What if that medium tasks itself to educating the public regarding copyrights and how ridiculous it is that a recording made in 1935 won't enter the Public Domain until 2067.
My favorite example of the ridiculousness of copyright abuse by the content industry is still Happy Birthday To You. The tune was first published in 1858... three years before Abraham Lincoln took office! Martin Van Buren, the country's 8th president, was still alive! Mark Twain wouldn't publish Tom Sawyer for another two decades! Yet this song was published in a few different forms over the next 80 years or so, and now the copyright on it does not expire until 2030... 172 years after it was first published. Think this is just some obscure case that no one takes seriously? Warner Music Group bought the rights to it in 1998, and as recently as 2008 they reported earning $5000 a day in royalties. Ever wonder why restaurant employees will embarrass you on your birthday but won't really sing Happy Birthday? Because it would be a public performance of a copyrighted work and they would be liable!
I think he meant "sysdir," not Sydir, and was trying to shut these script kiddies down by enticing them to carry out a preemptive strike on their own "SysDir."
SysDir (SYStem DIRectory) A folder or subfolder that contains the operating system. In Windows, it typically refers to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32
You could be dreaming, or you could simply be living or working in Menlo Park, CA. I used to drive past here all the time. All the car dealerships on El Camino Real left that strip of real estate sandwiched between the road and the CalTrain because there simply wasn't enough space for them to store enough inventory to be competitive with dealerships in Redwood City and Palo Alto. Strangely enough, lack of space for on-hand inventory was not a problem for Tesla, so they took over one of the empty lots.
I was wondering how I missed the fact that Timothy was actually Harry Potter all these years. At least we still get to hear Slashdot's own robotic overlord. That was comfortingly familiar.
HTML is a markup language, not the web. The HTML widgets are supposed to be self contained interactive bits. I doubt they CAN access the Internet because that would be a) a security risk and b) ugly if your website was down, and Apple doesn't like ugly.
HTML Modules
Apple’s widget creation tool, Dashcode, is built into iBooks Author. So it’s easy to create HTML widgets that appear as objects alongside the text. Web-based, dynamically updated data keeps examples current.
The whole point is that your content is always up-to-date if you use this feature because iBooks will pull the information from the Web.
Moreover it's against the (U.S) law to make a secret union.
They're called affairs, and they're not illegal, they're simply immoral, which means most people have them but say they don't, and those who don't wish they did.
Yep. Hollywood and Big Media will be pushing for a monitor standard which detects uncertified video, blocks it, reports you and sets your house on fire.
That's ridiculous. How could they seize and sell your house for profit if they burn it down? Unless the insurance money they could get for burning your house down is worth more than what they could actually sell it for in the current housing market... I think you might be on to something here.
Your files are going to be probed over the next few months for:
evidence of copyright infringement that can be used to increase damages
evidence of criminal activity other than copyright infringement by Megaupload users
confidential information that could be useful to law enforcement (contact lists for Mexican drug cartels? Can you imagine if they seized Evite? You know they'd be looking for "Welcome back from your cross-border smuggling mission!" parties and "Whack-A-Mole" mafia parties)
First Rule of Cloud Computing Use: Never upload anything to the cloud you wouldn't want the entire world to see.
Are you going to get this data back? Of course not. The servers have been seized by the government because they were used for criminal activities. They're not going to take the time to go through everyone's files to find the good ones and give them back.
"This photo belongs to 10-year-old Jimmy Thompson in Arlington, VA. Looks harmless to me. Go ahead and email this back to him." Right.
"This looks like a code snippet from some open source project. Looks harmless to me. Email it back to them." Sure.
"This one's just a video of Jimmy's family singing Happy Birthday to him at the park. Wait! That's infringement!" (Personally, I'm boycotting birthdays until 2030 when people can legally sing the song.)
They're going to count up the number of items that look like copyrighted content (7 billion copyrighted photographs, 28 million ripped DVDs, etc.), come up with a multiplier for each type ($5,000 for each photo, $15 million for each DVD, etc.) and then tell the judge the copyright infringement at Megaupload was so massive, the value of the damages is greater than the amount of U.S. debt held by China.
