The pigeons' feathers were checked, and they were given a cavity search as well.
Worst... job... ever.
"Oh, hey honey, how was your day at work?" "You know, the usual, stuck my finger into a couple hundred pigeons, just like every other day." "*sigh* Looks like I need to clean the poop off your uniform again"
LOL... so, "bandwidth of a minivan full of magtape" then?
Why am I picturing Recaro baby seats, five point harnesses all around, a NOS system, and an express ticket to the grocery store/soccer match?
Because, really, the mommy buses often seem to be some of the craziest drivers on the road.
I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've been cut off by someone with one of those "Baby on Board" signs... I don't know if they think that gives them license to speed, or if they're just assholes. But don't expect me to be extra safe because you have a kid on board when you're driving like an idiot and cutting me off.
You kids and your fancy cars, with the neon running lights and bass which can be heard for miles making the wiki wiki noises, your pants that don't fit, smoking the mary jane, and texting the person across the table from you.
What was I saying? Oh, yeah... get off my damned lawn.
It's like red cars. They get a higher amount of tickets, apparently.
Is it because cops target red cars? Or because people who buy red cars are more likely to drive fast?
Who knows.
In the case of the WRX, I'm not surprised... this is a car which can break any posted speed limit in North America while still accelerating in second gear. I remember being in a friend's as he merged into traffic... and we went from surface street speeds to passing the cars on the highway in a really short period.
I was quite impressed, since my non-turbo Impreza seemed plenty speedy to me prior to that. Though, I was just as happy with my slower version.
But you would also need a lot of cargo to support those people. In fact, your cargo to person ratio is going to be quite high. It would probably be 10 cargo trips for every human trip, so more like 100,000 trips. And we're talking 100,000 trips of a giant spaceship.
And what is the cost, both in terms of resources and pollution, of launching 100,000 times? Even if you kept it in orbit and brought people up to it it's a huge cost.
And I'm betting 100,000 launches is more than have been done in all of history. By a rather large amount, I'd think.
As usual, when I hear futurists telling us about the awesome the future will be... I find myself thinking "this is impractical, way more than anybody will ever be able to afford, and probably never going to happen".
It sounds like we'd need to pretty much strip the Earth of resources to pull this off, and unless Musk is paying this out of his own damned pocket, I think the entire idea is doomed to fail. And that doesn't change the fact that you're diverting a huge amount of resources for a relatively small percentage of humanity.
This is flying cars, Mr Fusion, and a vast amount of engineering, plus ponies, unicorns, and cats living with dogs... all in one big overly-optimistic ball of fantasy.
The sheer amount of energy required to do this is so mind boggling as to make the whole idea laughable.
I think the romantic idea of space colonization is pretty cool. But I don't really think it's quite as viable as people like to think it is. At least not with current energy requirements and sources.
Don't know about you, but my car's speedometer has... gasp... both kph and mph on it.
I can magically change from Canada to the US and back again, and still know what speed I'm going in the correct units.
It's really quite a marvelous invention to apply two scales to a dial. I've even seen some of them new-fangled digital ones where you could change all of the units pretty easily. Imagine, the same car can display either at the touch of a button.
Sorry, but requiring car makers to make it possible to have both has been a solved problem for a couple of decades now.
Besides, if it's anything like over here, nobody is going to pay attention to the speed limit anyway.:-P
Gordon Ramsey is not a culinary genius. I think you miss the whole point of the shows if you get that idea. He's a business chef and his goal is to make money, not to make food necessarily taste great.
Except, you don't get Michelin stars just for nothing. He trained under Michelin star chefs.
He's turned that into a lot of restaurants, a lot of money, and a lot of fame.
You may or may not like Ramsey (not everybody does, and that's fair), but if you think he's "just a business chef" out to make money, you're woefully unaware of the fact that he's a real chef, who worked in, and now owns, restaurants with Michelin stars. Which is about the snootiest rating for a restaurant you can get, given out by hard core foodies.
By the time you're there, you have some pretty mad skills, and a pretty refined palate. In fact, far better than most.
He probably knows more about food, and what it's supposed to taste like, than most professional chefs ever will.
