Yes, regular expressions are more powerful. They are also - sorry o mighty nerds of slashdot - completely confusing to the majority of more casual developers who want to be able to drop in a line of quick code and move on to making their drop shadowed corners even rounder.
In my case it was an error code that Mini do everything they can to keep meaningless... as opposed to DRM. It was also potentially life threatening.
Coming back out of the mountains, the electric system shut off in the car, the engine cut out. There was no shoulder so the first place out of traffic we could get to was the gap between the main freeway traffic and an oncoming merge lane.
It was a fairly dangerous spot - no walls, no guard rail to get behind, between two streams of traffic moving at speed - but the best option we had.
The car restarted, flashing up CC-ID 354 - whatever that meant. Most likely, we'd be safe pulling away and finding a less risky spot. But, if it was about to fail again, as we accelerated, we'd be dumped, stalled, in the middle of moving traffic with no shoulder.
Obvious answer: Call Mini service. First Mini dealership couldn't get their service department to answer. They sent me to Mini Roadside Assistance. That muppet had a call sheet he had to work through and couldn't do anything as he couldn't find out VIN in the system. By this point, as we got buffeted by every passing big rig, my wife told him she didn't give a damn about whether we were in the system or not, we simply needed to know if 354 meant it was safe or unsafe to move... Turns out he has none of the details. All he can do is call a tow truck. We hung up and called another dealership's service. They at least answered but refused to say what it meant, only that we shouldn't drive it. No details about whether it would likely get us half a mile to the next off ramp, nothing.
An online search (thank you iPhones) turned up nothing (curse you googles). Turns out the codes are kept pretty much to Mini alone.
What angers me about the whole experience is that "Error 354 means a fuse has blown and the car will stall over 10mph" would've told me there really was no safe way off. "Error 354 means the keyless ignition charger has a faulty connection, drive with the key out of the charger and take it in for service." would have told me it was safe to get out of that exposed position. "It's a secret" did nothing save endanger us.
Some are already here, if you rent a U-Haul truck, there's a governor on the engine that won't let you above 65mph.
Good thing there are absolutely no roads, anywhere in the nation, where it's legal to go over 65.
In California, it's an offence to obstruct the flow of traffic and drive under the speed limit. There're also a few 75mph stretches of freeway. That 65 limiter puts you in breach of the law on them.
'excessive speed is one of the primary ways that people are killed while driving.'
With the exception of vehicles randomly catching fire, carbon monoxide and the like, it's pretty much the only cause of deaths while driving.
But excessive speed (i.e. not being able to lose what speed you have and avoid a collision) is not the same thing as speeding (going over an assigned number that may or may not be appropriate for current road conditions).
If you're a pedestrian, getting hit by a car doing 40 in a 50 doesn't make you any less dead. Getting hit by the asshat talking on a phone, still doing 65 in a 65 and not noticing that you and the rest of traffic have stopped doesn't make a huge difference vs. the guy hitting at 75. Trying to go through 30mph turns at 30, on a frozen mountain pass, will still kill you.
A device that know what the current speed limit for the stretch of road you're on, and stops you from exceeding it, will reduce some of the excessive speed deaths but nowhere near all of them.
Plus, how long before someone's unit runs with about the accuracy of current GPSs? Mine regularly decides I'm suddenly on the overpass or the access road while I'm actually on the freeway - or vice versa.
How much safer are you when your car suddenly decides that 35 is quite fast enough on a freeway - because the access road to your side is posted at that speed - and you get slammed in to from behind?
How much safer are you when you're doing 35 on that access road and the idiot who's now so used to his car ensuring he's in the right ploughs in to you at the 65 freeway speed his car is picking up?
Shutter glasses, where your eyes are tricked in to thinking they're focusing on a real 3D image, are bad enough.
They're a great gimmick. They also suck, massively, as your eyes try to move to something your brain assumes is in the distance, yet is actually on the same fixed screen. They pull focus, everything goes blurry and it takes a moment to readjust.
For games like GTA, they're great... You're generally focusing on one distance - right where your car is. It only becomes a problem as you pick up speed, try focusing down the street and everything screws up for a moment as the trick doesn't behave the way your eyes expect it to.
For games where you're constantly looking up close and far away - watching the floor in front of you while you jump in an FPS and then sniping someone a block or two away - it's a nightmare.
As I recall, back in the days of head mounted VR rides, nausea was an even bigger issue. At least with shutter glasses you can easily look off elsewhere and your eyes are still focusing a couple of feet away. Now move to screens that push the edge of where you can focus, that wrap all of your vision and you can't look away from them.
Plus there's head movement. When your eyes don't match what your body's senses tell you, in a car, you get car sick. Now picture every slight movement of your body still showing the exact same image.
Sure, you can create a 3D environment that moves with you but they never update quite as fast as you ultimately perceive. Sure, 24fps is enough to fake the eyes in to thinking they're perceiving smooth motion. It takes a lot more to fully fool the brain in to believing reality's updating with every tiny movement of the head. That 120th of a second delay between when it knows your head starts turning and when the image updates is plenty to leave many people nauseous.