Second Rule of Cloud Computing Use: Never assume that you have any guarantee of access to anything in the cloud.
Keep in mind that the Rules of Cloud Computing Use are a necessary because of the Three Laws of Cloud Computing:
1. A cloud may not injure an industry association or government entity or, through inaction, allow an industry association or government entity to come to harm.
2. A cloud must obey the orders given to it by industry associations or government entities, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A cloud must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
I see a lot of venting and ranting, but not a lot of info about what actually has or has not happened. No one seems to have noticed some of these Web sites are up and running.
OK, now that we've got those facts sorted out, the next question is who cares?
This isn't like a DDOS attack against Amazon or Google. None of these organizations, government or otherwise, depend on their Web sites to transact business. Copyright.gov is an informational resource that contains reference material you can find in many other places. No one cares if it's down. Did you even know it existed before it allegedly went down? Justice.gov exists to inform the people about what the department is doing. That's it. If Anonymous wants to raise awareness about the DOJ's activities, taking their site down has the opposite effect, and does not hurt the DOJ. When was the last time you visited the MPAA or RIAA site? Is that where you're going to look to decide what movie you want to see tomorrow, or what music you're going to buy on iTunes? And UMG and BMI's businesses don't depend on their Web sites... their music is marketed and sold elsewhere.
We've known for about 12 years now that it's really not that hard in the scheme of things to DDOS even the biggest sites on the Web. Remember the shocking 3-hour attack on Yahoo in Feb 2000? The prevailing thought then was, "If they can shut down Yahoo, they can shut down anybody." This was a legitimate concern because with its site down, Yahoo's business does not exist. But these attacks are being directed at sites where it really doesn't matter. All it does it generate a scary-sounding news headline. Some of Anonymous's other antics have some real world implications for their targets... this does not.
I've been looking for a good way to create ePub files for my iPad for some time now. I use a number of different reference materials I've created for myself and others in environments where you're simply not going to have Internet access, and the iPad has been an ideal tool for this. The iBooks Author app is free, looks well-polished (like Pages and Keynote) and seems interesting with its promises of easily-implemented interactivity. I'm a little concerned about how the HTML widgets will be used... the idea of having content in a book that's always up to date is intriguing... but if you are somewhere you don't have Internet access will it display the last version seen or a 404 Not Found error message?
The app is available now on the Mac App Store, but it's worth noting that it's only available for the Mac and only runs on OS X Lion.
A limited remedy if issues arise as a result of an enthusiast's decision to enable overclocking, for a modest fee.
Just how limited is this remedy? For this modest fee, do they send an engineer in a bunny suit to your home/office to laugh at you and suggest that you not do that again?
I spent most of my formative years in a good, well-funded public school district. When I was in elementary school, computer class meant there was an Apple IIe available for each kid to use (and a futuristic-looking Apple IIgs in the corner that we could look at but never touch). We mostly played games that involved directing Algernon through a maze to a piece of cheese or fitting pieces of machinery together to solve a problem. I joined the math club because it met an hour before school in the computer room, and I'd intentionally write down wrong answers to the five math problems so I could spend most of that hour playing with the computers.
In seventh grade, computer class meant there was a Mac LC II for every kid to use. We'd spend the class time doing word processing or desktop publishing. The teacher allowed students free use of the computers for an hour or two after school every day, and I took advantage of it. I discovered Beyond Zork, played way too many games of Michael Casteel's Klondike (when I moved to Silicon Valley years later I had to make a pilgrimage to the Sunnyvale address where it was developed) and played with literally every element of the software to figure out what I could make it do.
