Wow, how can anyone not know that 911 doesn't respond to SMS? How many times has anyone heard the phrase "text 911" as opposed to "call 911"? Did anyone see texting mentioned as one of the options when the 911 system was explained to them? Since the emergency services never advertised SMS capabilities, and all 911 interactions I ever witnessed in movies/shows showed two-way vocal communication between the caller and the operator, I'd actually be rather surprised if my SMS to 911 did go through. And let's not forget: an SMS carries no guarantee of delivery. In an emergency you want to be sure your communication goes through or at least know when it doesn't, and most people I know have delivery reports turned off because that's the phone's factory setting.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it. It definitely makes sense in emergency situations to be able to communicate covertly with the emergency services and it's certainly way overdue. But I just don't understand the stupidity of some people who expect that everything and everyone is using the exact same technologies they're accustomed to.
What's next? People complaining that 911 doesn't respond to @911 tweets?
Well, I have the hand-crank model, and I haven't had any bad experiences with it yet. Granted, I haven't had to use it very often; I take pretty good care of my discs. But I've had one disc which many would consider dead returned to its former glory without any problems whatsoever.
A friend of mine borrowed some CDs of mine, among them several CDR's with data on them. While returning them, the plastic bag in which he carried them broke, and the CDs fell to the floor. Jewel cases cracked open, CDs skidded all over the pavement. We're talking tarmac with crushed stone in it here, the kind of street you wouldn't want to fall off your bike on when you were a kid because you'd be plucking sand and little stones out of your knees for days. One of the CDRs became so scratched (fortunately on the good side; if it were on the back the data-carrying layer would've certainly been damaged beyond repair) that it wouldn't read anymore. I've then spent ten minutes with the scratch doctor. Afterwards the disc looked like it would be impossible to retrieve any data from it. Lots of little scratches left the surface looking like there was some kind of film on it. Surprisingly, the data could be copied off to my harddrive without a hitch though.
YMMV though, but as far as I'm concerned, it's a pretty decent product given its price.
Of course, you could always go talk to the people at your local DVD rental shop and ask them what they'd charge you to resurface your discs. I'm sure a couple of them would probably offer such a service if requested, since they so often need that same service themselves. In fact, if you don't like taking any risks, this seems like your best option.
I remember one time, one of my translator colleagues got a call from a client in a hurry, asking why the translation was taking so long and if his [translation] machine was broken.
My colleague explained that translations are done by people, not machines, which also explained the cost. He added in jest/sarcasm that if someone wanted an instantaneous and free translation, one simply needed to use Babelfish.
Five minutes later, the office admin came to his desk, saying that translation order had been cancelled.
We laughed our collective asses off when we took that cancelled document and had it translated by Babelfish.
Just for fun, I translated this using babelfish, to Dutch, and then back to English. Funny result, but I guess it's still pretty good for a machine translation:
I remind one time, got an one of my translator colleagues question of a customer who in a haste, for which asks the translation this way long lasted and if its [ translate ] machine had break. My colleague explained that the translations people, machines are not done, which explained also the costs. He added in jest/sarcastic remark that if a someone immediate and free translation wild one simple Babelfish had use.
Five later minutes, bureauadmin came to its office, saying that the vertaalorde had been cancelled.
We laughed away our collective rests document then we that cancelled names and it had translated Babelfish.
Still, it boggles the mind to see "our collective asses" translated to "our collective donkeys" in Dutch, to result in "our collective rests" when translated back to English... Only explanation I have is that "donkey" and "easel" are the same word in Dutch. In fact, according to my online dictionary tool, easel is also a synonym for donkey in the English language. Something I was unaware of before this little experiment. So there you have it: it is indeed possible to use Babelfish to learn a foreign language!
Stephen King did the same with The Gunslinger; books 1-3 were brilliant; book 4 lost momentum, and then he took a long break. Years later he finally rushed out the last couple of installments in the series in record time, but the quality of storytelling wasn't the same as with the first 3 books.
I'm not sure how the Clix works, but my iRiver T30 had a firmware that only supported MTP, not UMS; I had to download another firmware that does UMS (which ment losing MTP support, but since I'm a linux user, and I only listen to stuff I rip myself and steer clear of DRM, that's hardly an issue for me). Then I used iRiver's firmware updater to install the new firmware; you need a Windows machine for this to work.