Plus there's the eye strain of your entire world being constantly 2 inches from your eyes.
My guess is that any technology that leaves most of its users with headaches and vomiting - plus eye damage over time - is going to have a hard time catching on. Without mass market pick up, its prices won't drop as fast as we're used to for other mass market products. You're left with a niche product for a niche market and the usual high prices that brings.
You may want to take a look at Microsoft's Photosynth (usual Microsoft bashing, what about Linux and Mac, I don't want to install silverlight, etc. aside).
What you'll generally find though is that either:
a) You don't shoot enough coverage. b) You shoot too damn much and it takes forever to upload.
Say you're used to DSLRs. You probably shoot about a 20-30 degree field of coverage at 10mp whenever something interesting comes up.
Your choice is either to shoot as wide as you can... In which case you won't have the detail you're used to when you zoom in on something interesting, leaving it an unidentifiable blur... Or you can take 36 overlapping shots at 10 degree intervals followed by a bunch of vertical passes - but then you're talking 50-100 x 10MP images to upload for every point you shoot from and it takes you half an hour to capture each of them.
Google goes with so low res it'd suck for trying to show people the details of a cool cathedral or whatever else. It's great for figuring out where you are but little more than that. You could shoot 8-10 very wide angle images (14mm lenses on a full frame sensor, etc.) which would get your numbers of files down in exchange for less detail. Still...
Street view takes a picture every 50 feet or so. Simple coverage of say a cathedral will still have you taking about 20 points inside and the same outside.
Even at 8-10 images per location, that's still a couple of hundred... and a few thousand if you want detailed ones. All at say 10MP... That's gigs upon gigs of data to upload, while away (or store on many memory cards) and hours spent doing it... For a single building you want people to be able to truly explore with you.
Or, of course, you just take a few wide shots from a few locations... Photosynth is great for that. But, afterwards, you realize you missed dozens of angles and people can't see that really cool X you remember.
It would have just been nice if they hadn't tried getting every camera angle in every shot.
It's great that, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, they're hiring epileptic tweakers as cameramen now - then tazing them for added dynamism - but, sweet jesus people, shaky cam is way past stale.
Plus, let's face it, your audience are nerds... They know there's nothing to transmit vibrations in space. So, when a spaceship explodes a few miles from the camera, the camera isn't going to shake with it.
We are very emotionally attached to our development and we place great importance to being independent. We founded our company because we didn't want to follow rules. We wanted to be the ones who make the rules instead. Money really doesn't mean much to us as long as we can do whatever we want while excelling at our passions. We feel that by accepting the offer, we couldn't achieve the maximum of our potential, and one of us joked that if we get in contact with the corporate environment and accept their money, we risk becoming lazy.
If you truly felt that, you wouldn't be asking the question on Slashdot. You'd already have your answer and there'd be no discussion needed.
Your challenge is, like most of us, you've all invested heavily in the underdog culture, come up with a million justifications for why... while no one was offering it... it was much better to do without money, how it was idealistic, etc.
Except now you have been offered money and the very fact you're having to ask puts lie to the concept of absolute belief in those values that were so easy to claim you had when, in truth, they were your only option.
You have both options open to you: You can take the money or you can decline it can keep being the same company. What you need to do is honestly weigh up your feelings and pick whichever is more important to you. But part of honesty is getting over having told yourself you believe something when your actions (in this case having to ask) scream that you haven't bought in to it quite as hard as you want the world, and most likely yourself, to believe.
At the end of the day, it's your call. Slashdot can give you more insight in to the pros and cons of different paths but it's your individual values that have to make the call and, as everyone's values are slightly different, no one on Slashdot can tell you what that ultimate answer is. Just be honest with yourself and accept that, whatever you choose, there'll be bad days when you wish you'd chosen the other but that that is reality and it's OK when it happens.
If it bothers you as a site owner, just like you can add your robots file to ditch search engines, one line of JavaScript will break you out of it.
if (top.location != location) top.location.href = document.location.href;
Granted, the experience still sucks for users of sites that don't have that and have the framing breaking their user experience assumptions. But at least it's a fix for site owners who dislike it.
It wasn't just the roommate who was alleging multiple cases of computer abuse. It's just a case of here's a provable crime - clearly tracable logs that go right back to his PC - that get them a search order that allows them to then seize everything and legally take a snoop around to see what of the larger allegations, that they don't currently have proof of, they can also get information on.
It's somewhat like getting Al Capone on tax evasion with the hope that, once you could make that stick, you could then get access to enough of the rest of his records you could pin more on him. Of course, Capone was smart enough that tax was about all he left records for. This guy thinks he's a l33t haxor who can't get caught and is evidently dumb enough to leave all kinds of digital paper trails.
