Actually, the winners of a presidential election are statistically very likely to have a penis, the only notable exception being, of course, Chester A. Arthur, who as we all know had his penis surgically removed in order to conserve precious blood flow needed to hold up his impressive side whiskers.
I wonder what percentage of Fry's customers are women? Depends on what part of the store you're in. If you are hanging around the appliances or general electronics, or the coffee shop, there are plenty of women. If you hang out near the stereo equipment, you get mainly 20-something guys wearing far too much Axe body spray (as if there were a tolerable amount) ogling the Monster cables. If you go to the pre-built computers area, you will see self-important business types looking at the laptops and families looking at the desktop machines. If you head over to the computer components area, you will find almost entirely geeks looking thoroughly uncomfortable with being out in public, standing around drooling on the motherboards. If you go over to the miscellaneous electronic components area (bits of wire, resistors, that sort of thing), you'll mostly find the old-school hacker type, beards flowing magestically over their impressive guts.
Really, it's a cross-section of society you're unlikely to find anywhere else.
Netscape 3.0 was the pinnacle of the Netscape browser. The standard edition (not necessarily the Gold edition) was light weight, fast, and standards compliant. Of course, it also marked the point at which IE really started to catch up with Netscape in terms of stability and performance. Netscape 4 was big, bloated, and marked the peak of Netscape's attempts to "embrace and extend" the standards. It also helped accelerate Netscape's decline.
Of course, I still think the best browser "busy" logo was the multiple animated panes behind the M in Mosaic Netscape 0.9 (before they were forced to change the name by the University of Illinois). Those were of course replaced by one of the worst, the giant pulsating N of Netscape 1.0.
With huge metroplexes like Chicago, things are different for a variety of reasons. However, to clarify, the north Austin neighborhood I'm referring to is not a suburb, it's in the city of Austin, a few miles from downtown. Actually, according to a recent newspaper article, the neighborhood is almost exactly in the center of population for the Austin metro area.
I think you're misjudging city dwellers. In my experience, whether or not Wal-Mart is really challenged depends almost entirely on whether or not there's an aggressive neighborhood association in the area where they want to build. In cities where Wal-Marts are present, they are generally always crowded, and presumably make good money.
Here in Austin, which is admittedly not a huge metropolis but is a good sized city, there are already several Wal-Mart stores, and I guarantee none of them are hurting for customers. However, there is a neighborhood association in north Austin that has been trying to block a Wal-Mart from being built near them for close to two years now. What's odd about that effort is that the area Wal-Mart wants to build in is currently occupied by a dilapidated mall that is mostly empty and rarely sees much traffic. They claim that having a Wal-Mart there would drive down property values (although I have seen plenty of very upscale neighborhoods located right next to Wal-Marts) more than having a mostly empty run-down mall does now. Personally, I think if another discount store that wasn't called Wal-Mart wanted to build there, no one would have any issue with it.
Personally, I rarely shop at Wal-Mart mostly because it's always too crowded and the marginal savings on decent stuff (the really cheap stuff is almost universally garbage) isn't worth the hassle. However, I doubt Wal-Mart spends a lot of time worrying about how to make their stores less crowded for my benefit.
The funny thing about common sense is it's not so common. Also, big ideas tend to fall apart during the implementation stage.
# Accept all submissions that pass a basic sanity check What exactly is a basic sanity check? Does the patent "make sense"? To who? As you can see from some of the patents out there, the patent office already accepts pretty much everything.
# Keep all submissions secret for X [days|weeks|months] Okay, that's a nice idea, but it would be difficult to enforce. Even if you could enforce it, you would have all sorts of conspiracy claims about the patent office burying patent applications related to ways to put oil companies out of business or whatever.
# If two submissions are received for the same "invention" within this timeframe, then disallow it as obvious That seems awfully harsh. Just because two people come up with the same idea around the same time doesn't make it obvious to the general public, or even to people in the same field. Hell, for all you know one of the applicants could have stolen the idea from the other one.
# To help facilitate a baseline for obvious, allow the general public to submit their obvious ideas at no charge (no need to check this overwhelming amount of info - but keep it handy for posterity). Coming up with an idea (ie, wouldn't a flying car kick ass) and coming up with a way to actually implement it (something you could file a patent on) are two very different things. For every great idea, there are probably thousands of people who came up with the idea independently of each other, but only a few (or even one) that managed to figure out how to make it work. Patents are not just ideas.
