That's a very interesting stance. Especially considering that visitors to the US have to fill out that weird sheet which has the following question:
"Do you intend to do anything illegal or immoral while in the US?"
It's a yes/no question, which is rather annoying. While people in New York might find it immoral for me to use the services of a prostitute in Nevada, it's not illegal. So... which one do I cross off?
Even with civil rights - if they won't (hypothetical question, remember) use those abilities on their own citizens, would you still object to your government spying on foreign nationals (who aren't on US soil)? If so, why not object against the CIA and NSA whose sole job is ty spy on those?
Given the chance to put a hardware backdoor into every PC, do you really think the USA would pass? Would ANY government in the world?
More interestingly - SHOULD any government in the world? From a security standpoint, they'd be able to get a massive intelligence advantage and as such it'd be rather stupid not to take advantage of it.
I won't disagree on her punishment, but since I was the first person to do ANYTHING about it (none of the other guys or witnesses had complained to the pricipal), it's difficult to have stopped her earlier.
Seriously - if you're the IT-guy (administrator or whatever) why is it your task? Is it also your task to run new power lines and add in new fuse boxes to keep the servers running?
Now, if you're the building supervisor then it's an entirely different thing, but other than that, how is it your task?
If I'm the guy that does most of the driving in the company cars (salesman or whatever), is it my task to arrange for a new parking structure, just because the old one is now flooded? No.
Call up five or ten contractors that deal in these sorts of things and have them give you an offer (maybe including a minimum need and a future need offer). Give those offers to your boss or the bean counters and let him/them decide what to buy. Shouldn't take more than an hours work one day (finding and calling contractors) and then something like 10 to 20 minutes per contractor to show them around.
Well, she'd done it before on at least four other occations. I was just the first guy to show her why she shouldn't do it.
And while spousal abuse is bad, pretty much everyone seems to forget that men are also physically abused (including beaten up) by their wives/girlfriends. The difference being that when a WOMAN stands up to her abuser and punches him/beats him up/kills him "we" cheer for her, but if a MAN stands up to his abuser, he is now a wifebeater - something that isn't easily explained.
Just look at Christopher Titus' "The Norman Rockwell is Bleeding" show and then imagine his girlfriend's side of the story to her friends and family.
As for going into debt to qualify for a mortagage.. eh. All you have to do is put your routine expenses on a credit card and pay it off in full each month. You get free use of money and you build credit history. If you can't do that (other than in a number of exceptional situations), you probably shouldn't qualify for a mortgage.
If I can't do that? What if I don't want to lend money for routine things? I can have an impeccable economy without a credit card, the need of a credit card or even wanting one.
Why should I be unable to loan money for a mortgage, if I have proven over the last 13 years (since I was 18) that I pay all my bills on time, rent, heat, electricity, car insurance (bought a cheap car cash), put money aside for retirement and general savings. All without the need or want of a credit card. I have 13 years of impeccable banking history - and you're saying I probably shouldn't qualify for a mortgage, simply because I don't want a credit card?
Yes you say "other than in a number of exceptional situations", but still - shutting people out from buying a house just because they won't buy into the whole "charge it" culture (including buying a stick of gum with a fucking credit card - George Carlin was right, those people should be stabbed in the eye) is rather extreme. Besides, before the advent of credit cards people could still loan money to buy a house, right? Probably because the banks did a proper piece of work evaluating their clients on a personal level
I wear contacts (-3.5) because I have crappy vision otherwise. However, the "natural" state for my eyes according to my optomotrist is much better than average (which is 20/20). With the contacts I am at 35/20. If he were to give me contacts that were "perfect" for my eyes, i.e. no improvement beyond what my eyes would be capable of naturally if I weren't suffering from whatever illness gives bad vision, I would have 40/20 to 45/20. That's what I'd be able to get with lasik surgery.
Would that disqualify me from wearing contacts in a game where visual acuity is a boon? What about lasik surgery? I mean, with enough money I'm sure you could get a doctor to sign off on the fact that you have incredible natural eye sight, and that you needed lasik/contacts becaue you suffered from $illness.
Well, I think of cannabis like a performance equalizing drug - not performance enhancement.