In eighth grade I spent a year in a good but very-poorly-funded school district where computer class meant there were five Apple IIs to be shared among 25 students. We were assigned the task of creating a word processing document, typing one paragraph of text, and saving it to a 5.25" floppy. We would take turns doing this while the other four people watched and the teacher went around reviewing our progress, coaching students through mistakes. I zipped through mine quickly and taught the others in my group how to do it and then we'd sit there for the last 30 min of class. While I sat there with my head on the table, bored out of my mind, I noticed a book on BASIC on the shelf below the windows. I asked the teacher if I could read it, and started writing my own BASIC programs. Seeing my progress and interest, he told me I could borrow it until I had finished it, and I did. I'd read it as I walked to and from school in the snow, and I'd lay on my bed writing programs on loose leaf. In class I'd hurry the other students in my group through their exercises so I could enter my programs and try them out.
I returned to my old school the next year, but I had a greater appreciation for access to computers and spent my time on them writing code instead of playing games. I never had a computer at home until my senior year of high school because my father insisted he would only buy a Windows box because "Macs aren't real computers."
Do I imagine everyone learns to program this way? No. But I do believe programming is not something that lends itself to being taught in a classroom as a standard lesson. There should be classes that expose students to just enough to draw the attention of those who are so inclined, and then provide avenues for those who are interested to continue to explore and grow. But programmers need to be driven, inquisitive, problem solving, and somewhat solitary. Being spoon-fed lessons in a classroom doesn't create effective programmers because in reality no one is going to spoon feed you solutions to problems -- you're paid to come up with solutions. If your employer or customers wanted solutions someone else has already come up with, they'd buy a box off the shelf for less money.
That said, I'm open to the possibility that I could be wrong and this could be a great way to train a superstar class of programmers. To those who think this is a great idea, what sort of curriculum would you suggest for it? What classes would you prescribe to give freshmen a solid base, sophomores and juniors something to build upon that base, and seniors something advanced to challenge and refine them?
You know, there's reason to believe the dinosaurs drove SUVs too. They used up all the fossil fuels, so mother nature introduced the concept of E85, resulting in them burning up their food supply and driving themselves to extinction so the fossil fuels they used up would be replenished in a million years. We only think an asteroid hit and kicked up enough dust to block out the sun and start an ice age. It wasn't dust... It was smog!
BBC reports that Sweden is allowing one citizen per week to take control of its official Twitter feed, in what's been described as 'the world's most democratic Twitter experiment.'
Democratic? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. According to Wikipedia:
Democracy in its purest or most ideal form would be a society in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives.
So it's not Democratic at all unless you let everyone vote on each Twitter post, which would make it American Idol: Sweden Edition. Instead, this is more like some MTV reality show where everyone sits at home and says, "huh... so that's what the country would be like if this moron was running things... thank goodness he's not... maybe next week will be different and meaningful" every week. A little advice to all you folks in Sweden: we tried this in the U.S. already. We called it the second Bush presidency.
I think they're missing the mark here. Just because social networks are juicy, low-hanging fruit doesn't mean they're going to find terrorists using them. Aren't most terrorists characterized by their anti-social behavior? People who have lots of social connections are less likely to have a desire to carry out a terrorist attack than someone who is isolated, anti-social and bitter. They're not going to find a terrorist plot posted on someone's wall with a time stamp and a description of the atrocities the person is mulling over. They ought to be looking at sites frequented by anti-social people who are isolated and bitter, like Sl... On second thought, Facebook sounds like a great resource to monitor!
Doctor: "Well, it looks like you have a genetic predisposition to paying exorbitant sums of money for things you don't need. It's called Gullibility. Don't be so sad, it's very common in this country, like a cancer! Just remember that even though it eats some people alive, some people survive! You just need to have balls like Lance Armstrong, avoid drugs and wear yellow shirts in the summertime. That will be $1000. Now that I know what to look for, I can zero in on this and accurately determine the likelihood of recurrence if we sequence your DNA just one more time and you give me your debit card pin number."
It means that Facebook is going to buy Walgreens or CVS, install these machines in every location and offer sequencing for free (as in you'll have to watch ads during the procedure and they will copyright your DNA). While you are strapped into a chair, a button you cannot reach will light up and you will be invited to opt out of their plan to sell your DNA, simply by pushing the lighted button. This might not seem like a big deal until Zynga targets you with some pointless free game that you are genetically predisposed to become addicted to (free as in you can do absolutely nothing even faster if you give them money).