# Require patent applicants to outline the level of investment necessary to realize a given patent - the system was designed to protect the investments of entrepreneurs so, if little to no investment is required, then there is no need for a patent on a given idea. Also, patent suit awards could be derived from this information accordingly. Even if an applicant could accurately come up with these numbers, who decides how much investment is required for an idea to be patentable? For an individual garage investor, 10 or 20 grand may be a huge investment constituting their entire life savings, but it's nothing to a large corporation. Once you set a minimum level of investment, you can bet the large corporations will seek to push it as high as possible in order to make it impossible for a small inventor to do anything with a patentable idea without massive outside investment.
It's not really about the interface, it's about them doing stupid crap like kicking boulders around or swimming around underwater when they should be paying attention to what's being said in the meeting.
I have no problems with using virtual worlds as a venue for some sort of team building exercise or something, but I don't see how being in this environment would be useful for a meeting where actual information is expected to be absorbed. For meetings at a distance, you need something like the web conferencing tools that already exist, that allow you to present information without unnecessary distraction. If you give your attendees something else to do other than pay attention to the meeting, they'll do it.
The problem with natural language searches is that natural language itself is a moving target. Sure, ten years ago "How do you change the air filter in a Toyota Camry?" would have been a legitimate question to ask a search engine online, but these days it would probably be asked like "lol how do u chng filtr in my pos car? kthxbye:)". I don't know how Google is supposed to keep up with that.
Kid who is very skilled at a game decides to play the game on the demo unit at the store. Kid does very well. A few people stop for a few seconds to watch him play, as people tend to do when others are playing the demo units, especially if they're doing well. Kid finishes playing, one or two people clap briefly, people leave.
The rest is just storytelling. The author was impressed by someone who was obviously far better at the game than he could ever be, but he was being a little melodramatic about it.
The e-book thing is an idea that simply refuses to die. Every couple of years, we get more hype about it, but it's never really gotten that far. My personal take on it is that it's a solution looking for a problem. An e-book reader is not really any more convenient to carry around than a paperback book, and is less durable. The only real advantage is the ability to carry around your entire library with you, but so far that hasn't been enough to overcome the disadvantages inherent in reading for extended periods of time from a small electronic device.
I'm not going to search the web for 'Real Doll', because I'm at work. So I'll ask here: What is a Real Doll? A "lifelike" sex doll. realdoll.com
Why do you know about it? Because he's been on the Internet for more than a couple of weeks, probably. Real Dolls were a popular subject on the Internet some years ago, and are still frequently referenced.
Where can I get one? realdoll.com, but it will cost you. You have to be really dedicated to self love to drop the kind of money they're asking on what is essentially a masturbatory aid.
This is exactly why I don't have a phone with email capability. If I ever do get one, I won't configure it for my work email. My cell phone number is readily available to anyone with an emergency situation at the office. If they need it, they can use it (but someone had better be dying if they do, or someone will be dying shortly after). I do occasionally check my work email from home, but I never, ever answer it from home (and believe me, sometimes that takes some effort to avoid). Anything sent by email is assumed to not be of earth-shattering importance. If it was so important that it couldn't wait until morning, they would have called.
Of course, when I'm not on call, I may not answer my phone immediately anyway. In those cases, if it's really important, they'll either leave a voice mail or call someone else on the team.
[quote]Now, I imagine I make a little more than the likely (14$ per hour) average/. reader, however I have been on-call my entire career.[/quote]
I think (or hope) you're vastly underestimating the average/. reader's salary there, but who knows. At any rate, that level of pay is way too low to be on call 24x7 in my opinion, unless you live in a third world country or get massive bonuses for pager pay.
Anyway, when I worked at small mom and pop ISPs where I was the only sysadmin (or one of two or three), I was on call constantly, and I dealt with it. However, if your company has the staff to at least rotate on call, they should do it. Being on call constantly will burn people out very quickly. Even if you don't get called, the limits that on-call can put on your leisure time (no trips outside of cell range, must be within a short distance of Internet access) can be quite stressful over time. Sure, if your life is your work it's probably not so bad, but what kind of life is that?
