Yeah; reread it and look for descriptions of her. Remember her profession.
Of course, not a lot was actually made of her nudity. It wasn't all that relevant to most of the plot, so you could consider it gratuitous.
And I did wondered if it wasn't a bit of an anomaly. After all, a nude, hairless human would be rather exposed to the weather, and the Ringworld does have weather. It would actually make more sense if she had worn an assortment of (revealing) clothing, depending on current weather conditions. The alternative would seem to be a good layer of insulation (implying a chubby form that wasn't mentioned) and the ability to rapidly modify the metabolism to generate or suppress internal heat (also not mentioned).
But it's Niven's story, not mine, so I won't be too critical.
Well, it'll be interesting to see who gets cast as Prill. They'll have to find an acress who will agree to 1) having all her hair removed, and 2) being nude for the entire movie.
Actually, I get email every day telling me about such actresses, and pictures of them appear on my screen at random times when I click on links. So I suppose the only real question is whether the movie can get less than an X rating.
Or maybe they can try to drop her from the movie. They might figure they've got enough love interest in Teela, assuming that the Hollywood people know about her. Then they'd just have the problem of who to cast as Hindmost. (We can make him a humanoid with weird ears, right?)
It'll be interesting when they get to Ringworld Throne, whose plot makes significant use of rishathra.
The stability is also arguable, and its perception will differ from person to person.
I've had to kill firefox and restart it a few times because it went berserk, gobbling up all the spare cpu, etc. In some cases, I've managed to get enough time (cpu and mine) to shut down tabs one at a time until the usage drops, and got some data on what was causing it.
The single most common thiing that the problem pages have in common is that they contained a flash ad. Firefox does have a gimmick for not running those annoying GIF "movies", and you can disable the javascript that causes a lot of cpu gobbling. But there's still no way that I can find to disable flash. Some flash ads aren't cpu eaters, but even then, if you have 30 tabs open, 15 flash ads can be a problem. And some flash ads are a disaster all by themselves.
So is there any work on fixing this? To be useful, it would have to be set up to permit running single flash images, like some browsers can block images but let you click on one to download it. I've dug around in the firefox info, but haven't found any mention of this.
I suppose popups were a higher priority. But now that popup blocking is implemented, maybe that code could be cloned to implement a similar flash-blocking feature.
The Apple ad didn't have much substance either.... But it sure sold a shitload of computers. Would that this ad did so well.
Heh. Now if you could only buy FireFox...
Actually, it might be fun to see the effect of mozilla.org setting up a firefox purchase plan. "Ordinarily FireFox is free, but if your purchasing department can't handle that, we can sell it to you for a low, low price."
This might go over well in the corporate world, if it came with a "support" service. This has worked well for Red Hat. The service would probably be in the form of email and a novice-user newsgroup. The only special non-free service might be regular emails notifying subscribers of new releases, new plugins, new extensions, security upgrades, etc. Computer-literate users would know how to find this stuff for free, of course (especially if they read/., where it's all announced;-). But I can see corporate users finding such a notification service useful, to simplify their support people's task.
And a bit of support money could encourage mozilla.org to expand the online firefox docs. They're fairly good already, but it's easy to find questions that aren't answered. (E.g., what are all the magic keyboard inputs, and just what do they do? If there's a list somewhere, it's very well hidden.) Maybe we could bribe the firefox insiders to fill in the missing indormation and polish up the new-user help info.
And we could use a firefox sales price as the basis of more in-crowd jokes about the clueless lusers...
Heh. I've been trying to figure out which world it is. It doesn't look like one I've ever visited. I wonder if it's inhabitants would approve of what this fox is doing to their world?
Popularity hasn't affected Apache httpd, so I wouldn't worry about FireFox so much.
Actually, popularity has had one very significant effect on apache: It has produced a large population of "eyes" in the heads of tech-savvy users who are constantly on the lookout for problems. And the open-source nature of apache means that those same users also tend to submit the fixes when they find a potential problem. So problems get fixed before the script kiddies can produce an exploit.
And we should be worrying about firefox's security right now. Actually, lots of the same tech-savvy users have been doing this for a couple of years. But whether or not there have been serious problems yet, we should be worrying and looking for problems. As with apache, we have the code available, and we can produce fixes before the exploits appear in the wild.
This really isn't possible with closed-source software, which is why both apache and firefox will probably continue to have very few exploitable security holes, while IIS and IE will still have them years from now.
In short, the reason that apache and firefox have good security records is that their users have worried about them. We should keep this up, no matter how good they look.
Well, the US Homeland Security folks protect us from terrorists by banning fingernail clippers on airplanes. Your head is probably a lot more dangerous. Especially if you have a thick skull, since you could bang it against the pilot's head and knock him unconscious.
Remember the security folk's list of "something you know, something you have, something you are". Sounds like you've got them all covered with one head. But then, maybe the rest of us do, too.
... current prestigious journals ARE NOT going to go to a low/no cost format for publishing online until there are one or two major competitors who are seen as valid (peer-review) and prestigious.
Perhaps. But it may happen sooner than you think.
