The "Friends of..." is people expressing their freedom of speech, rather than the direct campaign donations which could be seen as outright bribery. What is the difference? Every dollar that goes to a political campain is spent marketing that candidate. Giving a marketing agency a gob of money to promote a candidate is no different than giving the candidate a gob of money to promote himself. Either spending money to do mass marketing is covered under free speech or it isn't. These shell games created by McCain-Feingold haven't lessened the ability to bribe politicians one bit.
Umm, they were meeting to discuss an amendment which had just been voted on. So no, the requirements for VoIP operators weren't clearly laid out at that time, and in particular it was unknown whether the rules would apply only to calls which connect to the phone network or also IP-only calls.
There are two levels in the cup, and armadillo has already flown the profile of the level 1 flight at Oklahoma space port. They just have to repeat it at the cup to claim the $350k, but they are doing it with a smaller craft, so that they can enter their larger craft in the level 2.
It's too bad none of the other team are going to give it a go this year. Some of them looked like they might just pull off the level 1 profile. Much less suspenseful this way:P
I've never had any problems with my Verizon wireless service. Best coverage, no dropped calls in the city, no billing errors - completely reliable. Furthermore, both times that I renewed my contract at a third party store (thought it would make it easier to activate a new phone - it didn't), the retail monkeys signed me up for the wrong plan. One of the times I didn't notice it for months as the bill was about right - until I went on a trip out of state and racked up huge roaming charges, when I shouldn't have. Both times I called the Verizon customer service, and the very first person I talked to happily changed my plan to the one I thought I had signed up for and backdated it to the date I signed up - even months after the fact. I was expecting to spend a whole afternoon on the phone arguing with people, and was very pleasantly surprised.
The only negative side to Verizon Wireless is that their plans are more expensive than the other companies - $39.99 is the cheapest plan compared to $29.99 for everyone else, and their pay-as-you-go plans are highway robbery. But, yeah, my sister was with Alltel and she had all the same problems you mentioned, so I guess you get what you pay for. I just recently dropped Verizon for T-Mobile prepay, mostly because I just can't justify paying $45 a month when I only use ~150 minutes a month. We'll see how it goes.
Most of the horror stories that I have heard about Verizon, however, have been about their landline service. From what I've heard, they act like any of the regional telcom monopolies: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company". So I wouldn't judge one based on the other - the landline and wireless divisions are completely separate beasts. In particular I would be very wary of letting them cut your copper lines if you ever decide to go with fiber, because there is no turning back after that.
I would love to have an A3-sized e-reader for schematics. Having the ability to search my documents (where is R217?) without having to deal with the cumbersome laptops with small displays, would be great. I imagine a scroll with the batteries and processor in the center, or a folding book. Either way you would have the option of using it in A3 or A4 size depending on what you need to do. It wouldn't need a huge amount of memory, especially if it had WiFi. It wouldn't need a high a refresh rate or many colors - I could get by with monochrome, 16 colors would be nice, 256 would be exorbitant. Just high resolution PDF view and file browser and I'd be happy. Bonus points for excel documents.
Slashcode itself inserts tags for all the categories that a story is filled in before it goes live. I presume this is so they can merge the tag search and category search sometime in the future.
The MS licenses puts conditions on use - for instance, granting MS permission to use your patents. I'm not seeing that. Section 2B states that each contributor to grants access to any patents relevent to his contribution. However, that only applies to recipients of the software, and thus is irrelevant until you distribute your modified version. Furthermore, if you are simply a user, not a contributor, then you are not granting patent license to anyone. Lastly, even when you contribute and distribute, the patent license is only relevent to your contribution and derivative works thereof - not to unrelated projects that Microsoft may develop.
Now that you got me thinking though, Section 3B may be a restriction on use, and can apply even if you don't distribute the work. However, one could argue that if you are suing someone about a patent, it is because you don't consider it to be valid. Thus you aren't forced to stop using the software, and if you win the court case you will have done nothing illegal by continuing to use it. Furthermore, recent supreme court rulings state that continuing to allegedly infringe upon a patent while you are challenging it is not grounds for willfull infringement. Regardless section 3B is practically identical to the patent litigation clause in section 3 of the Apache License (v2).
