Or, for Mac users, umlauts are just u followed by the letter in question, acute accents are e followed by the letter, grave accents are ` followed by the letter, circumflex are i followed by the letter, and esszetts are simply s.
Oh, and it's "moot point" (no idea where the word moot comes from) and "hear, hear" (as in "we hear you". Or "preach it!").
Actually, that was my point, even if I made it poorly.
And a "moot" is a gathering of freemen in Merrie Olde England. How the meaning of "moot point" evolved from a point of discussion to a point not worthy of discussion is an interesting quirk of language. My understanding, however questionable and shaky, is that the arc went from "point of debate" to "debatable" to "already debated" to "of no significance / unworthy of debate."
I'm sure an etymologist will step in and give us the lowdown on this.
For example, I have seen two different kinds of tree castings made of stone: one, a negative casting made by molten lava that built up as an accretion on a tree (which obviously burned out), and two, a positive casting made through a slow fossilization ("petrification") process.
I would happily come up with a false etymology originating in the parlance of lime-slakers, medieval wall builders, sarcophagus fillers, or even potters discussing cone-10 firing, but you'd probably call me on it.
That being said, it is a weird phrase, that probably belongs with "mute points" and exclaimations like "here here!"
Oh yes we will. We'll have everyone else's cars. "We" being those of us who haven't died of all the horrible things the media has been predicting for us, e.g., Aviation Terrorism, Avian Flu, Nuclear Terrorism, Global Warming, Biological Terrorism, Earthquakes, Religious Terrorism, Civil War, Chemical Terrorism, Mercury Poisoning, Cyber Terrorism, Estrogen-imitating Pollutants, Intellectual Property Terrorism, Financial Collapse, Handicapped Parking Terrorism, etc.
Oh, and those cars? We'll be using 'em as houses. That's because there will be no fuel left to run them.
(Or, as the bumper sticker says: "After the rapture, can I have your car?")
I'd recommend moving to a location with a Japanese / Japanese-American Community. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland are all good choices. Having a comprehensible community available, especially one in various stages of assimilation, can make the transition easier for your wife. At least in these places, you'll be able to find acceptable tea, for example. The downside, of course, is that Real Estate is extremely pricey in these locations.
Other recommendations: keep some of your money in Yen. I know the Yen's not at its highest, but the dollar could continue to get weaker. Best to keep your options open.
I second what others have said about the INS. Just be aware that it can be Kafkaesque. Be patient and keep a sense of humor.
The tech job market is strange right now. There are jobs, but it's certainly not like '99. If you're good technically, you'll be able to find work. It may not be the kind of work that you'd prefer to do, but you're unlikely to starve. Again, be patient and keep a sense of humor.
I assume you just mean the birds have sensors for other frequencies like IR...
I'd guess that they're not big into illumination from space. I don't care what frequencies you're using -- painting your target kinda defeats the purpose of spying, since your target can't help but know when you're looking.
I'll admit, it's more oriented towards the hackerish experimenter, since it required that I rebuild my kernel with the Video 4 Linux modules. It took me a weekend to get the software part up and running and calibrated for the environment (noise masking, sensitivity, etc).
The hardware took longer since I had to learn how to run cables. Obviously, this *could* be done with wireless cameras, but my paranoia level was such that I don't want jamming or simple signal intercept... But I have a system monitoring my house and the perimeter with *cough* cameras (more than two, less than ten) going to a concealed machine with plenty of backup power. The cameras have IR boost for night-time security. I get about 10 fps/camera, and record both stills and video. I keep about two weeks worth of event data in a secure, web-accessible hierarchy by date and time. The capture data itself is timestamped and labeled as to its location.
My system has yielded images that are helping the police with an ongoing investigation. During the events leading up to this, I had one camera send me an SMS message any time there was motion detected, which enabled me to observe events in near realtime. If you need true realtime observation, there are ways to make it work with Motion, but I have no experience with them and can't speak to their quality.
Also, the Motion user community (the mailing list) is probably the most helpful, collaborative Open Source community I've ever dealt with.
Ob.Noxious: it's spelled "congratulations." You also meant "better than" and "too bad."
So I guess your point is that correct grammar is equivalent to mindless conformity and unoriginal thinking. You're wrong.
