You, uh, kinda missed the part about not buying a new $500 TV. So I doubt he bought a new $400 TV, going out of his way to find an old-school NTSC CRT instead - More likely, he still has the same TV that worked just fine 20 years ago (or if smart, he picked up a high-end-but-now-worthless giant SDTV for "$haul it away and you can have it, please" at a yard sale).
I don't think there are very many people in your position.
You apparently don't remember the Department of Commerce's $40 DTV decoder coupon from just four years ago, intended to placate the masses ("about 40 million coupons have been requested") who not only didn't have an HDTV, but didn't even have cable or satellite at that time (which didn't require a converter box).
So I wouldn't bet the farm on calling his situation all that rare.
Just to second the mining idea, you have two obvious things to mine - Water-ice (which has some very interesting and potentially dangerous properties at low pressures), and various peroxides (which readily produces oxygen, but has the down sides of counting as both caustic and explosive). Mars has both of those in abundance, and they provide the two single biggest needs a newly founded colony would have, while providing plenty of challenges and danger to exploit for the plot.
The long term solution is to build the 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit system.
No, the long-term solution involves freezing the 32-bit version as an eternal final-state "stable" branch, and moving on to the 64-bit world.
Yes, most people still run 32-bit hardware. And yes, most likely someone would maintain 32-bit backports of FireFox for years to come. But the Mozilla
foundation needs to direct their efforts on the reality of the present, not cripple themselves in the interests of backward compatibility.
FWIW, I write this as someone who would primarily use that 32-bit backport at the moment. But I don't expect Mozilla to support my aging
XP boxen any more than I expect them to support the Timex Sinclair 1000 or Atari ST I have stashed in the bottom of a closet somewhere.
I can't speak for really young people, but the 20-35 crowd with whom I work love their Androids.
They tend to see the iPhone as a bit more "stuffy", but that distinction may have more to do with company policies regarding who gets what, than with any actual differences between the devices themselves. But "Baffling"? C'mon, you just slide through the screens to the one you want, and tap when you get there.
Now, if you want to ask if the business world will get all hot over a device they can lock down via domain policies - I'd at least give that one a 50/50 (with the "not" 50% swearing like a sailor at the horror of having any mobile device trusted on their domain). But the actual users? Yeah, I'll have to go with the Nokia execs as "delusional" on this one.
to the point that I simple start to wonder if Wikipedia is taking itself way too seriously.
You need look no further than the "notability" requirement to prove that.
I appreciate Wiki as a convenient replacement for the encyclopedia, but Jimbo can take his army of Undead Nazi Editors (tm) and stuff them straight up his [citation needed].
I have stayed with Netflix through their recent screwups because they still offer exactly what I want for the price I want, and I don't particularly hate them as a company. And despite what everyone bitches about, my rate hasn't actually changed (except down!) since I originally signed up way back in their early days.
I do, however, loathe you as a company, with every fiber of my being. If you buy Netflix, I will drop my subscription before the ink dries.
So please, don't. I would prefer to keep my Netflix subscription. I will not, however, ever do business with Verizon, under any name I recognize as affiliated with them.
It's more ignorant to think that users need to know the underlying system or how URL is formed to use computer or internet. Truth is, no one wants to have to learn things they don't care about.
Except, they kinda do, unless they want to live as knowledge-beggars metaphorically tugging at the coattails of the intellectual elite who do want to understand the basic properties of the universe in which they live.
Everyone wants to get their email and games and free porn; everyone wants to pay as little to Uncle Sam as possible; everyone wants to stay a healthy weight, everyone wants to watch the latest crappy sitcom beamed to their TV from orbiting radio relays. And as long as you don't mind depending on "Kevin" from Bangalore, as long as you don't mind always taking the standard deductions (or paying someone $50 a page to fill out fairly simple forms), as long as you don't mind paying a trainer to "trick" you into burning as many calories as you take in, as long as you don't mind resorting to superstition and ineffectually whacking the set-top box when a storm passes overhead - Then yes, people can very much remain willfully ignorant.
That doesn't make it alright, much less a desirable state.
