What next, we aren't counting the cost of feeding, clothing, and housing the child during the years he's learning enough language skills to be able to understand the computer training? Give me a break. Does anyone list any of this stuff when they advertize their hardware?
'Sex offender' is one of those anti-concepts like 'intellectual property' (see SCO) that groups together a lot of different things with one common thread. One of the worst things that has come out of the hysteria about 'child predators' is that people who chose not to fight a minor offense years ago suddenly find that the punishment has been 'enhanced' ex post facto. And the last time I checked, that was unconstitutional.
But if you say this, you're an apologist for JonBenet's killer, and probably a crypto-nazi as well.
Normally, yes, but if you register your credit card with them and set to auto top-up every 90 days, they'll let you drop that to $15. That is precisely what I do for the three phones for myself, The Bride of Monster, and Monsterette II (her sister's old enough to pay her own damn phone bill). So each phone costs me $5/mo just as the grandparent says. Since I don't yammer away on the thing all the time, I've built up a balance of over $100 on mine.
I've even got TBoM trained to email the shopping list to my phone (##########@vmobl.com) when she wants me to pick something up at the store for her. That way it's in writing, and I didn't have to try to write something down and lose something in the process. Text messages only cost 5 cents to send/receive, cheaper than the phone call even if it were only a minute, so with that fat balance I can get a bunch of them before it's wiped out.
I actually got into an argument on a mailing list with a retired math professor on this one. He insists that 0^0 MVST be undefined. I demonstrated that there are definitions for exponentation that unambiguously provide the result 0^0=1. And it's not hard to understand why:
a * x = 0 [ + a [ + a...] ] for x repetitions of a. When x=0, there are NO a's in the right side of the equation, and the result is simply 0. It doesn't matter if a is positive, negative, or zero, because there are none of them in the expansion.
a ^ x = 1 [ * a [ * a...] ] for x repetitions of a. When x=0 there are NO a's in the right side of the equation, and the result is simply 1. It doesn't matter if a happens to be 0, because there are no zeroes in the expansion.
The professor was all hung up over the fact that a ^ x is discontinuous at a=0 and x=0. But 0 ^ x is already undefined where x
Then there's this putz, who thinks he can rename NaN and do something meaningful with it. The reason why division by 0 is undefined is because ANY number can be multiplied by zero to produce zero, and NO number can be multiplied by zero to produce anything BUT zero. Numbnutzity doesn't add anything of value to mathematics. But thanks for playing. Johnny, tell him about the nice consolation prizes....
Now we need to see if we can figure out what's causing global warming on Mars. Maybe it's got the same cycle, which in turn might be based on, oh, I don't know,... What do the Earth and Mars have in common that might affect temperatures... the SUN?
People who talk about vouchers forget something: just because one has a voucher doesn't mean that they're going to be *able* pursue their choice of education. There are many logistics to consider - like schools of choice already being filled to capacity. And then there's the transportation issue - if the school happens to be across town, who will be responsible for ensuring that the kid can even get there?
People who like the Food Stamp program forget something: just because one has food stamps doesn't mean that they're going to be *able* to pursue their choice of food. There are many logistics to consider - like foods of choice already having been purchased by other customers. And then there's the transportation issue - if the grocery store happens to be across town, who will be responsible for ensuring that the food stamp holder can even get there?
It is mind-boggling to me that the very people who make arguments like this poo-pooh supply-side economics. Does anyone doubt that a program that gives thousands of parents the means to choose where thousands of government dollars go will encourage good teachers, stymied by the Byzantine rules of the public schools, to start schools?
I do the s/voucher/food stamp/g thing to make the point that the decision to have government funding for some good or service does not require that the government doing the funding directly provide the good or service in question. Another reason I do that is to show the idiocy of the argument that parents shouldn't be able to use vouchers at religious schools. Nothing prevents the use of food stamps for kosher or halal foods, or requires vegetarians to purchase meat. Those are choices left to the consumer.