Is he the greatest chef ever? Probably not. Is he one of the better chefs around today? He's certainly up in the lists.
Can we stop with the "Windows on less than X amount of RAM is unusable" rhetoric?
Rhetoric??? Really??
Sorry, but in my experience recent versions of Windows are using almost 2GB of RAM on system startup. My wife's work laptop had (until recently) 4GB of RAM... and by the time it booted and had one program running on it, it was already thrashing. It was slow to the point of being painful.
My mother owns a laptop with Vista and 1GB of RAM on it.. and doing anything on it is pathetic.
It wasn't true then and with multicore processors and SSDs, it's even less true now.
The speed of your processor is completely irrelevant if all it's doing it paging to VM.
I've said for years, if you want to get the most longevity and usefulness out of a computer, don't worry about buying a faster CPU, buy a truck load more memory -- because over time everything wants more damned memory.
When my wife's work laptop got upgraded from 4GB to 12GB, the speed and the utility of the machine changed drastically... as in, actual multi-tasking worked because the machine wasn't thrashing. It went from "it's still booting, I can't start task manager" to "it's still booting, but I can start task manager, launch Outlook, AND fire up a VM". Because it's no longer wasting all of it's time paging.
It has been true since Windows 3 that if you run Windows with the minimum Microsoft suggested, you'd have a useless machine which did everything slowly. And this was when computers came with more like 4MB of RAM.
When Vista came out, it was pretty much unusable with anything less than what seemed like a vast amount of memory at the time, certainly more than was in most systems at the time.
If you think saying Windows with not enough RAM is rhetoric, either you don't use computers much, or you're entirely too willing to put up with a machine which is too damned slow.
Put a full version of Windows onto a tablet with a small amount of RAM, and you most certainly will end up with a slow and useless device.
Rhetoric my ass. It was true then, and it's true now. Windows with insufficient RAM is a dog.
So, most people still prefer Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1 is only slowly getting market share and people apparently don't like it much, Windows 9 is supposed to come out this fall... and somehow we're also expecting a Windows 10 next year?
Does Microsoft think people will pay them annually for an upgrade? Or that we'll buy new machines to run this new thing?? They might be sorely disappointed with that.
With the new version of the operating system, they'll be unifying the application platform for all devices: desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones
Hmmm... so they're going to have one big enormous bloated build for all platforms? Is that what this means?
Right, because your phone should carry all of the bloat which goes along with a server.
And, once again, one wonders if Microsoft really has any understanding of the mobile market.
Unless your phone has the same specs as your desktop, this isn't really going to be workable, is it?
I commend them for finally adding virtual desktops... a feature they've only occasionally realized people actually want, but the rest of this just makes me think they've lost the plot a little.
One of my accounts which I've had for years is definitely not my own name.
Because I use it for different things.
I've been studiously avoiding Google+ because of that stupid real-name policy, because the interweb isn't always a place you want to use your real name.
I understand Google have relaxed the real name requirement for Google+, but I honestly have no idea of what the net benefit of it would be to me.
I'm not interested in Google's vision of social networking everywhere. In fact, I'm actively disinterested in it.
They may feel they've created the greatest social networking system on the planet. But I don't give a shit about it or most other forms of social networking. And certainly not in having it integrated with every damned thing I do on the internet.
Well, some of the google apps are considered bloatware by some of us.
The constant nagging to sign up for Google+, the automatic creation of accounts and the like.
I prefer to use YouTube anonymously, if at all. Not so long ago on my Nexus 7 tablet, the app decided that I must have intended to sign up for a YouTube account and created one for me... YouTube had its data cleared and was immediately disabled.
Google has been a little too pushy with some of their services. I don't want your damned Google+, I'm not interested in it... stop telling me I need the damned thing.
I agree the proprietary bloatware is crap, and that's why I bought a Nexus branded tablet... but don't think for a minute Google isn't also doing some annoying things.
Sometimes, just launching one of their own apps can change your account in ways you didn't expect, and don't get told about.
I have a completely fake name, fake information which Facebook sees, and no pictures of me. I wasn't about to give them anything real. Almost nothing in my profile is true, and it will stay that way.
