Right, and if all you need is a few dozen drives, it's probably not worth it. Let's talk when you need to backup 12 TB every night and you can only recycle the tapes yearly.
Realistically, I have had a larger home file server than the entire corporate NAS/SAN at my last few jobs. And not talkin' about four-person mom-n'-pop shops here.
And yet, they all insist on using tapes for backup. Drives me up a wall to see the inefficiency.
After two years at my previous job, I finally convinced the head of IT to cycle through a handful of hot-swappable eSATA HDDs instead - After we had an actual serious crash and found tape after tape after worthless tape of complete unrecoverable garbage (despite never hearing a peep about corruption from the backup system). It took less than a week before I got to play the hero when we could recover a VP's "oops"ed spreadsheet in under a minute (as opposed to a day's work just to realize we had no viable backups).
Tapes may count as a "safe" industry standard, but anyone using them really needs to reevaluate their business needs. They definitely do have their strong points at the very highest end, but the standard "weekly backup with a nightly incremental" ain't one of them.
Mozilla is actually changing to an "assume it works" model where add-ons will be enabled and version compatibility information will be ignored
You can disable add-on version compatibility checking in your about:config options.
That said, while it means you don't need to screw around with editing the.rdf files, it also means that every few weeks random add-ons will break... Or magically heal... Or start doing bizarre things where once they worked just fine and oh-by-the-way its options page no longer loads to let you tweak its behavior...
Personally, I still haven't forgiven Mozilla for breaking the ability to use arbitrary-sized icons in the bookmarks toolbar. I have a larger, higher-DPI screen than ever, and they want me to suffer with 16x16 icons forever? Even most web sites now include a higher-res version of their favicon, but will FF let me see it? Hell no!
That is a load of dingo's kidneys. Rural farming communities, by contrast, were in a big fucking dustbowl where nothing would grow
...Which explains why, immediately following the hardships of the 1930s, America degenerated into a hellhole much like Africa today, a downward spiral from which we never recovered, right?
I absolutely agree with you about the consequences of modern industrial agriculture, and that Africa very much must not take the Miracle-Gro approach if they want to improve the condition of their soil over the long term. But that had nothing to do with the Great Depression, and everything to do with overfarming a thin layer of topsoil covering a geologically-recently-reclaimed desert in a high-wind and low-water area.
I was to going make some comments about the situation there but everything I wrote sounded racist. How do you address the fact that seems to be a clear pattern of behaviour in that continent that doesn't look like it will ever be solved while the locals are in charge?
Race != Culture.
You want to solve Africa's problems? Take the damned place over and set up a modern Western-style central government.
Gee, does that sound a bit too much like colonialism? Hey, guess what, Africa's colonial period counts as the only part of its history (post-Egypt, itself an exception due to the Nile and Mediterranean) where it had any meaningful level of economic output. You might argue that it only managed that by exploiting the local populations... But, if others can make money exploiting you, you can "exploit" yourself for the same gain!
Quit fighting each other over petty crap, clean up the water, focus on better using what resources you have (Yes, parts of Africa has some of the worst soil in the world - It also has enough arable land to feed its entire population with plenty of room for growth), and join the modern world. On the flip side of that, when you regularly make the "look, point, and laugh" headlines for burning witches over stealing your penises... Not a sign of good things to come.
So the USA is a third the size, with a third the population, but they are more than 3x richer...the real issue
Funny thing about "richer" - It only matters when participating in a larger economy, not when subsistence farming.
Case in point, look at how the US's Great Depression affected varying regions of the country in radically different ways - The wealthy coastal cities, whose economies and interests had largely separated from agriculture, suffered horribly; Rural farming communities, by contrast, barely noticed anything had changed (and despite the ever-popular fairy-tale about the evil bankers foreclosing on the poor ignorant farmer, at the peak of the Great Depression they suffered a mere one tenth of the foreclosure rate we experienced just two years ago).
So whether or not Africa has money only influences whether or not they can opt for our modern pathological approach to every problem - Buy their way out by importing expensive resources from "somewhere else". Problem with that approach, eventually you run out of money or somewhere-elses to exploit.
But the above statement is ridiculous. If I buy the hardcover, I still have to buy the paperback, which is NOT the same book. eBooks are no different. I still cheerfully pay for the paper copies from Baen *and* make a separate purchase for the electronic editions.
