Upcoming kind of implies that it's actually going to happen some day soon. As opposed to "the upcoming sun going supernova" - which is on about the same timescale as Duke Nukem Forever.
The reactors are to be pebble bed reactors, in which helium replaces radioactive, pressurized water.
Now that's the most reasonable explanation I've heard yet for those damn Oompa Lumpas - radioactive helium. Sure, huffing that stuff is fun, but what about the consequences!
"Constant death was a necessity in the days of video arcades... Now, in the comfort of our lounges or offices, what reason is there to keep dumping us out of the game we bought with our hard earned cash?"
Riding a bicycle down-hill is enjoyable for most people. If you never had to ride a bike up-hill in the first place though, it'd get pretty boring pretty fast. You need to know what up-hill means for down-hill to have any value.
If you want, wait a week or so after just about any game is released, search the web and find the God Mode cheats. Frequent deaths are instantly solved. Sure, you get to take a quick tour of all of the games set pieces and pretty graphics but it will barely be a fraction as rewarding as it would have been had you actually had to work for it. My guess is you'll resent the $50 you had to spend far more than if you'd actually earned your way through it.
The lazy option is there. My experience has been that when I've taken it, I've got far less out of the games than when my achievements have actually meant something.
Going back to the bike analogy... Imagine having an engine that powers you up and down hills regardless. Oh, wait, I have one... I call it my car. Yet I've never had a fraction of the fun driving down a hill that I used to get after working to get my bike to the top of a hill and feeling the exhilaration on the way down the far side. Sure, I see more hills now, in less time - which suits my busier adult lifestyle - but each hill means a fraction of what they used to. That's why grown men take time out to go mountain biking and why others find the time to play games without cheating.
A person copied a system without renumeration to its creators, creating a system to play copies of other people's software without renumeration to the software's creators... OK, that's good and proper, right?
One of the creators of the software that was being copied without renumeration copied that person's software, without renumeration... And that's bad?
I must be getting middle aged. This stuff's just starting to sound like people getting outraged for the self-importance of getting outraged.
The figure I've always heard is multiply salary by 4x to figure out the actual cost of an employee, once PC access, HR, legal etc. costs are factored in.
That being the case, Microsoft's average employee costs them $75,000 a year - which is about normal for an IT company.
I totally agree, but your solution isn't a realistic one. That's only a great way to LOSE your job.
Except some parts of being fired for that are illegal in most states.
Change your phone number. When they discover that it no longer gets through, they'll likely try demanding the new one. Point out that it's illegal to actually demand home phone numbers from employees and even more so to imply that their jobs will be at risk if they fail to provide them.
(Even on a non-expense level, think about it on a harrassment level. CIO decides he'd like to take to phoning the cute blonde girl, on the web team, at home. Rather than make it obvious, he demands everyone's phone numbers. She declines, sensing his real motives, he threatens her. Now you see why those laws are there. It's just convenient that they cover you too.)
Or, alternatively, tell the CIO that you need a list of what means of out of hours contact are required - pagers, cell phones, home numbers, an upgrade from that 1200 baud modem you have, etc. and what the requirements are for your always responding to them.
Once you have that list, run it via a lawyer (or even a casual search of a book on business laws) and take it over the the HR department. Then wait for them to either have him fired for breaking that many laws (you'd be amazed how imcompetent with laws they have to follow many IT managers are), have his spoken to and his expectations realigned or, at the very least, get it on record that your raised its illegality with HR, that they elected to do nothing, and then you've got a much better case for quitting and claiming the company were wilfully breaking the law.
Alternatively - time to start hiking in the canyons when out of work. Those things are a bitch for cell phone and pager signals.
What, an earthed chicken wire [Faraday's] cage, with your cell phone and page sitting politely inside, along with caller-id, doesn't count as a canyon?
"Do you see good, even epic story lines, becoming a core feature of MMORPGs in the future?"
This would be the same game that cancelled its MMORPG component after customers had already bought copies but the MMORPG component hadn't shipped yet?
Surely, to have a meaningful opinion on the subject, you should actually have been involved in the area you claim expertise on and actually stayed with it through to completion.