But I access Facebook from exactly one browser, which isn't used for anything else. It has exactly one web site with cookies set, and that's Facebook.
Ever other browser blocks traffic from Facebook, rejects cookies, and generally treats it as a completely untrusted site.
If you're visiting other sites while you have a cookie set from Facebook, chances are Facebook can tell what you're doing.
I see a very large amount of web sites which make callouts to Facebook.
So, in addition to your very sensible strategy of not giving Facebook real information, you should also be keeping tabs on what other contexts Facebook might be getting information from you.
I would guess that if you use the same browser to visit other web sites, Facebook is still getting the information.
Almost every commercial web page has embedded links to Facebook. Which means they're probably still tracking you anyway, they just can't correlate it to a specific Facebook users.
Unless you have a lot of privacy extensions, you might be surprised just how much tracking happens on every site you visit via web-bugs, cross-site crap, and several other things.
Simply not being logged into Facebook isn't really stopping them from getting at least some data unless you've taken other steps.
In my experience very few of those trackers are actually required for the site to function.
If you're using something you can selectively disallow, you can usually get it to work no problem. If I can't, I leave.
So far, my best combination in Chrome is DoNotTrackMe, Scriptsafe, Ghostery, AdBlockPlus, HTTP SwitchBoard, and Disconnect.
HTTP Switchboard gives really good granularity and also does script and cookie blocking, plus several other things.
So far I've confirmed Safari has had the blocking of 3rd party cookies implemented incompetently, worked around, and never updated... so that's the least trustworthy browser I've found.
Firefox has some good add-ons, can selectively block cookies NoScript, DoNotTrackMe, AdBlockPlus, Ghostery and Disconnect... but I've not found anything with the granularity of HTTP Switchboard, so I suspect web-bugs can still slip by some of them.
I really wish Mozilla hadn't caved and decided not to implement strong blocking of crap... unfortunately their desire for ad revenue trumped making a browser which could actually be made more private.
IE, well... treat IE like the thing you use for work when all else fails. Because there's always another exploit around the corner.
This is why all of the browsers I don't use for Facebook do not accept cookies from Facebook, do not allow them to set cookies, and in a few cases do not even allow traffic to them.
The amount of embedded crap in every page you visit is mind-boggling.
Every company wants to link to Facebook and as a result, Facebook pretty much knows everywhere you go.
The only way I trust Facebook is in a heavily locked down browser, which isn't used for anything else.
And, even then, I wouldn't trust Facebook as far as I could throw Zuckerfuck off a cliff... and then won't let me measure that distance so far.
If your browser doesn't have at least 3 privacy extensions, you're handing all of this information over to these clowns to collect your data and do targeted marketing.
Just deny them the information and the ability to meaningfully know anything about you.
I block every advertising and analytics company I can find... and it's bad enough that Slashdot on this page as I type has scorecard research, google analytics, google ad services, and whatever the heck RPX now is. Fortunately, they're all blocked.
I miss the internet before all of the assholes who want to advertise, monetize, track, correlate, and cross reference. But I'm sure as hell not going to let them get any information I can block from them.
Dude, it's the games section... it's an actual interview... about an actual game... on redbull.com... it seems reasonably on-topic for what it's supposed to be.
What do you want, "Man Strains Thumb Playing Call of Duty"?
Slashdot Mirror
Worst ... job ... ever.
"Oh, hey honey, how was your day at work?"
"You know, the usual, stuck my finger into a couple hundred pigeons, just like every other day."
"*sigh* Looks like I need to clean the poop off your uniform again"
LOL ... so, "bandwidth of a minivan full of magtape" then?
Why am I picturing Recaro baby seats, five point harnesses all around, a NOS system, and an express ticket to the grocery store/soccer match?
Because, really, the mommy buses often seem to be some of the craziest drivers on the road.
I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've been cut off by someone with one of those "Baby on Board" signs ... I don't know if they think that gives them license to speed, or if they're just assholes. But don't expect me to be extra safe because you have a kid on board when you're driving like an idiot and cutting me off.