The actual exhibit shows, step by step, how the harassment was tracked to a pair of web mail accounts, tracked via server logs to a specific IP, tracked to a machine in the suspect's name, running Linux.
Linux is an embellishing detail but the actual accusation has nothing to do with "OMG, LINUX IS WEIRD!" and everything to do with... yep, guy's a douche and he used a Linux box to harass someone, here's step by step proof to demonstrate that.
Your case, if it's as simple as you make out, is totally different. As you describe it, you were falsely accused due to ignorance. He was proved almost certainly guilty by a very methodical approach where Linux was just one minor detail that's been overplayed in cheap headline grabbing summaries.
"College Police Think Using Linux Is Suspicious Behavior
If you read the warrant request...
A student was falsely outed by a fake profile on adam2adam, a gay site.
Server logs show it was accessed by two web based email accounts.
Those accounts were traced by the network registration system to 137.167.207.174, a machine on 00:23:28:BE:24... a machine runing Linux.
On page 7, it states that only two machines in the entire hall of residence accessed the network using Linux.
So, yes, when you narrow down all possible suspects to just two people who both use Linux... and the machine is on an account registered to one of them... Using Linux, in that specific case, really is exceptionally suspicious behavior.
It's a cheap headline grabber to imply, "Dumb cops think Linux is weird and so criminal!" In reality, it's a computer forensics specialist writing an incredibly clearly, methodical listing, tracking down a harassment issue to a Linux machine, registered under the suspect's name.
Sorry dude, you were a raging douchebag who falsely outed someone because you two had an argument and you're a lousy enough hacker that your anonymous web based mail accounts led them straight to the specific machine you did it on. Screaming OMG, COPS HATE LINUX doesn't make it any less true.
Entertainingly, Autodesk tried to trademark Gibson's term cyberspace. Apparently they couldn't understand why Gibson thought they should pay him a royalty to use his intellectual property just as they expect others to pay them a royalty to use theirs. After spending a little money on lawyers, they settled for "Autodesk Cyberspace" and he realized he wasn't going to get much further even if he spent a lot more.
Not one to quite gracefully, Gibson trademarked "Eric Gullichsen" in response.
My own recent conversations with other major ISPs suggest that the average broadband user only pulls down 2-6GB of data per month as it is.
And, in the days of 56.6kbps modems, just about no one pulled down 100MB of data per month. Why don't we cap it there?
Oh yeah... because we actually like society advancing not staying stagnant.
Just because most users don't, currently, constantly bang up against capacity limits, that's no reason to cap them at it to ensure they will as their usage patterns grow. Well, OK, it is if you're terrified their usage patterns are going to include cancelling your hugely profitable cable TV service and watching their content online. Which, let's face it, is the real reason these caps are getting introduced almost exclusively by organizations who don't want you able to circumvent their other business model.
I tried explaining, "We really prefer classes to be descriptive of purpose rather than descriptive of the style. That way, we can change the styling for a given class of data later and still have the class names make sense. So please use descriptive of purpose classes not descriptive of style ones."
First shot of a set, point your camera at their driver's license.
Takes about 30 seconds.
If it's for personal use, you're going to be keeping the whole set together and will always have that first image with the date stamped files.
There was an interesting article, a while back, about all of the cunning defenses that geeks think of (YANAL). As the writer pointed out, being able to win in court is not the same thing as not being dragged through hell in the process.
2257 formalizes something that was already around - child pornography is illegal. Whether it does or doesn't exist, if the cops believe you have images of child porn, they'll still destroy your life in the investigation.
Whether 2257 exists or not, the whole first shot at a driver's license makes sense regardless. That being the case, as bad a law as 2257 is, it doesn't really change much for personal use... You either risk hell and assume it won't happen or you don't. 2257 adds little.
It is a deliberate tactic for anti-sex groups to threaten porn stars with stalkers. If they can't shame them into obedience, then they expose them to sexual predators.
This is commonly used as an argument against 2257. It's also wrong.
If you actually read the wording, it allows for only the original rights owner of an image to keep the full proof of identity.
They may then send a redacted copy to all subsequent re-distributors for their records. That copy may blank out everything uniquely identifiable - driver's license number, etc. - leaving only the picture and the date of birth visible.
So long as a paper trail remains back to the original record holder, no one else has to have any information that aids stalkers. The original record holders only have to produce it for law enforcement, not for anyone curious.
I'll totally concede the act is abusive and designed to threaten pornographers that they can't shut down legally. But it's done with the intent of creating unreasonable burdens for record holders not to target the stars.
But then again, "Won't anyone think of the sleazy fat pornographer?!" doesn't work as well as "Won't anyone think of the poor model?!" Even if the former's true and the latter isn't.
Said one, 'I believe Bill Gates is a charlatan because...'
An investor said that?
And they believe Bill Gates was a seventh level magic user who magicked them in to investing with him through flim flammery?
Sorry the economy sucks but take some personal responsibility and stop blaming everyone.