Granted, the wording of the introduction to the MS license(s) is much more forcefull than the Apache License, and its similarity to an EULA did give me pause at first. But after reading it, I don't think it restricts use anymore that the Apache License (if at all). If you are simply using the software, then the license merely requires you to agree to not distribute contrary to the license, which you aren't doing anyway. If you are going to redistribute it, what difference does it make whether you agree to follow the license when you start using it or when you start distributing it?
From the Apache License
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR USE, REPRODUCTION, AND DISTRIBUTION 1. Definitions. "License" shall mean the terms and conditions for use, reproduction, and distribution as defined by Sections 1 through 9 of this document. Not only is this license approved by the OSI as open source, it is also considered to be a Free Software License by the FSF and is even compatible with GPLv3.
My bittorrent speeds have dropped dramatically recently, presumably the result of ISP throttling. Every ISO I have tried to download lately (all legal install disks) have been faster to download directly from the server than via bittorrent, even with hundreds of peers and dozens of seeds.
I am fortunate enough to have an ISP that has free usenet service. Who knows how long that will last once pirates start eating up that bandwidth. They could just kill alt.binaries, just like they could just implement general bandwidth caps rather than throttling specific port. But past behavior doesn't support that idea.
The Digital Bytes has a page clarifying the details about exactly what is contained in each of the various sets that are being releasing.
The good news is the original version is finally available on DVD. The bad news is that it is only available as part of a collectors edition. The good news is that the 4-disc set is fairly reasonably priced at $35.
When you say the changes are quite minor, is that in comparison to the theatrical release or the directors cut? Just curious - I like both. I am glad that they are finally releasing it on DVD, and although it is annoying that I have to buy the 4 disc collectors edition to get it, $35 isn't a bad price.
It's like being afraid of strangers because you keep getting mugged at family reunions. Well, in their defense, I've been to a few family reunions and I can't imagine anyone stranger.
It is still no different than any other situation. If *right now* someone calls and reports my car stolen, and the police happen to see me driving it they will pull me over, and will have every right to do so because they have legitimate probable cause. Falsely accusing someone is still a crime, and ratting on people is not facilitated by this device whatsoever.
This system is actually slightly less prone to abuse because the owner has to provide (minimal) verification their identity when they call up On-Star to report their car stolen (or have the door unlocked or anything else).
This is no different from any other type of search. If they stop and search your car without a warrant or probable cause then that is unconstitutional. If they stop and search your car, after you call them and tell them it is stolen, that is not unconstitutional.
I would never install something like this on my car, and I will be the first one to protest if the government every makes it mandatory. But there are no constitutional issues with giving people the choice to install remote-entry or anti-theft devices, and there are already checks and balances in place to deal with police abuses.
That one bugs be too, especially since the correct answer is none of them. It shouldn't be saving user-added works in the main dictionary, it should be saving them in a separate dictionary. That way they can add words to the main dictionary, without it conflicting with my changes when I upgrade.
In and out of Slashdot.
on
Ask Rob Malda
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
These are probably pretty cliche questions, but I am interested in the answers.
What is a normal day at slashdot like? How much time do you spend improving slashcode vs picking stories vs the normal computer admin tasks vs other stuff. How are the workload/responsibilities split up among the different staff members? How has this changes over the years?
I also remember back in the old days, the work you did with Enlightenment, as well as the animated short you made (Duckpins?). I was wondering if you get the chance to do much programing outside of slashcode, or what other hobbies you spend your free time doing now (besides being married).
Yeah, I've had good teachers and bad teachers, but adding technology will not magically turn bad teachers into good ones. In fact from my experience it makes them even worse. Think a poor lecturer can't get worse? Just give them powerpoint, and you will quickly change your mind. As far as interactive tools (like computer geometry packages), a good teacher will integrate them seamlessly with what they are teaching, a bad one will just put it in front of the kids and expect them to learn on their own.