According to a post on this page, the older firmwares only did MTP; if you want UMS as well, you need a newer firmware.
Does the player mount as a thumbdrive when you plug it in? If not, your player only does MTP, not UMS.
As to what software to use to synch the player; heck, I just use a file browser, or "cp" on the commandline.
Great men think alike... Then again, so do the dumb masses. And there's more of them than there are great men. So, logically speaking... Where exactly do you make the leap from one anecdotal scenario where you thought the same thing somebody else thought at the same time, combined with the axiom that great men think alike, to assuming both of you are great men?
great_man(A) & great_man(B) => think_alike(A, B)
does not imply:
think_alike(A, B) => great_man(A) & great_man(B)
Face it, statistically speaking, and considering you're not above committing to such logical fallacies, there's little basis for such an assumption.;)
Heh, same problem here, though my contacts are already used to it. Now when I add new contacts, I just tell them upfront that I'm "online" 24/7, but that it doesn't mean I'm actually behind the computer, or even at home. Seems to work well enough; nowadays I only change my state to busy when I'm actually at the computer, and trying to get work done without being interrupted. Most of my contacts respect that and only disturb me for important messages, or something that can be said in 5 lines or less.
Even so they could have died out millions of years ago. Or we could be the first advanced race and as we reach out amoung the stars we shall find other less advanced races.
Well, a Dutch stand up comedian (Theo Maassen) has made a pretty good argument why searching for extraterrestrial life is not something we should devote so many resources to; it basically goes like this:
Why do we want to know if there's extraterrestrial life anyway? It's really simple, there are only 2 possibilities. Either there is, or there isn't. Even if there is, there are only 2 possible scenarios: either they're more advanced than us, or they're less advanced. If they're less advanced than us, I don't want anything to do with them, and if they're more advanced they'll find us long before we find them.
Not that I agree, but you gotta admit, he makes an interesting point...;)
Anyway, something that's often overlooked in the media coverage of these issues (but which I'm sure is actively researched and debated in certain circles) is whether we really want to make first contact at this point in our evolution. Let's assume we find extraterrestrial life, and it's advanced enough to travel to Earth, for we are surely in no position to pay them a visit anytime soon. Do they pose a threat, and can we defend ourselves against them? If we manage to make first contact with a species that does indeed pose a threat, I rate our chance of survival very slim at best. Just look at what happened to the Native Americans when Europe decided to find an alternative route to India. Now imagine what would've happened if back then we would've had today's body armor, p90's, RPG's, tanks, rockets, stealth bombers and whatnot. Try defending against that with a measly bow and a quiver of arrows.
Best leave them be until we can be relatively sure we can handle them, should they prove to be a nuisance. And while we're at it, might not be a bad idea to stop broadcasting radio waves they could use to trace us back with too. If they're anything like us, I don't know if I really want to get to know them in the first place...
Those Sanyo 2700 mAH batteries, I take it you're refering to the "Superlattice Alloy" types? They been performing well for you? I bought 8 of them, but they lose their charge over a timespan of 2 to 3 weeks, while lying on the shelf. However, I assume it's because of the crappy Memorex charger I charged them in the first couple of weeks (didn't have a decent charger back then, and it said on the charger that it was suitable for NiCd and NiMH, so I went with that). Now, no matter what I do to them in my Ansmann charger that does a great job on the included 2300 mAH batteries, I can't seem to get those Sanyos to perform. They're still OK for high drain applications, but not for long term storage while not in use.
Long story short, at first I thought that it must've been some annoying trait of NiMH batteries, but when the new batteries that came with the Ansmann charger proved me wrong, I started suspecting I might've overcharged them with the old crappy charger... If you can confirm those batteries actually work great for you, then I can safely assume this to be the case. In which case: does anyone here know a way to revive NiMH batteries that have been overcharged and/or undercharged a couple of times too many?
Mod parent up; the moron who submitted the article totally failed to grasp the so-called "article" he links to. Submitter should have done his homework before he posted this crap on slashdot; this ain't even a subtle mistake anymore, and I'd hardly call the concept difficult to understand. It might help if he actually read the stuff he links to instead of trying to be the first to post it...
You do realize that simply owning the vinyl version doesn't make it legal for you to download the MP3s from somewhere, right?