If you're going to sit around annoying the shit out of everyone at the watercooler, telling them how you're a really smart investor when the economy's strong... you don't get to whine when it's weak. You took credit for your "decisions" then, they're still your decisions now.
If you were really so incompetent an investor to fall for "a charlatan" you probably shouldn't be investing anyway. And, if you do lose, hopefully the pain will be just sufficient enough to teach you that.
I got hit up by Greenpeace yesterday, pushing for support on legislation to reduce carbon emissions. Here's what I told them.
How many kids do you have/plan to have? Honestly, it doesn't matter. Do you have/plan to have any?
As a global society, we can't even manage to get everyone to sign up to stopping the increase in emissions. Even those countries that do sign up rarely show any interest in anything close to 50% reductions within a single generation (around 20 years).
Assuming we can't manage to drop at least 50% over each and every generation, and the population certainly isn't going down... Humanity is going to put out more carbon over your genetic line's lifetime, no matter what you do, than someone without kids will ever put out in their lifetime that politely ends and then stops stressing the environment.
You want to save the environment... Stop focusing your energy on nice-idea-but-ultimately-inconsequential carbon cuts and push for the real problem, humans, to stop breeding.
Humanity is, sadly, a plague on the global environment in just the same way locusts are in smaller areas - they massively produce in numbers too large for their environment to support.
The sad conclusion I've come to is that, able to keep draining the environment in new and creative ways that no other animal can do, short of choosing to conciously adopt a responsible breeding program, no amount of trying minor tweaks is going to make that dramatic a difference until we screw things up so badly nature forces it upon us.
I'm sorry... My knee jerk just hit me in the face so hard I lost all ability to reason for a while.
The dozen banks now receiving the biggest rescue packages, totaling more than $150 billion, requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers over the past six years.
We've got our panties in a bunch over their hiring H1Bs at the rate of one one thousandth of their global workforce each year during the fastest period of growth in banking history? Anyone else feeling stupid yet?
21,860 over six years.
So an average of 3,600 a year?
Or, divided across the dozen quoted, an average of three hundred whole H1Bs per bank, each year.
To put that in context, Citibank, not even the largest of them, had around 300,000 worldwide workers. Their lay offs have hit around 10% of that number... 30,000. 300 H1Bs a year is suddenly a very, very small number.
Even if none of the H1Bs moved on during the six years, they'd have hired a total of about 2,000 of them. They'd still have laid off 28,000 non H1B holders even if every last H1B holder had gone first.
Sweet jesus, they're clearly the most evil H1B abusers evar.
And as for talking about how evil they were for hiring these H1Bs over the last six years as the system imploded? It's been falling apart for the last year or so. The other five of those that we're busy lumping in there were (admittedly for bad reasons) the fastest period of growth the banking sector has ever seen.
The constant whining about H1Bs, I'm sorry, is the same pathetic xenophobia and protectionism that kicks in, whether grounded or not, whenever people get scared.
I was disgusted in 2002 as that shameful of human traits was used to justify stripping away the nation's civil liberties. I was disgusted as it turned in to attacking mosques and regarding all muslims as obvious terrorists. I was disgusted as it was used to justify attacking as "unpatriotic" anyone who dared question what turned out to be lies justifying a war that's cost 5,000 American lives. And, yeah, I'm pretty disgusted by it now too.
Xenophobia's pathetic at any time. Massively distorting numbers to make a point that really doesn't exist doesn't help.
The first 486 I got my hands on came with a $5,000 price tag.
My first Pentium came in, well spec'd, around $2,500.
The PCs I was building for myself ran about $1,500 five years ago and the last one was down around $1,100 - all "mid-range" machines, capable of playing the latest games in fairly high quality and reasonably functional for at least 18 months to 2 years.
Since a little after that Pentium, the systems I see more casual friends buying have dropped from few people buying $3,000 laptops to a fair number of people getting $2,000 laptops to most of them having $1,000 laptops, to $699 Circuit City or BestBuy "deals" to $300 netbooks.
When Moore came up with his law, in the mid 60s, what was the single cheapest usefully functional computer you could buy? I wasn't buying then but I'm guessing several hundred thousand dollars and it took up half the room. From day one, people have been trading processor cycles for cost.
Slashdot Mirror
The Masked Input Plugin already solves this pretty nicely.
$("#ssn").mask("999-99-9999");
is pretty easy to implement.
Yes, regular expressions are more powerful. They are also - sorry o mighty nerds of slashdot - completely confusing to the majority of more casual developers who want to be able to drop in a line of quick code and move on to making their drop shadowed corners even rounder.
In my case it was an error code that Mini do everything they can to keep meaningless... as opposed to DRM. It was also potentially life threatening.
Coming back out of the mountains, the electric system shut off in the car, the engine cut out. There was no shoulder so the first place out of traffic we could get to was the gap between the main freeway traffic and an oncoming merge lane.
It was a fairly dangerous spot - no walls, no guard rail to get behind, between two streams of traffic moving at speed - but the best option we had.