That strikes me as a dangerous distinction to make - Would you say (and I don't mean this as a leading question) that you have the "right" to rip a DVD or CD for playback on your computer? And if at some point in the future, the studios start offering large-scale online movie purchases, would your answer change?
From my perspective, I pay for the content, not the form factor. Yes, I may prefer different form factors for different uses (I'd rather have tech references easily searchable, and I'd rather have light-n'-fluffy fiction useable with no batteries required); but I don't buy a book because it comes in form-X; I buy it because of its information or entertainment content.
Now, if you offered me the "plus eBook download code" version for only a buck or two more than the dead-tree-only version, I'd consider that reasonable. But to make me pay for both separately? Not interested.
Another way to look at this - Pro-IP apologists love pointing out that the sales price of a given media-product doesn't usually have much relation to the cost of production; I would consider this almost the "You sure you want to die for that hill?" reverse case of that - Yes, it costs the publisher a bit to prep an eBook version on top of the physical one, but... So what? I don't want either/or, I want both. I'll pay a bit more for the convenience, but once I own a physical version of it, I have absolutely no qualms about how I obtain the digital one. They can take my money, or consider me an off-the-top 50% piracy rate.
What Book Publishers Should Learn From Harry Potter
They should learn form this that we wanted these 5+ years ago, preferably released simultaneously with the print version, and ideally the print versions should have included one free e-Version each.
What will they learn from this? They'll learn that they can fake it and promote themselves as "DRM-Free" by releasing material that everyone already owns in another form (and therefore piracy doesn't much matter), which continuing to burden new releases and reference material under as onerous of a lock as they can clamp on.
If our conversation is going to follow the pattern of a typical slashdot discussion thread, you will now need to retroactively define the terms "major", "mass produced", and "smaller" in such a way that you can insist that I am not only wrong, but also a smelly hippy that likes Hitler.
Or, I could just thank you for pointing out something cool I had somehow missed when I needed to redo my roof a few years back.
(Though your tone makes me more inclined to just consider you an ass and move on).
At this point we're not especially limited on space for solar installs. Our problem is that our collection systems aren't cheap enough.
This. These 3d shapes give a better yield for a given footprint, but actually cost more.
Hey, If you can make individual flat panels cheaply enough, I'll pave half an acre with them for all I care about the "footprint". That said, I really don't understand why no major company has come up with mass produced smaller panels in a roofing-shingle form factor, but, entirely different topic.
Now, the part of this that does appeal to me involves the improved yield at high latitudes - But does that mean improved only against the footprint, or against the surface area? If the former, hey, cool, I live just far enough North that solar won't realistically pay back the investment given the present dominant efficiencies and prices; If the latter, then to repeat myself, just make 'em cheaper, I'll provide the space.
Even more bizarre, even before then you *could* within a certain distance of the border -- because they didn't want MA to lose out on liquor sales to NH and RI.
And for those who don't realize this - No part of MA takes more than an hour to get to either RI or NH. So pretty much a moot point in either case.
On top of that, if you live close enough to NH, they have far lower liquor taxes, so pretty much all of New England saves up to do our bulk liquor shopping there whenever we plan to pass through.
I don't normally respond to ACs, but you sound sincere, so... I'll take the chance.:)
How do you ensure presence of mind during an accident?
Um... By paying attention to the road? That has nothing to do with posture.
I've driven clear across the continent, east-west and north-south
Though "only" within the continental US - Ditto. Not impressive, just extremely boring.
I don't know if it's saved me from any accidents, but after the few near misses I was glad my hands were already in an optimal position for maneuvering.
I've had a front tire blowout on the highway and kept control of the vehicle... Not because I had a death-grip on a particular pair of spots on the wheel, but because I reacted quickly and appropriately (let off the gas, didn't brake hard, and moved over to the far right ASAP). I've had my brakes fail, also on the highway, which I didn't notice until I attempted to take a left exit; Again, reacted quickly and appropriately, moved to the right as quickly as traffic allowed, and rolled to a stop. Not grip. Presence. Of. Mind.
If you have a real, identifiable medical condition, you might be excused.
Not looking for excuses, but the GP did specifically mention carpal tunnel. If I keep my wrists at certain angles, especially with a lot of vibration in whatever I need to hold (no, not a sex joke), my hands will literally go numb within a few minutes. Not hyperbole or whining.