Technology in education can be useful, if used for good reason, but it is usually just an expensive crutch. And what is particularly frustrating is that the administration never listens to the (good) teachers to figure out when this is. In high school my science teachers could never get money to do experiments, the art/drafting teachers could never get money for graphics/CAD software (for the advanced classes) - they constantly had to scrape, borrow and buy things out of pocket. Yet some bonehead bureaucrat gets the idea that we should have "internet in every classroom", and they spend 10x what the teachers were asking for on useless crap.
Fapping is known to cause death in kittens, and if your cable only has 5 of them, with 9 lives each, well that won't hold up for very long. You should upgrade to fiber.
I was looking for a good court case illustrating the Supreme Court's view on anonymous speech being protected as free speech, and you found one first.
It seems to me that the way this should work is that the case should go to trial first, and if the hospital can prove (to judge or jury depending) that the the anonymous person did something illegal (libel, revealing private patient info), then he will be outed and punished. Otherwise he should keep his anonymity.
I blame two straight days of code reviews and insider trading/diversity/harassment training. It apparently rotted my brain in addition to putting me in a horrible mood:)
Or you could increase the density of water for super-human powers, like instant brass knuckles. Although, if you wanted to preserve volume, you'd have to drink a lot of water beforehand and then expel it afterwords. You could achieve both of these by drinking some fluid that contained both water and a time-release diuretic. Also adds a nice subplot of a man caught in a self destructive cycle of addiction. They called him PubMan.
That isn't correct because there are other tasks that they are working besides their top 10. They could have another 100 tasks which each occupy just 0.5% of the staff, meaning that only half of their staff is working on the top 10 priorities. Secondly, just because something has higher priority does not necisarily mean that it has a higher number of staff allocated to it, especially if it just recently increased in priority, and they don't have enough people that are proficient in that area. Therefore, the number could be anywhere between 7 staff members, and 95.5% of the staff.
But even if we do make the assumption that staff is a nondecreasing function of priority, the most that you can say is that the top two priority tasks each have as many staff members as the third priority task which leaves at most 100% - 3*3.5% = 89.5% available.
That would mean that TV power is going to PC's instead. That may be true for people who live by themselves. But consider a family of 4 with one computer and one television. They take turns using the computer, while the remaining three watch TV. So each individual's TV time decreases by 1/4, but the total time that the television is on remains the same. Thus the power used by the computer is in addition to that of the television.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, they were meeting to discuss an amendment which had just been voted on. So no, the requirements for VoIP operators weren't clearly laid out at that time, and in particular it was unknown whether the rules would apply only to calls which connect to the phone network or also IP-only calls.
There are two levels in the cup, and armadillo has already flown the profile of the level 1 flight at Oklahoma space port. They just have to repeat it at the cup to claim the $350k, but they are doing it with a smaller craft, so that they can enter their larger craft in the level 2.
:P
It's too bad none of the other team are going to give it a go this year. Some of them looked like they might just pull off the level 1 profile. Much less suspenseful this way
I've never had any problems with my Verizon wireless service. Best coverage, no dropped calls in the city, no billing errors - completely reliable. Furthermore, both times that I renewed my contract at a third party store (thought it would make it easier to activate a new phone - it didn't), the retail monkeys signed me up for the wrong plan. One of the times I didn't notice it for months as the bill was about right - until I went on a trip out of state and racked up huge roaming charges, when I shouldn't have. Both times I called the Verizon customer service, and the very first person I talked to happily changed my plan to the one I thought I had signed up for and backdated it to the date I signed up - even months after the fact. I was expecting to spend a whole afternoon on the phone arguing with people, and was very pleasantly surprised.
