IEDs before you enter an area, or before the bad guys have a chance to put them in place? What is the problem if an R/C truck with a camera on it trundles up to a possible bomb while you're behind a building 150 yards away, and it "accidently" blows up the IED? You were going to blow it up anyway, so if anything you just lost a $1,000 R/C truck. If these things are remotely triggerable, why aren't you remotely triggering them with a $50 R/C transmitter instead of sending in a robot that costs a quarter of a million dollars? I'm not really seeing the problem with the R/C vehicle. I don't think I'm alone. Make it more clear for us. Is it like police forensics where you want to be able to check out the device in detail before you kill it?
Watch your step. It's dangerous over there.
You may have some good points, but if the whole point of this device is to drop a charge of C4 and blow up the UXO anyway, what difference does it make if the ordnance is triggered by the RF signal of the truck when it gets too close? You lose a $1,000 RC truck. You can buy 249 more for the price of one of those Talon gizmos. The ordinance could just as easily have a magnetic detector that may be triggered by the approach of the $250,000 robot, and then you just lost a $250,000 robot. Even with stringent requirements there is really no reason that a robot with one arm, two tracks and a landline should be costing us that kind of money.
I'd bet that in 99% of battlefield situations, some little recon/destroy vehicle like this would do just fine and save lives. I'd also bet it's a hell of a lot more mobile than the $250,000 version, too. Mobile in terms of one guy being able to carry it in a backpack, like that cool surveillance plane I read about. That means even people on foot can have one of these one standby.
Something else to think about: At the price level of this RC truck it doesn't even need to be adopted by the military for it to be useful. Soldiers are already buying their own $1,000 bullet proof vests, I'm sure there are a lot of families who wouldn't mind shipping something like this over there on their own dollar if it might help keep their soldier alive long enough to get home. Hell, a typical platoon could get together and afford one even on their current meager salaries. This kind of solution has its place.
The freedom to own firearms in the United States is not solely about your own personal self defense, although that is an important aspect. Its main purpose for being in the Constitution was to make sure that the citizens had the right to choose to defend the country against attackers, both foreign and domestic. In other places the military has a tendency to form an alliance with some political group and stage a coup, often to set up a dictatorship. One of the many reasons that keeps that from happening here is that a large portion of the population is armed and willing to use those arms even against our own military or police to defend freedom against tyranny. The police, the military and the government are here to serve us, not the other way around.
Going back to personal self defense, it is actually an untruth that arming yourself will result in some sort of "arms race" with the criminal element. Most criminals are just out to make a quick buck. In an armed society they do exactly what you would do, they avoid people who are known to be armed and instead go after those who can be identified as being unarmed. Instead of coming into your house while you and your family are at home, they will go to an empty house or wait until you're on vacation. In a society where weapons are banned, there is absolutely nothing to make the criminal think twice about entering an occupied home. After all, he probably has an illegally obtained firearm, and he can be fairly certain that you have nothing equivalent to defend yourself or your family with.
I've never quite understood how anyone can think having guns at home won't make you safer. Some have a strange idea that the attacker has a good chance of taking your gun away and using it against you. Again, in real life this is shown to be bullshit. There are literally a million or so incidents every year when someone successfully defends themselves and/or others with a firearm, and in the vast majority of those incidents no shot is ever fired! The bottom line is, the police cannot protect you in 99% of situations, mostly because they simply can't be physically present and they aren't going to stop a bullet for you. If you aren't armed or at least have the right to be, you are simply giving the criminals the upper hand in your society.
Here's some interesting reading for you:
http://www.sacsconsulting.com/ccw_Statistics.htm
http://www.savetheguns.com/self_defense.htm
If it doesn't convince you of anything maybe it will at least clue you into the perspective on the pro-firearm side of things.
No, I think they meant burglarized, just like they said. It's perfectly good English on this side of the pond, as is "buglary". English has rules but they aren't always set in stone. If you want a language that makes perfect sense go check out Lojban, previously known as Loglan.
this is only with Colour Laser Printers. Typically, only businesses can afford these types of products, as they generally range from 15,000 to 500,000Cdn. (cheaper ones)
Um, where I work we just bought a pretty hefty color laser printer for around $1,600. I think the cheapest ones are just a few hundred. That's color, not monochrome. I don't know where you get your prices. The Canadian dollar isn't quite that far below the US dollar.
It really is no big deal, its not like someone is actually trying to track your prints on a regular basis.
I will never understand this reasoning. Hey, I just tracked you down through your IP address and installed a remote keylogger on your computer. But that's OK with you, right, because you're not doing anything illegal, right? Oh don't worry, I'll only be checking it once a week or so. Not on a regular basis. That makes it OK, right? Remember that anonymous letter you're writing to expose your employer's illegal money laundering activities? I'm sure you won't mind if I insert a unique serial number in that file so that document can be traced back to you. Right? I won't be telling you about this serial number, naturally, and that's OK too. You'll find out about it when Vinny the Wrench comes to see you this Thursday evening. He'll know exactly where you are because the police installed a tracking device in your car without your knowledge, for no particular reason, despite the amazing fact that you've always been an honest, law abiding citizen, and your employer is given access to this tracking information. But that's OK, right, because you aren't doing anything illegal with your car either, and you have no reason not to let your employer know where you are at all times. Right?
Bah.
Is all that pretty unlikely? Yeah, but it's not like it's never happened to anyone. It has and it will.
So, to wrap this up, if anyone really feels paranoid, and Bush is checking every piece of paper and tracing it back to huge CorpX - then use an inkjet.
If you aren't paranoid about things like this, you don't understand how government works, or human nature, or history. Power corrupts, information is abused. That's the way the world works. You have to fight tooth and nail just to maintain the status quo, to keep the few freedoms you do have. Sure, use an inkjet, if you're aware of the fact that your hardware is allowing you to be tracked. What about those situations where you don't have a choice to use some other type of device? And who's to say that inkjets don't also have a similar chip that prints a unique serial number on everything you print? Up until today, most of us didn't think our color laser printers had anything like that inside. Inkjet printers already have either hardware or software to detect counterfitting. How easy it would be to print the printer's serial number in a nearly invisible microscopic pattern of dots.
NOBODY is trying to support counterfitting by opposing this sort of thing. Get over yourself, Mr. Law Abiding Citizen. Guess what? The rest of the world doesn't necessarily obey the law. That includes your employer, your local government, and even law enforcement personnel. I know, shocking.
drop the hubub about privacy.
We'll drop it when we think it's not important anymore. Thanks.