You are free to argue that these should be changed. If you find them unbearable you are free to move to some place that imposes less on it's citizens. Like say Somalia.
Ah, the eternal refrain of the Loyal Citizen - "If you don't like it, GTFO".
The government asks of you only 2 (or 3, if you are male) things: pay your taxes, enter the selective service (for males), and participate in jury duty
Which I consider two (as a male) too many, and would further argue about how much tax we really need to pay.
Like I said, this is what is wrong with this country, at all levels. It's not "give and take" anymore. It's "see how much I can take, and how little I can give".
We allow the government to exist because it facilitates us getting about with our daily lives. We do indeed bear a price for that, but when that price means "can't get about with my daily life", the price has grown too high to bear. Conning people into believing in some BS nobility of the "social contract" counts as one of the greatest evils ever perpetuated by the oligarchy on human society.
and im sure the Labor board would love to hear about somebody getting canned over Jury Duty since i think that is one of the things IT IS A FELONY TO FIRE OVER.
Nobody actually gets fired for serving on jury duty... or taking maternity leave... or putting in their obligatory National Guard time.
Funny, though, how much discretion your employer has on who gets promoted, who gets raises, who gets sacked when hard times come.
How do you get a fair verdict when one of the jurors fell asleep and the one looked at a murder trial as some mundane routine
For one, it very clearly shows that they had no emotional involvement in the outcome. If I ever found myself as the defendant in such a case, I'd take disinterested jurors over passionate ones in a frickin' heartbeat.
As for falling asleep, I will agree that goes a bit too far. That said, I don't know that I'd do any better listening to lawyers babble for hours on end in a language that sounds like English but has only a superficial resemblance thereto. After a week, or three, or more, of that - Could you honestly claim that you'd give "let's ask the same question again with one word changed" your full attention, just after lunch and after the asshats in the hotel room above yours partied until 2am?
Any type of incident such as this should be considered obstruction of justice, or at least contempt of court, and should come with a fine and/or jail sentence
Sure - Just as soon as jury duty becomes purely voluntary (and don't give me "then just don't register to vote"), or at the very least, easily deferrable to any convenient time within the next year or so once notified. What we have now amounts to nothing short of indentured servitude if you want to actually exercise your right to vote. At any time, they can call you in and unless you have a damned good reason, you can find the next few weeks of your life suddenly unavailable to you (and Zeus help you if you actually get called for any sort of high-profile capital case, unless you like the thought of effectively living in solitary confinement for six months).
I can understand why jurors shouldn't receive outside information about the trial (though have a personal bone over expecting experts to magically forget everything they know for the purposes of serving on a jury).
But non-detail-bearing outbound messages? Seriously, so what? That has no effect on the actual trial or the defendant's ability to enjoy the due process of law leading to a more-or-less fair verdict.
Re:It's special the same way every baby is a mirac
on
Is the Earth Special?
·
· Score: 1
It's special the same way every baby is a miracle
This. I would expect "appeal to low probability" to come from creationists, not in a Slashdot FP.
In a sufficiently large (possibly infinite) universe, it really just doesn't matter how uncommon any (non-zero) probability event appears - It will still happen all over the place, over and over and over and over again.
Of course, that still leaves us with that pesky question, "why don't we see ET yet?".
Homeland security does not have a budget of a trillion dollars. They don't even have a budget of 100 billion. In 2011, they had a budget of $55 billion.
The entire US military doesn't have a budget of a trillion dollars (though depending on which defense-like categories you throw in, you can get it up over 900 billion).
Now, I will readily agree that we could FAR better spend that by sending it directly to 3rd world dictators and Taliban militants, who would do less to oppress the US populace with the same money. But the DHS' budget really only amounts to one more tiny drop of blood pulled from our veins.
That's true, but like the person posting the article it would be nice to have a convenient way to strip out all the attachments and have a "text only" archive with the attached images and other files stripped out (small and quickly searchable), and a "content/media only" archive of the attachments in the form of plain files rather than encoded within e-mail messages.
Search for everything. Sort by attachment. Select all (that have attachments). Save attachment(s). Delete attachment(s). Done.