Here's why grammar matters: 1. Disambiguation of meaning. 2. Precision.
Why would I bother to spend my time looking at your "original thinking" unless I feel you've put serious effort into it? Every rebel kid out there claims original thinking, but few of them actually have anything interesting to say. So, if you care about your original thoughts and wish for others to take them seriously, you should be willing to package them in such a way as to make them accessible. Making the effort to use proper grammar is just a sign of respect for your own ideas. Writing is about communication.
Now, if you're a True Rebel, you don't give a fuck what anyone else thinks, thus you can go off and do whatever you want. In that case, why bother writing anything at all? But then you lose the prerogative to whine about people not taking you seriously.
You can also carry around a white noise generator (and/or boombox loaded with that annoying hip-hop or techno all you kids are listening to these days) if you don't want people hearing what it is you have to say.
Usually, I encounter the opposite problem: people shouting their overly personal details into cell phones. I'd rather they'd just shut up.
My brother has a term for this: "eaveslammed" (a variant on eavesdropping).
Well, I agree it's a fine line sometimes. In this case, though, it wasn't.
The client had selected a product to use for implementing a project. We took the job knowing that they used a given product. The employee was hired knowing that using this product would be part of the job description, and they would be integrating into a lot of legacy code.
They got fed up because they knew a better product, and, damn it, they weren't going to waste their time figuring out the challenge of doing it in this product when there's a better/easier one out there.
Again, it's a fine line. Yeah, it would have been good if we could use a better product. We'd talked with the client, and they'd said they wanted to use the product they had been using. At some point, you either have to say OK, we'll do it their way, or you bail.
Where you draw the line depends a lot on you.
For us, the difference in the products was not particularly great. Maybe 5-10% more effort or something with their desired approach. But we were being paid on time & materials, so that really didn't matter. This employee made it into a philosophical ultimatim -- either we use the best product, or I won't do it at all.
As for providing the best work environment, well, again, that's easier said than done. In the service industry, you have to kowtow to clients sometimes. You occasionally have to do things their way, even if it's wrong. Sometimes, it's not even their fault (remember those conversations along the lines of "but the VCs won't give us money unless we use Oracle. Yeah, I know it's a fifty record phone directory, but that's what they said. Take it or leave it").
If one is good enough, and people are throwing so much work their way that one can reject all except the jobs that are ideal, well, one could ignore all the above. One can then afford to be a prima donna. But the grandparent was talking about doing work in the real world, and very few of us exist in an environment where we have such control over our jobs.
I'm not saying your wrong about your experience, obviously, but I have been on both sides of the process and have seen degrees make a big difference. I've seen people with great experience lose out to people from the "right institution."
Here're a few reasons: - Some institutions, particularly service-related companies, are vain about the statistics they can cite. I worked with a Big Consulting Company once who had a VP who would frequently state that over 25% of their employees had PhDs from Berkeley, Stanford, or MIT. I asked him what their GPAs were as a joke, but he took it entirely seriously, and told me he could find out. For companies and people like that, the image is as important as the education. Their product is design audits, system reviews, etc, so they're essentially selling confidence to other companies. They sell to upper management, not the engineers, so easily-recognized indications of quality (i.e., reputation) are important.
- Insecure hiring/HR people. It's like the old "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" mentality. It's a defensive mechanism.
- It's cultural, too. Certain cultures put more emphasis on titles and institutions than others. American culture (whatever that is:) ) tends to be much more pragmatic and about ability rather than titles. But I've worked with recent immigrants from various places where that is not the case -- I saw an excellent potential employee turned down because his degree was from a "second-rate" university.
Also, people's prejudices come out in the hiring environment. University degrees are easily verified, while experience may or may not be.
And experience can be a slippery thing, too. I hired someone once who gave an outstanding interview and who had amazing knowledge of Unix development. This person turned out to be very talented, but unable to follow directions at all, or even perform the job requirements. It wasn't a lack of ability, it was an unwillingness to work with the requirements that our client had imposed. A university degree here would have been a good thing -- it indicates that someone is capable of, for want of a better phrase, being compliant and going along with the bullshit that jobs unfortunately often require. Being talented and knowledgable is not enough. You have to be able to deal with and compromise with people who are less talented, situations that are not ideal, and, as you call it, the real world.