Actually, Samsung would be very interested. I bought one of their LED TVs recently, and as I was throwing out the box this morning I noticed a 5"x7" cloth in a plastic pouch, labelled:
This product is high glossy, Please be careful of surface scratch while installation. Make sure to brush off the dirt on the provided cloth before cleaning the cabinet. For cleaning the front cabinet, make sure you use only the provided cloth on which to spray water 4 to 6 times before wiping it out softly in one direction. After cleaning, wipe cabinet to remove any moisture
So it sounds to me like they're making a big deal about my TV not being waterproof. They're even telling me I can't spray water on the screen directly, I must spray water on their magic cloth no more than 6 times, and even then promptly wipe away what little moisture that puts on the frame around the screen. Then there's a diagram showing me that I must wipe the frame of the TV in a counterclockwise motion. Apparently the screen itself cannot be cleaned with even a damp cloth... So this must be a real issue.
So they should have this ready for practical applications in the consumer market right about the same time hard drive component manufacturing becomes available and, coincidentally, about the same time the hard drive industry jumps on the Thunderbolt bandwagon. Perhaps this trifecta will also coincide with the Third Coming of Steve Jobs -- with no hard drives available, almost no one using his new Thunderbolt, and no ability to store his entire movie collection on one hard drive, he figured he'd leave Earth for a while and come back when we were ready for him.
Anyone else pick up on the note in TFA about how this technology uses 96 bits to make one byte of data? I wonder if the drive sizes will be advertised in bits to make them seem even more ridiculously impressive!
I cannot think of a company I have ever detested as much as I detest AT&T.
If you find that this keeps you up at night, might I suggest opening an account with Comcast (when their cable modem died they said they had to send a tech out to fix it, it would take three weeks, and I would continue to be billed for the service they could not provide... Then they actually told me I was bluffing when I asked to be connected with someone who could close my account) or Wells Fargo (they charged me $2 for asking what their branch hours were, and their answer was "we don't know")? Then you can have warm and fuzzy intellectual debates about which one is worst. Enjoy!
Going to Mars was cool last century. This century our priorities have shifted and we can't put humans in orbit of this planet without making them honorary cosmonauts.
If you want to get people interested in going to Mars, you need to start by erasing the memory of the film "Mission To Mars" from the public consciousness. The very thought of going to Mars now triggers a knee-jerk reaction of: "Wait... didn't Quinn Mallory, Ken Mattingly and Merlin already do this? And it sucked?" It might be easier to simply rename Mars and make it sound like we're going somewhere new and exciting, like Pandora. Then we can start thinking about this again.
Ironically, I recently went to an urgent care facility and was seen by an MD who listened to the first few words out of my mouth, was in too much of a rush to listen past that, looked in my ear, pronounced my diagnosis, prescribed medication and hurried out the door to see her next patient. A week later, my condition worsened and I got a second opinion from someone who actually listened to me describe the problem, and found out that not only was the diagnosis wrong, the medication she prescribed was having the opposite effect of what was needed. It may actually have done permanent damage.
So a year ago, I would have said I'd be more comfortable with an MD. Now I'd place a higher premium on someone with a good listener badge.
Actually, I'm not sure if that's still considered irony. I think they simply call it "Managed Healthcare" these days.
Apparently this is a recurring problem for Google. On Sept 27, 2010, a French court convicted Google and Eric Schmidt of criminal defamation (discussion of it and why it wouldn't happen in the U.S. here) for Google's suggest function. The fact that over a year later they're facing this again means (a) they were expecting this to happen and have apparently decided it's part of the cost of doing business in France, and (b) the company suing them has many lawyers who were surely aware of this and saw a neat way to make some money and censor negative opinions.
This explains why they kept getting closer and closer to windows. Maybe now that they've realized this isn't the way to go they can get back on track.
rimshot
Maybe if they took the phone outside they'd get better results. All the imperfections in the windows are probably cutting into the amount of actual power the device gets.