Presumably I don't have to describe Science and Nature to anyone here, other than to note that both are peer-reviewed and prestigious. Both are fully available online now. At present, they are obviously in a transitional state. As of 2004, you can get full online access only if you're a "member", and in both cases, membership includes a print copy of their flagship journal. (Both organizations produce a number of other journals.)
This is clearly transitional, because like most computer-fluent subscribers, I've found that the printed copy mostly just sits on a table now until I throw it away. Their web sites are good enough that I can read them from my Mac about as easily as from the printed copy. And I can copy-and-paste passages to email, something that comes in very handy at times. And I can get to previous issues from anywhere that I have Net access.
Like most subscribers, I don't save the printed copies, because they're weekly (and thick), and I simply don't have the storage space for all the years that I'd like to have kept. It seems obvious to me that the sensible thing to do is to offer subscribers like me an online-only membership, for a price that's discounted by the printing and mailing costs.
My guess is that they'll start doing this within a year or so.
(They may have already, but their online subscription/membership information is sufficiently confusing that I can't tell.;-)
Good point. Maybe they've been working on solving the problems of terrorists using the maps for nefarious purposes, by making the maps so inaccurate that terrorists will end up at the wrong address.
Now, this might sound like a joke, but such things have been done.
The only real argument against it is the old advice that one shouldn't attribute to malice something that can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Maybe it wasn't pointless. For example, you generally can't use copy-and-paste to copy part of the text to another window. This is done for a couple of reasons. The obvious one is copyright protection, since it makes exact copying difficult. But a more important use is to interfere with criticism, which often requires copying significant chunks of text to explain what's being criticised.
For example, consider the following paragraph (which I've laboriously retyped:
Your eye has a lot of depth of field. Everything you see is sharp and in focus. The laws of physics make it impossible for a camera to do this.
I'd originally intended to comment on this, and the comment could well go here. This paragraph is rather discrediting to any reader who knows any physics at all. Your eye and your camera are subject to exactly the same laws of physics, and photons don't change their behavior for either one. Fact is, your eye doesn't have an infinite depth of field; it just has a very fast "autofocus". And it's difficult for most humans to look at something without automatically focusing on the subject of interest. The only real difference with a camera is that the picture preserves the focus from when the picture was taken, so you can look at the out-of-focus portions easily. It takes training (that most people don't have) to do the same with your eyes.
Anyway, I'd consider this paragraph a "howler" that instantly discredits the rest of the text. I'd suggest that it be rewritten in some way that's not blatantly incorrect (to someone with a bit of knowledge of optics).
It even gets worse in the next paragraph, which starts "A digital SLR has a shallow depth of field,...". Um, no; it's the lense, primarily the iris opening (f-stop) that gives the depth of field. The camera itself doesn't have a depth of field. With an SLR, this isn't trivial. One of the important features of such cameras is interchangable lenses. This article is comparing SLRs with "Standard" cameras, so it's important to distinguish camera properties from lens properties.
OK, so this was aimed at the PHB, not anyone with even a minimum of knowledge of optics. So I'm pissed for having my time wasted like this by an abstract that promises more than it delivers. I suppose I should have known the second I saw the white space and the flash, and hit the Back button. I'll go away now.
Go to a newsstand and check how many publications use 30% whitespace on their pages. It's just not practical to do that when your purpose is to present informative articles.
Exactly. When I see a page that is mostly white space, I immediately conclude that the author isn't particularly interested in imparting information. And the author also doesn't care that I may have other windows (such as this one to generate a message) on the screen. I don't need anthing but the one page, because nothing else I have is nearly as important.
Of course, lots of "news" sources commit this sin, too. Look at how much of nytimes.com's pages are full of boilerplate and padding (and ads, of course). It's difficult to get as much as 50% of their web pages to show actual article content. And they're supposed to be one of the top news sources?
There is absolutely no reason that we can't have an honest and reliable election system in this country.
Actually, there are two major reasons: the Republican Party, and the Democratic Party.
It used to be that the Democrats were the dominant party, and also the one that was well known for widespread voting fraud. But the Republicans seem to have learned, and have taken the lead in both areas.
Why you would have a maximum number of votes for a machine AT ALL.
Because talks with the client have made it clear that they want a way to limit the number of votes in certain "problem" precincts with a history of voting "problems", and you won't get the sale unless this feature is included.
Bill Clinton... got a blowjob and lied about it so that his wife wouldn't find out.
So where in the world did you grow up?
When I was a boy growing up in the US, one of the firm lessons that was drilled into us was that a guy with any brains wouldn't "kiss and tell". We had a name for such a guy; we called him a "jerk". If you wanted the slightest chance with the chicks, you'd keep very quiet about what you did with them in private. I understood all this at an early age, perhaps because most of my good friends were of the female persuasion. I suspect that this was true for Bill Clinton, too. Talking about your sex life would get you a bad rep and cut your chances.
Bill was just being a normal American guy who likes women and wants to "protect their reputation", as the saying goes. And his choice of a wife tells us that he sees women for who they are, not just for their bod. "Yeah, he fools around with bimbos. But look at the woman he married. What a man!"