That said, it doesn't really seem to make much difference - Reiterating my original point, your safety has far more to do with attending to the task at hand, than where you specifically put your hands on the wheel.
Left hand at six o'clock and the other on the gear stick. That takes care of carpal tunnel issues.
This. I didn't want to speak up lest people consider me just trying to look "bad", but you've hit the nail on the head, my friend!
If I hold the steering wheel at 10/2 or 9/3, my hands will go numb within five minutes (and I'll regret it even more that night while trying to sleep). One hand at the bottom (actually more like seven than six), the other resting somewhere around the console area. I don't get this whole "control" issue - Not talking about doing 4G turns in a fighter jet; maintaining control of a car in a bad situation requires presence of mind, not ergonomics.
If you can't read a map but rely on POV views, I don't want you on the roads without special dispensation and training. You have no spatial awareness, and are a danger to others.
I agree with you in spirit, but seriously? Reading a map has largely become a "legacy" skill like basket-weaving or buggy-whip repair. Not knowing how to read a map doesn't (automatically) make people stupid, it just means they never learned to read a map.
People don't use technologies to make things they know how to do easier, they use them so they won't have to learn something in the first place.
Learning takes time. We can either use our time to learn higher-level tasks and let the machines do the grunt-work for us, or we can spend it running through pointless exercises over and over and over.
I think the best example of this comes from the age-old schoolboy's complaint about math - "Why do we have to learn this stuff, we'll never use it!". And in all fairness, they won't. The vast majority of people need nothing beyond basic 6th-grade arithmetic. A few of the skilled trades require some basic geometry. Hell, I work as a programmer, and although my "hobby" coding draws heavily on my math background (particularly linear algebra and differential), the work I actually get paid for only rarely requires even simple trig (and if you remember SOHCAHTOA, that about covers it). On the flip side of that, as I find myself doing a lot of SQL these days, I would call my formal math training, even at the college level, wholly inadequate for thinking in terms of set-based logic.
Personally, I would say that we need to spend less time teaching "the three Rs", and more time teaching them how to live in the modern world - How to make (and stick to) a budget; how to use a computer to find less-kosher content without getting pwnd; how to read food labels and prepare a basically nutritious meal with under a thousand calories (and how many miles you need to jog to burn off anything over that); basic cell-phone etiquette (and I would say that applies to the parent topic, as it largely applies to all use of "gadgets" at inappropriate times). Skills we all really need.
I very much believe in the value of a well-rounded education, but let's face it, burger-flippers don't need Chaucer.
I've tried a few versions of XBMC (and have 11 downloading in the background, just to take a look), and I never really understood the big deal about it.
With the original XBox, okay, cool, you had a fairly high-functionality networked media player running on a $99 console gaming system. Neat.
But on a modern PC? Running a variety of programs to handle each individual media type in a manner I prefer for them doesn't present any sort of burden to me or to the system. I have no real reason to stay within the context of a single program that can do-it-all - I just make a new desktop shortcut to my preferred handler of format-X, and bam, I have it always instantly available to me.
So tell me, Slashdot - What have I missed here that makes XBMC so impressive?
They're also being sued because they used imagery from the movie on their website.
I consider that part, and only that part of this mess, somewhat legitimate. As in, "stop doing that" legitimate, not "you used our ball, so we'll take your whole court" legitimate.
Perhaps one of our resident armchair lawyers can answer a question for me - TFA discusses two of the actors from the movie supporting this pub. If Ian McKellen posed for a picture, totally unrelated to LoTR, in vaguely renny-like attire and gave the pub the right to use it, would that count as kosher? And if Elijah Wood and Liv Tyler and Christopher Lee and Cate Blanchett and Orlando Bloom all did the same - At what point does an entirely original combination of "similar" elements become infringing?
Using images right from the movie, I'll concede as a violation (though still an intolerable offense against all of humanity that we have, as another commenter put it somewhat mockingly, "small business being legally hammered by evil mega-corp"). But using concepts and names that predate The One True Franchise? As I already said, fuck no.
The word "Hobbit" predates Tolkein (the real one) by a good century. The prefix "hob" (from "hobbe"), with a variety of faerie-folksy suffixes, predates that by another three centuries - At least.