No, he didn't know that. He appreciates you pointing it out to him though. So do the rest of us. If what you say is true, this is big news indeed!.
Now, since you've been so friendly to share some of that vast array of knowledge of yours, here's a free piece of info from me, I thought you might appreciate it: for all intents and purposes, gravity on earth works in a downward fashion, pulling things towards the ground.
Hey, I could back and forth obvious, generally known and utterly redundant crap with you all day if I wanted...
When the first CD-Rom came out, everyone was like 'what is the hokey piece of cr... Hey I can copy the music now?'
Yup, because before that, you know, with the audio cassette and the 8-track there was no way in hell people could copy music. In fact, my entire highschool cassette collection taped from the radio and CDs, the one I played on my walkman while riding the bike to and from school, is just a figment of my imagination. I think that collection starred in Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends once, because we all know it couldn't have been real...
Well, I haven't looked into mobile solutions, but my Abit IC7-MAX3 mainboard came with one of those for regular (3.5") IDE drives, and it's still in the box, unused... You certainly can't use that one inside a laptop since it's a little less than 2 by 2 inches, if I recall correctly... But maybe they have a module that can be embedded on a mobile mainboard, wouldn't surprise me.
In fact swap was the first thing I decided to encrypt on my laptop. Encrypting swap is simpler and less intrusive than everything else. Thus there is really not much reason not to encrypt swap. No need for complicated key management, just generate a new random key on every boot.
I wouldn't exactly call it less intrusive; it has one big downside: suspend to disk doesn't work with encrypted swap...
Well, that's not entirely correct; suspend to disk still works fine. It's just the resume after the reboot that stops working...
It all boils down to what you need most: security or convenience. You can have both with some sort of hardware encryption with a passphrase and/or dongle, something like those SecureIDE encryption devices you place between your IDE interface and your harddrive. But from what I've heard (don't know if this is true, so take with a grain of salt), most consumer encryption hardware solutions use weak encryption anyway.
Entering a password at boot time is not a viable solution. The computer has to be able to boot the OS to a login prompt, which will allow the user to enter their password to decrypt their personal files.
And since it's you saying that, it must be true! Who the hell are all these arrogant people who actually want to see proof, or at least some sort of reasoning behind your statements? Arrogant pricks! You say it's not viable, you have a slashdot account, you are absolutely correct in, and let me emphasize this: every fucking thing you ever say, even in your sleep!!!
Anyway, me being an arrogant prick n' all... Why exactly do you reckon entering a password at boot time is not a viable solution? Remember, we're talking about people with sensitive data on their company laptops, which must be unaccessible under any circumstances should the laptop ever be stolen, so if your whole argument hinges on the "but they're elderly morons who can barely use Windows" line of reasoning, don't waste our time replying.
Requiring a password at boot time has a number of problems. First, you either have to give everyone that uses the computer the same password to boot the system, or you need to use a multi-key encryption routine, which might difficult to maintain as you add or remove new users.
Which quickly becomes a logistical nightmare in the context of the original question: "Why not use FDE on mobile devices?"... Imagine each and every user of my personal company laptop needing his own personal password to boot the device... Or the trust issues raised by sharing the single password (in case we don't want to go the multi-password route) with all the other users of my personal company laptop. It basically boils down to one of two choices:
I create a new password for... let me count them... not a single soul on this planet...
I share my password with, and thus must evaluate the trustworthyness of... let me count them again... nobody!
It's not like I haven't got anything else to do, you know? My shedule is pretty hectic already without all this extra hassle...
What you want is for the machine to boot and automatically decrypt the public filesystem information (the OS, and various other directories) securely (ie, it is tied to the machine via a TPM chip of some sort) without the need to identify the user, since you need a valid username and password to login this shouldn't be a security risk over and above any other security risk of someone stealing your laptop and having as much time as they need to fiddle with it.
Because we all know the contents of/tmp, or the logfiles on the computer are utterly worthless without the data in your home directory... The whole friggin' point behind encryption is you leave no possible attack vector uncovered for potential attackers to exploit! You want to make it as hard as possible to get to any data on the harddrive at all, except for a well chosen subset of files on a separate partition needed to boot the computer into the "query for decryption password" stage. On Linux, that means the only partition you don't encrypt is/boot; all the rest, even swap, should be encrypted if security means anything to you.