Next people like George W. Bush will think their failing to do their service in the National Guard qualifies them to make decisions as Commander-in-Chief.
On a side note, most gamers will be angered by it too.
In a classic case of dumbing down for consoles, they're replacing the incredibly innovative gameplay features of the original with a more SOCOM style feel for the sequel.
The original was brilliant in its use of the whole unit. You could toggle between troops, setting up truly complex strategies. No longer did you have to deal with AI companions who'd never display human level intelligence - you could simply swap to them, position them, use them for their unique abilities, then swap back to someone else.
My epiphany moment in the game came a few missions in when I carefully set a sniper up on one side of a small depression, overlooking an enemy emplacement, two other guys were on the opposite side supplying crossing fire, the others had a machine gun and an anti tank weapon ready. A quick swap to the anti tank weapon had him stand, fire, quickly swap out and lie back down. Getting the enemies' attention, they all opened up on me, only to be cut down by the well placed covering fire that was waiting to be fired upon before returning fire. Now tell me how to do that in any AI based game where it's not just a forced part of the script.
It's that genius that they're removing from Ghost Recon II to make it more console friendly. Once again, a great game dies in order to get more console sales.
A person who incorrectly weights the value of preventative measures against their relative costs.
Yes, it's wonderful to be contactable in case your permission is required for medical procedures. How many times has that been necessary? How many procedures that really can't wait for you to be contacted do they actual stop because they can't contact you?
Now weigh that against the cost. Even if it's a small cost per instance, there are a massive number of instances of jerks ruining movies, meals and everything else making unnecessary phonecalls, with phones ringing, etc.
A rational person can accept that certain environments have a great cost for permitting cell phone usage than the cost of not doing so.
That only becomes more so when there are valid options for those establishments (such as them having a posted emergency number, having call forwarding available, a single lit 911-only emergency phone placed in the theater). Also, if it truly isn't worth it to you - you personally don't have to go. You can go to a cinema that does permit cell phones along with all the other parents, teenagers and everyone else who feels more entitled - that doesn't mean no one else should be permitted the option.
So, if a rational person can accept that the overall cost of permitting cellphones in certain environments is greater than overall cost of blocking them, the rational response is to permit their blocking and allow individuals to make their decisions as to whether or not to go there.
To be unable to agree with permitting rational choices to be made, because it affects your possible ability to deal with one exceptionally unlikely circumstance implies that, no, you can't correctly value the situation and, yes, you are a control freak.
Barring the fact that I don't believe you when you say that you get viruses over the 20 minutes that it takes to download and install the patches, the fix is simple.
The internet's not the only means of getting a virus on a nice clean build - even if you're using all legitimate install CDs.
Make sure things like you don't have a virus stuck somewhere other than your OS' file system. Getting a virus within 20 minutes each time sounds more like you've got something stuck in your Master Boot Record or wherever that's simply returning with every reinstall.
No, you're an over protective control freak who just happens to also be a parent.
Parents have managed to be away from their children for two hours or more for millenia without the world exploding. Look out the window, the human race seems to have made it this far just fine.
Some bad things will happen to your children in life. That's actually natural. The child who's never been allowed to fall, get a cold, cut themselves or anything else will be chronically ill prepared to live a life outside of your protective bubble.
I know it's scary but let it happen. It's better for the kid to have some [limited] exposure to the reall world. They'll grow up much better adjusted for it.
Leave them with a sitter. Tell the sitter where you're going and, in a major emergency, they can call the theater itself. It's worked for thousands of years, it can work for you too.
Haven't they been installing X-Box Live centers for the US Army to stay in touch with friends back home? What could be more beautiful than the thought of forty or fifty of our brave warriors all sitting in a room together, using the vibrate function with their partners back home?
Isn't a pop-music critic irrelevant by definition?
Pop Music is an abbrieviation of Popular Music. By definition, the best popular music is simply whatever sells the most. The worst popular music is whatever sells the least.
Certainly, people can have other views. People can have their personal tastes. At the end of the day though, they simply have opinions vs. the simple perfect (by definition) metric of sales.