Even without vouchers to help them out, parents vote with their wallets. In Kansas City, MO, the government-run schools are so bad that a federal judge took over the district and imposed tax increases. A Jesuit school in KC, Rockhurst High School offers arguably the best education in the entire state, at a tuition rate roughly 2/3 the per-pupil cost to the taxpayers in the government schools.
I'd venture a guess that vouchers or not, for many, the public school system will be the only option *left*.
In the few places where vouchers have been tried, the public schools have also shown improvement, for the same reason why having a McDonald's and a Wendy's across the street from each other makes them both provide better service to their customers. But even if none of this happens, there's another alternative....
Two members of KCLUG home-school their kids. One of them fits the stereotype; a very conservative Christian. The other is a leftist atheist. They seem to agree on very little other than their right to choose things like how their their computers and children will be educated. They can choose what sorts of rules their children will have to follow, and there's no need for a court to decide what those rules are.
a vulnerability point for stuffing the ballot boxes.
How so? With pre-printed ballots, the election workers already have a stack of ballots they could use to stuff the box. Presumably, they have a certain number of them, which have been carefully counted before election day, and are counted again at the end of the election, so that the tally of votes cast ought to equal the difference. Allowing a printer to produce additional ballots on demand requires one more variable to be accounted for.
It occurs to me that there's a lovely low-tech solution for visually-impaired voters. A plastic jig that holds the ballot in place, covering the printed text with braille, and with cutouts about a half mm larger than the oval, can guide the voter to get the Sharpie in the right place. Before a jig can be used, the election workers use a ballot to mark every oval, so that no one can tell by examining the jig afterwards what votes were actually cast. This deliberately spoiled ballot is accounted for, and signed by at least two election workers and set aside as documentation that they followed the procedures.
I'm not sure if I were a blind person whether I'd prefer to trust a human friend or a machine I couldn't see designed and built by people who might want to steal my vote.
A visually-impaired voter should be allowed to bring that trusted human (including a child too young to cast a vote himself) into the voting booth, if that is his wish.
Currently I lean toward optical scan, filled in by the voter and not by machine, with readers set to reject invalid ballots with helpful error messages ("Looks like you voted twice for Congress")and trigger a shred-it-log-it-replace-it procedure.
This is pretty much what we do now in Kansas City, Kansas, after we replaced the old machines (in both senses of the word). There are so many advantages to this method:
Since the time each voter spends at the optical scan machine is just a few moments, there is no waiting while the person behind the curtain flipping levers on a mechanical machine works through all the races on the ballot. We use small folding tables with privacy shields, all of which can be folded up into a very small space for storage between elections.
The machine can, as you suggest, catch overvotes and alert the voter and election officials to allow the ballot to be redone.
In the event of a failure of the scanner, or to randomly audit to prove there's no hanky-panky with its software, a hand count can easily be done, without any damned chads to fall out during the process. Ballots can be temporarily held in an old-fashioned locked box, then transported to the county courthouse, where another machine can be used to count all the ballots en masse.
Absentee and provisional ballots can be executed on the same form as regular ballots, but processed as appropriate, reducing costs and eliminating a possible source of problems.
For visually handicapped voters, all that is needed is a computer that can give braille, or headphones for oral feedback, and a printer to print the selections onto the same size paper as the other voters use. If it's set up correctly, this printer can print the regular ballots as well, allowing the election workers to begin the day with a smaller number of pages preprinted, and only need to print additional forms if turnout is fairly heavy.
Working on such systems becomes a royal pain in the ass after you've become used to the software development freedom of open source, a cause that Stallman has given decades of his life to.
No, he has not. He has given that time to FREE SOFTWARE, and if you use the words 'open source' in his presence, he'll throw a hissy fit and insist you rephrase your statement before he will even talk to you further.
And because when she buys a wireless card she has to learn about something called "ndiswrapper".