Normally a drunk or drowsy person would run off the road and either be jolted awake by the rumble strips or hit a tree/guardrail/ditch/etc. It sounds morbid, but they are the only ones injured or killed.
This new system defeats the purpose of the rumble strips by preventing your from getting to them and keeps you on the road until you hit someone else. It turns a dangerous, incapacitated driver's vehicle into a guided missile. This is a very bad thing. I'm not at all convinced the a vibrating steering wheel will wake them up... Rumble strips violently rock the whole car and make a loud, disturbing noise.
Slashdot Mirror
What if that medium tasks itself to educating the public regarding copyrights and how ridiculous it is that a recording made in 1935 won't enter the Public Domain until 2067.
My favorite example of the ridiculousness of copyright abuse by the content industry is still Happy Birthday To You. The tune was first published in 1858... three years before Abraham Lincoln took office! Martin Van Buren, the country's 8th president, was still alive! Mark Twain wouldn't publish Tom Sawyer for another two decades! Yet this song was published in a few different forms over the next 80 years or so, and now the copyright on it does not expire until 2030... 172 years after it was first published. Think this is just some obscure case that no one takes seriously? Warner Music Group bought the rights to it in 1998, and as recently as 2008 they reported earning $5000 a day in royalties. Ever wonder why restaurant employees will embarrass you on your birthday but won't really sing Happy Birthday? Because it would be a public performance of a copyrighted work and they would be liable!
I think he meant "sysdir," not Sydir, and was trying to shut these script kiddies down by enticing them to carry out a preemptive strike on their own "SysDir."
SysDir
(SYStem DIRectory) A folder or subfolder that contains the operating system. In Windows, it typically refers to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32
You could be dreaming, or you could simply be living or working in Menlo Park, CA. I used to drive past here all the time. All the car dealerships on El Camino Real left that strip of real estate sandwiched between the road and the CalTrain because there simply wasn't enough space for them to store enough inventory to be competitive with dealerships in Redwood City and Palo Alto. Strangely enough, lack of space for on-hand inventory was not a problem for Tesla, so they took over one of the empty lots.
I was wondering how I missed the fact that Timothy was actually Harry Potter all these years. At least we still get to hear Slashdot's own robotic overlord. That was comfortingly familiar.
HTML is a markup language, not the web. The HTML widgets are supposed to be self contained interactive bits. I doubt they CAN access the Internet because that would be a) a security risk and b) ugly if your website was down, and Apple doesn't like ugly.
Apple's site specifically states:
HTML Modules
Apple’s widget creation tool, Dashcode, is built into iBooks Author. So it’s easy to create HTML widgets that appear as objects alongside the text. Web-based, dynamically updated data keeps examples current.
The whole point is that your content is always up-to-date if you use this feature because iBooks will pull the information from the Web.
Moreover it's against the (U.S) law to make a secret union.
They're called affairs, and they're not illegal, they're simply immoral, which means most people have them but say they don't, and those who don't wish they did.
Yep. Hollywood and Big Media will be pushing for a monitor standard which detects uncertified video, blocks it, reports you and sets your house on fire.
That's ridiculous. How could they seize and sell your house for profit if they burn it down? Unless the insurance money they could get for burning your house down is worth more than what they could actually sell it for in the current housing market... I think you might be on to something here.
First Rule of Cloud Computing Use: Never upload anything to the cloud you wouldn't want the entire world to see.
Are you going to get this data back? Of course not. The servers have been seized by the government because they were used for criminal activities. They're not going to take the time to go through everyone's files to find the good ones and give them back.
They're going to count up the number of items that look like copyrighted content (7 billion copyrighted photographs, 28 million ripped DVDs, etc.), come up with a multiplier for each type ($5,000 for each photo, $15 million for each DVD, etc.) and then tell the judge the copyright infringement at Megaupload was so massive, the value of the damages is greater than the amount of U.S. debt held by China.
Second Rule of Cloud Computing Use: Never assume that you have any guarantee of access to anything in the cloud.