I'm sure an argument can be made about marketing having an influence on sales. While that's potentially true, recognise what the basic business of a record label is. They want to make as much money as possible. If they believe a record has mass appeal, whether it's good, bad or indifferent, they'll put in as much money as they think will get them a return greater than their investment. OK, they can get that judgment wrong sometimes but their opinion, given their paid highly for it, is more likely to be accurate than most critics. If the critics were so accurate, the record labels would hire them as A and R men.
There is the notion of artistic merit. Then again, seeing as it's relatively rare for anything artistic to get even close to uniform reviews, even that is more personal opinion and personal values than anything else.
At the end of the day, all a critic really does is serve to be someone with an opinion. If you can find one with an opinion close to your own, they can save you time by helping you find things that suit such a shared opinion.
Still, when it comes to pop music, given its basic definition, analysing criticism, as opposed to analysing nothing more complex than sales figures, is probably a mistake.
If you actually take the time to read the judgement (I know, reading articles before commenting is bad form on slashdot), you'll realise:
The privacy policy was one minor point in a long list of much more salient points. Every single one of those points were struck down first.
What the judge was saying was that the vast majority of the case's real merits were struck down. With this one point left, which was frankly tacked on the end to try and just add some additional weight, it alone isn't strong enough to hold up the whole case.
Imagine the RIAA came after someone and sued them for mass producing CDs, of violating copyrights across the globe, of harming legitimate sources of revenues to the turn of tens of millions of dollars, oh, and also copying other people's CDs for your own personal use. If the defendent could then prove the whole case was bullsh*t except for the last point, we'd be hailing the judge for throwing out the case as being, to all intents and purposes, groundless.
Sure, the RIAA could replead the case on the one debatable point but they certainly couldn't maintain it in the form it was originally presented.
In the same way, the case against NorthWest might be debatable in the significantly more limited form of soley being about violating the privacy policy but, in its current form, it can't be maintained.
The only problem is: Violating a privacy policy entitles people to... well most privacy policies entitle you to third party arbitration and the arbitration board will likely say, "Very bad, don't do it again." (NW's policy doesn't even specify that) It was the other charges, which were actual laws, that had the potential for a massive punative payout.
To keep the case moving forward, the lawyers needed the potential of a big payday. That's the real reason this is an issue - because they were trying to hang a big payday off something much smaller in an attempt to keep the non-justified but bigger issues in play.
In that regard, the judge was right to kill the overall case.
"Buy X now! Available for the last time ever on video!"
They deliberately orphan older movies to force consumers [who may not want to buy them just yet but equally don't want to never be able to buy them] to purchase them in a given format.
Mind you, using Disney as an example might not be the best move as they can (and do) buy better/more politicians.
I'm all for the usual baiting of Micro$oft as the evil monopoly that they are but this one's legitimate.
I think anyone who ever installed a copy of Windows ME will agree that Microsoft need all the help they can when it comes to itemising the TODO list in their source code.
My microwave is a computer, my bedside alarmclock is a computer. You just can't do that wide a range of computational tasks on either one of them.
I'm guessing there are probably far more microwaves in circulation than cell phones. So, arguably, you can claim that "microwaves are the center of our digital lives!"
Sure, you can't do as much on a microwave as you can on a cellphone or a cellphone/PDA combination. So, we rule out microwaves, as they're not as capable, even if they're more numerous?
Does that mean we can rule out cellphones and PDAs as they're not as capable, even if they're more numerous than home PCs?
What makes a computer (in people's heads, as opposed to a textbook definition) is a pretty fuzzy area. Claiming that cellphone/PDAs are more numerous than PCs and hence our main computers is simply a case of picking a subset of that definition that most suits you and then distorting it.
Actually, it's because it's translated from Japanese. It may mean nothing in a English, but in western alphabet form Japanese, the acronym comes out as
U.S.E.D.S.C.H.O.O.L.G.I.R.L.P.A.N.T.I.E.S.
Although longer, it seems infinitely more memorable to certain very lonely Japanese engineer types.
Wasn't it a Mac guy who wrote that famous article about tracking down the guys who stole his computer as soon as it was next connected to the net?
My personal preference:
Back up your data regularly enough that you don't lose too much if your system crashes, gets dropped or... in this case... gets stolen.
Set it up so that, every time it connects to the net, it quietly emails you its IP address.