Strangely, when I bought a wireless USB dongle a few weeks ago, I did not have to learn anything. Ubuntu figured out that it needed to use ndiswrapper, and wlan0 showed up all on its own. The only configuring I had to do was the WEP key. At the next KCLUG meeting, I noticed that someone had their wireless show up as eth1. I commented on the fact that mine was wlan0, at which point I was informed that was an indication that ndiswrapper was involved. You learn something every day, I guess.
But I didn't have to learn it, because It Just Worked(TM). And that, I believe, is the essence of the Aunt Tilly Test. Of course, Aunt Tilly isn't going to buy a WAP and wireless card in the first place. If she gets a laptop, it's probably going to have 802.11g built in, which will let her use the WiFi at Starbucks just fine. If she doesn't have that, or wants a WAP at home, she'll probably get Cousin Delbert the computer nerd to set it up anyway.
And because asking a little old lady to get root so she can edit/etc/sudoers is hopeless bullshit, but thanks for playing.
Again, when I installed Ubuntu, it had me create the monster account. I never edited/etc/sudoers manually, nor has there been any reason to do so. When I first heard about sudo, I thought it was crazy. Now I see the elegance of it. If Aunt Tilly wants to install software, a window will pop up telling her she needs to re-enter her password to do that. Let me repeat that it is her password, not some 'rude' password tomfoolery. That way she doesn't have to remember two different passwords.
Even AT can understand that she logs into her computer as tilly so that Evil Computer Crackers in Dirkadirkastan can't break into her computer. All Delbert has to tell her is that if she wants to install programs, the computer should ask her to prove she isn't a Dirkadirkastanian terrorist, and if she's minding her own business surfing the Web for scrapbooking tips, and that thing pops up all on its own, maybe it's because the scrapbooking website got pwn3d, and she can just cancel out of it.
If she ever slips up and completely hoses her system somehow, the install is so simple that she can handle it solo just fine, after watching Del do it the first time. Or he might just leave the CD in there and never even bother to install anything, if all she needs is a web browser.
Separated by a common language, but don't show it.
on
Edgy Eft Knot 2 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I understand how we've got different pronunciations for vowels, which tend to shift all over the place. (Oy rally do.)
I even get how a bloke might have to change a tyre on his lorry, maybe open the bonnet and fiddle with the carburettor to get the thing working, so he can pop over to some bird's flat to knock her up. Then he could find he's required to step outside so he can put a flaming fag between his lips and suck on it... because of the Anti-Smoking Nazis (pronounced either way).
Now, can you explain 'leftenant'?
But this is what got my attention:
One of the many things people have complained about is Ubuntu's fairly plain splash loading screen, as well as all the "scary text" scrolling by.
Ever since Windows 95 and the window floating in the clouds, with the pulsating blue bar across the bottom of the screen, the conventional wisdom has been that users are 'scared' by words during the boot. Anyone suffering from logophobia needs to seek professional help, not have enablers writing software for them.
I am reassured by those text messages, and should one of them fail, I damnwell want to know which one it was. Of course, that might just be because I'll do something about it, rather than freak out about the computer being borked.
It seems like every time there's an election, there's a referendum on one tax or another. There is a particularly nasty trick that the tax advocates play:
Year X: This tax is temporary, only for Y years.
Year X+Y: This isn't really a tax increase, because it replaces the tax passed in Year X. Your tax bill isn't going to go up if this passes.
Of course, it's usually a different group saying these two things, so that the lie isn't as blatant.
The regulated monopolies are so in bed with the government that they start to think the same way.
Ranks right up there with 'Micro$oft' and 'Chimpy McBusHitlerburton', eh?
I suppose I could post details of his public statements on the subject of Shi'ite eschatology, the return of the Hidden (12th) Imam, the status of Israel as a 'temporary country', etc. But that would probably put people to sleep faster than listening to a John Kerry speech.