Keep in mind that the Rules of Cloud Computing Use are a necessary because of the Three Laws of Cloud Computing:
I see a lot of venting and ranting, but not a lot of info about what actually has or has not happened. No one seems to have noticed some of these Web sites are up and running.
copyright.gov is up
DOJ is up
RIAA seems to be down
MPAA is up
UMG is down
BMI is down
OK, now that we've got those facts sorted out, the next question is who cares?
This isn't like a DDOS attack against Amazon or Google. None of these organizations, government or otherwise, depend on their Web sites to transact business. Copyright.gov is an informational resource that contains reference material you can find in many other places. No one cares if it's down. Did you even know it existed before it allegedly went down? Justice.gov exists to inform the people about what the department is doing. That's it. If Anonymous wants to raise awareness about the DOJ's activities, taking their site down has the opposite effect, and does not hurt the DOJ. When was the last time you visited the MPAA or RIAA site? Is that where you're going to look to decide what movie you want to see tomorrow, or what music you're going to buy on iTunes? And UMG and BMI's businesses don't depend on their Web sites... their music is marketed and sold elsewhere.
We've known for about 12 years now that it's really not that hard in the scheme of things to DDOS even the biggest sites on the Web. Remember the shocking 3-hour attack on Yahoo in Feb 2000? The prevailing thought then was, "If they can shut down Yahoo, they can shut down anybody." This was a legitimate concern because with its site down, Yahoo's business does not exist. But these attacks are being directed at sites where it really doesn't matter. All it does it generate a scary-sounding news headline. Some of Anonymous's other antics have some real world implications for their targets... this does not.
I've been looking for a good way to create ePub files for my iPad for some time now. I use a number of different reference materials I've created for myself and others in environments where you're simply not going to have Internet access, and the iPad has been an ideal tool for this. The iBooks Author app is free, looks well-polished (like Pages and Keynote) and seems interesting with its promises of easily-implemented interactivity. I'm a little concerned about how the HTML widgets will be used... the idea of having content in a book that's always up to date is intriguing... but if you are somewhere you don't have Internet access will it display the last version seen or a 404 Not Found error message?
The app is available now on the Mac App Store, but it's worth noting that it's only available for the Mac and only runs on OS X Lion.
A limited remedy if issues arise as a result of an enthusiast's decision to enable overclocking, for a modest fee.
Just how limited is this remedy? For this modest fee, do they send an engineer in a bunny suit to your home/office to laugh at you and suggest that you not do that again?
I spent most of my formative years in a good, well-funded public school district. When I was in elementary school, computer class meant there was an Apple IIe available for each kid to use (and a futuristic-looking Apple IIgs in the corner that we could look at but never touch). We mostly played games that involved directing Algernon through a maze to a piece of cheese or fitting pieces of machinery together to solve a problem. I joined the math club because it met an hour before school in the computer room, and I'd intentionally write down wrong answers to the five math problems so I could spend most of that hour playing with the computers.
In seventh grade, computer class meant there was a Mac LC II for every kid to use. We'd spend the class time doing word processing or desktop publishing. The teacher allowed students free use of the computers for an hour or two after school every day, and I took advantage of it. I discovered Beyond Zork, played way too many games of Michael Casteel's Klondike (when I moved to Silicon Valley years later I had to make a pilgrimage to the Sunnyvale address where it was developed) and played with literally every element of the software to figure out what I could make it do.
In eighth grade I spent a year in a good but very-poorly-funded school district where computer class meant there were five Apple IIs to be shared among 25 students. We were assigned the task of creating a word processing document, typing one paragraph of text, and saving it to a 5.25" floppy. We would take turns doing this while the other four people watched and the teacher went around reviewing our progress, coaching students through mistakes. I zipped through mine quickly and taught the others in my group how to do it and then we'd sit there for the last 30 min of class. While I sat there with my head on the table, bored out of my mind, I noticed a book on BASIC on the shelf below the windows. I asked the teacher if I could read it, and started writing my own BASIC programs. Seeing my progress and interest, he told me I could borrow it until I had finished it, and I did. I'd read it as I walked to and from school in the snow, and I'd lay on my bed writing programs on loose leaf. In class I'd hurry the other students in my group through their exercises so I could enter my programs and try them out.
