If you're going to prevent public review, you're taking the responsibility to perform internal review such that you are certain you have reached a level of validation equivalent to that provided by public review.
Which is fine, but it's also why safety-critical or high-availability software costs 10-100x what consumer software does. One of its features is that there's no in-the-wild beta testing, and no tolerance for released bugs. You've moved that validation into the development itself. (Everyone stop looking so amazed; software development by people who want to make money at it has always been about how many bugs you can ignore and still get market share. Microsoft's monopoly means it can profit from selling essentially non-running programs. Compare also the low-end, pretty-package, sounded-like-a-cool-product shitware you have ten of under your desk and don't see any value in returning because you're tired of standing on principle in the 30-minute line at Fry's.)
Shrouding the details of a network configuration implies that either you have adequately tested the network against boundary conditions, load, and pathological states, or you're willing to suffer failures and have your ass handed to you by your users who wish you'd just let them look at it because they know they would have seen this coming if they had.
Wait. There's been 120 years of cops and robbers, and you don't think the cops understand "there's this guy stole my stuff; I don't know his name, but I know how to find him"?
Don't talk to the desk sargeant. Ask to talk to a detective. They certainly have heard about tracing people on the net, and if they're the first in their jurisdiction to succeed at it, all the better.
The point is, when you are the victim of criminal acts, the state is your lawyer. You shouldn't investigate your own case until after the state tells you to get lost.
Take the method outlined in that well-modded-up post to the police. Tell them that this guy stole your computer and these emails are proof. The Authorities can deal with the supboenas, warrants, etc., and you won't have to pay a lawyer.
Threatening to sue someone frivolously is grounds for a countersuit. It is not a crime.
Threatening to report someone to the police if they don't do what you ask is a crime (in some jurisdictions yada yada IANAL blah blah blah).
Threatening to sue someone is just the first step in civil law. If you have a case under the law, you might win right there. If you don't, you fight. Countersuit, appeal, drain the bank account, settle whenever, are all options for what happens after. Welcome to our world.
So no, it's not a crime, but an idle threat might be grounds for a countersuit, and a filed, frivolous lawsuit is definitely grounds for a damn solid countersuit.
IANAL, I just know this one thing. And it might be wrong.
IF YOU DON'T WANT POP-UPS, GO TO WWW.SAFEWEB.COM, CLICK ON "Configure", CHECK "Block Pop-Up Windows", AND CLICK ON "Set Permanent Options".
Added bonus: every connection is SSL between you and Safeweb (not so between Safeweb and the server you're trying to reach, but your netadmin can't sniff that).
I also recommend "Disable Java Applets", "Disable Plugins", and "Filter Profiling Cookies".
Then you get an extra banner ad with Safeweb's customers in it, but the ESC key still stops animated GIFs, and that's all they accept (so far).
Only gotcha: it's a little slower than connecting directly, and every hour or so the proxy server slashdots itself, but it always comes back. Oh, and sometimes they rejigger your authentication to further shroud your identity, so you lose your login to slashdot; annoying as hell when you're posting a message it took you ten minutes to write, but a necessary evil.
Unless I'm with someone who's not learned that indentation flames and such are a waste of time. Then it's linnux.
It's not lee-nookz for the same reason I don't aspirate my r's and g's when I say "garage".
I also say Frez-nul instead of fer-nell; and liberry. Every dog is a pup, pup-pup, or pupper, and several dogs is puppies. All my girlfriends get nicknames (through a quirk of fate, many of them have been named Linda (5) or Laura (2 in a row), so this actually works out as cognitive self-preservation).
Anyone coming on Linux in the wild would look at it and say it how it's spelled. When it was brand-spankin' new, Linus wasn't out there bitching about how people were mentally pronouncing it as they read the postings on Usenet.
So my point is two-fold: 1. Language is fun and ambiguous. 2. Don't judge what you think is a l33t h4xx0r by the way he spells or says things. He may actually be a comp.unix.wizard emeritus ready to reverse your real-world troll on you.
Sure, Junkyard Wars is cool, but the new season of Battlebots is cooler.
All of the arena hazards got a 5x (yes, five times) improvement in motor power (they didn't look all that wimpy last year, but they're positively rocking this year), and the saws and hammer were improved to increase destruction capability.
The contestants have clearly been improving their bots, too. They're heavier and stronger.