Where I work now, the junior and intermediate admins are hourly employees, and the senior level guys are on salary. If you're hourly, and you work in the offhours, you get 1.5x overtime. If you're salaried, you get comp time. On call is rotated between members of a team, and most people will be on call around once every 4 to 8 weeks depending on the size of the team. Since we have people in the command center on staff 24x7, we only get called for escalations, and we get paid $125 per weekend day ($50 per weekday day) that we're on call, whether we get called or not.
As I get older, I am constantly amazed at what people are willing to put up with from their employers. I see employment as a simple business deal: you are exchanging your services for compensation. Like any business deal, if both sides are not getting what they need from it, they should seek to either renegotiate or terminate the relationship. If your employer is abusing your good work ethic by calling you all the time for non-emergency things (meaning the building is not actually on fire), especially if they aren't paying you anything extra for it, then you either need to have a talk with your employer or go find another one.
It doesn't matter how many radio or TV or any other kind of signals we pollute space with. Everybody knows that we aren't going to be contacted by any alien races until we build a warp drive so they can detect the warp signature.
Most of the scripted shows have only started going into reruns over the past week or two as they've run out of already filmed shows. The networks also have several episodes of shows slated to be midseason replacements that are also already in the can. Some of them may even trot out shows that were originally rejected in order to fill time. Most (all?) of the networks also have a selection of reality shows that have no writers (or at least not any union writers) ready to go on the air. So basically, the new stuff will likely suck, but there will still be some new stuff.
If the strike goes on for a very long time, expect to see schedules filled with almost entirely reality and game shows.
Actually, the Nazi Internet filtering and monitoring program wasn't nearly as effective as they had hoped. It was one of the great failures of the Nazis, and one wonders if the war would have turned out differently had they been successful in their attempts at truly effective Net filtering.
Their first attempts were very crude, and basically involved having operators inspect each packet by hand before allowing them to be sent. This was slow and time consuming, and delayed packet switching so badly that the Net in Germany became near unusable. As the Nazis wanted to be able to monitor communications, rather than simply eliminating communication, they knew they needed a better way.
They weren't able to come up with automated solutions until 1941, and even then they were slow and unreliable. The first techniques involved large machines with automated "hands" to pick out the packets and text scanners to look for offending text. However, the machines broke down frequently, and were easily defeated by employing simple encoding such as rot13, or even by intentionally misspelling banned words.
It wasn't until late 1944 that they were able to come up with a fully digital process, but of course by then it was too late to do much good.
This will do great things for the National Strategic Light Reserve, which is a vital part of our national security initiatives. Specifically, it exists to protect the nation in the event the sun burns out. Up until now, we've been storing light using a series of 100 watt bulbs and mirrors, but there has always been doubt as to what would happen to our light reserves in the event of a power outage. Perhaps this technology will help us solve that issue.
It's really not as bad as it sounds. The kid always tries to snipe, but he sucks at hiding so he usually gets pwnd pretty early. I've tried to teach him the finer points of camouflage, but the little bastard just keeps yelling about "fucking campers" and complaining that he keeps getting killed because his ping time sucks and he just won't listen. 3 year olds can be so stubborn sometimes.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the winners of a presidential election are statistically very likely to have a penis, the only notable exception being, of course, Chester A. Arthur, who as we all know had his penis surgically removed in order to conserve precious blood flow needed to hold up his impressive side whiskers.
Really, it's a cross-section of society you're unlikely to find anywhere else.
Netscape 3.0 was the pinnacle of the Netscape browser. The standard edition (not necessarily the Gold edition) was light weight, fast, and standards compliant. Of course, it also marked the point at which IE really started to catch up with Netscape in terms of stability and performance. Netscape 4 was big, bloated, and marked the peak of Netscape's attempts to "embrace and extend" the standards. It also helped accelerate Netscape's decline.
Of course, I still think the best browser "busy" logo was the multiple animated panes behind the M in Mosaic Netscape 0.9 (before they were forced to change the name by the University of Illinois). Those were of course replaced by one of the worst, the giant pulsating N of Netscape 1.0.
With huge metroplexes like Chicago, things are different for a variety of reasons. However, to clarify, the north Austin neighborhood I'm referring to is not a suburb, it's in the city of Austin, a few miles from downtown. Actually, according to a recent newspaper article, the neighborhood is almost exactly in the center of population for the Austin metro area.