The car restarted, flashing up CC-ID 354 - whatever that meant. Most likely, we'd be safe pulling away and finding a less risky spot. But, if it was about to fail again, as we accelerated, we'd be dumped, stalled, in the middle of moving traffic with no shoulder.
Obvious answer: Call Mini service. First Mini dealership couldn't get their service department to answer. They sent me to Mini Roadside Assistance. That muppet had a call sheet he had to work through and couldn't do anything as he couldn't find out VIN in the system. By this point, as we got buffeted by every passing big rig, my wife told him she didn't give a damn about whether we were in the system or not, we simply needed to know if 354 meant it was safe or unsafe to move... Turns out he has none of the details. All he can do is call a tow truck. We hung up and called another dealership's service. They at least answered but refused to say what it meant, only that we shouldn't drive it. No details about whether it would likely get us half a mile to the next off ramp, nothing.
An online search (thank you iPhones) turned up nothing (curse you googles). Turns out the codes are kept pretty much to Mini alone.
What angers me about the whole experience is that "Error 354 means a fuse has blown and the car will stall over 10mph" would've told me there really was no safe way off. "Error 354 means the keyless ignition charger has a faulty connection, drive with the key out of the charger and take it in for service." would have told me it was safe to get out of that exposed position. "It's a secret" did nothing save endanger us.
Some are already here, if you rent a U-Haul truck, there's a governor on the engine that won't let you above 65mph.
Good thing there are absolutely no roads, anywhere in the nation, where it's legal to go over 65.
In California, it's an offence to obstruct the flow of traffic and drive under the speed limit. There're also a few 75mph stretches of freeway. That 65 limiter puts you in breach of the law on them.
'excessive speed is one of the primary ways that people are killed while driving.'
With the exception of vehicles randomly catching fire, carbon monoxide and the like, it's pretty much the only cause of deaths while driving.
But excessive speed (i.e. not being able to lose what speed you have and avoid a collision) is not the same thing as speeding (going over an assigned number that may or may not be appropriate for current road conditions).
If you're a pedestrian, getting hit by a car doing 40 in a 50 doesn't make you any less dead. Getting hit by the asshat talking on a phone, still doing 65 in a 65 and not noticing that you and the rest of traffic have stopped doesn't make a huge difference vs. the guy hitting at 75. Trying to go through 30mph turns at 30, on a frozen mountain pass, will still kill you.
A device that know what the current speed limit for the stretch of road you're on, and stops you from exceeding it, will reduce some of the excessive speed deaths but nowhere near all of them.
Plus, how long before someone's unit runs with about the accuracy of current GPSs? Mine regularly decides I'm suddenly on the overpass or the access road while I'm actually on the freeway - or vice versa.
How much safer are you when your car suddenly decides that 35 is quite fast enough on a freeway - because the access road to your side is posted at that speed - and you get slammed in to from behind?
How much safer are you when you're doing 35 on that access road and the idiot who's now so used to his car ensuring he's in the right ploughs in to you at the 65 freeway speed his car is picking up?
Shutter glasses, where your eyes are tricked in to thinking they're focusing on a real 3D image, are bad enough.
They're a great gimmick. They also suck, massively, as your eyes try to move to something your brain assumes is in the distance, yet is actually on the same fixed screen. They pull focus, everything goes blurry and it takes a moment to readjust.
For games like GTA, they're great... You're generally focusing on one distance - right where your car is. It only becomes a problem as you pick up speed, try focusing down the street and everything screws up for a moment as the trick doesn't behave the way your eyes expect it to.
For games where you're constantly looking up close and far away - watching the floor in front of you while you jump in an FPS and then sniping someone a block or two away - it's a nightmare.
As I recall, back in the days of head mounted VR rides, nausea was an even bigger issue. At least with shutter glasses you can easily look off elsewhere and your eyes are still focusing a couple of feet away. Now move to screens that push the edge of where you can focus, that wrap all of your vision and you can't look away from them.
Plus there's head movement. When your eyes don't match what your body's senses tell you, in a car, you get car sick. Now picture every slight movement of your body still showing the exact same image.
Sure, you can create a 3D environment that moves with you but they never update quite as fast as you ultimately perceive. Sure, 24fps is enough to fake the eyes in to thinking they're perceiving smooth motion. It takes a lot more to fully fool the brain in to believing reality's updating with every tiny movement of the head. That 120th of a second delay between when it knows your head starts turning and when the image updates is plenty to leave many people nauseous.
Plus there's the eye strain of your entire world being constantly 2 inches from your eyes.
My guess is that any technology that leaves most of its users with headaches and vomiting - plus eye damage over time - is going to have a hard time catching on. Without mass market pick up, its prices won't drop as fast as we're used to for other mass market products. You're left with a niche product for a niche market and the usual high prices that brings.
You may want to take a look at Microsoft's Photosynth (usual Microsoft bashing, what about Linux and Mac, I don't want to install silverlight, etc. aside).