And when the saws or one of the bots flips a 300-lb contestant 10 feet into the air, it's massively cool.
I give it 10, maybe 20 years before the show turns into a live-action MechWarrior. Probably with a tie-in to Junkyard Wars, if everyone's smart.
The only degradation year-to-year: they changed spokesmodels and now it's that plastic-surgery disaster, Tracy Bingham. Hey! She weighs maybe 100 lbs, she's half-lexan, and she's got the brains of a remote-controlled car; maybe the plan is she should get in the arena! See how far she'd fly off the kill-saw...
--Blair
"Claimer: I'm not connected to the show in any way except via my eyeballs."
> it shouldn't produce environmental problems like nuclear waste or dirty emission
You mean besides neutron-irradiated casing material that needs to be changed every once in a while because the neutrons have turned it into brittle and useless junk? I guess that isn't so bad, but it could be as bad as spent fuel rods from fission.
The world's culture is mostly gaussian distributions. For the fat part of the support for any good idea there are two tails, one overbearingly pro and one insanely con.
And there are sophists among them all.
Fusion is good for the people who will profit from it. It won't reduce the price of power at all. It will reduce the probability of price spikes due to impending failures of the economies of scale, but only if it scales well. Fission starts out scaled about 1/1000th the planetary footprint of fossil fuel technologies of similar capacity, and fusion should be even moreso, except for the need to build lasers the size of the White House to fuse a fuel-pea. Might as well be supporting the switch from gasoline cars to maglev flying carpets, for all the good it'll do you and me.
They're much more fey than your usual American ad. And they're loaded with sexual imagery (get a load of Rapunzel's castle), some of it hetero, some of it homo.
The lip sync is bizarre, too. But I know why. They were made in Europe and dubbed into English. The Euro versions could be saying almost anything, but probably they're just translations of the naff script.
I can understand the copyright assignment to keep you from pulling out the rug later on; so long as the assignment is to something closer to public-domain than it is to Sun's coffers.
What I don't understand is the need for a cumbersome visual signature.
Congress and President Clinton made ESIGN the law last year, and some of your favorite spammers are already using it.
So why is an open-software group not accepting electronic signatures?
I got the info in traffic school. I typically get nailed by this overweaning legislation once every 30 months or so. Just the right frequency to qualify to pay the hundred-dollar extortion for whatever info they consider current that year, to keep the points off my license and avoid the arbitrary $500 increase in the illegal tax they call "mandatory insurance".
Until next time, I'm sticking to "Studies show that speeding doesn't cause accidents, it increases the fatality rate from a lower number of accidents."
It's better than the 15% who currently "obey" the law, and area actually the dumbest of all, because impeding the flow of traffic causes more accidents than speeding does.
Speeding doesn't tend to cause accidents anyway. Studies surrounding the institution and repeal of the double-nickel have proved that increasing speed reduces accident frequency. But it increases the fatality rate, absolutely and per-accident.
That's why you don't get to go 95 on the freeway. Not because you'll cause an accident, but because you're likely to be dead if you cause almost any accident at all. And if you're dead, you can't push your car to the side of the road, and it stops traffic for hours, and ties up homicide detectives and the coroner and the Accident Scene Sanitation Service and all sorts of NHTSA employees. Better you should live a cripple and keep the full legal responsibility for the paperwork to yourself.
I liked the it's-on-a-stage-set-in-burbank look of the original series.
I finally saw GATTACA the other night on the skiffy channel. You know what my favorite part of it was? They went to space in single-breasted suits. Not jumpsuits. Not moonsuits. Not lycra leotards and polyester toreador pants. Single-breasted GQ serge with coordinated ties and well-shined wing-tips.
They didn't climb a gantry or strap themselves into G-force cots. They walked from a hallway through one circular pressure door, sat in their stadium-style leather theater seats, and smiled at the stars out the window.
So get rid of the metal grate. I want a nice linoleum running all through the ship's decks. Maybe some shag wall-to-wall carpeting in the captain's quarters. 400 years of progress and you think humankind won't be bringing their lifestyles into space?
1. That advertisement has a very chilling lesson for us all:
Teach kids to stay out of the street.
If your kids are too small to learn or too stupid to obey, where the fuck are you and what are you doing that they can get into the street?