I think you're misjudging city dwellers. In my experience, whether or not Wal-Mart is really challenged depends almost entirely on whether or not there's an aggressive neighborhood association in the area where they want to build. In cities where Wal-Marts are present, they are generally always crowded, and presumably make good money.
Here in Austin, which is admittedly not a huge metropolis but is a good sized city, there are already several Wal-Mart stores, and I guarantee none of them are hurting for customers. However, there is a neighborhood association in north Austin that has been trying to block a Wal-Mart from being built near them for close to two years now. What's odd about that effort is that the area Wal-Mart wants to build in is currently occupied by a dilapidated mall that is mostly empty and rarely sees much traffic. They claim that having a Wal-Mart there would drive down property values (although I have seen plenty of very upscale neighborhoods located right next to Wal-Marts) more than having a mostly empty run-down mall does now. Personally, I think if another discount store that wasn't called Wal-Mart wanted to build there, no one would have any issue with it.
Personally, I rarely shop at Wal-Mart mostly because it's always too crowded and the marginal savings on decent stuff (the really cheap stuff is almost universally garbage) isn't worth the hassle. However, I doubt Wal-Mart spends a lot of time worrying about how to make their stores less crowded for my benefit.
I agree. I've been in plenty of batcaves and without the overpowering smell of guano, it's really not a true batcave. Nice effort though.
Give a man Internet access, and he'll surf porn all day and starve to death.
It means the board told him if he didn't step down, his family would soon be in very poor health.
It's not really about the interface, it's about them doing stupid crap like kicking boulders around or swimming around underwater when they should be paying attention to what's being said in the meeting.
I have no problems with using virtual worlds as a venue for some sort of team building exercise or something, but I don't see how being in this environment would be useful for a meeting where actual information is expected to be absorbed. For meetings at a distance, you need something like the web conferencing tools that already exist, that allow you to present information without unnecessary distraction. If you give your attendees something else to do other than pay attention to the meeting, they'll do it.
It should be noted that Coffman believes that these problems can be fixed in time for 2008 using upgrades and patches, so this is definitely not a death knell for e-voting in Colorado.
It also constitutes cruel and unusual punishment for those poor paralegals who have to sift through all this crap during discovery.
The problem with natural language searches is that natural language itself is a moving target. Sure, ten years ago "How do you change the air filter in a Toyota Camry?" would have been a legitimate question to ask a search engine online, but these days it would probably be asked like "lol how do u chng filtr in my pos car? kthxbye :)". I don't know how Google is supposed to keep up with that.
Let me translate for you:
Kid who is very skilled at a game decides to play the game on the demo unit at the store. Kid does very well. A few people stop for a few seconds to watch him play, as people tend to do when others are playing the demo units, especially if they're doing well. Kid finishes playing, one or two people clap briefly, people leave.
The rest is just storytelling. The author was impressed by someone who was obviously far better at the game than he could ever be, but he was being a little melodramatic about it.
The e-book thing is an idea that simply refuses to die. Every couple of years, we get more hype about it, but it's never really gotten that far. My personal take on it is that it's a solution looking for a problem. An e-book reader is not really any more convenient to carry around than a paperback book, and is less durable. The only real advantage is the ability to carry around your entire library with you, but so far that hasn't been enough to overcome the disadvantages inherent in reading for extended periods of time from a small electronic device.
What is a Real Doll? A "lifelike" sex doll. realdoll.com Why do you know about it? Because he's been on the Internet for more than a couple of weeks, probably. Real Dolls were a popular subject on the Internet some years ago, and are still frequently referenced. Where can I get one? realdoll.com, but it will cost you. You have to be really dedicated to self love to drop the kind of money they're asking on what is essentially a masturbatory aid.
Yes, exactly, 10 ways. We are talking about robots here, we have to use their number system.
This is exactly why I don't have a phone with email capability. If I ever do get one, I won't configure it for my work email. My cell phone number is readily available to anyone with an emergency situation at the office. If they need it, they can use it (but someone had better be dying if they do, or someone will be dying shortly after). I do occasionally check my work email from home, but I never, ever answer it from home (and believe me, sometimes that takes some effort to avoid). Anything sent by email is assumed to not be of earth-shattering importance. If it was so important that it couldn't wait until morning, they would have called.