Anyway, that's my take on it. Yes, experience is very important, but I wouldn't overlook a good degree as a tool for getting yourself hired.
That'd be an excellent first step if you want to keep IRC less snoopable.
But I guess my point is that even if the whole connection is encrypted, we don't really *know* that No Such Agency can't read it anyway. After all (setting on tinfoil hat mode) they were pursuing Phil Zimmerman legally in all manner of different ways, and then suddenly just stopped one day. Maybe they decided that they couldn't win the legal battles, and they should just leave poor Phil alone. Or maybe they found a weakness in the public crypto system. Maybe they found a really good way to factor multiples of large primes. Dunno. Maybe I'm just in tinfoil hat mode.
An invite only channel, with key, now where does CIA plan to step in?
At some router.
To be snarky: the IRC protocol travels over these things called "wires," which can be tapped. If you don't think that Some Agency is monitoring TCP packets on the network, well, I think you're naive.
Now, you can certainly encrypt your traffic and make it harder for them. I have no idea what capabilities they have for decryption. It's possible that they've backdoored popular algorythms -- the math on some of these things is only comprehensible to a specialist, and sometimes something that appears quite innocuous can weaken an entire cryptosystem.
Then again, maybe I'm attributing more intelligence to intelligence than is warranted.
Slashdot Mirror
Crap. My (opt-) got filtered out.
That was opt-u, opt-e, opt-`, opt-i, and opt-s.
Just ignore this posting and the one above.
Or, for Mac users, umlauts are just u followed by the letter in question, acute accents are e followed by the letter, grave accents are ` followed by the letter, circumflex are i followed by the letter, and esszetts are simply s.
What car's electronics include microphones?
You'd be surprised.
For example, the Porsche Boxster has a microphone built-in to simplify the installation of a handsfree phone kit.
Actually, that was my point, even if I made it poorly.
And a "moot" is a gathering of freemen in Merrie Olde England. How the meaning of "moot point" evolved from a point of discussion to a point not worthy of discussion is an interesting quirk of language. My understanding, however questionable and shaky, is that the arc went from "point of debate" to "debatable" to "already debated" to "of no significance / unworthy of debate."
I'm sure an etymologist will step in and give us the lowdown on this.
Not always, not always.
For example, I have seen two different kinds of tree castings made of stone: one, a negative casting made by molten lava that built up as an accretion on a tree (which obviously burned out), and two, a positive casting made through a slow fossilization ("petrification") process.
I would happily come up with a false etymology originating in the parlance of lime-slakers, medieval wall builders, sarcophagus fillers, or even potters discussing cone-10 firing, but you'd probably call me on it.
That being said, it is a weird phrase, that probably belongs with "mute points" and exclaimations like "here here!"
Exactly. The etymology of the word "fan" shows that it is merely an abbreviation of "fanatic."
So if you're really a fan, you simply cannot help but be obsessed.
Oh yes we will. We'll have everyone else's cars. "We" being those of us who haven't died of all the horrible things the media has been predicting for us, e.g., Aviation Terrorism, Avian Flu, Nuclear Terrorism, Global Warming, Biological Terrorism, Earthquakes, Religious Terrorism, Civil War, Chemical Terrorism, Mercury Poisoning, Cyber Terrorism, Estrogen-imitating Pollutants, Intellectual Property Terrorism, Financial Collapse, Handicapped Parking Terrorism, etc.
Oh, and those cars? We'll be using 'em as houses. That's because there will be no fuel left to run them.
(Or, as the bumper sticker says: "After the rapture, can I have your car?")
I'd recommend moving to a location with a Japanese / Japanese-American Community. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland are all good choices. Having a comprehensible community available, especially one in various stages of assimilation, can make the transition easier for your wife. At least in these places, you'll be able to find acceptable tea, for example. The downside, of course, is that Real Estate is extremely pricey in these locations.
Other recommendations: keep some of your money in Yen. I know the Yen's not at its highest, but the dollar could continue to get weaker. Best to keep your options open.
I second what others have said about the INS. Just be aware that it can be Kafkaesque. Be patient and keep a sense of humor.