Subject says it all. I don't worry about cookies, cache, or malicious scripts (other than wastes-of-bandwidth) because every time I open FireFox, it looks shiny and new to the outside world.
When I visit a "sensitive" site, like my bank, I open a new browser session and close it when I finish. Aside from that, I just don't worry about it, and have never had a problem. Hell, even that great data-mining wizard Google - My home page and probably the single most frequent site I hit - Always defaults me to Georgia (presumably the location of my ISP's HQ), missing by over a thousand miles.
Poor choice of words, perhaps, but I completely understand the sentiment. I've had some form of email since around 1991, and despite my OCD-like "completionist" tendencies, I never thought to archive it all until sometime around 2003.
Now, considering the tiny actual disk space those early emails would have taken, I sorely regret my earlier habit of read-respond-delete.
These days, I delete spam (and some large attachments), and nothing else. And some day, I'll probably regret deleting even the spam... But since I get around a 10:1 ratio of spam, I can't realistically keep it all.
I dropped it while dodging a nickel rocket and the rocket blasted it.
Forgive the OT, but what does "nickel rocket" mean in that context? I've only heard it used to refer to someone who will always take the cheapest approach to any problem; and Google pretty much just confirms my definition.
Others have pointed it out, but if you can run this on a GPU, you don't need to look any further than that.
Specifically, check out some of the BitCoin mining rigs people have built, like 4x Radeon 6990s in a single box. For comparison, a single 6990 easily beats a top-of-the-line modern CPU by a factor of 50 (as in, not 50%, but 5000%). You can build such a box for well under $5k.
Slashdot Mirror
and no one even sells CRTs any more.
You, uh, kinda missed the part about not buying a new $500 TV. So I doubt he bought a new $400 TV, going out of his way to find an old-school NTSC CRT instead - More likely, he still has the same TV that worked just fine 20 years ago (or if smart, he picked up a high-end-but-now-worthless giant SDTV for "$haul it away and you can have it, please" at a yard sale).
I don't think there are very many people in your position.
You apparently don't remember the Department of Commerce's $40 DTV decoder coupon from just four years ago, intended to placate the masses ("about 40 million coupons have been requested") who not only didn't have an HDTV, but didn't even have cable or satellite at that time (which didn't require a converter box).
So I wouldn't bet the farm on calling his situation all that rare.
Just to second the mining idea, you have two obvious things to mine - Water-ice (which has some very interesting and potentially dangerous properties at low pressures), and various peroxides (which readily produces oxygen, but has the down sides of counting as both caustic and explosive). Mars has both of those in abundance, and they provide the two single biggest needs a newly founded colony would have, while providing plenty of challenges and danger to exploit for the plot.
Can I get some love for Wasteland! It looks especially awesome on my black and white LCD laptop circa 1988!
Yes. Yes, you can.
I still consider Wasteland the greatest video game of all time. Pity that Fountain of Dreams ended up so damned buggy.
The long term solution is to build the 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit system.
No, the long-term solution involves freezing the 32-bit version as an eternal final-state "stable" branch, and moving on to the 64-bit world.
Yes, most people still run 32-bit hardware. And yes, most likely someone would maintain 32-bit backports of FireFox for years to come. But the Mozilla foundation needs to direct their efforts on the reality of the present, not cripple themselves in the interests of backward compatibility.
FWIW, I write this as someone who would primarily use that 32-bit backport at the moment. But I don't expect Mozilla to support my aging XP boxen any more than I expect them to support the Timex Sinclair 1000 or Atari ST I have stashed in the bottom of a closet somewhere.
I can't speak for really young people, but the 20-35 crowd with whom I work love their Androids.
They tend to see the iPhone as a bit more "stuffy", but that distinction may have more to do with company policies regarding who gets what, than with any actual differences between the devices themselves. But "Baffling"? C'mon, you just slide through the screens to the one you want, and tap when you get there.
Now, if you want to ask if the business world will get all hot over a device they can lock down via domain policies - I'd at least give that one a 50/50 (with the "not" 50% swearing like a sailor at the horror of having any mobile device trusted on their domain). But the actual users? Yeah, I'll have to go with the Nokia execs as "delusional" on this one.
to the point that I simple start to wonder if Wikipedia is taking itself way too seriously.