You kids and your fancy cars, with the neon running lights and bass which can be heard for miles making the wiki wiki noises, your pants that don't fit, smoking the mary jane, and texting the person across the table from you.
What was I saying? Oh, yeah ... get off my damned lawn.
It's like red cars. They get a higher amount of tickets, apparently.
Is it because cops target red cars? Or because people who buy red cars are more likely to drive fast?
Who knows.
In the case of the WRX, I'm not surprised ... this is a car which can break any posted speed limit in North America while still accelerating in second gear. I remember being in a friend's as he merged into traffic ... and we went from surface street speeds to passing the cars on the highway in a really short period.
I was quite impressed, since my non-turbo Impreza seemed plenty speedy to me prior to that. Though, I was just as happy with my slower version.
And what is the cost, both in terms of resources and pollution, of launching 100,000 times? Even if you kept it in orbit and brought people up to it it's a huge cost.
And I'm betting 100,000 launches is more than have been done in all of history. By a rather large amount, I'd think.
As usual, when I hear futurists telling us about the awesome the future will be ... I find myself thinking "this is impractical, way more than anybody will ever be able to afford, and probably never going to happen".
It sounds like we'd need to pretty much strip the Earth of resources to pull this off, and unless Musk is paying this out of his own damned pocket, I think the entire idea is doomed to fail. And that doesn't change the fact that you're diverting a huge amount of resources for a relatively small percentage of humanity.
This is flying cars, Mr Fusion, and a vast amount of engineering, plus ponies, unicorns, and cats living with dogs ... all in one big overly-optimistic ball of fantasy.
The sheer amount of energy required to do this is so mind boggling as to make the whole idea laughable.
I think the romantic idea of space colonization is pretty cool. But I don't really think it's quite as viable as people like to think it is. At least not with current energy requirements and sources.
Don't know about you, but my car's speedometer has ... gasp ... both kph and mph on it.
I can magically change from Canada to the US and back again, and still know what speed I'm going in the correct units.
It's really quite a marvelous invention to apply two scales to a dial. I've even seen some of them new-fangled digital ones where you could change all of the units pretty easily. Imagine, the same car can display either at the touch of a button.
Sorry, but requiring car makers to make it possible to have both has been a solved problem for a couple of decades now.
Besides, if it's anything like over here, nobody is going to pay attention to the speed limit anyway. :-P
If the copyright cartel had their way, any piece of technology which could possibly be used for things they don't approve of would be illegal.
They've been trying very hard to get that for years. If they keep bribing the right people, they might eventually get it.
Except, you don't get Michelin stars just for nothing. He trained under Michelin star chefs.
He's turned that into a lot of restaurants, a lot of money, and a lot of fame.
You may or may not like Ramsey (not everybody does, and that's fair), but if you think he's "just a business chef" out to make money, you're woefully unaware of the fact that he's a real chef, who worked in, and now owns, restaurants with Michelin stars. Which is about the snootiest rating for a restaurant you can get, given out by hard core foodies.
By the time you're there, you have some pretty mad skills, and a pretty refined palate. In fact, far better than most.
He probably knows more about food, and what it's supposed to taste like, than most professional chefs ever will.
Is he the greatest chef ever? Probably not. Is he one of the better chefs around today? He's certainly up in the lists.
You know, vista wasn't terrible if you threw enough resources at it.
I've been running it on a quad-core machine with 8GB of RAM since 2009. It's my daily desktop.
And I can honestly say I've been quite happy with it. Which, I know isn't something you hear every day. :-P
Rhetoric??? Really??
Sorry, but in my experience recent versions of Windows are using almost 2GB of RAM on system startup. My wife's work laptop had (until recently) 4GB of RAM ... and by the time it booted and had one program running on it, it was already thrashing. It was slow to the point of being painful.
My mother owns a laptop with Vista and 1GB of RAM on it .. and doing anything on it is pathetic.
The speed of your processor is completely irrelevant if all it's doing it paging to VM.
I've said for years, if you want to get the most longevity and usefulness out of a computer, don't worry about buying a faster CPU, buy a truck load more memory -- because over time everything wants more damned memory.