2. Speed is situational. If you're in a place where there are kids playing in or near the street, or where your view is obstructed and there might be kids there, then 30 mph is a good 10-30 mph higher than a prudent driver will drive anyway.
3. A car doing 30 brakes to a stop 3 feet farther than a car doing 29. You could save a kid by lowering the speed in that ad to 29 mph. A car doing 29 brakes to a stop 2.9 feet farther than a car doing 28. You could save a kid by lowering the speed in that new ad to 28 mph. A car doing 28 brakes to a stop 2.8 feet farther than a car doing 27 mph. You could save a kid by lowering the speed in that new ad to 27. A car... by lowering the speed in that new ad to 0 mph. No more children will die in traffic mishaps due to speed. Problem solved.
4. In the U.S., residential zones almost universally limit speed to 25. In some places that's an "absolute maximum speed limit" regardless of whether it's posted or not (see speed is situational above). Who are these limeys who are so hateful of children that they would add 5 mph to the reasonable and prudent speed in their neighborhoods?
--Blair
"Cavitate cheek. Insert tongue as necessary."
Police already know how many people are speeding: over 90%.
They also know how many people they can stop for speeding and make it pay for the time and effort: 15%.
So they set their radar guns for the speed at which the top 15% of cars will be going, and wait.
No need for tracking technology there. Just put a cop out in traffic and he'll find someone to nail within minutes. He wouldn't even need a radar gun. Most speeders are oblivious to what's going on behind them anyway. The gun just reduces the mean-time-to-collar, increasing the gross margin on the operation.
The question is, if 90% of us are "breaking" the law, are we wrong or is the law? And why don't we raise the speed limits a few mph so only 15% of us are breaking the law*?
--Blair
* - in some states, the standard for setting a speed limit on a street is to estimate the 85-percentile speed. But those estimates are based on old evidence, and somewhat derated due to revenue-generating motives.
I love how the right wastes its moderation points suppressing political statements.
--Blair
"The second thing the Nazis did was outlaw guns. The first was to bomb the opposition press. Six years later, they hijacked the government (cf. November 2000). Then they outlawed the guns."
A keyboard knows the difference between a keypress and a tap.
This thing might, but it would take learning a whole new set of muscle and pressure memory translations.
The Gesture and mouse-in-place things might save a little elbow grease, but the non-giving surface and variable pressures would result in callused fingers.
And carpal tunnel isn't caused by keystroke, it's caused by bad elbow-wrist-hand-finger alignment, and heredity (and greed).
YMMV.
I just want one of the ultra-quiet keyboards they faked in GATTACA, instead of this $2.99 parts-and-labor[*], $13.99 retail thing I've got here at work.
--Blair
* - maybe less; the other day at Fry's, I saw a pile of boxed keyboards in the keyboard section with $2.99 stickers on them. It wasn't a special price. It was the price. You couldn't tell them from this one without some MTTF testing.
Re:What ever happened to that MSN house?
on
Webvan Out Of Gas
·
· Score: 2
The price of Fame.
You do know that Pee Wee's Playhouse started in the art theaters of San Francisco, don't you?
There's some old tape of one of those original stage shows (featuring Phil Hartman as Cap'n Bill or Sailor Dan or something; he's on the make now that he's on dry land, and he's not being too choosy) that'll clue you into the continuing subversion of the Saturday Morning version.
The BMG's aren't exactly harmless in their Intel commercials, either. Launching one against a wall; clocking him with the rotating exclamation point, etc.
Booosh just wants to get off the geeky stuff and on to the cool explosions and shit.
--Blair
Re:What ever happened to that MSN house?
on
Webvan Out Of Gas
·
· Score: 2
The "MSN House" thing was a gag. A fake. An act. It wasn't really intended even to look real. The people were acting (badly). They were using a script. It was a commercial mini-film from the outset. Parody. Just parody.
And I'll echo what someone else said. "Billions of dollars and this is what they come up with?" I'm more than satisfied that they canned it without letting it bottom out.
I have the same problem with Intel advertising, although lately they're smart enough to pawn the creativity aspect off to someone who's clearly creative, i.e., the Blue Man Group. It's still got nothing to do with CPUs, but at least it's more entertaining than embarassing to watch.
I post talking about Seabrook's P.R. retardation, then I go browsing their website some more and find that Blinky*, the three-eyed genetic-deviant fish, is their freaking MASCOT...