You need look no further than the "notability" requirement to prove that.
I appreciate Wiki as a convenient replacement for the encyclopedia, but Jimbo can take his army of Undead Nazi Editors (tm) and stuff them straight up his [citation needed].
Should judges be required to know enough to distinguish between posting only vs. reading the web site du jour?
"Know", no.
"Prove", yes.
Oh shit, it's pla.
:)
Hi there!
No worries - I made a factual error (in at least some states), you called me on it. I wouldn't have it any other way!
/ Lacking USENET access at the moment. And any year now, I hope to have a "real" ISP available out here in the middle of frickin' nowhere.
I have stayed with Netflix through their recent screwups because they still offer exactly what I want for the price I want, and I don't particularly hate them as a company. And despite what everyone bitches about, my rate hasn't actually changed (except down!) since I originally signed up way back in their early days.
I do, however, loathe you as a company, with every fiber of my being. If you buy Netflix, I will drop my subscription before the ink dries.
So please, don't. I would prefer to keep my Netflix subscription. I will not, however, ever do business with Verizon, under any name I recognize as affiliated with them.
It's more ignorant to think that users need to know the underlying system or how URL is formed to use computer or internet. Truth is, no one wants to have to learn things they don't care about.
Except, they kinda do, unless they want to live as knowledge-beggars metaphorically tugging at the coattails of the intellectual elite who do want to understand the basic properties of the universe in which they live.
Everyone wants to get their email and games and free porn; everyone wants to pay as little to Uncle Sam as possible; everyone wants to stay a healthy weight, everyone wants to watch the latest crappy sitcom beamed to their TV from orbiting radio relays. And as long as you don't mind depending on "Kevin" from Bangalore, as long as you don't mind always taking the standard deductions (or paying someone $50 a page to fill out fairly simple forms), as long as you don't mind paying a trainer to "trick" you into burning as many calories as you take in, as long as you don't mind resorting to superstition and ineffectually whacking the set-top box when a storm passes overhead - Then yes, people can very much remain willfully ignorant.
That doesn't make it alright, much less a desirable state.
I made a phone call. That's all it took to re-schedule. It's far easier than people think it is.
Interesting... Then I suppose I need to withdraw that objection.
I wonder if that varies by state, though.
You are free to argue that these should be changed. If you find them unbearable you are free to move to some place that imposes less on it's citizens. Like say Somalia.
Ah, the eternal refrain of the Loyal Citizen - "If you don't like it, GTFO".
Now WTF is your problem?
"Lord, save me from your followers!"
The government asks of you only 2 (or 3, if you are male) things: pay your taxes, enter the selective service (for males), and participate in jury duty
Which I consider two (as a male) too many, and would further argue about how much tax we really need to pay.
Like I said, this is what is wrong with this country, at all levels. It's not "give and take" anymore. It's "see how much I can take, and how little I can give".
We allow the government to exist because it facilitates us getting about with our daily lives. We do indeed bear a price for that, but when that price means "can't get about with my daily life", the price has grown too high to bear. Conning people into believing in some BS nobility of the "social contract" counts as one of the greatest evils ever perpetuated by the oligarchy on human society.
and im sure the Labor board would love to hear about somebody getting canned over Jury Duty since i think that is one of the things IT IS A FELONY TO FIRE OVER.
Nobody actually gets fired for serving on jury duty... or taking maternity leave... or putting in their obligatory National Guard time.
Funny, though, how much discretion your employer has on who gets promoted, who gets raises, who gets sacked when hard times come.
How do you get a fair verdict when one of the jurors fell asleep and the one looked at a murder trial as some mundane routine
For one, it very clearly shows that they had no emotional involvement in the outcome. If I ever found myself as the defendant in such a case, I'd take disinterested jurors over passionate ones in a frickin' heartbeat.
As for falling asleep, I will agree that goes a bit too far. That said, I don't know that I'd do any better listening to lawyers babble for hours on end in a language that sounds like English but has only a superficial resemblance thereto. After a week, or three, or more, of that - Could you honestly claim that you'd give "let's ask the same question again with one word changed" your full attention, just after lunch and after the asshats in the hotel room above yours partied until 2am?