Consider Ross Rebagliati from the Winter Olympics in Nagano who won gold in snowboarding (giant slalom) and was then disqualified for smoking weed. There is absolutly no way what so ever that cannabis will have made him a BETTER athlete during the games - all it could have done was make the other athletes relatively better (compared to him). Hence performance equalizing drug.
The fact that he could outperform the non-stoned athletes while being stoned himself is quite impressive. They should have given him a second medal (give him gold AND silver) instead of taking gold away. To be fair they did overturn that decision, but the point still stands.
Yes, it's an illegal drug in most places, and I suppose they should crack down on that to force the athletes to be "positive rolemodels", but I can't help but wonder what would happen if the same thing were to happen in a championship taking place in Holland. In that case you can't just disqualify on the grounds that the drug is illegal (because it's not), and it's obviously (well, maybe not scientificly) not a performance enhancing drug... so what grounds would be used? "It's bad for you"?
As someone above suggested, bury the entire PC, as AC will still exist in 25 years.
I'd suggest burying an Asus Eee. Get a couple of memory cards to have redundant storage - try to increase survivability, and make a redundant storage. Remove the battery from it - maybe ensure that it isn't buried along with the computer just in case.
If it's for a school project, why not go the distance and include stuff like a fun example of current websites (offline Wikipedia would be cool), maybe a semester's worth of digital homework and sollutions etc?
Throw in some movies that can be played on the machine as well.
After all, once you have the computer to play it on, you're only limited by storage space (provided the computer survives).
Hell, how about magnetic tape storage? Isn't that supposed to last "forever"? Get one that has a USB plug for the Eee and you're set:)
The only man who hits a woman is a coward and a cad.
Well, then I'm a a coward and a cad.
I've hit a woman once in anger. I didn't use a hand or foot or anything though.
Here's the scenario - sounds rather stupid, but so was she.
High school, it's between classes and I'm heading to my next class. The girl, let's call her Mallory, who I've never actually spoken to before for several reasons, including me not having any classes with her and her being in the hot babes club and me being in the nerdy geek club.
Anyway, Mallory decides to give me a very charming and inviting smile and a somewhat coy "hi there". I stop and turn to face her with an equally charming "uhh... hi". Followed by her kicking me as hard as she could in my nuts.
Now, that was about as stupid as putting two nails in an extention cord and touching them. See, when you kick someone REALLY hard in the nuts, you don't give them the tear-producing "holy hell" pain. No, you are going to send pain through the pubic bone and the soft tissue surrounding it, which gives the guy a nice big adrenaline boost for ten to fifteen seconds before the "holy hell" pain sets in.
My response to her kicking me in the nuts was gritting my teeth, removing my glasses and then giving her more or less a perfect head butt, resulting in her breaking her nose, spewing blood over her otherwise pristine white top, knocking two teeth loose and sending her to the floor in pain.
Now, you may call me a coward and a cad - but in that situation I'd consider myself an educator, teaching her that you don't EVER attack someone and expect them to just take it. Especially when it's unprovoked.
Granted, I did get detention for the episode. I spet three hours in detention because as I took my glasses off it was a deliberate thing, not just instinctive reaction. She got two weeks suspension and had a nice big ugly nose for about a month after that. And the lovely knowledge that with 30+ witnesses to the whole tihng, including several teachers, she couldn't just claim she'd been assaulted.
This raises an interesting issue of where do you draw the line between essential and non-essential features of websites. What should the web look like? Should government authorities be the ones making that decision?
That isn't raised unless you think it's quite alright to claim that a Prius is an "all terrain vehicle" (as long as 'all terrain' doesn't include deep mud, steep unpaved hills and stuff like that).
This isn't about the government making the decision that "this or that is an essential feature of websites", it's about Manufacturer A claiming that Product B can do Feature C when obviously it cannot do Feature C but only a subset of that feature.
Lying to sell your products is not allowed in the UK. It may be in the US or elsewhere in the world, but this is about the UK. And in the UK they have this pesky law about not claiming your product can do things that it cannot do.
For some reason you're only linking to the front page and not the carger in question. But that charger, that's just brilliant.