Hand it the hell over, don't get hurt, and give the police the address of the guy as soon as he tries using it (or the address of whoever buys it once he sells it).
What, you think the average mugger has a set of OS disks at home and knows how to clean up a stolen laptop before selling it on?
My rule of thumb: The UK Criminal Injuries Compensation board puts a broken nose at about five grand. My laptop is worth about a quarter of that. In short, it's not worth getting hurt over. I'd rather just hand it over and let a little bit of intelligence catch the guy two days later.
Sure, macho bravado about guns makes people feel better but, realistically, any sensible mugger doesn't anounce their intent from 100 yards away and give you time to get your gun. They wait until they're right beside you and, should you appear to go for a gun, knife or anything else, will lay in to you far faster than you can pull it out - whatever you may choose to believe.
Hand it over, take care of yourself, claim on the insurance. Far more sensible.
I would never, ever consider moving somewhere where I couldn't. It just demonstrates a government's utter contempt for its citizenry. I guess we'll never be neighbors.
Actually, it demonstrates the British government's utter consideration it has for its citizens. Neither you, nor you gun, will ever move to London.
And when your nearest major city can get its gun related murders in a week down to England's yearly total for the whole country, then the English might start to believe the claims that a prevalence of firearms make the place safer.
Legend has it the Seymour Cray actually toggled the first operating system for the CDC7600 in on the front panel from memory when it was first powered on. Needless to say, Seymour Cray is a Real Programmer.
Assuming that "Real Men" and "Hardcore" are synonymous, and given that Java falls firmly in to the Quiche Eating category, can you really say you can have Hardcore Quiche?
Slashdot Mirror
for the upcoming title Duke Nukem Forever
Upcoming kind of implies that it's actually going to happen some day soon. As opposed to "the upcoming sun going supernova" - which is on about the same timescale as Duke Nukem Forever.
The reactors are to be pebble bed reactors, in which helium replaces radioactive, pressurized water.
Now that's the most reasonable explanation I've heard yet for those damn Oompa Lumpas - radioactive helium. Sure, huffing that stuff is fun, but what about the consequences!
Now look at what you've done. You made Uncle Bill mad again. ;-)
That's uncle bill now.
"Constant death was a necessity in the days of video arcades... Now, in the comfort of our lounges or offices, what reason is there to keep dumping us out of the game we bought with our hard earned cash?"
Riding a bicycle down-hill is enjoyable for most people. If you never had to ride a bike up-hill in the first place though, it'd get pretty boring pretty fast. You need to know what up-hill means for down-hill to have any value.
If you want, wait a week or so after just about any game is released, search the web and find the God Mode cheats. Frequent deaths are instantly solved. Sure, you get to take a quick tour of all of the games set pieces and pretty graphics but it will barely be a fraction as rewarding as it would have been had you actually had to work for it. My guess is you'll resent the $50 you had to spend far more than if you'd actually earned your way through it.
The lazy option is there. My experience has been that when I've taken it, I've got far less out of the games than when my achievements have actually meant something.
Going back to the bike analogy... Imagine having an engine that powers you up and down hills regardless. Oh, wait, I have one... I call it my car. Yet I've never had a fraction of the fun driving down a hill that I used to get after working to get my bike to the top of a hill and feeling the exhilaration on the way down the far side. Sure, I see more hills now, in less time - which suits my busier adult lifestyle - but each hill means a fraction of what they used to. That's why grown men take time out to go mountain biking and why others find the time to play games without cheating.
Anybody else first read that as STFU? Seems oddly appropriate somehow.
Clippy bugs you a lot too?
A person copied a system without renumeration to its creators, creating a system to play copies of other people's software without renumeration to the software's creators... OK, that's good and proper, right?
One of the creators of the software that was being copied without renumeration copied that person's software, without renumeration... And that's bad?
I must be getting middle aged. This stuff's just starting to sound like people getting outraged for the self-importance of getting outraged.
The figure I've always heard is multiply salary by 4x to figure out the actual cost of an employee, once PC access, HR, legal etc. costs are factored in.
That being the case, Microsoft's average employee costs them $75,000 a year - which is about normal for an IT company.