What you'll generally find though is that either:
a) You don't shoot enough coverage.
b) You shoot too damn much and it takes forever to upload.
Say you're used to DSLRs. You probably shoot about a 20-30 degree field of coverage at 10mp whenever something interesting comes up.
Your choice is either to shoot as wide as you can... In which case you won't have the detail you're used to when you zoom in on something interesting, leaving it an unidentifiable blur... Or you can take 36 overlapping shots at 10 degree intervals followed by a bunch of vertical passes - but then you're talking 50-100 x 10MP images to upload for every point you shoot from and it takes you half an hour to capture each of them.
Google goes with so low res it'd suck for trying to show people the details of a cool cathedral or whatever else. It's great for figuring out where you are but little more than that. You could shoot 8-10 very wide angle images (14mm lenses on a full frame sensor, etc.) which would get your numbers of files down in exchange for less detail. Still...
Street view takes a picture every 50 feet or so. Simple coverage of say a cathedral will still have you taking about 20 points inside and the same outside.
Even at 8-10 images per location, that's still a couple of hundred... and a few thousand if you want detailed ones. All at say 10MP... That's gigs upon gigs of data to upload, while away (or store on many memory cards) and hours spent doing it... For a single building you want people to be able to truly explore with you.
Or, of course, you just take a few wide shots from a few locations... Photosynth is great for that. But, afterwards, you realize you missed dozens of angles and people can't see that really cool X you remember.
great ... camera angles.
It would have just been nice if they hadn't tried getting every camera angle in every shot.
It's great that, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, they're hiring epileptic tweakers as cameramen now - then tazing them for added dynamism - but, sweet jesus people, shaky cam is way past stale.
Plus, let's face it, your audience are nerds... They know there's nothing to transmit vibrations in space. So, when a spaceship explodes a few miles from the camera, the camera isn't going to shake with it.
We are very emotionally attached to our development and we place great importance to being independent. We founded our company because we didn't want to follow rules. We wanted to be the ones who make the rules instead. Money really doesn't mean much to us as long as we can do whatever we want while excelling at our passions. We feel that by accepting the offer, we couldn't achieve the maximum of our potential, and one of us joked that if we get in contact with the corporate environment and accept their money, we risk becoming lazy.
If you truly felt that, you wouldn't be asking the question on Slashdot. You'd already have your answer and there'd be no discussion needed.
Your challenge is, like most of us, you've all invested heavily in the underdog culture, come up with a million justifications for why... while no one was offering it... it was much better to do without money, how it was idealistic, etc.
Except now you have been offered money and the very fact you're having to ask puts lie to the concept of absolute belief in those values that were so easy to claim you had when, in truth, they were your only option.
You have both options open to you: You can take the money or you can decline it can keep being the same company. What you need to do is honestly weigh up your feelings and pick whichever is more important to you. But part of honesty is getting over having told yourself you believe something when your actions (in this case having to ask) scream that you haven't bought in to it quite as hard as you want the world, and most likely yourself, to believe.
At the end of the day, it's your call. Slashdot can give you more insight in to the pros and cons of different paths but it's your individual values that have to make the call and, as everyone's values are slightly different, no one on Slashdot can tell you what that ultimate answer is. Just be honest with yourself and accept that, whatever you choose, there'll be bad days when you wish you'd chosen the other but that that is reality and it's OK when it happens.
If it bothers you as a site owner, just like you can add your robots file to ditch search engines, one line of JavaScript will break you out of it.
if (top.location != location) top.location.href = document.location.href;
Granted, the experience still sucks for users of sites that don't have that and have the framing breaking their user experience assumptions. But at least it's a fix for site owners who dislike it.
My read on it...
It wasn't just the roommate who was alleging multiple cases of computer abuse. It's just a case of here's a provable crime - clearly tracable logs that go right back to his PC - that get them a search order that allows them to then seize everything and legally take a snoop around to see what of the larger allegations, that they don't currently have proof of, they can also get information on.
It's somewhat like getting Al Capone on tax evasion with the hope that, once you could make that stick, you could then get access to enough of the rest of his records you could pin more on him. Of course, Capone was smart enough that tax was about all he left records for. This guy thinks he's a l33t haxor who can't get caught and is evidently dumb enough to leave all kinds of digital paper trails.
Read the exhibit...
The actual exhibit shows, step by step, how the harassment was tracked to a pair of web mail accounts, tracked via server logs to a specific IP, tracked to a machine in the suspect's name, running Linux.
Linux is an embellishing detail but the actual accusation has nothing to do with "OMG, LINUX IS WEIRD!" and everything to do with... yep, guy's a douche and he used a Linux box to harass someone, here's step by step proof to demonstrate that.
Your case, if it's as simple as you make out, is totally different. As you describe it, you were falsely accused due to ignorance. He was proved almost certainly guilty by a very methodical approach where Linux was just one minor detail that's been overplayed in cheap headline grabbing summaries.