The tech job market is strange right now. There are jobs, but it's certainly not like '99. If you're good technically, you'll be able to find work. It may not be the kind of work that you'd prefer to do, but you're unlikely to starve. Again, be patient and keep a sense of humor.
... or did they consistently replace "APL" with "FORTRAN" in the article.
I could fix that for them with sed, or maybe a Perl script. Now, where did I leave all my leaning toothpicks...
I second this suggestion.
Works great for everything I've thrown at it.
They'll release updates on the 2nd Tuesday of each month?
I guess that means that the 2nd Monday (or thereabouts) would be the ideal time to unleash any malware that you want to inflict on the world.
At least you get a month of free reign, before you have to mutate.
"ACCESS DENIED" for the 802.11b
and
"NETWORK UNAVAILABLE" for the 802.11g
I assume you just mean the birds have sensors for other frequencies like IR...
I'd guess that they're not big into illumination from space. I don't care what frequencies you're using -- painting your target kinda defeats the purpose of spying, since your target can't help but know when you're looking.
Wouldn't be the first time.
Happily, it's probably not the last time neither.
I'm a Motion user, myself.
I'll admit, it's more oriented towards the hackerish experimenter, since it required that I rebuild my kernel with the Video 4 Linux modules. It took me a weekend to get the software part up and running and calibrated for the environment (noise masking, sensitivity, etc).
The hardware took longer since I had to learn how to run cables. Obviously, this *could* be done with wireless cameras, but my paranoia level was such that I don't want jamming or simple signal intercept... But I have a system monitoring my house and the perimeter with *cough* cameras (more than two, less than ten) going to a concealed machine with plenty of backup power. The cameras have IR boost for night-time security. I get about 10 fps/camera, and record both stills and video. I keep about two weeks worth of event data in a secure, web-accessible hierarchy by date and time. The capture data itself is timestamped and labeled as to its location.
My system has yielded images that are helping the police with an ongoing investigation. During the events leading up to this, I had one camera send me an SMS message any time there was motion detected, which enabled me to observe events in near realtime. If you need true realtime observation, there are ways to make it work with Motion, but I have no experience with them and can't speak to their quality.
Also, the Motion user community (the mailing list) is probably the most helpful, collaborative Open Source community I've ever dealt with.
Yeah. Or even alternative options.
Ob.Noxious: it's spelled "congratulations." You also meant "better than" and "too bad."
So I guess your point is that correct grammar is equivalent to mindless conformity and unoriginal thinking. You're wrong.
Here's why grammar matters:
1. Disambiguation of meaning.
2. Precision.
Why would I bother to spend my time looking at your "original thinking" unless I feel you've put serious effort into it? Every rebel kid out there claims original thinking, but few of them actually have anything interesting to say. So, if you care about your original thoughts and wish for others to take them seriously, you should be willing to package them in such a way as to make them accessible. Making the effort to use proper grammar is just a sign of respect for your own ideas. Writing is about communication.
Now, if you're a True Rebel, you don't give a fuck what anyone else thinks, thus you can go off and do whatever you want. In that case, why bother writing anything at all? But then you lose the prerogative to whine about people not taking you seriously.
shouldn't there be another "lint list;" in there before the greps?
The funny thing is, this joke isn't actually from the last time that rumors about an IBM/Apple merger was discussed.
It's from the time before that!
Dude! I pack a double-barrelled sawed-off spudgun under the seat of my car. Never can be too careful here in LA.
You can also carry around a white noise generator (and/or boombox loaded with that annoying hip-hop or techno all you kids are listening to these days) if you don't want people hearing what it is you have to say.
Usually, I encounter the opposite problem: people shouting their overly personal details into cell phones. I'd rather they'd just shut up.
My brother has a term for this: "eaveslammed" (a variant on eavesdropping).
Well, I agree it's a fine line sometimes. In this case, though, it wasn't.
The client had selected a product to use for implementing a project. We took the job knowing that they used a given product. The employee was hired knowing that using this product would be part of the job description, and they would be integrating into a lot of legacy code.
They got fed up because they knew a better product, and, damn it, they weren't going to waste their time figuring out the challenge of doing it in this product when there's a better/easier one out there.