I totally agree, but your solution isn't a realistic one. That's only a great way to LOSE your job.
Except some parts of being fired for that are illegal in most states.
Change your phone number. When they discover that it no longer gets through, they'll likely try demanding the new one. Point out that it's illegal to actually demand home phone numbers from employees and even more so to imply that their jobs will be at risk if they fail to provide them.
(Even on a non-expense level, think about it on a harrassment level. CIO decides he'd like to take to phoning the cute blonde girl, on the web team, at home. Rather than make it obvious, he demands everyone's phone numbers. She declines, sensing his real motives, he threatens her. Now you see why those laws are there. It's just convenient that they cover you too.)
Or, alternatively, tell the CIO that you need a list of what means of out of hours contact are required - pagers, cell phones, home numbers, an upgrade from that 1200 baud modem you have, etc. and what the requirements are for your always responding to them.
Once you have that list, run it via a lawyer (or even a casual search of a book on business laws) and take it over the the HR department. Then wait for them to either have him fired for breaking that many laws (you'd be amazed how imcompetent with laws they have to follow many IT managers are), have his spoken to and his expectations realigned or, at the very least, get it on record that your raised its illegality with HR, that they elected to do nothing, and then you've got a much better case for quitting and claiming the company were wilfully breaking the law.
Alternatively - time to start hiking in the canyons when out of work. Those things are a bitch for cell phone and pager signals.
What, an earthed chicken wire [Faraday's] cage, with your cell phone and page sitting politely inside, along with caller-id, doesn't count as a canyon?
"Do you see good, even epic story lines, becoming a core feature of MMORPGs in the future?"
This would be the same game that cancelled its MMORPG component after customers had already bought copies but the MMORPG component hadn't shipped yet?
Surely, to have a meaningful opinion on the subject, you should actually have been involved in the area you claim expertise on and actually stayed with it through to completion.
Next people like George W. Bush will think their failing to do their service in the National Guard qualifies them to make decisions as Commander-in-Chief.
What kind of an insane world would that be?!
On a side note, most gamers will be angered by it too.
In a classic case of dumbing down for consoles, they're replacing the incredibly innovative gameplay features of the original with a more SOCOM style feel for the sequel.
The original was brilliant in its use of the whole unit. You could toggle between troops, setting up truly complex strategies. No longer did you have to deal with AI companions who'd never display human level intelligence - you could simply swap to them, position them, use them for their unique abilities, then swap back to someone else.
My epiphany moment in the game came a few missions in when I carefully set a sniper up on one side of a small depression, overlooking an enemy emplacement, two other guys were on the opposite side supplying crossing fire, the others had a machine gun and an anti tank weapon ready. A quick swap to the anti tank weapon had him stand, fire, quickly swap out and lie back down. Getting the enemies' attention, they all opened up on me, only to be cut down by the well placed covering fire that was waiting to be fired upon before returning fire. Now tell me how to do that in any AI based game where it's not just a forced part of the script.
It's that genius that they're removing from Ghost Recon II to make it more console friendly. Once again, a great game dies in order to get more console sales.
OK, the definition of a control freak:
A person who incorrectly weights the value of preventative measures against their relative costs.
Yes, it's wonderful to be contactable in case your permission is required for medical procedures. How many times has that been necessary? How many procedures that really can't wait for you to be contacted do they actual stop because they can't contact you?
Now weigh that against the cost. Even if it's a small cost per instance, there are a massive number of instances of jerks ruining movies, meals and everything else making unnecessary phonecalls, with phones ringing, etc.
A rational person can accept that certain environments have a great cost for permitting cell phone usage than the cost of not doing so.
That only becomes more so when there are valid options for those establishments (such as them having a posted emergency number, having call forwarding available, a single lit 911-only emergency phone placed in the theater). Also, if it truly isn't worth it to you - you personally don't have to go. You can go to a cinema that does permit cell phones along with all the other parents, teenagers and everyone else who feels more entitled - that doesn't mean no one else should be permitted the option.
So, if a rational person can accept that the overall cost of permitting cellphones in certain environments is greater than overall cost of blocking them, the rational response is to permit their blocking and allow individuals to make their decisions as to whether or not to go there.