As someone else said "it's just a USB hub", and maybe it is, but that's make it any less brilliant. Besides, you can't get USB chargers for all the stuff. My old Nokia phone doesn't have one (and I'm not getting a new one just to get a USB charger), but I can get a charger plug for this. Besides, it looks really cool.
Not to mention "uhm, just find somewhere on that usb hub to plug in your phone" doesn't sound nearly as impressive as "just plug it into that". And again, it looks really cool, which is a plus with the ladies.
Excelent. Finally someone who can tell me just what the bloody hell this sign is: That's my shift+4. Google doesn't even seem to know what the hell it is. It looks a little bit like a bomb as seen from behind - main fusulage in the middle and four fins, but surely you aren't suggesting we bomb the manufacturers?
Well, diesel engines have already won Le Mans three years in a row (only been allowed for three years) despite having a smaller fuel tank than the gasoline cars, yet the public opinion is that diesel engines are useless for any kind of fast car and especially race cars.
So no, winning Le Mans in a "green" car is hardly going to change the image.
"You've got the wrong name and _maybe_ the wrong date of birth, and you're not flying."
Oh, come on! We all know to be terrified of letting 5-year-olds onto the plane (video). If they share a name, they're bound to share ideologies. And what better place to hide explosives than in a shitty diaper?
And that kid was only wanted by the INS! I can just imagine the hillarity ensuing when they clear an airport because another kid "made a stink bomb" in his diaper - we all know how much the TSA loves words like those.
I work for a Canadian company which is owned by an American company which is run by the Canadian company. We're traded on an American stock exchange, we all work in Canada, and we just bought an American company made up almost entirely of Brits and Irish. So what does that make us?
Are reviewers on crack? Or is it just the readers?
Gamespot weighed in with a 5.5/10, while IGN gave it a slightly more favorable 7.8.
Why the hell is a 40% increase in score (5.5 * 1.4 = 7.7) only "slightly more"? I think if I were given a 40% raise I'd consider it more than just "a slight raise". What would it take to be "more" favorable? 60%? "Much more" would be 80% and "they downright liked it" would be a 100% increase?
Whatever happened to the olden days of reviews when kids weren't on my lawn, 5.5 was above average, 7.8 was "buy if you even like the genre slightly" and 9+ was "go buy now!"?
I can't help but wonder what the actual mean (or median for that matter) is in game reviews these days. That'd be an interesting experiment, wouldn't it? I mean, if the mean score is 8.9 on a scale from 1 to 10, then aparently you need to adjust the scale for it to make sense.
Well, if you read the reviews, AMDs integrated graphics sollution 780g kicks ass. Only the very very newest Intel integrated chipset is slightly better, but that uses around 20W compared to AMD's chipset's 1W
Currently I'm running the following system out of the same wall plug (with a meter inbetween): Laptop (desktop replacement actually) * 2.0 GHz AMD Turion 64x2 * 2 WD1200 harddrives * 17" monitor
That's drawing a grand total of... drumroll please: 110 Watts.
Yes, it's a laptop. But this has more than enough power to do whatever most people would do. Well, it's lacking in the GPU department. My point is, 135W just for the CPU is insane. Yes, some people will have a need for that. Some. Just like some people have an actual use for a 4x4 all terrain vehicle.
Well, Denmark also has elections for more than just one thing at a time. AND we have more than just two parties in the national elections. Hell, last national election my local area had 12 parties and probably close to 100 candidates.
In addition to that we'll have county level elections and municipality level elections.
You know what we do? Use more than one fucking piece of paper! You only get to cast one vote in each election anyway, so 1 piece of paper for each election. That has the really nice side effect of you remembering that you've voted for say Sherrif, proposition 127, proposition 197 and Mayor because you've already folded those ballots.
Also makes it really fast to count, because you simply bunch the ballots by election (every ballot has a different colour) and party/yes/no.
Because the first time it might only be their name and SSN.
The next time it might be all their bank account information, detailing everything they've done over the last 10 years, including the times they've been dumb enough to pay for dinner with their mistresses with a credit card.