As annoying as it is, mispronouncing words doesn't mean you don't know what you mean. We could get Jimmy Carter, who was an actual nuclear engineer in the Navy, to say "Nukey-er", while wearing a nice sweater and telling us to fiddle with the thermostat, while Madman Armageddonjihad fiddles with making bombs he can use to kill Crusaders, Jews, Baha'i, Hindus, Sufis, Sunnis, members of other Shi'a subgroups that don't believe in exactly the same interpretation of Allah....
I for, one, do NOT welcome our new-clear, Shi'ite Overlords. No matter how you pronounce "nuclear", or, for that matter, "Shi'ite".
Sort of like the way the fake 60 Minutes article on Bush's little vacation from the Air National Guard was placed by a GOP operative trying to smear CBS and Dan Rather.
It isn't possible to fact-check a bald assertion, because there are no facts there to check. He's put forth a theory; it's on him to prove it.
Sort of like the way the fake 60 Minutes article on Bush's little vacation from the Air National Guard was placed by a GOP operative trying to smear CBS and Dan Rather.
Yeah.... And they convinced the CBS and Reuters editors to go along with the con!
Remember when you fold your hat, you want the shiny side of the foil OUT, or it won't work to protect you from Karl Rove's Mind Control Rays.
HTH.
The government needs to quit protecting the stupid
While I agree completely with this statement, that's not what TFA is about. It's about a condo association trying to protect its members. That is a matter of private contracts between people who agree to restrain their own behavior in exchange for perceived benefits.
A condo association might legitimately go so far as to forbid individual residents from setting up wireless networks, and instead have the association itself set them up, imposing some particluar encryption regime, since interference between the wifi setups in a condo could affect everyone's ability to use them. And if you know those are the rules when you buy your unit, and agree to those rules, then presumably it's because you like it that way.
Government, OTOH, imposes rules on people against their will, so it should only be employed where someone's person or property is being transgressed (against their informed consent).
Rather than explaining each term parenthetically, it would be better to introduce any jargon terms in the form of a nice clickable link to the definition, or even allow an on-hover tooltip that explains the new concept. This is a technique I'm trying to use in my own writing; any attempt to explain an idea fully will bore more knowledgable readers to tears, while failing to do so will leave the newbies behind.
Some day, I'll be able to make an entire sentence of a single word:
This is a word I keep seeing on web sites, but it isn't in any dictionary I can find. Is it 'lead', as in a news article's 'lead paragraph', or in 'I think you should lead with...'?
It may be slander, and it may be outrageous and stupid, but people do call others Nazis as an insult all the time
I just googled George W. Bush Nazi and got over 10 million hits. That doesn't even count the 17 million Bush Hitler hits.
Apparently, those on the 'left' politically consider Nazism on the 'right', while their opposite numbers say that Socialism/Communism is on the 'left'. Therefore, a political figure perceived to be on the 'right' can be branded a Nazi, or a Hitler, while those on the left have to settle for mere Stalinhood.
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What next, we aren't counting the cost of feeding, clothing, and housing the child during the years he's learning enough language skills to be able to understand the computer training? Give me a break. Does anyone list any of this stuff when they advertize their hardware?
2006-12-08T22:46:59Z
(The - and : could be omitted to save space). Going so far as to enshrine an Excel bug into the weekday function is just nuts.
But if you say this, you're an apologist for JonBenet's killer, and probably a crypto-nazi as well.
a * x = 0 [ + a [ + a ...] ] for x repetitions of a. When x=0, there are NO a's in the right side of the equation, and the result is simply 0. It doesn't matter if a is positive, negative, or zero, because there are none of them in the expansion.
a ^ x = 1 [ * a [ * a ...] ] for x repetitions of a. When x=0 there are NO a's in the right side of the equation, and the result is simply 1. It doesn't matter if a happens to be 0, because there are no zeroes in the expansion.