When my wife's work laptop got upgraded from 4GB to 12GB, the speed and the utility of the machine changed drastically ... as in, actual multi-tasking worked because the machine wasn't thrashing. It went from "it's still booting, I can't start task manager" to "it's still booting, but I can start task manager, launch Outlook, AND fire up a VM". Because it's no longer wasting all of it's time paging.
It has been true since Windows 3 that if you run Windows with the minimum Microsoft suggested, you'd have a useless machine which did everything slowly. And this was when computers came with more like 4MB of RAM.
When Vista came out, it was pretty much unusable with anything less than what seemed like a vast amount of memory at the time, certainly more than was in most systems at the time.
If you think saying Windows with not enough RAM is rhetoric, either you don't use computers much, or you're entirely too willing to put up with a machine which is too damned slow.
Put a full version of Windows onto a tablet with a small amount of RAM, and you most certainly will end up with a slow and useless device.
Rhetoric my ass. It was true then, and it's true now. Windows with insufficient RAM is a dog.
So, most people still prefer Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1 is only slowly getting market share and people apparently don't like it much, Windows 9 is supposed to come out this fall ... and somehow we're also expecting a Windows 10 next year?
Does Microsoft think people will pay them annually for an upgrade? Or that we'll buy new machines to run this new thing?? They might be sorely disappointed with that.
Hmmm ... so they're going to have one big enormous bloated build for all platforms? Is that what this means?
Right, because your phone should carry all of the bloat which goes along with a server.
And, once again, one wonders if Microsoft really has any understanding of the mobile market.
Unless your phone has the same specs as your desktop, this isn't really going to be workable, is it?
I commend them for finally adding virtual desktops ... a feature they've only occasionally realized people actually want, but the rest of this just makes me think they've lost the plot a little.
A full windows install with Intel chips isn't exactly tuned for mobile battery performance.
So will these things have an exceedingly short battery life?
And I'm betting they will have so little memory as to be unusable -- because Windows with anything less than 4G is a complete dog in my experience.
I predict a terrible product on this one.
Nobody did.
There are Stream tablets, and Stream laptops. The GP even quotes the part which says laptops.
A tablet without a touch screen is basically an etch a sketch. :-P
Wow, did you think of that all by yourself?
Your mom must be really proud.
So, are they going to remove this once they've finalized the release?
Or is Microsoft more or less giving themselves the right to do real time monitoring of every Windows machine on the planet?
Because that would make them even bigger assholes than I've come to expect, and quite possibly would break the law in a bunch of places.
Sounds like a terrible idea to me, maybe if they focused on more QA before they released it, they wouldn't need to do this.
A real-time "call home to Microsoft" feature needs to be killed.
One of my accounts which I've had for years is definitely not my own name.
Because I use it for different things.
I've been studiously avoiding Google+ because of that stupid real-name policy, because the interweb isn't always a place you want to use your real name.
I understand Google have relaxed the real name requirement for Google+, but I honestly have no idea of what the net benefit of it would be to me.
I'm not interested in Google's vision of social networking everywhere. In fact, I'm actively disinterested in it.
They may feel they've created the greatest social networking system on the planet. But I don't give a shit about it or most other forms of social networking. And certainly not in having it integrated with every damned thing I do on the internet.
And many device manufacturers prefer to enhance their revenue stream and monetize your experience.
The market never gets to choose.
Because the market is always skewed in favor of the people who control the market.
And they don't want it to be free and open, they want your money and ad impressions.
The manufacturers don't give a damn what you or the market wants.
Annoyingly, some of them can't be directly disabled.
You need to uninstall updates to get it back to a lower version, and then disable it.
I've seen several of the core Google apps which can't simply be disabled.
It's kind of annoying.
Well, some of the google apps are considered bloatware by some of us.
The constant nagging to sign up for Google+, the automatic creation of accounts and the like.
I prefer to use YouTube anonymously, if at all. Not so long ago on my Nexus 7 tablet, the app decided that I must have intended to sign up for a YouTube account and created one for me ... YouTube had its data cleared and was immediately disabled.
Google has been a little too pushy with some of their services. I don't want your damned Google+, I'm not interested in it ... stop telling me I need the damned thing.