When the stories about Bill's sex life started coming out, we also heard the reports about 80% of American women having dreams (or daydreams) of sex with him. As an experiment, I tried mentioning the above explanation to various women. Invariably, they'd grin. Quite a few of them said that this was one reason they dreamed about sex with him.
Sorry, but outside of the most extreme anti-sex right-winger crowds, Bill's secrecy about what he and Monica were doing was not only not criminal in any way; it was the expected behavior of a fellow who wants to avoid the "jerk" label. It was highly honorable behavior.
If you think otherwise, you're simply announcing an extremist anti-sex attitude, probably having something to do with extremist religious beliefs.
As for the "lying to Congress" charge; Congress had no business asking him about his private sex life. That was underhanded politics in the extreme, and it's a lot of why so many people are dismissing the Republican party as a gang of radical fundamentalists now. No honorable American male would even think of asking such things in a public forum. When the Senate Republicans did so, it merely told us that they are a bunch of jerks.
(We would gossip about him in private, of course. But we'd never expect Bill to tell us the truth. A grin and a chuckle would do. Nudge, nudge; wink; wink.;-)
All the reports just after the election claimed that these votes were lost because the machine ran out of memory. Now we're reading the explanation that someone set a max-votes limit to 3000.
Are the reporters really so clueless that they don't understand the difference? Or maybe they do understand, but half of them are trying to put something over on us?
I notice that TFA's explanation is "... an exhausted poll worker failed to notice a "memory full" caption on a machine,...". But the slashdot abstract says "... setting the machine to record a maximum of three thousand votes...", which conflicts with the article's explanation.
Actually, if you consider the US East Coast ("BosWash", the Boston-to-Washington corridor), and a 100-mile-wide strip along the West Coast, the population densities and areas are comparable to Japan and Northwestern Europe. And the technophile population of those areas is comparable to Japan's and Europe's. So you'd think that the infrastructure would have been built up in those two parts of the US as they have been in Japan.
Lots has been written about why this isn't true. The common explanation seems to be the unwillingness of US businesses to plan for anything beyond the current quarter. American corporations don't make long-term investments any more. They want to know what will be a sure source of profit in the very short term. Anything risky is left for someone else to develop.
Not really. Much of the fun of core wars is documenting the battle and figuring out why particular competitors have won. Core wars is generally played out on a machine set up for just that purpose, and the competitors are known beforehand.
With malware, the battle is generally hidden, and you can't learn much from it. You just know that something's happened, because innocent bystanders (i.e., the software you want to run) has been injured in the battle. And you didn't volunteer your machine as a battlefield.
... it would give us hope that someone will finally remember that the only winning move is not to play.
Unfortunately, the effect of this was demoed nearly a decade ago, by none other than Microsoft, who has never been punished for their actions.
When the first version of Windows Media Player came out, all the reviewers reported that after they'd tested it, they found all their other audio software was dead and had to be re-installed. And if they left any piece of WMP in their machine, any time it ran, all the non-MS audio software would again die and you'd have to reinstall it.
My wife found out about this the hard way. She had some nice audio software. Then she installed some financial software (not from Microsoft). It silently installed WMP as a "bonus". All her quality audio software was broken. She reinstalled, but eventually gave up, because neither of us could figure out how to uninstall WMP. And it eventually developed an even more annoying behavior: When you started upsome audio using a high-quality player, WMP would start up in parallel. The two renditions would both come out of the speakers, out of sync by a couple seconds.
She's now a very happy Mac user. She gave me her Windows box, and it's mostly turned off, except when I need to test something (mostly web pages) against Windows software.
Anyway, in such cases "not to play" means you don't even try to sell your software to Windows users. It doesn't matter whether you were a good guy and cooperated with the others. WMP will kill you anyway.
I know a number of audio-software developers who have become rather depressed by this. They can get put on MS's "good guys" list, of course, by selling the control of their software to MS. But they seem to have this silly idea that they should be able to build and sell their own software.
There's really no reason that the spy/malware folks should ever stop shooting down other software. The only real solution is to keep their software out entirely. Or maybe jail them. I wouldn't think you'd need any new laws. Vandalism is already illegal everywhere. But such laws aren't enforced for software.
I wonder if a vandalism charge could be successful against WMP?
The idea being they'll wean their customers into thinking of their brand name as being equivalent to the IBM brand name. They have five years to do so -- an eternity in Internet time.
Well, I dunno about this. I just came out of working for a couple of years on a project to wean a big corporation (which shall remain nameless to protect the clueless;-) from their old mainframe systems to a flock of networked linux servers. It was interesting to hear from the sales ("client liaison";-) guys what it took to persuade the suits to pay us to do it.
One "interesting" problem was that their people mostly have Windows 98 machines on their desks. These are the advanced ones, actually; many still use W95. I'm not kidding. They might have some XP boxes in another decade, but I wouldn't bet a lot of money on it.