People were scared by radiation in the '50s. All that "duck and cover" stuff. All that "godless commies" stuff. All that "godless commies are gonna irradiate the American Way of Life" stuff.
Three Mile Island just made the scare local and palpable. Until then, people blindly bought the promises of safety made by the nuke plant builders. Unfortunately, so did the nuke plant builders, and the nuke plant operators. So the promises and the safety went blind as well.
Chernobyl made it worse, but what made it worst of all is debacles like Seabrook, which failed to contain the politics surrounding its construction in the wake of Three Mile Island.
Nuclear power generation is safer and cleaner and less expensive than coal or natural gas, and the disposal of the spent fuel is less polluting than spewing it into the air. But the people who jumped into the industry are very sloppy with their P.R., and didn't react properly to negative publicity. They look like shills. Or they really were shills, cutting safety measures to reduce costs even more. Either of which degrades their position and keeps the polluter-fired powerplants in operation.
I don't get why everyone's calling this a nuclear-powered rocket.
All the radiation does is heat the hydrogen to a point that it reacts at an efficient rate with the ramjet flow of normal air (20% oxygen) instead of with a huge tank full of LOX.
You still need a huge tank full of hydrogen, and you need an atmosphere full of oxygen. Which, guess what, there ain't none of in outer space. You can't get to ramjet speed without some other propulsion system that works in the atmosphere, and you can't navigate into orbit without some other propulsion system that works outside the atmosphere.
Robert Heinlein told a story 55 years ago (Rocketship Galileo) about a couple of kids who reach the moon using atomic power alone as propulsion. They evaporate zinc*. No oxidizer involved.
Basically, I'll be impressed when they make the heater for this hybrid ramjet solar powered.
--Blair
* - That link is way cooler than just the book mention. Way, way, way cooler.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to prevent public review, you're taking the responsibility to perform internal review such that you are certain you have reached a level of validation equivalent to that provided by public review.
Which is fine, but it's also why safety-critical or high-availability software costs 10-100x what consumer software does. One of its features is that there's no in-the-wild beta testing, and no tolerance for released bugs. You've moved that validation into the development itself. (Everyone stop looking so amazed; software development by people who want to make money at it has always been about how many bugs you can ignore and still get market share. Microsoft's monopoly means it can profit from selling essentially non-running programs. Compare also the low-end, pretty-package, sounded-like-a-cool-product shitware you have ten of under your desk and don't see any value in returning because you're tired of standing on principle in the 30-minute line at Fry's.)
Shrouding the details of a network configuration implies that either you have adequately tested the network against boundary conditions, load, and pathological states, or you're willing to suffer failures and have your ass handed to you by your users who wish you'd just let them look at it because they know they would have seen this coming if they had.
--Blair
Wait. There's been 120 years of cops and robbers, and you don't think the cops understand "there's this guy stole my stuff; I don't know his name, but I know how to find him"?
Don't talk to the desk sargeant. Ask to talk to a detective. They certainly have heard about tracing people on the net, and if they're the first in their jurisdiction to succeed at it, all the better.
The point is, when you are the victim of criminal acts, the state is your lawyer. You shouldn't investigate your own case until after the state tells you to get lost.
--Blair
Skip the lawsuit part.
Take the method outlined in that well-modded-up post to the police. Tell them that this guy stole your computer and these emails are proof. The Authorities can deal with the supboenas, warrants, etc., and you won't have to pay a lawyer.
--Blair
"Or explain layer-3 semantics to him."
IANAL, but...
Threatening to sue someone frivolously is grounds for a countersuit. It is not a crime.
Threatening to report someone to the police if they don't do what you ask is a crime (in some jurisdictions yada yada IANAL blah blah blah).
Threatening to sue someone is just the first step in civil law. If you have a case under the law, you might win right there. If you don't, you fight. Countersuit, appeal, drain the bank account, settle whenever, are all options for what happens after. Welcome to our world.
So no, it's not a crime, but an idle threat might be grounds for a countersuit, and a filed, frivolous lawsuit is definitely grounds for a damn solid countersuit.
IANAL, I just know this one thing. And it might be wrong.
--Blair
"What I say three times is true."
Ads of the form of:
IF YOU DON'T WANT POP-UPS, GO TO WWW.SAFEWEB.COM, CLICK ON "Configure", CHECK "Block Pop-Up Windows", AND CLICK ON "Set Permanent Options".