Besides, some of the stuff can be fixed once published. Shut down credit cards etc, get new ones. Next time it'll be the new ones disclosed.
Sooner or later they won't be allowed to have a credit card.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a very interesting stance. Especially considering that visitors to the US have to fill out that weird sheet which has the following question:
"Do you intend to do anything illegal or immoral while in the US?"
It's a yes/no question, which is rather annoying. While people in New York might find it immoral for me to use the services of a prostitute in Nevada, it's not illegal. So ... which one do I cross off?
Even with civil rights - if they won't (hypothetical question, remember) use those abilities on their own citizens, would you still object to your government spying on foreign nationals (who aren't on US soil)? If so, why not object against the CIA and NSA whose sole job is ty spy on those?
Speaking of - the best ever bumper sticker I've seen is this:
Free Tibet! - Limit: One per customer
Given the chance to put a hardware backdoor into every PC, do you really think the USA would pass? Would ANY government in the world?
More interestingly - SHOULD any government in the world? From a security standpoint, they'd be able to get a massive intelligence advantage and as such it'd be rather stupid not to take advantage of it.
I won't disagree on her punishment, but since I was the first person to do ANYTHING about it (none of the other guys or witnesses had complained to the pricipal), it's difficult to have stopped her earlier.
You do know what a merkin is, right? Right?
Seriously - if you're the IT-guy (administrator or whatever) why is it your task? Is it also your task to run new power lines and add in new fuse boxes to keep the servers running?
Now, if you're the building supervisor then it's an entirely different thing, but other than that, how is it your task?
If I'm the guy that does most of the driving in the company cars (salesman or whatever), is it my task to arrange for a new parking structure, just because the old one is now flooded? No.
Call up five or ten contractors that deal in these sorts of things and have them give you an offer (maybe including a minimum need and a future need offer). Give those offers to your boss or the bean counters and let him/them decide what to buy. Shouldn't take more than an hours work one day (finding and calling contractors) and then something like 10 to 20 minutes per contractor to show them around.
Delegate, delegate, delegate!
Well, she'd done it before on at least four other occations. I was just the first guy to show her why she shouldn't do it.
And while spousal abuse is bad, pretty much everyone seems to forget that men are also physically abused (including beaten up) by their wives/girlfriends. The difference being that when a WOMAN stands up to her abuser and punches him/beats him up/kills him "we" cheer for her, but if a MAN stands up to his abuser, he is now a wifebeater - something that isn't easily explained.
Just look at Christopher Titus' "The Norman Rockwell is Bleeding" show and then imagine his girlfriend's side of the story to her friends and family.
If I can't do that? What if I don't want to lend money for routine things? I can have an impeccable economy without a credit card, the need of a credit card or even wanting one.
Why should I be unable to loan money for a mortgage, if I have proven over the last 13 years (since I was 18) that I pay all my bills on time, rent, heat, electricity, car insurance (bought a cheap car cash), put money aside for retirement and general savings. All without the need or want of a credit card. I have 13 years of impeccable banking history - and you're saying I probably shouldn't qualify for a mortgage, simply because I don't want a credit card?
Yes you say "other than in a number of exceptional situations", but still - shutting people out from buying a house just because they won't buy into the whole "charge it" culture (including buying a stick of gum with a fucking credit card - George Carlin was right, those people should be stabbed in the eye) is rather extreme. Besides, before the advent of credit cards people could still loan money to buy a house, right? Probably because the banks did a proper piece of work evaluating their clients on a personal level
You actually raise a very good point.
I wear contacts (-3.5) because I have crappy vision otherwise. However, the "natural" state for my eyes according to my optomotrist is much better than average (which is 20/20). With the contacts I am at 35/20. If he were to give me contacts that were "perfect" for my eyes, i.e. no improvement beyond what my eyes would be capable of naturally if I weren't suffering from whatever illness gives bad vision, I would have 40/20 to 45/20. That's what I'd be able to get with lasik surgery.
Would that disqualify me from wearing contacts in a game where visual acuity is a boon? What about lasik surgery? I mean, with enough money I'm sure you could get a doctor to sign off on the fact that you have incredible natural eye sight, and that you needed lasik/contacts becaue you suffered from $illness.