Another interesting aspect is that their desktop machines mostly have an IBM logo. This is because the management are primarily of the school that consider "computer" and "IBM machine" to be synonyms. They look with trepidation at companies like Dell and Gateway, because they're not IBM, so their machines are just toys, not real computers.
How pervasive this view can be is indicated by the ruse that the sales guys used to get them to accept the idea of linux. They introduced the suits IBM's online sales sites, and showed them that "linux is an IBM product". No, I'm not kidding. They think of linux as an IBM business-management system. We actually used RedHat, and the question of how RedHat is related to IBM was glossed over. The management there mostly thinks they are migrating to the new kind of networked computing that IBM invented.
This management team is highly unlikely to ever sign off on a Lenovo purchase, because they'll always want real computers, and real computers come from IBM. A few non-IBM desktop and laptop machines may be purchased, but only for flunkies. Managers will want a real computer on their desk, and real computers have an IBM logo.
It might be interesting to see data on just how widespread this attitude is. I know I've seen lots of anecdotal evidence that a great many business schools still instill this attitude in their students. This is mostly done tacitly, by never mentioning any other vendor. Microsoft can sell to their graduates mostly because there's a great deal of confusion about whether Microsoft is a part of IBM. (After all, you can see from IBM's web sites that both Windows and Linux are IBM products.;-)
And I'll say again, I'm not kidding.
Of course, outside North America and Western Europe, we may well be reaching the point where a phrase such as "a giant American corporation like IBM or Microsoft" is used to scare people. So in the other 80% of the world, Lenovo may well be the future.
... other problems... like only have a single mouse button...
I have a PB, and I've wondered about the single button. If you try pressing it at different points, you'll find that it acts like a rocker switch. If you press the left edge, it goes down, you get a click, and the right edge goes up slightly. Similarly, if you press the center, you get a click, but the edges don't go down very much.
So it sure looks like it has at least three physically-different "click" states. What I wonder is whether the software can distinguish these. If so, it's really a 3-button mouse, and OSX is treating all three of the "buttons" as identical.
Anyone know about this? A program can distinguish the left-shift and right-shift keys, and also the left-CMD and right-CMD keys, as on most keyboards. Is there a way to get distinguishable left-click, center-click and right-click events from the button bar?
(Meanwhile, my wife has worked with CAD systems, and sometimes complains about not having a 16-button mouse. There are so many things you can do with one, especially if it also has a reticle.;-)
The actual innocence of you actions has no influence on whether you will be investigated, suspected, or harrased by the intelligence community.... Just be happy that you have nothing to hide.
Heh. Funny story: Back in the 70's, when I was a grad student, I lived for a while in the top floor of a triple-decker. The second floor was occupied by a fellow who was quite active in radical politics. Nice guy. We talked occasionally. He had a policy of never paying his phone bill, and his phone was never cut off. He suggested that my phone was probably tapped, too, but we had no way of proving that either way.
One week, there was a phone-worker strike. The phone company publicised the fact that there would be no phone repairs for the duration, except to official and/or emergency lines.
On Friday, my phone started having problems, and was hardly usable. I called the phone company from the phone downstairs and told them about it, and they said it might be a while before they could get to it because of the strike.
Early the next morning, a couple of phone guys showed up at the door to look at the phone. They found and fixed the problem. I thanked them, and they left.
I started telling people about this, and everyone was really impressed. "Wow; how'd you get on their list?" The fellow downstairs just grinned. It gave me some real cred in the academic community.
The really fun part was that several female friends decided to start calling and starting discussions that would really turn on any listeners. I'll leave the details to your imagination. Some of them also decided they should come over and act out some of the discussions, with lots of sound effects for the benefit of any hidden mikes in my apartment. We never knew whether there were any mikes, but we had fun acting on the possibility.
I wonder if they still have any of those recordings in my files ?
Watching video content is not a right, it is a privledge.
Perhaps, perhaps not; it depends on your local laws.
But there is one thing that's farily consistent in the laws everywhere: If someone sells me something that doesn't work for me, and they didn't describe it well enough that I could tell before the sale that it wouldn't work, it is fraud. Wherever you live, your legal language has a term for fraud. There are often special laws for what in English is called "consumer fraud", i.e., businesses tricking someone into buying something different from what they thought they were buying.
Some CDs and DV DVDs have labels on the outside that say what equipment they play on; most don't. If you buy them via a web site, such warnings are almost never visible before you buy. It's fairly common for vendors to make it very difficult to get a refund in such cases. This is clearly intentional fraud. "We've got that sucker's money; we don't care whether he can use what we sold him."
And in a lot of the world, if you sell me a recording of any sort, you can't prosecute me if I watch it. Even if I have to modify my equipment (e.g. by modifying the hardware or by writing a bit of code) to do so. But in some parts of the world, such modifications are illegal. When government outlaw such actions by customers, they are openly and knowingly supporting consumer fraud by the sellers of recordings.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah; reread it and look for descriptions of her. Remember her profession.
Of course, not a lot was actually made of her nudity. It wasn't all that relevant to most of the plot, so you could consider it gratuitous.