JRR knew all this perfectly well, and never claimed exclusive rights to a common word used to describe the wee people of mythology. Only these asshats that have tried to cash in on Grand-dad's legacy have so poor of a grasp of the work of their ancestor as to claim it as a "copyright". He, as a proper good ol' Don, would no doubt have outright disowned his fool-descendants for their ignorance.
Sad, really, and just one more reason we need to get rid of this entire BS charade we call "intellectual property" ASAP.
As soon as they make it easy to use them for totally anonymous purchases - Which includes the funding side of the wallet as well as the use.
Right now, however, we already have something almost as good - The Visa Gift card. You can buy them with cash, you can use them almost anywhere, you can't ever go over your "limit", and since they have no name associated with them, it makes no sense to ask for ID at the point of sale (though make no mistake, I've had salesdrones ask for it - Who then completely failed to explain what, exactly, they planned to compare my ID against, in the absence of a signature, name, picture, address, or anything else meaningful).
They have only one major flaw, entirely artificially imposed by the US's bizarre hatred of gambling - You can't easily recharge them. You have to pay the "convenience" fee to pick up a new one, with a fixed predetermined limit. Instead of, for example, "buying" your groceries plus a $1000 recharge for $1000 plus the cost of your groceries (paid in cash from my monthly visit to the ATM, of course).
Fix that, and I'd basically give up cash altogether. Make these some sort of "help Uncle Sam track even your cash purchases" deal, and thankyouverymuchbutno.
And no need to even mention ceramics or the fancier plastics, that shit is totally harmless.
Seriously? I have a ceramic (kitchen) knife. Damned fragile, and they won't survive a drop from the counter unless you get very very lucky... But sharper than any metal blade I've ever seen. Like scary sharp, the sort of thing that demands your respect or enforces its own punishment. Like easy to draw blood just washing the damned things if you don't pay attention to the task.
You probably couldn't effectively use it for a stabbing motion, but for slashing, you can cut to the bone with ease.
Use the fucking metal detectors that are already there! They work great. They'll pick up any gun, even a small one. No, there is no gun that has no metal in it (nor bullets).
I agree with you in spirit, but your premise here does not hold true.
The Glock 23 has no metal parts in it (as the most famous - You can actually get at least half-a-dozen polymer frames today, in a variety of poly chambers and actions). Poly casings hit the mainstream within the last few years (though they still cost a bit more); Hand-load with a properly sized ceramic bullet, and you have fully live firearm without a scrap of metal in it.
How about maintain two FB profiles, one for friends and one 'work safe' one with work colleagues on it.
Better solution - Maintain a fake 2nd page covered in information about how much you support various federally protected classes to which you may (or may not) actually belong.
Then watch them squirm when they try to come up with any plausible reason to give the job to the boss' young white Christian nephew rather than to a reasonably qualified older gay Muslim African-American (whether in the "Samuel Jackson" or the "Dave Matthews" sense of the term).
Asking for access to personal material opens a whole can of legal issues that most employers don't want, and it surprises me any would actively seek to subject themselves to such accusations. Hell, my own current employer actually has a policy banning managers from searching the intarwebs for job applicants, just to avoid these issues.
...problem solved. Low resolution spectrum analyzers can be inexpensive and the jammer signature is easy to identify.
And it takes only a few seconds to triangulate the source of the signal...
Except, you can cause calls to drop with just a momentary burst of jamming goodness. You don't need to actively swamp out any signals whatsoever for the duration, you just need to click the button every time Joe Important tries to make a call. And if you count as a moving target yourself, the odds of getting caught reduce to the same as "oops, guess I shouldn't have brought a dime-bag to the courthouse".
I always wondered why many states require passenger cars to pass through strict emissions tests, however it is perfectly OK to have trains, dump trucks, buses, and large vehicles spew columns of dark black diesel exhaust into the sky....
As the short answer to that, well-maintained big diesel engines have a useful lifetime measured in millions of miles. Decades of use.
Believe it or not, (most) emissions rules do apply to those vile soot-belchers (at least, the non-road ones); It will just take literally 50 years to cycle through the worst-of-the-worst currently in service.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, and if all you need is a few dozen drives, it's probably not worth it. Let's talk when you need to backup 12 TB every night and you can only recycle the tapes yearly.
Realistically, I have had a larger home file server than the entire corporate NAS/SAN at my last few jobs. And not talkin' about four-person mom-n'-pop shops here.