Added bonus: every connection is SSL between you and Safeweb (not so between Safeweb and the server you're trying to reach, but your netadmin can't sniff that).
I also recommend "Disable Java Applets", "Disable Plugins", and "Filter Profiling Cookies".
Then you get an extra banner ad with Safeweb's customers in it, but the ESC key still stops animated GIFs, and that's all they accept (so far).
Only gotcha: it's a little slower than connecting directly, and every hour or so the proxy server slashdots itself, but it always comes back. Oh, and sometimes they rejigger your authentication to further shroud your identity, so you lose your login to slashdot; annoying as hell when you're posting a message it took you ten minutes to write, but a necessary evil.
--Blair
Sigh.
I pronounce it leye-nix.
Unless I'm with someone who's not learned that indentation flames and such are a waste of time. Then it's linnux.
It's not lee-nookz for the same reason I don't aspirate my r's and g's when I say "garage".
I also say Frez-nul instead of fer-nell; and liberry. Every dog is a pup, pup-pup, or pupper, and several dogs is puppies. All my girlfriends get nicknames (through a quirk of fate, many of them have been named Linda (5) or Laura (2 in a row), so this actually works out as cognitive self-preservation).
Anyone coming on Linux in the wild would look at it and say it how it's spelled. When it was brand-spankin' new, Linus wasn't out there bitching about how people were mentally pronouncing it as they read the postings on Usenet.
So my point is two-fold: 1. Language is fun and ambiguous. 2. Don't judge what you think is a l33t h4xx0r by the way he spells or says things. He may actually be a comp.unix.wizard emeritus ready to reverse your real-world troll on you.
--Blair
Sure, Junkyard Wars is cool, but the new season of Battlebots is cooler.
All of the arena hazards got a 5x (yes, five times) improvement in motor power (they didn't look all that wimpy last year, but they're positively rocking this year), and the saws and hammer were improved to increase destruction capability.
The contestants have clearly been improving their bots, too. They're heavier and stronger.
And when the saws or one of the bots flips a 300-lb contestant 10 feet into the air, it's massively cool.
I give it 10, maybe 20 years before the show turns into a live-action MechWarrior. Probably with a tie-in to Junkyard Wars, if everyone's smart.
The only degradation year-to-year: they changed spokesmodels and now it's that plastic-surgery disaster, Tracy Bingham. Hey! She weighs maybe 100 lbs, she's half-lexan, and she's got the brains of a remote-controlled car; maybe the plan is she should get in the arena! See how far she'd fly off the kill-saw...
--Blair
"Claimer: I'm not connected to the show in any way except via my eyeballs."
> it shouldn't produce environmental problems like nuclear waste or dirty emission
You mean besides neutron-irradiated casing material that needs to be changed every once in a while because the neutrons have turned it into brittle and useless junk? I guess that isn't so bad, but it could be as bad as spent fuel rods from fission.
The world's culture is mostly gaussian distributions. For the fat part of the support for any good idea there are two tails, one overbearingly pro and one insanely con.
And there are sophists among them all.
Fusion is good for the people who will profit from it. It won't reduce the price of power at all. It will reduce the probability of price spikes due to impending failures of the economies of scale, but only if it scales well. Fission starts out scaled about 1/1000th the planetary footprint of fossil fuel technologies of similar capacity, and fusion should be even moreso, except for the need to build lasers the size of the White House to fuse a fuel-pea. Might as well be supporting the switch from gasoline cars to maglev flying carpets, for all the good it'll do you and me.
--Blair
"Mmm. Needs work."
Those commercials are worth a second look.
They're much more fey than your usual American ad. And they're loaded with sexual imagery (get a load of Rapunzel's castle), some of it hetero, some of it homo.
The lip sync is bizarre, too. But I know why. They were made in Europe and dubbed into English. The Euro versions could be saying almost anything, but probably they're just translations of the naff script.
--Blair
I can understand the copyright assignment to keep you from pulling out the rug later on; so long as the assignment is to something closer to public-domain than it is to Sun's coffers.
What I don't understand is the need for a cumbersome visual signature.
Congress and President Clinton made ESIGN the law last year, and some of your favorite spammers are already using it.
So why is an open-software group not accepting electronic signatures?
--Blair
I assume you have a URL for a study that we can all peruse :) Or am I expecting too much from a slashdot reader.