And I did wondered if it wasn't a bit of an anomaly. After all, a nude, hairless human would be rather exposed to the weather, and the Ringworld does have weather. It would actually make more sense if she had worn an assortment of (revealing) clothing, depending on current weather conditions. The alternative would seem to be a good layer of insulation (implying a chubby form that wasn't mentioned) and the ability to rapidly modify the metabolism to generate or suppress internal heat (also not mentioned).
But it's Niven's story, not mine, so I won't be too critical.
I believe Ringworld has entered production.
...
Well, it'll be interesting to see who gets cast as Prill. They'll have to find an acress who will agree to 1) having all her hair removed, and 2) being nude for the entire movie.
Actually, I get email every day telling me about such actresses, and pictures of them appear on my screen at random times when I click on links. So I suppose the only real question is whether the movie can get less than an X rating.
Or maybe they can try to drop her from the movie. They might figure they've got enough love interest in Teela, assuming that the Hollywood people know about her. Then they'd just have the problem of who to cast as Hindmost. (We can make him a humanoid with weird ears, right?)
It'll be interesting when they get to Ringworld Throne, whose plot makes significant use of rishathra.
OK, Ringworld fans, go wild
The stability is also arguable, and its perception will differ from person to person.
I've had to kill firefox and restart it a few times because it went berserk, gobbling up all the spare cpu, etc. In some cases, I've managed to get enough time (cpu and mine) to shut down tabs one at a time until the usage drops, and got some data on what was causing it.
The single most common thiing that the problem pages have in common is that they contained a flash ad. Firefox does have a gimmick for not running those annoying GIF "movies", and you can disable the javascript that causes a lot of cpu gobbling. But there's still no way that I can find to disable flash. Some flash ads aren't cpu eaters, but even then, if you have 30 tabs open, 15 flash ads can be a problem. And some flash ads are a disaster all by themselves.
So is there any work on fixing this? To be useful, it would have to be set up to permit running single flash images, like some browsers can block images but let you click on one to download it. I've dug around in the firefox info, but haven't found any mention of this.
I suppose popups were a higher priority. But now that popup blocking is implemented, maybe that code could be cloned to implement a similar flash-blocking feature.
The Apple ad didn't have much substance either. ... But it sure sold a shitload of computers. Would that this ad did so well.
...
/., where it's all announced ;-). But I can see corporate users finding such a notification service useful, to simplify their support people's task.
...
Heh. Now if you could only buy FireFox
Actually, it might be fun to see the effect of mozilla.org setting up a firefox purchase plan. "Ordinarily FireFox is free, but if your purchasing department can't handle that, we can sell it to you for a low, low price."
This might go over well in the corporate world, if it came with a "support" service. This has worked well for Red Hat. The service would probably be in the form of email and a novice-user newsgroup. The only special non-free service might be regular emails notifying subscribers of new releases, new plugins, new extensions, security upgrades, etc. Computer-literate users would know how to find this stuff for free, of course (especially if they read
And a bit of support money could encourage mozilla.org to expand the online firefox docs. They're fairly good already, but it's easy to find questions that aren't answered. (E.g., what are all the magic keyboard inputs, and just what do they do? If there's a list somewhere, it's very well hidden.) Maybe we could bribe the firefox insiders to fill in the missing indormation and polish up the new-user help info.
And we could use a firefox sales price as the basis of more in-crowd jokes about the clueless lusers
Heh. I've been trying to figure out which world it is. It doesn't look like one I've ever visited. I wonder if it's inhabitants would approve of what this fox is doing to their world?
Popularity hasn't affected Apache httpd, so I wouldn't worry about FireFox so much.
Actually, popularity has had one very significant effect on apache: It has produced a large population of "eyes" in the heads of tech-savvy users who are constantly on the lookout for problems. And the open-source nature of apache means that those same users also tend to submit the fixes when they find a potential problem. So problems get fixed before the script kiddies can produce an exploit.
And we should be worrying about firefox's security right now. Actually, lots of the same tech-savvy users have been doing this for a couple of years. But whether or not there have been serious problems yet, we should be worrying and looking for problems. As with apache, we have the code available, and we can produce fixes before the exploits appear in the wild.
This really isn't possible with closed-source software, which is why both apache and firefox will probably continue to have very few exploitable security holes, while IIS and IE will still have them years from now.
In short, the reason that apache and firefox have good security records is that their users have worried about them. We should keep this up, no matter how good they look.
Well, the US Homeland Security folks protect us from terrorists by banning fingernail clippers on airplanes. Your head is probably a lot more dangerous. Especially if you have a thick skull, since you could bang it against the pilot's head and knock him unconscious.
Remember the security folk's list of "something you know, something you have, something you are". Sounds like you've got them all covered with one head. But then, maybe the rest of us do, too.
A working head can be a dangerous thing.
... current prestigious journals ARE NOT going to go to a low/no cost format for publishing online until there are one or two major competitors who are seen as valid (peer-review) and prestigious.
;-)
Perhaps. But it may happen sooner than you think.