To be unable to agree with permitting rational choices to be made, because it affects your possible ability to deal with one exceptionally unlikely circumstance implies that, no, you can't correctly value the situation and, yes, you are a control freak.
Barring the fact that I don't believe you when you say that you get viruses over the 20 minutes that it takes to download and install the patches, the fix is simple.
The internet's not the only means of getting a virus on a nice clean build - even if you're using all legitimate install CDs.
Make sure things like you don't have a virus stuck somewhere other than your OS' file system. Getting a virus within 20 minutes each time sounds more like you've got something stuck in your Master Boot Record or wherever that's simply returning with every reinstall.
I'm a parent.
No, you're an over protective control freak who just happens to also be a parent.
Parents have managed to be away from their children for two hours or more for millenia without the world exploding. Look out the window, the human race seems to have made it this far just fine.
Some bad things will happen to your children in life. That's actually natural. The child who's never been allowed to fall, get a cold, cut themselves or anything else will be chronically ill prepared to live a life outside of your protective bubble.
I know it's scary but let it happen. It's better for the kid to have some [limited] exposure to the reall world. They'll grow up much better adjusted for it.
Leave them with a sitter. Tell the sitter where you're going and, in a major emergency, they can call the theater itself. It's worked for thousands of years, it can work for you too.
Haven't they been installing X-Box Live centers for the US Army to stay in touch with friends back home? What could be more beautiful than the thought of forty or fifty of our brave warriors all sitting in a room together, using the vibrate function with their partners back home?
The Army That Plays Together, Stays Together
Ew.
Isn't a pop-music critic irrelevant by definition?
Pop Music is an abbrieviation of Popular Music. By definition, the best popular music is simply whatever sells the most. The worst popular music is whatever sells the least.
Certainly, people can have other views. People can have their personal tastes. At the end of the day though, they simply have opinions vs. the simple perfect (by definition) metric of sales.
I'm sure an argument can be made about marketing having an influence on sales. While that's potentially true, recognise what the basic business of a record label is. They want to make as much money as possible. If they believe a record has mass appeal, whether it's good, bad or indifferent, they'll put in as much money as they think will get them a return greater than their investment. OK, they can get that judgment wrong sometimes but their opinion, given their paid highly for it, is more likely to be accurate than most critics. If the critics were so accurate, the record labels would hire them as A and R men.
There is the notion of artistic merit. Then again, seeing as it's relatively rare for anything artistic to get even close to uniform reviews, even that is more personal opinion and personal values than anything else.
At the end of the day, all a critic really does is serve to be someone with an opinion. If you can find one with an opinion close to your own, they can save you time by helping you find things that suit such a shared opinion.
Still, when it comes to pop music, given its basic definition, analysing criticism, as opposed to analysing nothing more complex than sales figures, is probably a mistake.
If you actually take the time to read the judgement (I know, reading articles before commenting is bad form on slashdot), you'll realise:
The privacy policy was one minor point in a long list of much more salient points. Every single one of those points were struck down first.
What the judge was saying was that the vast majority of the case's real merits were struck down. With this one point left, which was frankly tacked on the end to try and just add some additional weight, it alone isn't strong enough to hold up the whole case.
Imagine the RIAA came after someone and sued them for mass producing CDs, of violating copyrights across the globe, of harming legitimate sources of revenues to the turn of tens of millions of dollars, oh, and also copying other people's CDs for your own personal use. If the defendent could then prove the whole case was bullsh*t except for the last point, we'd be hailing the judge for throwing out the case as being, to all intents and purposes, groundless.
Sure, the RIAA could replead the case on the one debatable point but they certainly couldn't maintain it in the form it was originally presented.
In the same way, the case against NorthWest might be debatable in the significantly more limited form of soley being about violating the privacy policy but, in its current form, it can't be maintained.
The only problem is: Violating a privacy policy entitles people to... well most privacy policies entitle you to third party arbitration and the arbitration board will likely say, "Very bad, don't do it again." (NW's policy doesn't even specify that) It was the other charges, which were actual laws, that had the potential for a massive punative payout.