"College Police Think Using Linux Is Suspicious Behavior
If you read the warrant request...
A student was falsely outed by a fake profile on adam2adam, a gay site.
Server logs show it was accessed by two web based email accounts.
Those accounts were traced by the network registration system to 137.167.207.174, a machine on 00:23:28:BE:24... a machine runing Linux.
On page 7, it states that only two machines in the entire hall of residence accessed the network using Linux.
So, yes, when you narrow down all possible suspects to just two people who both use Linux... and the machine is on an account registered to one of them... Using Linux, in that specific case, really is exceptionally suspicious behavior.
It's a cheap headline grabber to imply, "Dumb cops think Linux is weird and so criminal!" In reality, it's a computer forensics specialist writing an incredibly clearly, methodical listing, tracking down a harassment issue to a Linux machine, registered under the suspect's name.
Sorry dude, you were a raging douchebag who falsely outed someone because you two had an argument and you're a lousy enough hacker that your anonymous web based mail accounts led them straight to the specific machine you did it on. Screaming OMG, COPS HATE LINUX doesn't make it any less true.
Entertainingly, Autodesk tried to trademark Gibson's term cyberspace. Apparently they couldn't understand why Gibson thought they should pay him a royalty to use his intellectual property just as they expect others to pay them a royalty to use theirs. After spending a little money on lawyers, they settled for "Autodesk Cyberspace" and he realized he wasn't going to get much further even if he spent a lot more.
Not one to quite gracefully, Gibson trademarked "Eric Gullichsen" in response.
My own recent conversations with other major ISPs suggest that the average broadband user only pulls down 2-6GB of data per month as it is.
And, in the days of 56.6kbps modems, just about no one pulled down 100MB of data per month. Why don't we cap it there?
Oh yeah... because we actually like society advancing not staying stagnant.
Just because most users don't, currently, constantly bang up against capacity limits, that's no reason to cap them at it to ensure they will as their usage patterns grow. Well, OK, it is if you're terrified their usage patterns are going to include cancelling your hugely profitable cable TV service and watching their content online. Which, let's face it, is the real reason these caps are getting introduced almost exclusively by organizations who don't want you able to circumvent their other business model.
Is there anything offensive about the name "goatse"?
I believe you mean goats.ie
There's understanding English and understanding English.
I was asked to try out an Indian outsourcing firm at one point. They gave me HTML along the lines of:
<ul>
<li><a href="#" class="blue_link">test</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="blue_link">test</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="blue_link">test</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="blue_link">test</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="blue_link">test</a></li>
</ul>
I tried explaining, "We really prefer classes to be descriptive of purpose rather than descriptive of the style. That way, we can change the styling for a given class of data later and still have the class names make sense. So please use descriptive of purpose classes not descriptive of style ones."
I got back:
<ul>
<li><a href="#" class="descriptive_of_purpose_class">test</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="descriptive_of_purpose_class">test</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="descriptive_of_purpose_class">test</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="descriptive_of_purpose_class">test</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="descriptive_of_purpose_class">test</a></li>
</ul>
Once I stopped laughing, I cried for a bit.
So [tongue out] starts or stops your iPod Touch
Wouldn't that be an iPod lick?
It would also make listening to KISS and singing along as Gene pretty much impossible.
First shot of a set, point your camera at their driver's license.
Takes about 30 seconds.
If it's for personal use, you're going to be keeping the whole set together and will always have that first image with the date stamped files.
There was an interesting article, a while back, about all of the cunning defenses that geeks think of (YANAL). As the writer pointed out, being able to win in court is not the same thing as not being dragged through hell in the process.
2257 formalizes something that was already around - child pornography is illegal. Whether it does or doesn't exist, if the cops believe you have images of child porn, they'll still destroy your life in the investigation.
Whether 2257 exists or not, the whole first shot at a driver's license makes sense regardless. That being the case, as bad a law as 2257 is, it doesn't really change much for personal use... You either risk hell and assume it won't happen or you don't. 2257 adds little.
It is a deliberate tactic for anti-sex groups to threaten porn stars with stalkers. If they can't shame them into obedience, then they expose them to sexual predators.
This is commonly used as an argument against 2257. It's also wrong.
If you actually read the wording, it allows for only the original rights owner of an image to keep the full proof of identity.
They may then send a redacted copy to all subsequent re-distributors for their records. That copy may blank out everything uniquely identifiable - driver's license number, etc. - leaving only the picture and the date of birth visible.
So long as a paper trail remains back to the original record holder, no one else has to have any information that aids stalkers. The original record holders only have to produce it for law enforcement, not for anyone curious.
I'll totally concede the act is abusive and designed to threaten pornographers that they can't shut down legally. But it's done with the intent of creating unreasonable burdens for record holders not to target the stars.
But then again, "Won't anyone think of the sleazy fat pornographer?!" doesn't work as well as "Won't anyone think of the poor model?!" Even if the former's true and the latter isn't.