If, however, "security" means nothing to you, like in your case, why bother with encryption at all? Do us all a favor, and leave this topic to those who actually know something about it, instead of spreading your dim witted halftruths as the holy gospel, ok? There's enough misinformed morons in this world already without you having to dumb them down even more.
Slashdot Mirror
Get your facts straight; the word is simply misspelled in that article; it's "klinkklare". See Vandale.nl.
No, but ignorance is a symptom of stupidity...
on friendly local sites I use a variation of my real name, but not here.
This is a local site for local people. There's nothing for you here...
Wow, how can anyone not know that 911 doesn't respond to SMS? How many times has anyone heard the phrase "text 911" as opposed to "call 911"? Did anyone see texting mentioned as one of the options when the 911 system was explained to them? Since the emergency services never advertised SMS capabilities, and all 911 interactions I ever witnessed in movies/shows showed two-way vocal communication between the caller and the operator, I'd actually be rather surprised if my SMS to 911 did go through. And let's not forget: an SMS carries no guarantee of delivery. In an emergency you want to be sure your communication goes through or at least know when it doesn't, and most people I know have delivery reports turned off because that's the phone's factory setting.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it. It definitely makes sense in emergency situations to be able to communicate covertly with the emergency services and it's certainly way overdue. But I just don't understand the stupidity of some people who expect that everything and everyone is using the exact same technologies they're accustomed to.
What's next? People complaining that 911 doesn't respond to @911 tweets?
The plugin is called a knife, and you'll have to wait a bit for the worms to appear... Not speaking of personal experience, of course.
You kidding? Blacksmithing is loads of fun!
Well, I have the hand-crank model, and I haven't had any bad experiences with it yet. Granted, I haven't had to use it very often; I take pretty good care of my discs. But I've had one disc which many would consider dead returned to its former glory without any problems whatsoever.
A friend of mine borrowed some CDs of mine, among them several CDR's with data on them. While returning them, the plastic bag in which he carried them broke, and the CDs fell to the floor. Jewel cases cracked open, CDs skidded all over the pavement. We're talking tarmac with crushed stone in it here, the kind of street you wouldn't want to fall off your bike on when you were a kid because you'd be plucking sand and little stones out of your knees for days. One of the CDRs became so scratched (fortunately on the good side; if it were on the back the data-carrying layer would've certainly been damaged beyond repair) that it wouldn't read anymore. I've then spent ten minutes with the scratch doctor. Afterwards the disc looked like it would be impossible to retrieve any data from it. Lots of little scratches left the surface looking like there was some kind of film on it. Surprisingly, the data could be copied off to my harddrive without a hitch though.
YMMV though, but as far as I'm concerned, it's a pretty decent product given its price.
Of course, you could always go talk to the people at your local DVD rental shop and ask them what they'd charge you to resurface your discs. I'm sure a couple of them would probably offer such a service if requested, since they so often need that same service themselves. In fact, if you don't like taking any risks, this seems like your best option.
Probably not what you're looking for, but it includes "lol", cats and ancient egypt: http://youtube.com/watch?v=NVOFmu2ZIqI
Just for fun, I translated this using babelfish, to Dutch, and then back to English. Funny result, but I guess it's still pretty good for a machine translation:
I remind one time, got an one of my translator colleagues question of a customer who in a haste, for which asks the translation this way long lasted and if its [ translate ] machine had break. My colleague explained that the translations people, machines are not done, which explained also the costs. He added in jest/sarcastic remark that if a someone immediate and free translation wild one simple Babelfish had use. Five later minutes, bureauadmin came to its office, saying that the vertaalorde had been cancelled. We laughed away our collective rests document then we that cancelled names and it had translated Babelfish.
Still, it boggles the mind to see "our collective asses" translated to "our collective donkeys" in Dutch, to result in "our collective rests" when translated back to English... Only explanation I have is that "donkey" and "easel" are the same word in Dutch. In fact, according to my online dictionary tool, easel is also a synonym for donkey in the English language. Something I was unaware of before this little experiment. So there you have it: it is indeed possible to use Babelfish to learn a foreign language!