To keep the case moving forward, the lawyers needed the potential of a big payday. That's the real reason this is an issue - because they were trying to hang a big payday off something much smaller in an attempt to keep the non-justified but bigger issues in play.
In that regard, the judge was right to kill the overall case.
Disney outright uses it as a marketing ploy:
"Buy X now! Available for the last time ever on video!"
They deliberately orphan older movies to force consumers [who may not want to buy them just yet but equally don't want to never be able to buy them] to purchase them in a given format.
Mind you, using Disney as an example might not be the best move as they can (and do) buy better/more politicians.
Hey, be fair to Microsoft!
I'm all for the usual baiting of Micro$oft as the evil monopoly that they are but this one's legitimate.
I think anyone who ever installed a copy of Windows ME will agree that Microsoft need all the help they can when it comes to itemising the TODO list in their source code.
The last time I used the tilde key must have been yesterday, I don't know about you but, cd ~ is alot easier than typing /home/whatever.
Shut up you ~o!
My microwave is a computer, my bedside alarmclock is a computer. You just can't do that wide a range of computational tasks on either one of them.
I'm guessing there are probably far more microwaves in circulation than cell phones. So, arguably, you can claim that "microwaves are the center of our digital lives!"
Sure, you can't do as much on a microwave as you can on a cellphone or a cellphone/PDA combination. So, we rule out microwaves, as they're not as capable, even if they're more numerous?
Does that mean we can rule out cellphones and PDAs as they're not as capable, even if they're more numerous than home PCs?
What makes a computer (in people's heads, as opposed to a textbook definition) is a pretty fuzzy area. Claiming that cellphone/PDAs are more numerous than PCs and hence our main computers is simply a case of picking a subset of that definition that most suits you and then distorting it.
Actually, it's because it's translated from Japanese. It may mean nothing in a English, but in western alphabet form Japanese, the acronym comes out as
U.S.E.D.S.C.H.O.O.L.G.I.R.L.P.A.N.T.I.E.S.
Although longer, it seems infinitely more memorable to certain very lonely Japanese engineer types.
Wasn't it a Mac guy who wrote that famous article about tracking down the guys who stole his computer as soon as it was next connected to the net?
My personal preference:
Back up your data regularly enough that you don't lose too much if your system crashes, gets dropped or... in this case... gets stolen.
Set it up so that, every time it connects to the net, it quietly emails you its IP address.
Hand it the hell over, don't get hurt, and give the police the address of the guy as soon as he tries using it (or the address of whoever buys it once he sells it).
What, you think the average mugger has a set of OS disks at home and knows how to clean up a stolen laptop before selling it on?
My rule of thumb: The UK Criminal Injuries Compensation board puts a broken nose at about five grand. My laptop is worth about a quarter of that. In short, it's not worth getting hurt over. I'd rather just hand it over and let a little bit of intelligence catch the guy two days later.
Sure, macho bravado about guns makes people feel better but, realistically, any sensible mugger doesn't anounce their intent from 100 yards away and give you time to get your gun. They wait until they're right beside you and, should you appear to go for a gun, knife or anything else, will lay in to you far faster than you can pull it out - whatever you may choose to believe.
Hand it over, take care of yourself, claim on the insurance. Far more sensible.
Don't forget "smell of urine".
Oh, come on! Three days at a lan party, you don't want to miss the CS finals, everyone's done it!
Haven't they?... Anyone?...
I would never, ever consider moving somewhere where I couldn't. It just demonstrates a government's utter contempt for its citizenry. I guess we'll never be neighbors.
Actually, it demonstrates the British government's utter consideration it has for its citizens. Neither you, nor you gun, will ever move to London.
And when your nearest major city can get its gun related murders in a week down to England's yearly total for the whole country, then the English might start to believe the claims that a prevalence of firearms make the place safer.
It's long been said that there are real men and quiche eaters.
Legend has it the Seymour Cray actually toggled the first operating system for the CDC7600 in on the front panel from memory when it was first powered on. Needless to say, Seymour Cray is a Real Programmer.
Assuming that "Real Men" and "Hardcore" are synonymous, and given that Java falls firmly in to the Quiche Eating category, can you really say you can have Hardcore Quiche?
What's next: "AOL for Powerusers"?