You want google, you know where to find it.
I got the info in traffic school. I typically get nailed by this overweaning legislation once every 30 months or so. Just the right frequency to qualify to pay the hundred-dollar extortion for whatever info they consider current that year, to keep the points off my license and avoid the arbitrary $500 increase in the illegal tax they call "mandatory insurance".
Until next time, I'm sticking to "Studies show that speeding doesn't cause accidents, it increases the fatality rate from a lower number of accidents."
--Blair
It's better than the 15% who currently "obey" the law, and area actually the dumbest of all, because impeding the flow of traffic causes more accidents than speeding does.
Speeding doesn't tend to cause accidents anyway. Studies surrounding the institution and repeal of the double-nickel have proved that increasing speed reduces accident frequency. But it increases the fatality rate, absolutely and per-accident.
That's why you don't get to go 95 on the freeway. Not because you'll cause an accident, but because you're likely to be dead if you cause almost any accident at all. And if you're dead, you can't push your car to the side of the road, and it stops traffic for hours, and ties up homicide detectives and the coroner and the Accident Scene Sanitation Service and all sorts of NHTSA employees. Better you should live a cripple and keep the full legal responsibility for the paperwork to yourself.
> Sorry.
And naive.
--Blair
These sets are too techy-sweepy-steely-gloomy.
I liked the it's-on-a-stage-set-in-burbank look of the original series.
I finally saw GATTACA the other night on the skiffy channel. You know what my favorite part of it was? They went to space in single-breasted suits. Not jumpsuits. Not moonsuits. Not lycra leotards and polyester toreador pants. Single-breasted GQ serge with coordinated ties and well-shined wing-tips.
They didn't climb a gantry or strap themselves into G-force cots. They walked from a hallway through one circular pressure door, sat in their stadium-style leather theater seats, and smiled at the stars out the window.
So get rid of the metal grate. I want a nice linoleum running all through the ship's decks. Maybe some shag wall-to-wall carpeting in the captain's quarters. 400 years of progress and you think humankind won't be bringing their lifestyles into space?
--Blair
1. That advertisement has a very chilling lesson for us all:
... by lowering the speed in that new ad to 0 mph. No more children will die in traffic mishaps due to speed. Problem solved.
Teach kids to stay out of the street.
If your kids are too small to learn or too stupid to obey, where the fuck are you and what are you doing that they can get into the street?
2. Speed is situational. If you're in a place where there are kids playing in or near the street, or where your view is obstructed and there might be kids there, then 30 mph is a good 10-30 mph higher than a prudent driver will drive anyway.
3. A car doing 30 brakes to a stop 3 feet farther than a car doing 29. You could save a kid by lowering the speed in that ad to 29 mph. A car doing 29 brakes to a stop 2.9 feet farther than a car doing 28. You could save a kid by lowering the speed in that new ad to 28 mph. A car doing 28 brakes to a stop 2.8 feet farther than a car doing 27 mph. You could save a kid by lowering the speed in that new ad to 27. A car
4. In the U.S., residential zones almost universally limit speed to 25. In some places that's an "absolute maximum speed limit" regardless of whether it's posted or not (see speed is situational above). Who are these limeys who are so hateful of children that they would add 5 mph to the reasonable and prudent speed in their neighborhoods?
--Blair
"Cavitate cheek. Insert tongue as necessary."
Police already know how many people are speeding: over 90%.
They also know how many people they can stop for speeding and make it pay for the time and effort: 15%.
So they set their radar guns for the speed at which the top 15% of cars will be going, and wait.
No need for tracking technology there. Just put a cop out in traffic and he'll find someone to nail within minutes. He wouldn't even need a radar gun. Most speeders are oblivious to what's going on behind them anyway. The gun just reduces the mean-time-to-collar, increasing the gross margin on the operation.
The question is, if 90% of us are "breaking" the law, are we wrong or is the law? And why don't we raise the speed limits a few mph so only 15% of us are breaking the law*?
--Blair
* - in some states, the standard for setting a speed limit on a street is to estimate the 85-percentile speed. But those estimates are based on old evidence, and somewhat derated due to revenue-generating motives.
I love how the right wastes its moderation points suppressing political statements.
--Blair
"The second thing the Nazis did was outlaw guns. The first was to bomb the opposition press. Six years later, they hijacked the government (cf. November 2000). Then they outlawed the guns."