The professor was all hung up over the fact that a ^ x is discontinuous at a=0 and x=0. But 0 ^ x is already undefined where x Then there's this putz, who thinks he can rename NaN and do something meaningful with it. The reason why division by 0 is undefined is because ANY number can be multiplied by zero to produce zero, and NO number can be multiplied by zero to produce anything BUT zero. Numbnutzity doesn't add anything of value to mathematics. But thanks for playing. Johnny, tell him about the nice consolation prizes....
Now we need to see if we can figure out what's causing global warming on Mars. Maybe it's got the same cycle, which in turn might be based on, oh, I don't know,... What do the Earth and Mars have in common that might affect temperatures... the SUN?
It is mind-boggling to me that the very people who make arguments like this poo-pooh supply-side economics. Does anyone doubt that a program that gives thousands of parents the means to choose where thousands of government dollars go will encourage good teachers, stymied by the Byzantine rules of the public schools, to start schools?
I do the s/voucher/food stamp/g thing to make the point that the decision to have government funding for some good or service does not require that the government doing the funding directly provide the good or service in question. Another reason I do that is to show the idiocy of the argument that parents shouldn't be able to use vouchers at religious schools. Nothing prevents the use of food stamps for kosher or halal foods, or requires vegetarians to purchase meat. Those are choices left to the consumer.
Even without vouchers to help them out, parents vote with their wallets. In Kansas City, MO, the government-run schools are so bad that a federal judge took over the district and imposed tax increases. A Jesuit school in KC, Rockhurst High School offers arguably the best education in the entire state, at a tuition rate roughly 2/3 the per-pupil cost to the taxpayers in the government schools.
In the few places where vouchers have been tried, the public schools have also shown improvement, for the same reason why having a McDonald's and a Wendy's across the street from each other makes them both provide better service to their customers. But even if none of this happens, there's another alternative....Two members of KCLUG home-school their kids. One of them fits the stereotype; a very conservative Christian. The other is a leftist atheist. They seem to agree on very little other than their right to choose things like how their their computers and children will be educated. They can choose what sorts of rules their children will have to follow, and there's no need for a court to decide what those rules are.
It occurs to me that there's a lovely low-tech solution for visually-impaired voters. A plastic jig that holds the ballot in place, covering the printed text with braille, and with cutouts about a half mm larger than the oval, can guide the voter to get the Sharpie in the right place. Before a jig can be used, the election workers use a ballot to mark every oval, so that no one can tell by examining the jig afterwards what votes were actually cast. This deliberately spoiled ballot is accounted for, and signed by at least two election workers and set aside as documentation that they followed the procedures.
A visually-impaired voter should be allowed to bring that trusted human (including a child too young to cast a vote himself) into the voting booth, if that is his wish.-
Since the time each voter spends at the optical scan machine is just a few moments, there is no waiting while the person behind the curtain flipping levers on a mechanical machine works through all the races on the ballot. We use small folding tables with privacy shields, all of which can be folded up into a very small space for storage between elections.
-
The machine can, as you suggest, catch overvotes and alert the voter and election officials to allow the ballot to be redone.
- In the event of a failure of the scanner, or to randomly audit to prove there's no hanky-panky with its software, a hand count can easily be done, without any damned chads to fall out during the process. Ballots can be temporarily held in an old-fashioned locked box, then transported to the county courthouse, where another machine can be used to count all the ballots en masse.
- Absentee and provisional ballots can be executed on the same form as regular ballots, but processed as appropriate, reducing costs and eliminating a possible source of problems.
For visually handicapped voters, all that is needed is a computer that can give braille, or headphones for oral feedback, and a printer to print the selections onto the same size paper as the other voters use. If it's set up correctly, this printer can print the regular ballots as well, allowing the election workers to begin the day with a smaller number of pages preprinted, and only need to print additional forms if turnout is fairly heavy.You think that CIO of the largest retailer in the US is a job you can get straight out of DeVry?