And yet, they all insist on using tapes for backup. Drives me up a wall to see the inefficiency.
After two years at my previous job, I finally convinced the head of IT to cycle through a handful of hot-swappable eSATA HDDs instead - After we had an actual serious crash and found tape after tape after worthless tape of complete unrecoverable garbage (despite never hearing a peep about corruption from the backup system). It took less than a week before I got to play the hero when we could recover a VP's "oops"ed spreadsheet in under a minute (as opposed to a day's work just to realize we had no viable backups).
Tapes may count as a "safe" industry standard, but anyone using them really needs to reevaluate their business needs. They definitely do have their strong points at the very highest end, but the standard "weekly backup with a nightly incremental" ain't one of them.
If you insist on posting this drivel to every thread, can you at least spell "faggots" correctly?
Homophobia, racism, f***t p**t, we can ignore - But poor spelling??? DIAF, dude.
Mozilla is actually changing to an "assume it works" model where add-ons will be enabled and version compatibility information will be ignored
.rdf files, it also means that every few weeks random add-ons will break... Or magically heal... Or start doing bizarre things where once they worked just fine and oh-by-the-way its options page no longer loads to let you tweak its behavior...
You can disable add-on version compatibility checking in your about:config options.
That said, while it means you don't need to screw around with editing the
Personally, I still haven't forgiven Mozilla for breaking the ability to use arbitrary-sized icons in the bookmarks toolbar. I have a larger, higher-DPI screen than ever, and they want me to suffer with 16x16 icons forever? Even most web sites now include a higher-res version of their favicon, but will FF let me see it? Hell no!
Firefox installs system-wide and requires admin rights to update. This is somewhat annoying.
http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable.
'Nuff said.
How is that a solution for people running websites that need to update their sites whenever a new version gets released to the general public?
Simple answer - You only officially support the ESR versions, and make your users entirely aware of both that fact, and the "why" behind it.
And maybe, just maybe, if Mozilla notices 90% of their market share only runs the ESR version, they'll get the fucking hint.
That is a load of dingo's kidneys. Rural farming communities, by contrast, were in a big fucking dustbowl where nothing would grow
...Which explains why, immediately following the hardships of the 1930s, America degenerated into a hellhole much like Africa today, a downward spiral from which we never recovered, right?
I absolutely agree with you about the consequences of modern industrial agriculture, and that Africa very much must not take the Miracle-Gro approach if they want to improve the condition of their soil over the long term. But that had nothing to do with the Great Depression, and everything to do with overfarming a thin layer of topsoil covering a geologically-recently-reclaimed desert in a high-wind and low-water area.
I was to going make some comments about the situation there but everything I wrote sounded racist. How do you address the fact that seems to be a clear pattern of behaviour in that continent that doesn't look like it will ever be solved while the locals are in charge?
Race != Culture.
You want to solve Africa's problems? Take the damned place over and set up a modern Western-style central government.
Gee, does that sound a bit too much like colonialism? Hey, guess what, Africa's colonial period counts as the only part of its history (post-Egypt, itself an exception due to the Nile and Mediterranean) where it had any meaningful level of economic output. You might argue that it only managed that by exploiting the local populations... But, if others can make money exploiting you, you can "exploit" yourself for the same gain!
Quit fighting each other over petty crap, clean up the water, focus on better using what resources you have (Yes, parts of Africa has some of the worst soil in the world - It also has enough arable land to feed its entire population with plenty of room for growth), and join the modern world. On the flip side of that, when you regularly make the "look, point, and laugh" headlines for burning witches over stealing your penises... Not a sign of good things to come.
So the USA is a third the size, with a third the population, but they are more than 3x richer ...the real issue
Funny thing about "richer" - It only matters when participating in a larger economy, not when subsistence farming.
Case in point, look at how the US's Great Depression affected varying regions of the country in radically different ways - The wealthy coastal cities, whose economies and interests had largely separated from agriculture, suffered horribly; Rural farming communities, by contrast, barely noticed anything had changed (and despite the ever-popular fairy-tale about the evil bankers foreclosing on the poor ignorant farmer, at the peak of the Great Depression they suffered a mere one tenth of the foreclosure rate we experienced just two years ago).
So whether or not Africa has money only influences whether or not they can opt for our modern pathological approach to every problem - Buy their way out by importing expensive resources from "somewhere else". Problem with that approach, eventually you run out of money or somewhere-elses to exploit.