The only negative side to Verizon Wireless is that their plans are more expensive than the other companies - $39.99 is the cheapest plan compared to $29.99 for everyone else, and their pay-as-you-go plans are highway robbery. But, yeah, my sister was with Alltel and she had all the same problems you mentioned, so I guess you get what you pay for. I just recently dropped Verizon for T-Mobile prepay, mostly because I just can't justify paying $45 a month when I only use ~150 minutes a month. We'll see how it goes.
Most of the horror stories that I have heard about Verizon, however, have been about their landline service. From what I've heard, they act like any of the regional telcom monopolies: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company". So I wouldn't judge one based on the other - the landline and wireless divisions are completely separate beasts. In particular I would be very wary of letting them cut your copper lines if you ever decide to go with fiber, because there is no turning back after that.
I would love to have an A3-sized e-reader for schematics. Having the ability to search my documents (where is R217?) without having to deal with the cumbersome laptops with small displays, would be great. I imagine a scroll with the batteries and processor in the center, or a folding book. Either way you would have the option of using it in A3 or A4 size depending on what you need to do. It wouldn't need a huge amount of memory, especially if it had WiFi. It wouldn't need a high a refresh rate or many colors - I could get by with monochrome, 16 colors would be nice, 256 would be exorbitant. Just high resolution PDF view and file browser and I'd be happy. Bonus points for excel documents.
Wow, the e-paper he is holding in that picture has a full 4,096 shades of brown. Perfect for Doom!
Seriously, Here is an article with a better picture. Still not much contrast, but getting better.
Slashcode itself inserts tags for all the categories that a story is filled in before it goes live. I presume this is so they can merge the tag search and category search sometime in the future.
Now that you got me thinking though, Section 3B may be a restriction on use, and can apply even if you don't distribute the work. However, one could argue that if you are suing someone about a patent, it is because you don't consider it to be valid. Thus you aren't forced to stop using the software, and if you win the court case you will have done nothing illegal by continuing to use it. Furthermore, recent supreme court rulings state that continuing to allegedly infringe upon a patent while you are challenging it is not grounds for willfull infringement. Regardless section 3B is practically identical to the patent litigation clause in section 3 of the Apache License (v2).
Granted, the wording of the introduction to the MS license(s) is much more forcefull than the Apache License, and its similarity to an EULA did give me pause at first. But after reading it, I don't think it restricts use anymore that the Apache License (if at all). If you are simply using the software, then the license merely requires you to agree to not distribute contrary to the license, which you aren't doing anyway. If you are going to redistribute it, what difference does it make whether you agree to follow the license when you start using it or when you start distributing it?
1. Definitions.
"License" shall mean the terms and conditions for use, reproduction, and distribution as defined by Sections 1 through 9 of this document. Not only is this license approved by the OSI as open source, it is also considered to be a Free Software License by the FSF and is even compatible with GPLv3.
My bittorrent speeds have dropped dramatically recently, presumably the result of ISP throttling. Every ISO I have tried to download lately (all legal install disks) have been faster to download directly from the server than via bittorrent, even with hundreds of peers and dozens of seeds.
I am fortunate enough to have an ISP that has free usenet service. Who knows how long that will last once pirates start eating up that bandwidth. They could just kill alt.binaries, just like they could just implement general bandwidth caps rather than throttling specific port. But past behavior doesn't support that idea.
The Digital Bytes has a page clarifying the details about exactly what is contained in each of the various sets that are being releasing.
The good news is the original version is finally available on DVD.
The bad news is that it is only available as part of a collectors edition.
The good news is that the 4-disc set is fairly reasonably priced at $35.
When you say the changes are quite minor, is that in comparison to the theatrical release or the directors cut? Just curious - I like both. I am glad that they are finally releasing it on DVD, and although it is annoying that I have to buy the 4 disc collectors edition to get it, $35 isn't a bad price.
(seriously though, I agree with you).
It is still no different than any other situation. If *right now* someone calls and reports my car stolen, and the police happen to see me driving it they will pull me over, and will have every right to do so because they have legitimate probable cause. Falsely accusing someone is still a crime, and ratting on people is not facilitated by this device whatsoever.