I didn't know there were any black people on Saturn to hate. And Rovian Plots need to be hatched on Jupiter - at least it rhymes.
But I didn't have to learn it, because It Just Worked(TM). And that, I believe, is the essence of the Aunt Tilly Test. Of course, Aunt Tilly isn't going to buy a WAP and wireless card in the first place. If she gets a laptop, it's probably going to have 802.11g built in, which will let her use the WiFi at Starbucks just fine. If she doesn't have that, or wants a WAP at home, she'll probably get Cousin Delbert the computer nerd to set it up anyway.
Again, when I installed Ubuntu, it had me create the monster account. I never edited
Even AT can understand that she logs into her computer as tilly so that Evil Computer Crackers in Dirkadirkastan can't break into her computer. All Delbert has to tell her is that if she wants to install programs, the computer should ask her to prove she isn't a Dirkadirkastanian terrorist, and if she's minding her own business surfing the Web for scrapbooking tips, and that thing pops up all on its own, maybe it's because the scrapbooking website got pwn3d, and she can just cancel out of it.
If she ever slips up and completely hoses her system somehow, the install is so simple that she can handle it solo just fine, after watching Del do it the first time. Or he might just leave the CD in there and never even bother to install anything, if all she needs is a web browser.
I even get how a bloke might have to change a tyre on his lorry, maybe open the bonnet and fiddle with the carburettor to get the thing working, so he can pop over to some bird's flat to knock her up. Then he could find he's required to step outside so he can put a flaming fag between his lips and suck on it... because of the Anti-Smoking Nazis (pronounced either way).
Now, can you explain 'leftenant'?
But this is what got my attention:
Ever since Windows 95 and the window floating in the clouds, with the pulsating blue bar across the bottom of the screen, the conventional wisdom has been that users are 'scared' by words during the boot. Anyone suffering from logophobia needs to seek professional help, not have enablers writing software for them.I am reassured by those text messages, and should one of them fail, I damnwell want to know which one it was. Of course, that might just be because I'll do something about it, rather than freak out about the computer being borked.
Year X: This tax is temporary, only for Y years.
Year X+Y: This isn't really a tax increase, because it replaces the tax passed in Year X. Your tax bill isn't going to go up if this passes.
Of course, it's usually a different group saying these two things, so that the lie isn't as blatant.
The regulated monopolies are so in bed with the government that they start to think the same way.
Ranks right up there with 'Micro$oft' and 'Chimpy McBusHitlerburton', eh? I suppose I could post details of his public statements on the subject of Shi'ite eschatology, the return of the Hidden (12th) Imam, the status of Israel as a 'temporary country', etc. But that would probably put people to sleep faster than listening to a John Kerry speech.
I for, one, do NOT welcome our new-clear, Shi'ite Overlords. No matter how you pronounce "nuclear", or, for that matter, "Shi'ite".
A condo association might legitimately go so far as to forbid individual residents from setting up wireless networks, and instead have the association itself set them up, imposing some particluar encryption regime, since interference between the wifi setups in a condo could affect everyone's ability to use them. And if you know those are the rules when you buy your unit, and agree to those rules, then presumably it's because you like it that way.
Government, OTOH, imposes rules on people against their will, so it should only be employed where someone's person or property is being transgressed (against their informed consent).
Some day, I'll be able to make an entire sentence of a single word:
Then I'll know I'm good.This is a word I keep seeing on web sites, but it isn't in any dictionary I can find. Is it 'lead', as in a news article's 'lead paragraph', or in 'I think you should lead with...'?
Apparently, those on the 'left' politically consider Nazism on the 'right', while their opposite numbers say that Socialism/Communism is on the 'left'. Therefore, a political figure perceived to be on the 'right' can be branded a Nazi, or a Hitler, while those on the left have to settle for mere Stalinhood.