But the above statement is ridiculous. If I buy the hardcover, I still have to buy the paperback, which is NOT the same book. eBooks are no different. I still cheerfully pay for the paper copies from Baen *and* make a separate purchase for the electronic editions.
That strikes me as a dangerous distinction to make - Would you say (and I don't mean this as a leading question) that you have the "right" to rip a DVD or CD for playback on your computer? And if at some point in the future, the studios start offering large-scale online movie purchases, would your answer change?
From my perspective, I pay for the content, not the form factor. Yes, I may prefer different form factors for different uses (I'd rather have tech references easily searchable, and I'd rather have light-n'-fluffy fiction useable with no batteries required); but I don't buy a book because it comes in form-X; I buy it because of its information or entertainment content.
Now, if you offered me the "plus eBook download code" version for only a buck or two more than the dead-tree-only version, I'd consider that reasonable. But to make me pay for both separately? Not interested.
Another way to look at this - Pro-IP apologists love pointing out that the sales price of a given media-product doesn't usually have much relation to the cost of production; I would consider this almost the "You sure you want to die for that hill?" reverse case of that - Yes, it costs the publisher a bit to prep an eBook version on top of the physical one, but... So what? I don't want either/or, I want both. I'll pay a bit more for the convenience, but once I own a physical version of it, I have absolutely no qualms about how I obtain the digital one. They can take my money, or consider me an off-the-top 50% piracy rate.
What Book Publishers Should Learn From Harry Potter
They should learn form this that we wanted these 5+ years ago, preferably released simultaneously with the print version, and ideally the print versions should have included one free e-Version each.
What will they learn from this? They'll learn that they can fake it and promote themselves as "DRM-Free" by releasing material that everyone already owns in another form (and therefore piracy doesn't much matter), which continuing to burden new releases and reference material under as onerous of a lock as they can clamp on.
If our conversation is going to follow the pattern of a typical slashdot discussion thread, you will now need to retroactively define the terms "major", "mass produced", and "smaller" in such a way that you can insist that I am not only wrong, but also a smelly hippy that likes Hitler.
Or, I could just thank you for pointing out something cool I had somehow missed when I needed to redo my roof a few years back.
(Though your tone makes me more inclined to just consider you an ass and move on).
At this point we're not especially limited on space for solar installs. Our problem is that our collection systems aren't cheap enough.
This. These 3d shapes give a better yield for a given footprint, but actually cost more.
Hey, If you can make individual flat panels cheaply enough, I'll pave half an acre with them for all I care about the "footprint". That said, I really don't understand why no major company has come up with mass produced smaller panels in a roofing-shingle form factor, but, entirely different topic.
Now, the part of this that does appeal to me involves the improved yield at high latitudes - But does that mean improved only against the footprint, or against the surface area? If the former, hey, cool, I live just far enough North that solar won't realistically pay back the investment given the present dominant efficiencies and prices; If the latter, then to repeat myself, just make 'em cheaper, I'll provide the space.
Even more bizarre, even before then you *could* within a certain distance of the border -- because they didn't want MA to lose out on liquor sales to NH and RI.
And for those who don't realize this - No part of MA takes more than an hour to get to either RI or NH. So pretty much a moot point in either case.
On top of that, if you live close enough to NH, they have far lower liquor taxes, so pretty much all of New England saves up to do our bulk liquor shopping there whenever we plan to pass through.
I don't normally respond to ACs, but you sound sincere, so... I'll take the chance. :)
How do you ensure presence of mind during an accident?
Um... By paying attention to the road? That has nothing to do with posture.
I've driven clear across the continent, east-west and north-south
Though "only" within the continental US - Ditto. Not impressive, just extremely boring.
I don't know if it's saved me from any accidents, but after the few near misses I was glad my hands were already in an optimal position for maneuvering.
I've had a front tire blowout on the highway and kept control of the vehicle... Not because I had a death-grip on a particular pair of spots on the wheel, but because I reacted quickly and appropriately (let off the gas, didn't brake hard, and moved over to the far right ASAP). I've had my brakes fail, also on the highway, which I didn't notice until I attempted to take a left exit; Again, reacted quickly and appropriately, moved to the right as quickly as traffic allowed, and rolled to a stop. Not grip. Presence. Of. Mind.