Any type of incident such as this should be considered obstruction of justice, or at least contempt of court, and should come with a fine and/or jail sentence
Sure - Just as soon as jury duty becomes purely voluntary (and don't give me "then just don't register to vote"), or at the very least, easily deferrable to any convenient time within the next year or so once notified. What we have now amounts to nothing short of indentured servitude if you want to actually exercise your right to vote. At any time, they can call you in and unless you have a damned good reason, you can find the next few weeks of your life suddenly unavailable to you (and Zeus help you if you actually get called for any sort of high-profile capital case, unless you like the thought of effectively living in solitary confinement for six months).
I can understand why jurors shouldn't receive outside information about the trial (though have a personal bone over expecting experts to magically forget everything they know for the purposes of serving on a jury).
But non-detail-bearing outbound messages? Seriously, so what? That has no effect on the actual trial or the defendant's ability to enjoy the due process of law leading to a more-or-less fair verdict.
It's special the same way every baby is a miracle
This. I would expect "appeal to low probability" to come from creationists, not in a Slashdot FP.
In a sufficiently large (possibly infinite) universe, it really just doesn't matter how uncommon any (non-zero) probability event appears - It will still happen all over the place, over and over and over and over again.
Of course, that still leaves us with that pesky question, "why don't we see ET yet?".
Homeland security does not have a budget of a trillion dollars. They don't even have a budget of 100 billion. In 2011, they had a budget of $55 billion.
The entire US military doesn't have a budget of a trillion dollars (though depending on which defense-like categories you throw in, you can get it up over 900 billion).
Now, I will readily agree that we could FAR better spend that by sending it directly to 3rd world dictators and Taliban militants, who would do less to oppress the US populace with the same money. But the DHS' budget really only amounts to one more tiny drop of blood pulled from our veins.
That's true, but like the person posting the article it would be nice to have a convenient way to strip out all the attachments and have a "text only" archive with the attached images and other files stripped out (small and quickly searchable), and a "content/media only" archive of the attachments in the form of plain files rather than encoded within e-mail messages.
Search for everything. Sort by attachment. Select all (that have attachments). Save attachment(s). Delete attachment(s). Done.
Subject says it all. I don't worry about cookies, cache, or malicious scripts (other than wastes-of-bandwidth) because every time I open FireFox, it looks shiny and new to the outside world.
When I visit a "sensitive" site, like my bank, I open a new browser session and close it when I finish. Aside from that, I just don't worry about it, and have never had a problem. Hell, even that great data-mining wizard Google - My home page and probably the single most frequent site I hit - Always defaults me to Georgia (presumably the location of my ISP's HQ), missing by over a thousand miles.
WTF? It's his own personal email.
Poor choice of words, perhaps, but I completely understand the sentiment. I've had some form of email since around 1991, and despite my OCD-like "completionist" tendencies, I never thought to archive it all until sometime around 2003.
Now, considering the tiny actual disk space those early emails would have taken, I sorely regret my earlier habit of read-respond-delete.
These days, I delete spam (and some large attachments), and nothing else. And some day, I'll probably regret deleting even the spam... But since I get around a 10:1 ratio of spam, I can't realistically keep it all.
I dropped it while dodging a nickel rocket and the rocket blasted it.
Forgive the OT, but what does "nickel rocket" mean in that context? I've only heard it used to refer to someone who will always take the cheapest approach to any problem; and Google pretty much just confirms my definition.
We're talking about 40+Gbit/sec internet backbones in this article, not end user connections.
:)
The entire first half of TFA talks about his 1Mbit WiFi connection. I care about my paltry 1.2Mbit intenet connection.
Now in fairness, the same problem does indeed apply at the backbone level... But I didn't call you "ridiculous".
Others have pointed it out, but if you can run this on a GPU, you don't need to look any further than that.
Specifically, check out some of the BitCoin mining rigs people have built, like 4x Radeon 6990s in a single box. For comparison, a single 6990 easily beats a top-of-the-line modern CPU by a factor of 50 (as in, not 50%, but 5000%). You can build such a box for well under $5k.