I returned to my old school the next year, but I had a greater appreciation for access to computers and spent my time on them writing code instead of playing games. I never had a computer at home until my senior year of high school because my father insisted he would only buy a Windows box because "Macs aren't real computers."
Do I imagine everyone learns to program this way? No. But I do believe programming is not something that lends itself to being taught in a classroom as a standard lesson. There should be classes that expose students to just enough to draw the attention of those who are so inclined, and then provide avenues for those who are interested to continue to explore and grow. But programmers need to be driven, inquisitive, problem solving, and somewhat solitary. Being spoon-fed lessons in a classroom doesn't create effective programmers because in reality no one is going to spoon feed you solutions to problems -- you're paid to come up with solutions. If your employer or customers wanted solutions someone else has already come up with, they'd buy a box off the shelf for less money.
That said, I'm open to the possibility that I could be wrong and this could be a great way to train a superstar class of programmers. To those who think this is a great idea, what sort of curriculum would you suggest for it? What classes would you prescribe to give freshmen a solid base, sophomores and juniors something to build upon that base, and seniors something advanced to challenge and refine them?
You know, there's reason to believe the dinosaurs drove SUVs too. They used up all the fossil fuels, so mother nature introduced the concept of E85, resulting in them burning up their food supply and driving themselves to extinction so the fossil fuels they used up would be replenished in a million years. We only think an asteroid hit and kicked up enough dust to block out the sun and start an ice age. It wasn't dust... It was smog!
BBC reports that Sweden is allowing one citizen per week to take control of its official Twitter feed, in what's been described as 'the world's most democratic Twitter experiment.'
Democratic? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. According to Wikipedia:
Democracy in its purest or most ideal form would be a society in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives.
So it's not Democratic at all unless you let everyone vote on each Twitter post, which would make it American Idol: Sweden Edition. Instead, this is more like some MTV reality show where everyone sits at home and says, "huh... so that's what the country would be like if this moron was running things... thank goodness he's not... maybe next week will be different and meaningful" every week. A little advice to all you folks in Sweden: we tried this in the U.S. already. We called it the second Bush presidency.
I think they're missing the mark here. Just because social networks are juicy, low-hanging fruit doesn't mean they're going to find terrorists using them. Aren't most terrorists characterized by their anti-social behavior? People who have lots of social connections are less likely to have a desire to carry out a terrorist attack than someone who is isolated, anti-social and bitter. They're not going to find a terrorist plot posted on someone's wall with a time stamp and a description of the atrocities the person is mulling over. They ought to be looking at sites frequented by anti-social people who are isolated and bitter, like Sl... On second thought, Facebook sounds like a great resource to monitor!
Patient: "Hebho bhoctor, bhat dho I habh?"
Doctor: "Well, it looks like you have a genetic predisposition to paying exorbitant sums of money for things you don't need. It's called Gullibility. Don't be so sad, it's very common in this country, like a cancer! Just remember that even though it eats some people alive, some people survive! You just need to have balls like Lance Armstrong, avoid drugs and wear yellow shirts in the summertime. That will be $1000. Now that I know what to look for, I can zero in on this and accurately determine the likelihood of recurrence if we sequence your DNA just one more time and you give me your debit card pin number."
The next day...
It means that Facebook is going to buy Walgreens or CVS, install these machines in every location and offer sequencing for free (as in you'll have to watch ads during the procedure and they will copyright your DNA). While you are strapped into a chair, a button you cannot reach will light up and you will be invited to opt out of their plan to sell your DNA, simply by pushing the lighted button. This might not seem like a big deal until Zynga targets you with some pointless free game that you are genetically predisposed to become addicted to (free as in you can do absolutely nothing even faster if you give them money).