Again, it's a fine line. Yeah, it would have been good if we could use a better product. We'd talked with the client, and they'd said they wanted to use the product they had been using. At some point, you either have to say OK, we'll do it their way, or you bail.
Where you draw the line depends a lot on you.
For us, the difference in the products was not particularly great. Maybe 5-10% more effort or something with their desired approach. But we were being paid on time & materials, so that really didn't matter. This employee made it into a philosophical ultimatim -- either we use the best product, or I won't do it at all.
As for providing the best work environment, well, again, that's easier said than done. In the service industry, you have to kowtow to clients sometimes. You occasionally have to do things their way, even if it's wrong. Sometimes, it's not even their fault (remember those conversations along the lines of "but the VCs won't give us money unless we use Oracle. Yeah, I know it's a fifty record phone directory, but that's what they said. Take it or leave it").
If one is good enough, and people are throwing so much work their way that one can reject all except the jobs that are ideal, well, one could ignore all the above. One can then afford to be a prima donna. But the grandparent was talking about doing work in the real world, and very few of us exist in an environment where we have such control over our jobs.
I disagree.
:) ) tends to be much more pragmatic and about ability rather than titles. But I've worked with recent immigrants from various places where that is not the case -- I saw an excellent potential employee turned down because his degree was from a "second-rate" university.
I'm not saying your wrong about your experience, obviously, but I have been on both sides of the process and have seen degrees make a big difference. I've seen people with great experience lose out to people from the "right institution."
Here're a few reasons:
- Some institutions, particularly service-related companies, are vain about the statistics they can cite. I worked with a Big Consulting Company once who had a VP who would frequently state that over 25% of their employees had PhDs from Berkeley, Stanford, or MIT. I asked him what their GPAs were as a joke, but he took it entirely seriously, and told me he could find out. For companies and people like that, the image is as important as the education. Their product is design audits, system reviews, etc, so they're essentially selling confidence to other companies. They sell to upper management, not the engineers, so easily-recognized indications of quality (i.e., reputation) are important.
- Insecure hiring/HR people. It's like the old "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" mentality. It's a defensive mechanism.
- It's cultural, too. Certain cultures put more emphasis on titles and institutions than others. American culture (whatever that is
Also, people's prejudices come out in the hiring environment. University degrees are easily verified, while experience may or may not be.
And experience can be a slippery thing, too. I hired someone once who gave an outstanding interview and who had amazing knowledge of Unix development. This person turned out to be very talented, but unable to follow directions at all, or even perform the job requirements. It wasn't a lack of ability, it was an unwillingness to work with the requirements that our client had imposed. A university degree here would have been a good thing -- it indicates that someone is capable of, for want of a better phrase, being compliant and going along with the bullshit that jobs unfortunately often require. Being talented and knowledgable is not enough. You have to be able to deal with and compromise with people who are less talented, situations that are not ideal, and, as you call it, the real world.
Anyway, that's my take on it. Yes, experience is very important, but I wouldn't overlook a good degree as a tool for getting yourself hired.
That'd be an excellent first step if you want to keep IRC less snoopable.
But I guess my point is that even if the whole connection is encrypted, we don't really *know* that No Such Agency can't read it anyway. After all (setting on tinfoil hat mode) they were pursuing Phil Zimmerman legally in all manner of different ways, and then suddenly just stopped one day. Maybe they decided that they couldn't win the legal battles, and they should just leave poor Phil alone. Or maybe they found a weakness in the public crypto system. Maybe they found a really good way to factor multiples of large primes. Dunno. Maybe I'm just in tinfoil hat mode.
In any case, I'm getting OT here.
At some router.
To be snarky: the IRC protocol travels over these things called "wires," which can be tapped. If you don't think that Some Agency is monitoring TCP packets on the network, well, I think you're naive.
Now, you can certainly encrypt your traffic and make it harder for them. I have no idea what capabilities they have for decryption. It's possible that they've backdoored popular algorythms -- the math on some of these things is only comprehensible to a specialist, and sometimes something that appears quite innocuous can weaken an entire cryptosystem.
Then again, maybe I'm attributing more intelligence to intelligence than is warranted.