Presumably I don't have to describe Science and Nature to anyone here, other than to note that both are peer-reviewed and prestigious. Both are fully available online now. At present, they are obviously in a transitional state. As of 2004, you can get full online access only if you're a "member", and in both cases, membership includes a print copy of their flagship journal. (Both organizations produce a number of other journals.)
This is clearly transitional, because like most computer-fluent subscribers, I've found that the printed copy mostly just sits on a table now until I throw it away. Their web sites are good enough that I can read them from my Mac about as easily as from the printed copy. And I can copy-and-paste passages to email, something that comes in very handy at times. And I can get to previous issues from anywhere that I have Net access.
Like most subscribers, I don't save the printed copies, because they're weekly (and thick), and I simply don't have the storage space for all the years that I'd like to have kept. It seems obvious to me that the sensible thing to do is to offer subscribers like me an online-only membership, for a price that's discounted by the printing and mailing costs.
My guess is that they'll start doing this within a year or so.
(They may have already, but their online subscription/membership information is sufficiently confusing that I can't tell.
Good point. Maybe they've been working on solving the problems of terrorists using the maps for nefarious purposes, by making the maps so inaccurate that terrorists will end up at the wrong address.
Now, this might sound like a joke, but such things have been done.
The only real argument against it is the old advice that one shouldn't attribute to malice something that can be adequately explained by stupidity.
So it's now illegal in the UK to possess a street map of London?
After all, such a map could be very useful to a terrorist intent on terrorizing some place.
I was over there a few months back, and I saw lots of street maps for sale at the airport. I wonder if those vendors have been arrested yet?
Maybe it wasn't pointless. For example, you generally can't use copy-and-paste to copy part of the text to another window. This is done for a couple of reasons. The obvious one is copyright protection, since it makes exact copying difficult. But a more important use is to interfere with criticism, which often requires copying significant chunks of text to explain what's being criticised.
For example, consider the following paragraph (which I've laboriously retyped:
I'd originally intended to comment on this, and the comment could well go here. This paragraph is rather discrediting to any reader who knows any physics at all. Your eye and your camera are subject to exactly the same laws of physics, and photons don't change their behavior for either one. Fact is, your eye doesn't have an infinite depth of field; it just has a very fast "autofocus". And it's difficult for most humans to look at something without automatically focusing on the subject of interest. The only real difference with a camera is that the picture preserves the focus from when the picture was taken, so you can look at the out-of-focus portions easily. It takes training (that most people don't have) to do the same with your eyes.
Anyway, I'd consider this paragraph a "howler" that instantly discredits the rest of the text. I'd suggest that it be rewritten in some way that's not blatantly incorrect (to someone with a bit of knowledge of optics).
It even gets worse in the next paragraph, which starts "A digital SLR has a shallow depth of field,
OK, so this was aimed at the PHB, not anyone with even a minimum of knowledge of optics. So I'm pissed for having my time wasted like this by an abstract that promises more than it delivers. I suppose I should have known the second I saw the white space and the flash, and hit the Back button. I'll go away now.
Go to a newsstand and check how many publications use 30% whitespace on their pages. It's just not practical to do that when your purpose is to present informative articles.
Exactly. When I see a page that is mostly white space, I immediately conclude that the author isn't particularly interested in imparting information. And the author also doesn't care that I may have other windows (such as this one to generate a message) on the screen. I don't need anthing but the one page, because nothing else I have is nearly as important.
Of course, lots of "news" sources commit this sin, too. Look at how much of nytimes.com's pages are full of boilerplate and padding (and ads, of course). It's difficult to get as much as 50% of their web pages to show actual article content. And they're supposed to be one of the top news sources?
There is absolutely no reason that we can't have an honest and reliable election system in this country.
Actually, there are two major reasons: the Republican Party, and the Democratic Party.
It used to be that the Democrats were the dominant party, and also the one that was well known for widespread voting fraud. But the Republicans seem to have learned, and have taken the lead in both areas.
Why you would have a maximum number of votes for a machine AT ALL.
Because talks with the client have made it clear that they want a way to limit the number of votes in certain "problem" precincts with a history of voting "problems", and you won't get the sale unless this feature is included.
Bill Clinton ... got a blowjob and lied about it so that his wife wouldn't find out.
;-)
...
So where in the world did you grow up?
When I was a boy growing up in the US, one of the firm lessons that was drilled into us was that a guy with any brains wouldn't "kiss and tell". We had a name for such a guy; we called him a "jerk". If you wanted the slightest chance with the chicks, you'd keep very quiet about what you did with them in private. I understood all this at an early age, perhaps because most of my good friends were of the female persuasion. I suspect that this was true for Bill Clinton, too. Talking about your sex life would get you a bad rep and cut your chances.
Bill was just being a normal American guy who likes women and wants to "protect their reputation", as the saying goes. And his choice of a wife tells us that he sees women for who they are, not just for their bod. "Yeah, he fools around with bimbos. But look at the woman he married. What a man!"
When the stories about Bill's sex life started coming out, we also heard the reports about 80% of American women having dreams (or daydreams) of sex with him. As an experiment, I tried mentioning the above explanation to various women. Invariably, they'd grin. Quite a few of them said that this was one reason they dreamed about sex with him.