Very little is known about the new Palm webOS, but it will supposedly support HTML5
Really?
A decade before the standard's expected to be done? While it's still in an early working draft that they can't stop squabbling over?
I'm impressed. Or sceptical. ...or they just intend to take 10 years over building the OS too. ;)
Said one, 'I believe Bill Gates is a charlatan because...'
An investor said that?
And they believe Bill Gates was a seventh level magic user who magicked them in to investing with him through flim flammery?
Sorry the economy sucks but take some personal responsibility and stop blaming everyone.
If you're going to sit around annoying the shit out of everyone at the watercooler, telling them how you're a really smart investor when the economy's strong... you don't get to whine when it's weak. You took credit for your "decisions" then, they're still your decisions now.
If you were really so incompetent an investor to fall for "a charlatan" you probably shouldn't be investing anyway. And, if you do lose, hopefully the pain will be just sufficient enough to teach you that.
I got hit up by Greenpeace yesterday, pushing for support on legislation to reduce carbon emissions. Here's what I told them.
How many kids do you have/plan to have? Honestly, it doesn't matter. Do you have/plan to have any?
As a global society, we can't even manage to get everyone to sign up to stopping the increase in emissions. Even those countries that do sign up rarely show any interest in anything close to 50% reductions within a single generation (around 20 years).
Assuming we can't manage to drop at least 50% over each and every generation, and the population certainly isn't going down... Humanity is going to put out more carbon over your genetic line's lifetime, no matter what you do, than someone without kids will ever put out in their lifetime that politely ends and then stops stressing the environment.
You want to save the environment... Stop focusing your energy on nice-idea-but-ultimately-inconsequential carbon cuts and push for the real problem, humans, to stop breeding.
Humanity is, sadly, a plague on the global environment in just the same way locusts are in smaller areas - they massively produce in numbers too large for their environment to support.
The sad conclusion I've come to is that, able to keep draining the environment in new and creative ways that no other animal can do, short of choosing to conciously adopt a responsible breeding program, no amount of trying minor tweaks is going to make that dramatic a difference until we screw things up so badly nature forces it upon us.
Wow, that's quite an achievement for the communist North that can't even feed its own population.
Sure, not entirely surprising for the South, but an amazing achievement for all Korea.
Unless, of course, "all Korea" is a little more selective?
I'm sorry... My knee jerk just hit me in the face so hard I lost all ability to reason for a while.
The dozen banks now receiving the biggest rescue packages, totaling more than $150 billion, requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers over the past six years.
We've got our panties in a bunch over their hiring H1Bs at the rate of one one thousandth of their global workforce each year during the fastest period of growth in banking history? Anyone else feeling stupid yet?
21,860 over six years.
So an average of 3,600 a year?
Or, divided across the dozen quoted, an average of three hundred whole H1Bs per bank, each year.
To put that in context, Citibank, not even the largest of them, had around 300,000 worldwide workers. Their lay offs have hit around 10% of that number... 30,000. 300 H1Bs a year is suddenly a very, very small number.
Even if none of the H1Bs moved on during the six years, they'd have hired a total of about 2,000 of them. They'd still have laid off 28,000 non H1B holders even if every last H1B holder had gone first.
Sweet jesus, they're clearly the most evil H1B abusers evar.
And as for talking about how evil they were for hiring these H1Bs over the last six years as the system imploded? It's been falling apart for the last year or so. The other five of those that we're busy lumping in there were (admittedly for bad reasons) the fastest period of growth the banking sector has ever seen.
The constant whining about H1Bs, I'm sorry, is the same pathetic xenophobia and protectionism that kicks in, whether grounded or not, whenever people get scared.
I was disgusted in 2002 as that shameful of human traits was used to justify stripping away the nation's civil liberties. I was disgusted as it turned in to attacking mosques and regarding all muslims as obvious terrorists. I was disgusted as it was used to justify attacking as "unpatriotic" anyone who dared question what turned out to be lies justifying a war that's cost 5,000 American lives. And, yeah, I'm pretty disgusted by it now too.
Xenophobia's pathetic at any time. Massively distorting numbers to make a point that really doesn't exist doesn't help.
The first 486 I got my hands on came with a $5,000 price tag.
My first Pentium came in, well spec'd, around $2,500.
The PCs I was building for myself ran about $1,500 five years ago and the last one was down around $1,100 - all "mid-range" machines, capable of playing the latest games in fairly high quality and reasonably functional for at least 18 months to 2 years.
Since a little after that Pentium, the systems I see more casual friends buying have dropped from few people buying $3,000 laptops to a fair number of people getting $2,000 laptops to most of them having $1,000 laptops, to $699 Circuit City or BestBuy "deals" to $300 netbooks.
When Moore came up with his law, in the mid 60s, what was the single cheapest usefully functional computer you could buy? I wasn't buying then but I'm guessing several hundred thousand dollars and it took up half the room. From day one, people have been trading processor cycles for cost.