This system is actually slightly less prone to abuse because the owner has to provide (minimal) verification their identity when they call up On-Star to report their car stolen (or have the door unlocked or anything else).
This is no different from any other type of search. If they stop and search your car without a warrant or probable cause then that is unconstitutional. If they stop and search your car, after you call them and tell them it is stolen, that is not unconstitutional.
I would never install something like this on my car, and I will be the first one to protest if the government every makes it mandatory. But there are no constitutional issues with giving people the choice to install remote-entry or anti-theft devices, and there are already checks and balances in place to deal with police abuses.
That one bugs be too, especially since the correct answer is none of them. It shouldn't be saving user-added works in the main dictionary, it should be saving them in a separate dictionary. That way they can add words to the main dictionary, without it conflicting with my changes when I upgrade.
These are probably pretty cliche questions, but I am interested in the answers.
What is a normal day at slashdot like? How much time do you spend improving slashcode vs picking stories vs the normal computer admin tasks vs other stuff. How are the workload/responsibilities split up among the different staff members? How has this changes over the years?
I also remember back in the old days, the work you did with Enlightenment, as well as the animated short you made (Duckpins?). I was wondering if you get the chance to do much programing outside of slashcode, or what other hobbies you spend your free time doing now (besides being married).
Yeah, I've had good teachers and bad teachers, but adding technology will not magically turn bad teachers into good ones. In fact from my experience it makes them even worse. Think a poor lecturer can't get worse? Just give them powerpoint, and you will quickly change your mind. As far as interactive tools (like computer geometry packages), a good teacher will integrate them seamlessly with what they are teaching, a bad one will just put it in front of the kids and expect them to learn on their own.
Technology in education can be useful, if used for good reason, but it is usually just an expensive crutch. And what is particularly frustrating is that the administration never listens to the (good) teachers to figure out when this is. In high school my science teachers could never get money to do experiments, the art/drafting teachers could never get money for graphics/CAD software (for the advanced classes) - they constantly had to scrape, borrow and buy things out of pocket. Yet some bonehead bureaucrat gets the idea that we should have "internet in every classroom", and they spend 10x what the teachers were asking for on useless crap.
Fapping is known to cause death in kittens, and if your cable only has 5 of them, with 9 lives each, well that won't hold up for very long. You should upgrade to fiber.
I was looking for a good court case illustrating the Supreme Court's view on anonymous speech being protected as free speech, and you found one first.
It seems to me that the way this should work is that the case should go to trial first, and if the hospital can prove (to judge or jury depending) that the the anonymous person did something illegal (libel, revealing private patient info), then he will be outed and punished. Otherwise he should keep his anonymity.
Argg, I'm an idiot.
:)
I blame two straight days of code reviews and insider trading/diversity/harassment training. It apparently rotted my brain in addition to putting me in a horrible mood
Or you could increase the density of water for super-human powers, like instant brass knuckles. Although, if you wanted to preserve volume, you'd have to drink a lot of water beforehand and then expel it afterwords. You could achieve both of these by drinking some fluid that contained both water and a time-release diuretic. Also adds a nice subplot of a man caught in a self destructive cycle of addiction. They called him PubMan.
If the value could be a high as 89.5% then it isn't exactly less than or equal to 24.5 is it?
That isn't correct because there are other tasks that they are working besides their top 10. They could have another 100 tasks which each occupy just 0.5% of the staff, meaning that only half of their staff is working on the top 10 priorities. Secondly, just because something has higher priority does not necisarily mean that it has a higher number of staff allocated to it, especially if it just recently increased in priority, and they don't have enough people that are proficient in that area. Therefore, the number could be anywhere between 7 staff members, and 95.5% of the staff.
But even if we do make the assumption that staff is a nondecreasing function of priority, the most that you can say is that the top two priority tasks each have as many staff members as the third priority task which leaves at most 100% - 3*3.5% = 89.5% available.