Sorry, but outside of the most extreme anti-sex right-winger crowds, Bill's secrecy about what he and Monica were doing was not only not criminal in any way; it was the expected behavior of a fellow who wants to avoid the "jerk" label. It was highly honorable behavior.
If you think otherwise, you're simply announcing an extremist anti-sex attitude, probably having something to do with extremist religious beliefs.
As for the "lying to Congress" charge; Congress had no business asking him about his private sex life. That was underhanded politics in the extreme, and it's a lot of why so many people are dismissing the Republican party as a gang of radical fundamentalists now. No honorable American male would even think of asking such things in a public forum. When the Senate Republicans did so, it merely told us that they are a bunch of jerks.
(We would gossip about him in private, of course. But we'd never expect Bill to tell us the truth. A grin and a chuckle would do. Nudge, nudge; wink; wink.
Now back to bashing Wally O'Dell and company
All the reports just after the election claimed that these votes were lost because the machine ran out of memory. Now we're reading the explanation that someone set a max-votes limit to 3000.
...". But the slashdot abstract says "... setting the machine to record a maximum of three thousand votes ...", which conflicts with the article's explanation.
...
Are the reporters really so clueless that they don't understand the difference? Or maybe they do understand, but half of them are trying to put something over on us?
I notice that TFA's explanation is "... an exhausted poll worker failed to notice a "memory full" caption on a machine,
So which is it? Inquiring minds want to know
But can it ever escape the AOL user stigma?
Maybe. I hear that they've removed the code that automatically sends the "Me to!" messages.
Actually, if you consider the US East Coast ("BosWash", the Boston-to-Washington corridor), and a 100-mile-wide strip along the West Coast, the population densities and areas are comparable to Japan and Northwestern Europe. And the technophile population of those areas is comparable to Japan's and Europe's. So you'd think that the infrastructure would have been built up in those two parts of the US as they have been in Japan.
Lots has been written about why this isn't true. The common explanation seems to be the unwillingness of US businesses to plan for anything beyond the current quarter. American corporations don't make long-term investments any more. They want to know what will be a sure source of profit in the very short term. Anything risky is left for someone else to develop.
More fun than core wars
Not really. Much of the fun of core wars is documenting the battle and figuring out why particular competitors have won. Core wars is generally played out on a machine set up for just that purpose, and the competitors are known beforehand.
With malware, the battle is generally hidden, and you can't learn much from it. You just know that something's happened, because innocent bystanders (i.e., the software you want to run) has been injured in the battle. And you didn't volunteer your machine as a battlefield.
... it would give us hope that someone will finally remember that the only winning move is not to play.
Unfortunately, the effect of this was demoed nearly a decade ago, by none other than Microsoft, who has never been punished for their actions.
When the first version of Windows Media Player came out, all the reviewers reported that after they'd tested it, they found all their other audio software was dead and had to be re-installed. And if they left any piece of WMP in their machine, any time it ran, all the non-MS audio software would again die and you'd have to reinstall it.
My wife found out about this the hard way. She had some nice audio software. Then she installed some financial software (not from Microsoft). It silently installed WMP as a "bonus". All her quality audio software was broken. She reinstalled, but eventually gave up, because neither of us could figure out how to uninstall WMP. And it eventually developed an even more annoying behavior: When you started upsome audio using a high-quality player, WMP would start up in parallel. The two renditions would both come out of the speakers, out of sync by a couple seconds.
She's now a very happy Mac user. She gave me her Windows box, and it's mostly turned off, except when I need to test something (mostly web pages) against Windows software.
Anyway, in such cases "not to play" means you don't even try to sell your software to Windows users. It doesn't matter whether you were a good guy and cooperated with the others. WMP will kill you anyway.
I know a number of audio-software developers who have become rather depressed by this. They can get put on MS's "good guys" list, of course, by selling the control of their software to MS. But they seem to have this silly idea that they should be able to build and sell their own software.
There's really no reason that the spy/malware folks should ever stop shooting down other software. The only real solution is to keep their software out entirely. Or maybe jail them. I wouldn't think you'd need any new laws. Vandalism is already illegal everywhere. But such laws aren't enforced for software.
I wonder if a vandalism charge could be successful against WMP?
Somehow, I doubt that IBM would have forfieted their right to the "Think" meme altogether.
Hey, I still have one of those gray IBM "THINK" signs from the 70's.
Right now, it's sitting on the window sill in our downstairs bathroom.
The idea being they'll wean their customers into thinking of their brand name as being equivalent to the IBM brand name. They have five years to do so -- an eternity in Internet time.
;-) from their old mainframe systems to a flock of networked linux servers. It was interesting to hear from the sales ("client liaison" ;-) guys what it took to persuade the suits to pay us to do it.
;-)
Well, I dunno about this. I just came out of working for a couple of years on a project to wean a big corporation (which shall remain nameless to protect the clueless
One "interesting" problem was that their people mostly have Windows 98 machines on their desks. These are the advanced ones, actually; many still use W95. I'm not kidding. They might have some XP boxes in another decade, but I wouldn't bet a lot of money on it.