Well, I think of cannabis like a performance equalizing drug - not performance enhancement.
Consider Ross Rebagliati from the Winter Olympics in Nagano who won gold in snowboarding (giant slalom) and was then disqualified for smoking weed. There is absolutly no way what so ever that cannabis will have made him a BETTER athlete during the games - all it could have done was make the other athletes relatively better (compared to him). Hence performance equalizing drug.
The fact that he could outperform the non-stoned athletes while being stoned himself is quite impressive. They should have given him a second medal (give him gold AND silver) instead of taking gold away. To be fair they did overturn that decision, but the point still stands.
Yes, it's an illegal drug in most places, and I suppose they should crack down on that to force the athletes to be "positive rolemodels", but I can't help but wonder what would happen if the same thing were to happen in a championship taking place in Holland. In that case you can't just disqualify on the grounds that the drug is illegal (because it's not), and it's obviously (well, maybe not scientificly) not a performance enhancing drug ... so what grounds would be used? "It's bad for you"?
What were they changed into? Someone stroking a kitty for the good icon and someone clubbing a kitty for the bad icon?
As someone above suggested, bury the entire PC, as AC will still exist in 25 years.
I'd suggest burying an Asus Eee. Get a couple of memory cards to have redundant storage - try to increase survivability, and make a redundant storage. Remove the battery from it - maybe ensure that it isn't buried along with the computer just in case.
If it's for a school project, why not go the distance and include stuff like a fun example of current websites (offline Wikipedia would be cool), maybe a semester's worth of digital homework and sollutions etc?
Throw in some movies that can be played on the machine as well.
After all, once you have the computer to play it on, you're only limited by storage space (provided the computer survives).
Hell, how about magnetic tape storage? Isn't that supposed to last "forever"? Get one that has a USB plug for the Eee and you're set :)
Well, then I'm a a coward and a cad.
I've hit a woman once in anger. I didn't use a hand or foot or anything though.
Here's the scenario - sounds rather stupid, but so was she.
High school, it's between classes and I'm heading to my next class. The girl, let's call her Mallory, who I've never actually spoken to before for several reasons, including me not having any classes with her and her being in the hot babes club and me being in the nerdy geek club.
Anyway, Mallory decides to give me a very charming and inviting smile and a somewhat coy "hi there". I stop and turn to face her with an equally charming "uhh ... hi". Followed by her kicking me as hard as she could in my nuts.
Now, that was about as stupid as putting two nails in an extention cord and touching them. See, when you kick someone REALLY hard in the nuts, you don't give them the tear-producing "holy hell" pain. No, you are going to send pain through the pubic bone and the soft tissue surrounding it, which gives the guy a nice big adrenaline boost for ten to fifteen seconds before the "holy hell" pain sets in.
My response to her kicking me in the nuts was gritting my teeth, removing my glasses and then giving her more or less a perfect head butt, resulting in her breaking her nose, spewing blood over her otherwise pristine white top, knocking two teeth loose and sending her to the floor in pain.
Now, you may call me a coward and a cad - but in that situation I'd consider myself an educator, teaching her that you don't EVER attack someone and expect them to just take it. Especially when it's unprovoked.
Granted, I did get detention for the episode. I spet three hours in detention because as I took my glasses off it was a deliberate thing, not just instinctive reaction. She got two weeks suspension and had a nice big ugly nose for about a month after that. And the lovely knowledge that with 30+ witnesses to the whole tihng, including several teachers, she couldn't just claim she'd been assaulted.
That isn't raised unless you think it's quite alright to claim that a Prius is an "all terrain vehicle" (as long as 'all terrain' doesn't include deep mud, steep unpaved hills and stuff like that).
This isn't about the government making the decision that "this or that is an essential feature of websites", it's about Manufacturer A claiming that Product B can do Feature C when obviously it cannot do Feature C but only a subset of that feature.
Lying to sell your products is not allowed in the UK. It may be in the US or elsewhere in the world, but this is about the UK. And in the UK they have this pesky law about not claiming your product can do things that it cannot do.