A keyboard knows the difference between a keypress and a tap.
This thing might, but it would take learning a whole new set of muscle and pressure memory translations.
The Gesture and mouse-in-place things might save a little elbow grease, but the non-giving surface and variable pressures would result in callused fingers.
And carpal tunnel isn't caused by keystroke, it's caused by bad elbow-wrist-hand-finger alignment, and heredity (and greed).
YMMV.
I just want one of the ultra-quiet keyboards they faked in GATTACA, instead of this $2.99 parts-and-labor[*], $13.99 retail thing I've got here at work.
--Blair
* - maybe less; the other day at Fry's, I saw a pile of boxed keyboards in the keyboard section with $2.99 stickers on them. It wasn't a special price. It was the price. You couldn't tell them from this one without some MTTF testing.
The price of Fame.
You do know that Pee Wee's Playhouse started in the art theaters of San Francisco, don't you?
There's some old tape of one of those original stage shows (featuring Phil Hartman as Cap'n Bill or Sailor Dan or something; he's on the make now that he's on dry land, and he's not being too choosy) that'll clue you into the continuing subversion of the Saturday Morning version.
The BMG's aren't exactly harmless in their Intel commercials, either. Launching one against a wall; clocking him with the rotating exclamation point, etc.
--Blair
Booosh just wants to get off the geeky stuff and on to the cool explosions and shit.
--Blair
The "MSN House" thing was a gag. A fake. An act. It wasn't really intended even to look real. The people were acting (badly). They were using a script. It was a commercial mini-film from the outset. Parody. Just parody.
And I'll echo what someone else said. "Billions of dollars and this is what they come up with?" I'm more than satisfied that they canned it without letting it bottom out.
I have the same problem with Intel advertising, although lately they're smart enough to pawn the creativity aspect off to someone who's clearly creative, i.e., the Blue Man Group. It's still got nothing to do with CPUs, but at least it's more entertaining than embarassing to watch.
--Blair
It's not a lie, it's a metaphor.
If I was running a nuke plant, I wouldn't go within a million miles of selecting a mutant as my mascot.
But thanks for playing.
--Blair
>"evil bad guy conservatives and righteous selfless liberals"
I never said that, but hey, you're entitled to your opinion.
--Blair
Okay. This is too funny.
I post talking about Seabrook's P.R. retardation, then I go browsing their website some more and find that Blinky*, the three-eyed genetic-deviant fish, is their freaking MASCOT...
These guys are truly, truly clueless...
--Blair
* - that site is a horrific mutant freak, too...
People were scared by radiation in the '50s. All that "duck and cover" stuff. All that "godless commies" stuff. All that "godless commies are gonna irradiate the American Way of Life" stuff.
Three Mile Island just made the scare local and palpable. Until then, people blindly bought the promises of safety made by the nuke plant builders. Unfortunately, so did the nuke plant builders, and the nuke plant operators. So the promises and the safety went blind as well.
Chernobyl made it worse, but what made it worst of all is debacles like Seabrook, which failed to contain the politics surrounding its construction in the wake of Three Mile Island.
Nuclear power generation is safer and cleaner and less expensive than coal or natural gas, and the disposal of the spent fuel is less polluting than spewing it into the air. But the people who jumped into the industry are very sloppy with their P.R., and didn't react properly to negative publicity. They look like shills. Or they really were shills, cutting safety measures to reduce costs even more. Either of which degrades their position and keeps the polluter-fired powerplants in operation.
--Blair
I don't get why everyone's calling this a nuclear-powered rocket.
All the radiation does is heat the hydrogen to a point that it reacts at an efficient rate with the ramjet flow of normal air (20% oxygen) instead of with a huge tank full of LOX.
You still need a huge tank full of hydrogen, and you need an atmosphere full of oxygen. Which, guess what, there ain't none of in outer space. You can't get to ramjet speed without some other propulsion system that works in the atmosphere, and you can't navigate into orbit without some other propulsion system that works outside the atmosphere.
Robert Heinlein told a story 55 years ago (Rocketship Galileo) about a couple of kids who reach the moon using atomic power alone as propulsion. They evaporate zinc*. No oxidizer involved.
Basically, I'll be impressed when they make the heater for this hybrid ramjet solar powered.
--Blair
* - That link is way cooler than just the book mention. Way, way, way cooler.