This product is high glossy, Please be careful of surface scratch while installation. Make sure to brush off the dirt on the provided cloth before cleaning the cabinet. For cleaning the front cabinet, make sure you use only the provided cloth on which to spray water 4 to 6 times before wiping it out softly in one direction. After cleaning, wipe cabinet to remove any moisture
So it sounds to me like they're making a big deal about my TV not being waterproof. They're even telling me I can't spray water on the screen directly, I must spray water on their magic cloth no more than 6 times, and even then promptly wipe away what little moisture that puts on the frame around the screen. Then there's a diagram showing me that I must wipe the frame of the TV in a counterclockwise motion. Apparently the screen itself cannot be cleaned with even a damp cloth... So this must be a real issue.
So they should have this ready for practical applications in the consumer market right about the same time hard drive component manufacturing becomes available and, coincidentally, about the same time the hard drive industry jumps on the Thunderbolt bandwagon. Perhaps this trifecta will also coincide with the Third Coming of Steve Jobs -- with no hard drives available, almost no one using his new Thunderbolt, and no ability to store his entire movie collection on one hard drive, he figured he'd leave Earth for a while and come back when we were ready for him.
Anyone else pick up on the note in TFA about how this technology uses 96 bits to make one byte of data? I wonder if the drive sizes will be advertised in bits to make them seem even more ridiculously impressive!
I cannot think of a company I have ever detested as much as I detest AT&T.
If you find that this keeps you up at night, might I suggest opening an account with Comcast (when their cable modem died they said they had to send a tech out to fix it, it would take three weeks, and I would continue to be billed for the service they could not provide... Then they actually told me I was bluffing when I asked to be connected with someone who could close my account) or Wells Fargo (they charged me $2 for asking what their branch hours were, and their answer was "we don't know")? Then you can have warm and fuzzy intellectual debates about which one is worst. Enjoy!
Going to Mars was cool last century. This century our priorities have shifted and we can't put humans in orbit of this planet without making them honorary cosmonauts.
If you want to get people interested in going to Mars, you need to start by erasing the memory of the film "Mission To Mars" from the public consciousness. The very thought of going to Mars now triggers a knee-jerk reaction of: "Wait... didn't Quinn Mallory, Ken Mattingly and Merlin already do this? And it sucked?" It might be easier to simply rename Mars and make it sound like we're going somewhere new and exciting, like Pandora. Then we can start thinking about this again.
Ironically, I recently went to an urgent care facility and was seen by an MD who listened to the first few words out of my mouth, was in too much of a rush to listen past that, looked in my ear, pronounced my diagnosis, prescribed medication and hurried out the door to see her next patient. A week later, my condition worsened and I got a second opinion from someone who actually listened to me describe the problem, and found out that not only was the diagnosis wrong, the medication she prescribed was having the opposite effect of what was needed. It may actually have done permanent damage.
So a year ago, I would have said I'd be more comfortable with an MD. Now I'd place a higher premium on someone with a good listener badge.
Actually, I'm not sure if that's still considered irony. I think they simply call it "Managed Healthcare" these days.
Apparently this is a recurring problem for Google. On Sept 27, 2010, a French court convicted Google and Eric Schmidt of criminal defamation (discussion of it and why it wouldn't happen in the U.S. here) for Google's suggest function. The fact that over a year later they're facing this again means (a) they were expecting this to happen and have apparently decided it's part of the cost of doing business in France, and (b) the company suing them has many lawyers who were surely aware of this and saw a neat way to make some money and censor negative opinions.
This explains why they kept getting closer and closer to windows. Maybe now that they've realized this isn't the way to go they can get back on track.
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Maybe if they took the phone outside they'd get better results. All the imperfections in the windows are probably cutting into the amount of actual power the device gets.
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Thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the veal.
Normally a drunk or drowsy person would run off the road and either be jolted awake by the rumble strips or hit a tree/guardrail/ditch/etc. It sounds morbid, but they are the only ones injured or killed.
This new system defeats the purpose of the rumble strips by preventing your from getting to them and keeps you on the road until you hit someone else. It turns a dangerous, incapacitated driver's vehicle into a guided missile. This is a very bad thing. I'm not at all convinced the a vibrating steering wheel will wake them up... Rumble strips violently rock the whole car and make a loud, disturbing noise.