Stephen King did the same with The Gunslinger; books 1-3 were brilliant; book 4 lost momentum, and then he took a long break. Years later he finally rushed out the last couple of installments in the series in record time, but the quality of storytelling wasn't the same as with the first 3 books.
Let's hope WoT doesn't await the same fate...
I'm not sure how the Clix works, but my iRiver T30 had a firmware that only supported MTP, not UMS; I had to download another firmware that does UMS (which ment losing MTP support, but since I'm a linux user, and I only listen to stuff I rip myself and steer clear of DRM, that's hardly an issue for me). Then I used iRiver's firmware updater to install the new firmware; you need a Windows machine for this to work.
According to a post on this page, the older firmwares only did MTP; if you want UMS as well, you need a newer firmware.
Does the player mount as a thumbdrive when you plug it in? If not, your player only does MTP, not UMS.
As to what software to use to synch the player; heck, I just use a file browser, or "cp" on the commandline.
Great men think alike... Then again, so do the dumb masses. And there's more of them than there are great men. So, logically speaking... Where exactly do you make the leap from one anecdotal scenario where you thought the same thing somebody else thought at the same time, combined with the axiom that great men think alike, to assuming both of you are great men?
great_man(A) & great_man(B) => think_alike(A, B)
does not imply:
think_alike(A, B) => great_man(A) & great_man(B)
Face it, statistically speaking, and considering you're not above committing to such logical fallacies, there's little basis for such an assumption. ;)
Yeah yeah, I'm just messing with ya. ;p
Heh, same problem here, though my contacts are already used to it. Now when I add new contacts, I just tell them upfront that I'm "online" 24/7, but that it doesn't mean I'm actually behind the computer, or even at home. Seems to work well enough; nowadays I only change my state to busy when I'm actually at the computer, and trying to get work done without being interrupted. Most of my contacts respect that and only disturb me for important messages, or something that can be said in 5 lines or less.
Well, a Dutch stand up comedian (Theo Maassen) has made a pretty good argument why searching for extraterrestrial life is not something we should devote so many resources to; it basically goes like this:
Why do we want to know if there's extraterrestrial life anyway? It's really simple, there are only 2 possibilities. Either there is, or there isn't. Even if there is, there are only 2 possible scenarios: either they're more advanced than us, or they're less advanced. If they're less advanced than us, I don't want anything to do with them, and if they're more advanced they'll find us long before we find them.
Not that I agree, but you gotta admit, he makes an interesting point... ;)
Anyway, something that's often overlooked in the media coverage of these issues (but which I'm sure is actively researched and debated in certain circles) is whether we really want to make first contact at this point in our evolution. Let's assume we find extraterrestrial life, and it's advanced enough to travel to Earth, for we are surely in no position to pay them a visit anytime soon. Do they pose a threat, and can we defend ourselves against them? If we manage to make first contact with a species that does indeed pose a threat, I rate our chance of survival very slim at best. Just look at what happened to the Native Americans when Europe decided to find an alternative route to India. Now imagine what would've happened if back then we would've had today's body armor, p90's, RPG's, tanks, rockets, stealth bombers and whatnot. Try defending against that with a measly bow and a quiver of arrows.
Best leave them be until we can be relatively sure we can handle them, should they prove to be a nuisance. And while we're at it, might not be a bad idea to stop broadcasting radio waves they could use to trace us back with too. If they're anything like us, I don't know if I really want to get to know them in the first place...
*slap*
Those Sanyo 2700 mAH batteries, I take it you're refering to the "Superlattice Alloy" types? They been performing well for you? I bought 8 of them, but they lose their charge over a timespan of 2 to 3 weeks, while lying on the shelf. However, I assume it's because of the crappy Memorex charger I charged them in the first couple of weeks (didn't have a decent charger back then, and it said on the charger that it was suitable for NiCd and NiMH, so I went with that). Now, no matter what I do to them in my Ansmann charger that does a great job on the included 2300 mAH batteries, I can't seem to get those Sanyos to perform. They're still OK for high drain applications, but not for long term storage while not in use.
Long story short, at first I thought that it must've been some annoying trait of NiMH batteries, but when the new batteries that came with the Ansmann charger proved me wrong, I started suspecting I might've overcharged them with the old crappy charger... If you can confirm those batteries actually work great for you, then I can safely assume this to be the case. In which case: does anyone here know a way to revive NiMH batteries that have been overcharged and/or undercharged a couple of times too many?