Another interesting aspect is that their desktop machines mostly have an IBM logo. This is because the management are primarily of the school that consider "computer" and "IBM machine" to be synonyms. They look with trepidation at companies like Dell and Gateway, because they're not IBM, so their machines are just toys, not real computers.
How pervasive this view can be is indicated by the ruse that the sales guys used to get them to accept the idea of linux. They introduced the suits IBM's online sales sites, and showed them that "linux is an IBM product". No, I'm not kidding. They think of linux as an IBM business-management system. We actually used RedHat, and the question of how RedHat is related to IBM was glossed over. The management there mostly thinks they are migrating to the new kind of networked computing that IBM invented.
This management team is highly unlikely to ever sign off on a Lenovo purchase, because they'll always want real computers, and real computers come from IBM. A few non-IBM desktop and laptop machines may be purchased, but only for flunkies. Managers will want a real computer on their desk, and real computers have an IBM logo.
It might be interesting to see data on just how widespread this attitude is. I know I've seen lots of anecdotal evidence that a great many business schools still instill this attitude in their students. This is mostly done tacitly, by never mentioning any other vendor. Microsoft can sell to their graduates mostly because there's a great deal of confusion about whether Microsoft is a part of IBM. (After all, you can see from IBM's web sites that both Windows and Linux are IBM products.
And I'll say again, I'm not kidding.
Of course, outside North America and Western Europe, we may well be reaching the point where a phrase such as "a giant American corporation like IBM or Microsoft" is used to scare people. So in the other 80% of the world, Lenovo may well be the future.
... other problems ... like only have a single mouse button ...
;-)
I have a PB, and I've wondered about the single button. If you try pressing it at different points, you'll find that it acts like a rocker switch. If you press the left edge, it goes down, you get a click, and the right edge goes up slightly. Similarly, if you press the center, you get a click, but the edges don't go down very much.
So it sure looks like it has at least three physically-different "click" states. What I wonder is whether the software can distinguish these. If so, it's really a 3-button mouse, and OSX is treating all three of the "buttons" as identical.
Anyone know about this? A program can distinguish the left-shift and right-shift keys, and also the left-CMD and right-CMD keys, as on most keyboards. Is there a way to get distinguishable left-click, center-click and right-click events from the button bar?
(Meanwhile, my wife has worked with CAD systems, and sometimes complains about not having a 16-button mouse. There are so many things you can do with one, especially if it also has a reticle.
The actual innocence of you actions has no influence on whether you will be investigated, suspected, or harrased by the intelligence community. ... Just be happy that you have nothing to hide.
Heh. Funny story: Back in the 70's, when I was a grad student, I lived for a while in the top floor of a triple-decker. The second floor was occupied by a fellow who was quite active in radical politics. Nice guy. We talked occasionally. He had a policy of never paying his phone bill, and his phone was never cut off. He suggested that my phone was probably tapped, too, but we had no way of proving that either way.
One week, there was a phone-worker strike. The phone company publicised the fact that there would be no phone repairs for the duration, except to official and/or emergency lines.
On Friday, my phone started having problems, and was hardly usable. I called the phone company from the phone downstairs and told them about it, and they said it might be a while before they could get to it because of the strike.
Early the next morning, a couple of phone guys showed up at the door to look at the phone. They found and fixed the problem. I thanked them, and they left.
I started telling people about this, and everyone was really impressed. "Wow; how'd you get on their list?" The fellow downstairs just grinned. It gave me some real cred in the academic community.
The really fun part was that several female friends decided to start calling and starting discussions that would really turn on any listeners. I'll leave the details to your imagination. Some of them also decided they should come over and act out some of the discussions, with lots of sound effects for the benefit of any hidden mikes in my apartment. We never knew whether there were any mikes, but we had fun acting on the possibility.
I wonder if they still have any of those recordings in my files ?
Watching video content is not a right, it is a privledge.
Perhaps, perhaps not; it depends on your local laws.
But there is one thing that's farily consistent in the laws everywhere: If someone sells me something that doesn't work for me, and they didn't describe it well enough that I could tell before the sale that it wouldn't work, it is fraud. Wherever you live, your legal language has a term for fraud. There are often special laws for what in English is called "consumer fraud", i.e., businesses tricking someone into buying something different from what they thought they were buying.
Some CDs and DV DVDs have labels on the outside that say what equipment they play on; most don't. If you buy them via a web site, such warnings are almost never visible before you buy. It's fairly common for vendors to make it very difficult to get a refund in such cases. This is clearly intentional fraud. "We've got that sucker's money; we don't care whether he can use what we sold him."
And in a lot of the world, if you sell me a recording of any sort, you can't prosecute me if I watch it. Even if I have to modify my equipment (e.g. by modifying the hardware or by writing a bit of code) to do so. But in some parts of the world, such modifications are illegal. When government outlaw such actions by customers, they are openly and knowingly supporting consumer fraud by the sellers of recordings.