For some reason you're only linking to the front page and not the carger in question. But that charger, that's just brilliant.
As someone else said "it's just a USB hub", and maybe it is, but that's make it any less brilliant. Besides, you can't get USB chargers for all the stuff. My old Nokia phone doesn't have one (and I'm not getting a new one just to get a USB charger), but I can get a charger plug for this. Besides, it looks really cool.
Not to mention "uhm, just find somewhere on that usb hub to plug in your phone" doesn't sound nearly as impressive as "just plug it into that". And again, it looks really cool, which is a plus with the ladies.
Excelent. Finally someone who can tell me just what the bloody hell this sign is:
That's my shift+4. Google doesn't even seem to know what the hell it is. It looks a little bit like a bomb as seen from behind - main fusulage in the middle and four fins, but surely you aren't suggesting we bomb the manufacturers?
Well, diesel engines have already won Le Mans three years in a row (only been allowed for three years) despite having a smaller fuel tank than the gasoline cars, yet the public opinion is that diesel engines are useless for any kind of fast car and especially race cars.
So no, winning Le Mans in a "green" car is hardly going to change the image.
Oh, come on! We all know to be terrified of letting 5-year-olds onto the plane (video). If they share a name, they're bound to share ideologies. And what better place to hide explosives than in a shitty diaper?
And that kid was only wanted by the INS! I can just imagine the hillarity ensuing when they clear an airport because another kid "made a stink bomb" in his diaper - we all know how much the TSA loves words like those.
Subjects to the Queen?
Are reviewers on crack? Or is it just the readers?
Why the hell is a 40% increase in score (5.5 * 1.4 = 7.7) only "slightly more"? I think if I were given a 40% raise I'd consider it more than just "a slight raise". What would it take to be "more" favorable? 60%? "Much more" would be 80% and "they downright liked it" would be a 100% increase?
Whatever happened to the olden days of reviews when kids weren't on my lawn, 5.5 was above average, 7.8 was "buy if you even like the genre slightly" and 9+ was "go buy now!"?
I can't help but wonder what the actual mean (or median for that matter) is in game reviews these days. That'd be an interesting experiment, wouldn't it? I mean, if the mean score is 8.9 on a scale from 1 to 10, then aparently you need to adjust the scale for it to make sense.
Well, if you read the reviews, AMDs integrated graphics sollution 780g kicks ass. Only the very very newest Intel integrated chipset is slightly better, but that uses around 20W compared to AMD's chipset's 1W
Still. 130W is quite a lot.
Currently I'm running the following system out of the same wall plug (with a meter inbetween):
Laptop (desktop replacement actually)
* 2.0 GHz AMD Turion 64x2
* 2 WD1200 harddrives
* 17" monitor
Additional stuff:
3 external harddrives in enclosures
1 external dvd-drive
1 Wireless router
1 ADSL modem
That's drawing a grand total of ... drumroll please: 110 Watts.
Yes, it's a laptop. But this has more than enough power to do whatever most people would do. Well, it's lacking in the GPU department. My point is, 135W just for the CPU is insane. Yes, some people will have a need for that. Some. Just like some people have an actual use for a 4x4 all terrain vehicle.
Well, Denmark also has elections for more than just one thing at a time. AND we have more than just two parties in the national elections. Hell, last national election my local area had 12 parties and probably close to 100 candidates.
In addition to that we'll have county level elections and municipality level elections.
You know what we do? Use more than one fucking piece of paper! You only get to cast one vote in each election anyway, so 1 piece of paper for each election. That has the really nice side effect of you remembering that you've voted for say Sherrif, proposition 127, proposition 197 and Mayor because you've already folded those ballots.
Also makes it really fast to count, because you simply bunch the ballots by election (every ballot has a different colour) and party/yes/no.
Because the first time it might only be their name and SSN.
The next time it might be all their bank account information, detailing everything they've done over the last 10 years, including the times they've been dumb enough to pay for dinner with their mistresses with a credit card.
Besides, some of the stuff can be fixed once published. Shut down credit cards etc, get new ones. Next time it'll be the new ones disclosed.
Sooner or later they won't be allowed to have a credit card.