Making the website standards-compliant: $71.79 .002 cents/visitor
Number of visitors using a minority browser: 35,893
Profit if site renders correctly:
Depending on the particular style of math you fancy this week, you might just break even!
It's lobotomy, not labotomy... And yes, it's a great song. :D
No clue, but I'm intrigued... Do tell!
Mod parent up; the moron who submitted the article totally failed to grasp the so-called "article" he links to. Submitter should have done his homework before he posted this crap on slashdot; this ain't even a subtle mistake anymore, and I'd hardly call the concept difficult to understand. It might help if he actually read the stuff he links to instead of trying to be the first to post it...
No, he didn't know that. He appreciates you pointing it out to him though. So do the rest of us. If what you say is true, this is big news indeed!.
Now, since you've been so friendly to share some of that vast array of knowledge of yours, here's a free piece of info from me, I thought you might appreciate it: for all intents and purposes, gravity on earth works in a downward fashion, pulling things towards the ground.
Hey, I could back and forth obvious, generally known and utterly redundant crap with you all day if I wanted...
Yup, because before that, you know, with the audio cassette and the 8-track there was no way in hell people could copy music. In fact, my entire highschool cassette collection taped from the radio and CDs, the one I played on my walkman while riding the bike to and from school, is just a figment of my imagination. I think that collection starred in Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends once, because we all know it couldn't have been real...
Could it?
Well, I haven't looked into mobile solutions, but my Abit IC7-MAX3 mainboard came with one of those for regular (3.5") IDE drives, and it's still in the box, unused... You certainly can't use that one inside a laptop since it's a little less than 2 by 2 inches, if I recall correctly... But maybe they have a module that can be embedded on a mobile mainboard, wouldn't surprise me.
I wouldn't exactly call it less intrusive; it has one big downside: suspend to disk doesn't work with encrypted swap...
Well, that's not entirely correct; suspend to disk still works fine. It's just the resume after the reboot that stops working...
It all boils down to what you need most: security or convenience. You can have both with some sort of hardware encryption with a passphrase and/or dongle, something like those SecureIDE encryption devices you place between your IDE interface and your harddrive. But from what I've heard (don't know if this is true, so take with a grain of salt), most consumer encryption hardware solutions use weak encryption anyway.
And since it's you saying that, it must be true! Who the hell are all these arrogant people who actually want to see proof, or at least some sort of reasoning behind your statements? Arrogant pricks! You say it's not viable, you have a slashdot account, you are absolutely correct in, and let me emphasize this: every fucking thing you ever say, even in your sleep!!!
Anyway, me being an arrogant prick n' all... Why exactly do you reckon entering a password at boot time is not a viable solution? Remember, we're talking about people with sensitive data on their company laptops, which must be unaccessible under any circumstances should the laptop ever be stolen, so if your whole argument hinges on the "but they're elderly morons who can barely use Windows" line of reasoning, don't waste our time replying.
Which quickly becomes a logistical nightmare in the context of the original question: "Why not use FDE on mobile devices?"... Imagine each and every user of my personal company laptop needing his own personal password to boot the device... Or the trust issues raised by sharing the single password (in case we don't want to go the multi-password route) with all the other users of my personal company laptop. It basically boils down to one of two choices:
- I create a new password for... let me count them... not a single soul on this planet...
- I share my password with, and thus must evaluate the trustworthyness of... let me count them again... nobody!
It's not like I haven't got anything else to do, you know? My shedule is pretty hectic already without all this extra hassle...Because we all know the contents of /tmp, or the logfiles on the computer are utterly worthless without the data in your home directory... The whole friggin' point behind encryption is you leave no possible attack vector uncovered for potential attackers to exploit! You want to make it as hard as possible to get to any data on the harddrive at all, except for a well chosen subset of files on a separate partition needed to boot the computer into the "query for decryption password" stage. On Linux, that means the only partition you don't encrypt is /boot; all the rest, even swap, should be encrypted if security means anything to you.
If, however, "security" means nothing to you, like in your case, why bother with encryption at all? Do us all a favor, and leave this topic to those who actually know something about it, instead of spreading your dim witted halftruths as the holy gospel, ok? There's enough misinformed morons in this world already without you having to dumb them down even more.