If you have a real, identifiable medical condition, you might be excused.
Not looking for excuses, but the GP did specifically mention carpal tunnel. If I keep my wrists at certain angles, especially with a lot of vibration in whatever I need to hold (no, not a sex joke), my hands will literally go numb within a few minutes. Not hyperbole or whining.
That said, it doesn't really seem to make much difference - Reiterating my original point, your safety has far more to do with attending to the task at hand, than where you specifically put your hands on the wheel.
Left hand at six o'clock and the other on the gear stick. That takes care of carpal tunnel issues.
This. I didn't want to speak up lest people consider me just trying to look "bad", but you've hit the nail on the head, my friend!
If I hold the steering wheel at 10/2 or 9/3, my hands will go numb within five minutes (and I'll regret it even more that night while trying to sleep). One hand at the bottom (actually more like seven than six), the other resting somewhere around the console area. I don't get this whole "control" issue - Not talking about doing 4G turns in a fighter jet; maintaining control of a car in a bad situation requires presence of mind, not ergonomics.
If you can't read a map but rely on POV views, I don't want you on the roads without special dispensation and training. You have no spatial awareness, and are a danger to others.
I agree with you in spirit, but seriously? Reading a map has largely become a "legacy" skill like basket-weaving or buggy-whip repair. Not knowing how to read a map doesn't (automatically) make people stupid, it just means they never learned to read a map.
People don't use technologies to make things they know how to do easier, they use them so they won't have to learn something in the first place.
Learning takes time. We can either use our time to learn higher-level tasks and let the machines do the grunt-work for us, or we can spend it running through pointless exercises over and over and over.
I think the best example of this comes from the age-old schoolboy's complaint about math - "Why do we have to learn this stuff, we'll never use it!". And in all fairness, they won't. The vast majority of people need nothing beyond basic 6th-grade arithmetic. A few of the skilled trades require some basic geometry. Hell, I work as a programmer, and although my "hobby" coding draws heavily on my math background (particularly linear algebra and differential), the work I actually get paid for only rarely requires even simple trig (and if you remember SOHCAHTOA, that about covers it). On the flip side of that, as I find myself doing a lot of SQL these days, I would call my formal math training, even at the college level, wholly inadequate for thinking in terms of set-based logic.
Personally, I would say that we need to spend less time teaching "the three Rs", and more time teaching them how to live in the modern world - How to make (and stick to) a budget; how to use a computer to find less-kosher content without getting pwnd; how to read food labels and prepare a basically nutritious meal with under a thousand calories (and how many miles you need to jog to burn off anything over that); basic cell-phone etiquette (and I would say that applies to the parent topic, as it largely applies to all use of "gadgets" at inappropriate times). Skills we all really need.
I very much believe in the value of a well-rounded education, but let's face it, burger-flippers don't need Chaucer.
I've tried a few versions of XBMC (and have 11 downloading in the background, just to take a look), and I never really understood the big deal about it.
With the original XBox, okay, cool, you had a fairly high-functionality networked media player running on a $99 console gaming system. Neat.
But on a modern PC? Running a variety of programs to handle each individual media type in a manner I prefer for them doesn't present any sort of burden to me or to the system. I have no real reason to stay within the context of a single program that can do-it-all - I just make a new desktop shortcut to my preferred handler of format-X, and bam, I have it always instantly available to me.
So tell me, Slashdot - What have I missed here that makes XBMC so impressive?
They're also being sued because they used imagery from the movie on their website.
I consider that part, and only that part of this mess, somewhat legitimate. As in, "stop doing that" legitimate, not "you used our ball, so we'll take your whole court" legitimate.
Perhaps one of our resident armchair lawyers can answer a question for me - TFA discusses two of the actors from the movie supporting this pub. If Ian McKellen posed for a picture, totally unrelated to LoTR, in vaguely renny-like attire and gave the pub the right to use it, would that count as kosher? And if Elijah Wood and Liv Tyler and Christopher Lee and Cate Blanchett and Orlando Bloom all did the same - At what point does an entirely original combination of "similar" elements become infringing?
Using images right from the movie, I'll concede as a violation (though still an intolerable offense against all of humanity that we have, as another commenter put it somewhat mockingly, "small business being legally hammered by evil mega-corp"). But using concepts and names that predate The One True Franchise? As I already said, fuck no.