I agree the proprietary bloatware is crap, and that's why I bought a Nexus branded tablet ... but don't think for a minute Google isn't also doing some annoying things.
Sometimes, just launching one of their own apps can change your account in ways you didn't expect, and don't get told about.
I have a completely fake name, fake information which Facebook sees, and no pictures of me. I wasn't about to give them anything real. Almost nothing in my profile is true, and it will stay that way.
But I access Facebook from exactly one browser, which isn't used for anything else. It has exactly one web site with cookies set, and that's Facebook.
Ever other browser blocks traffic from Facebook, rejects cookies, and generally treats it as a completely untrusted site.
If you're visiting other sites while you have a cookie set from Facebook, chances are Facebook can tell what you're doing.
I see a very large amount of web sites which make callouts to Facebook.
So, in addition to your very sensible strategy of not giving Facebook real information, you should also be keeping tabs on what other contexts Facebook might be getting information from you.
I would guess that if you use the same browser to visit other web sites, Facebook is still getting the information.
Think so? Because I don't.
Almost every commercial web page has embedded links to Facebook. Which means they're probably still tracking you anyway, they just can't correlate it to a specific Facebook users.
Unless you have a lot of privacy extensions, you might be surprised just how much tracking happens on every site you visit via web-bugs, cross-site crap, and several other things.
Simply not being logged into Facebook isn't really stopping them from getting at least some data unless you've taken other steps.
In my experience very few of those trackers are actually required for the site to function.
If you're using something you can selectively disallow, you can usually get it to work no problem. If I can't, I leave.
So far, my best combination in Chrome is DoNotTrackMe, Scriptsafe, Ghostery, AdBlockPlus, HTTP SwitchBoard, and Disconnect.
HTTP Switchboard gives really good granularity and also does script and cookie blocking, plus several other things.
So far I've confirmed Safari has had the blocking of 3rd party cookies implemented incompetently, worked around, and never updated ... so that's the least trustworthy browser I've found.
Firefox has some good add-ons, can selectively block cookies NoScript, DoNotTrackMe, AdBlockPlus, Ghostery and Disconnect ... but I've not found anything with the granularity of HTTP Switchboard, so I suspect web-bugs can still slip by some of them.
I really wish Mozilla hadn't caved and decided not to implement strong blocking of crap ... unfortunately their desire for ad revenue trumped making a browser which could actually be made more private.
IE, well ... treat IE like the thing you use for work when all else fails. Because there's always another exploit around the corner.
This is why all of the browsers I don't use for Facebook do not accept cookies from Facebook, do not allow them to set cookies, and in a few cases do not even allow traffic to them.
The amount of embedded crap in every page you visit is mind-boggling.
Every company wants to link to Facebook and as a result, Facebook pretty much knows everywhere you go.
The only way I trust Facebook is in a heavily locked down browser, which isn't used for anything else.
And, even then, I wouldn't trust Facebook as far as I could throw Zuckerfuck off a cliff ... and then won't let me measure that distance so far.
If your browser doesn't have at least 3 privacy extensions, you're handing all of this information over to these clowns to collect your data and do targeted marketing.
Just deny them the information and the ability to meaningfully know anything about you.
I block every advertising and analytics company I can find ... and it's bad enough that Slashdot on this page as I type has scorecard research, google analytics, google ad services, and whatever the heck RPX now is. Fortunately, they're all blocked.
I miss the internet before all of the assholes who want to advertise, monetize, track, correlate, and cross reference. But I'm sure as hell not going to let them get any information I can block from them.
A journey of a 1000 miles begins with one step.
Everybody starts programming with toy apps, like Hello World.
Yes, complexity exists. But you start by showing people it's not magic and incomprehensible, and then go from there.
Dude, it's the games section ... it's an actual interview ... about an actual game ... on redbull.com ... it seems reasonably on-topic for what it's supposed to be.
What do you want, "Man Strains Thumb Playing Call of Duty"?
I've never noticed the flickering.
What I have noticed is that the faceting of the lens to make it brighter seems to create the optical illusion it's moving if you move relative to it.
Or, maybe that's actually flickering.
Either way, it makes my brain hurt.