Of course, when I'm not on call, I may not answer my phone immediately anyway. In those cases, if it's really important, they'll either leave a voice mail or call someone else on the team.
[quote]Now, I imagine I make a little more than the likely (14$ per hour) average /. reader, however I have been on-call my entire career.[/quote]
/. reader's salary there, but who knows. At any rate, that level of pay is way too low to be on call 24x7 in my opinion, unless you live in a third world country or get massive bonuses for pager pay.
I think (or hope) you're vastly underestimating the average
Anyway, when I worked at small mom and pop ISPs where I was the only sysadmin (or one of two or three), I was on call constantly, and I dealt with it. However, if your company has the staff to at least rotate on call, they should do it. Being on call constantly will burn people out very quickly. Even if you don't get called, the limits that on-call can put on your leisure time (no trips outside of cell range, must be within a short distance of Internet access) can be quite stressful over time. Sure, if your life is your work it's probably not so bad, but what kind of life is that?
Where I work now, the junior and intermediate admins are hourly employees, and the senior level guys are on salary. If you're hourly, and you work in the offhours, you get 1.5x overtime. If you're salaried, you get comp time. On call is rotated between members of a team, and most people will be on call around once every 4 to 8 weeks depending on the size of the team. Since we have people in the command center on staff 24x7, we only get called for escalations, and we get paid $125 per weekend day ($50 per weekday day) that we're on call, whether we get called or not.
As I get older, I am constantly amazed at what people are willing to put up with from their employers. I see employment as a simple business deal: you are exchanging your services for compensation. Like any business deal, if both sides are not getting what they need from it, they should seek to either renegotiate or terminate the relationship. If your employer is abusing your good work ethic by calling you all the time for non-emergency things (meaning the building is not actually on fire), especially if they aren't paying you anything extra for it, then you either need to have a talk with your employer or go find another one.
It doesn't matter how many radio or TV or any other kind of signals we pollute space with. Everybody knows that we aren't going to be contacted by any alien races until we build a warp drive so they can detect the warp signature.
Most of the scripted shows have only started going into reruns over the past week or two as they've run out of already filmed shows. The networks also have several episodes of shows slated to be midseason replacements that are also already in the can. Some of them may even trot out shows that were originally rejected in order to fill time. Most (all?) of the networks also have a selection of reality shows that have no writers (or at least not any union writers) ready to go on the air. So basically, the new stuff will likely suck, but there will still be some new stuff.
If the strike goes on for a very long time, expect to see schedules filled with almost entirely reality and game shows.
Actually, the Nazi Internet filtering and monitoring program wasn't nearly as effective as they had hoped. It was one of the great failures of the Nazis, and one wonders if the war would have turned out differently had they been successful in their attempts at truly effective Net filtering.
Their first attempts were very crude, and basically involved having operators inspect each packet by hand before allowing them to be sent. This was slow and time consuming, and delayed packet switching so badly that the Net in Germany became near unusable. As the Nazis wanted to be able to monitor communications, rather than simply eliminating communication, they knew they needed a better way.
They weren't able to come up with automated solutions until 1941, and even then they were slow and unreliable. The first techniques involved large machines with automated "hands" to pick out the packets and text scanners to look for offending text. However, the machines broke down frequently, and were easily defeated by employing simple encoding such as rot13, or even by intentionally misspelling banned words.
It wasn't until late 1944 that they were able to come up with a fully digital process, but of course by then it was too late to do much good.
This will do great things for the National Strategic Light Reserve, which is a vital part of our national security initiatives. Specifically, it exists to protect the nation in the event the sun burns out. Up until now, we've been storing light using a series of 100 watt bulbs and mirrors, but there has always been doubt as to what would happen to our light reserves in the event of a power outage. Perhaps this technology will help us solve that issue.
It's really not as bad as it sounds. The kid always tries to snipe, but he sucks at hiding so he usually gets pwnd pretty early. I've tried to teach him the finer points of camouflage, but the little bastard just keeps yelling about "fucking campers" and complaining that he keeps getting killed because his ping time sucks and he just won't listen. 3 year olds can be so stubborn sometimes.