This needs to stop, now
The word "Hobbit" predates Tolkein (the real one) by a good century. The prefix "hob" (from "hobbe"), with a variety of faerie-folksy suffixes, predates that by another three centuries - At least.
JRR knew all this perfectly well, and never claimed exclusive rights to a common word used to describe the wee people of mythology. Only these asshats that have tried to cash in on Grand-dad's legacy have so poor of a grasp of the work of their ancestor as to claim it as a "copyright". He, as a proper good ol' Don, would no doubt have outright disowned his fool-descendants for their ignorance.
Sad, really, and just one more reason we need to get rid of this entire BS charade we call "intellectual property" ASAP.
As soon as they make it easy to use them for totally anonymous purchases - Which includes the funding side of the wallet as well as the use.
Right now, however, we already have something almost as good - The Visa Gift card. You can buy them with cash, you can use them almost anywhere, you can't ever go over your "limit", and since they have no name associated with them, it makes no sense to ask for ID at the point of sale (though make no mistake, I've had salesdrones ask for it - Who then completely failed to explain what, exactly, they planned to compare my ID against, in the absence of a signature, name, picture, address, or anything else meaningful).
They have only one major flaw, entirely artificially imposed by the US's bizarre hatred of gambling - You can't easily recharge them. You have to pay the "convenience" fee to pick up a new one, with a fixed predetermined limit. Instead of, for example, "buying" your groceries plus a $1000 recharge for $1000 plus the cost of your groceries (paid in cash from my monthly visit to the ATM, of course).
Fix that, and I'd basically give up cash altogether. Make these some sort of "help Uncle Sam track even your cash purchases" deal, and thankyouverymuchbutno.
And no need to even mention ceramics or the fancier plastics, that shit is totally harmless.
Seriously? I have a ceramic (kitchen) knife. Damned fragile, and they won't survive a drop from the counter unless you get very very lucky... But sharper than any metal blade I've ever seen. Like scary sharp, the sort of thing that demands your respect or enforces its own punishment. Like easy to draw blood just washing the damned things if you don't pay attention to the task.
You probably couldn't effectively use it for a stabbing motion, but for slashing, you can cut to the bone with ease.
Use the fucking metal detectors that are already there! They work great. They'll pick up any gun, even a small one. No, there is no gun that has no metal in it (nor bullets).
I agree with you in spirit, but your premise here does not hold true.
The Glock 23 has no metal parts in it (as the most famous - You can actually get at least half-a-dozen polymer frames today, in a variety of poly chambers and actions). Poly casings hit the mainstream within the last few years (though they still cost a bit more); Hand-load with a properly sized ceramic bullet, and you have fully live firearm without a scrap of metal in it.
How about maintain two FB profiles, one for friends and one 'work safe' one with work colleagues on it.
Better solution - Maintain a fake 2nd page covered in information about how much you support various federally protected classes to which you may (or may not) actually belong.
Then watch them squirm when they try to come up with any plausible reason to give the job to the boss' young white Christian nephew rather than to a reasonably qualified older gay Muslim African-American (whether in the "Samuel Jackson" or the "Dave Matthews" sense of the term).
Asking for access to personal material opens a whole can of legal issues that most employers don't want, and it surprises me any would actively seek to subject themselves to such accusations. Hell, my own current employer actually has a policy banning managers from searching the intarwebs for job applicants, just to avoid these issues.
...problem solved. Low resolution spectrum analyzers can be inexpensive and the jammer signature is easy to identify.
And it takes only a few seconds to triangulate the source of the signal...
Except, you can cause calls to drop with just a momentary burst of jamming goodness. You don't need to actively swamp out any signals whatsoever for the duration, you just need to click the button every time Joe Important tries to make a call. And if you count as a moving target yourself, the odds of getting caught reduce to the same as "oops, guess I shouldn't have brought a dime-bag to the courthouse".
I always wondered why many states require passenger cars to pass through strict emissions tests, however it is perfectly OK to have trains, dump trucks, buses, and large vehicles spew columns of dark black diesel exhaust into the sky....
As the short answer to that, well-maintained big diesel engines have a useful lifetime measured in millions of miles. Decades of use.
Believe it or not, (most) emissions rules do apply to those vile soot-belchers (at least, the non-road ones); It will just take literally 50 years to cycle through the worst-of-the-worst currently in service.