We're all full of crap, so *that* particular fact doesn't change anything. If you wish to claim what he's saying is *wrong* then have at it and offer a refutation.
Dude, you need to post this shit in a more organized way on some web page. I might archive these posts of yours. I agree with most of what you say, and though your arguments may be flawed (not saying they are -- just saying they could be), your posts are quite lucid and illuminating towards this particular point of view.
I applaud your opinions and think they deserve to be shared with a broader audience than Slashdot.
Re:Anybody have success forwarding attachments?
on
Gmail Goes Public
·
· Score: 1
No, but I have problems sending attachments to begin with. Seems the combination of Linux/Firefox/56k_modem makes it a bitch to send attachments. I can fire up IE6 in a Windows XP VM and send attachments just fine (on the same machine, mind you). On Linux I just keep getting that damned "oops!" message.
I know I'm one of a dying breed of modem-only users, but it's still bloody annoying! I can HTTP PUT files just fine 'till the cows come home, so I wonder just was javascript voodoo gmail uses under the hood.
I always bring this up on the CG threads, and I'll do so again.
Take the asteroid sequence in ESB -- fabulous! You get a sense of real depth and motion, to the point of tipping back and forth in your seat and feeling your stomach drop at times, like watching those roller coaster films on an IMAX screen. That was all done with models and real cameras.
Take the asteroid/ring belt scene in Clones. Visually, it's a nice piece of eye candy, to be sure. But I was immediately struck by how flat and/or soulless it felt as compared to the ESB scene. There was no spacial impact, if you get my meaning.
I don't know if it's a fundamental flaw in CG vs real models and cameras, but until it's solved, I really think models are better in some cases.
However, the creature CG effects can be done pretty well. I think the CG Yoda in Clones was 95% there. I'm really hoping the latest movie will have it nailed.
Isn't PKZip pushing the 20 year mark? And I think that Unix tar'ed and/or compress(1)'ed files are well over 20 years old.
Give me a foo.tar.Z file from the early 80s and I can still uncompress it. Give me a foo.zip from a mid-80's BBS archive and I can still see what's insite.
Is this new proposal in line with the Aus. laws already on the books? Is it illegal to publish info on abortion (not that I know that country's stance on the issue) or illegal drugs?
Personally, information on illegal activities can serve a useful purpose. I personally think that recreational drug use is fine, so long as the user doesn't harm anyone other than themself. When I was in college, I pondered the wisdom of trying LSD or X. As the web was pretty new in those days (early '90s), good info was hard to find, though usenet was -- and still is -- a good resource. I stumbled onto hyperreal.org and spent many nights reading up on thorough summaries of the 2 drugs as well as people's experience with them.
The archive today is even better. I never knew that nutmeg was hallucinagenic.:)
In the end, I decided against trying either drug. The strongest thing in college I ever did was Everclear. But at least I was able to make an *informed* decision, for myself. Governments have no right to take that ability away from me.
Sound advice, and it can be possible to work such things into your daily routine.
When I went into the office (before I started telecommuting) I'd park in a lot on campus (worked at a large university) that was close to a mile from my building. In the morning, that was mostly a downhill walk; likewise an uphill walk at the end of the day.
So, 1.9 miles of brisk walking I wouldn't otherwise take at the cost of maybe 10 minutes each way.
Next, I stopped using the elevator for getting to my 4th floor office. I *usually* took the stairs down, but when I started taking them *up* every time I returned to the building, I got a short workout.
It may not seem like much, but over the course of a couple of months, I could notice my short-windedness disappearing. I didn't see a weight loss, but I felt a touch better.
I knew a Star Wars book geek in college. He said in the novels (supposedly canon, blessed by the Lucas Publishing Empire) explained "the cave" on Degobah. I hope tthey touch on this in RotS.
As I was told, Yoda went to hang out in exile on Degobah, and some bad-ass in the Dark Side camp came by to punch Yoda's ticket. Yoda, of course, being the Crouching Yoda Flying Jedi that he is, soundly defeated said enemy in the cave. This supposedly explained why the Dark Side imprint was there during Luke's (failed) test in ESB. It also might explain why the most powerful Good Side Jedia went so many years undetected by Vader and Palpatine, as the Dark Side imprint cloaked him some how.
But that's just what I heard -- I never read the books.
And is it me, or should it be obvious to the Jedi that Anakin "bringing balance to the Force" really means increasing the number of Dark Siders or wiping out the Good Side? I mean, there are some odd glances between Yoda and Mace Windu in the first two movies, so maybe they already know what's coming but don't tell anyone 'cause fate is already written. Maybe this stuff is obvious to anyone with half a brain (characters in the movie as well as the fans), but it seems poorly written and/or presented in the films.
The jugular is no trivial blood vessel, you know.:)
In the research I've done combing the net, I've read instances of shaving pretty much everything. Some guys on the cycling newsgroups talk about how great straight razors are on the legs because they simply don't clog up. You can shave one large area with a single stroke, unlike your average double/triple/quadruple bladed monstrosity from Gillette.
On the weirder side, some guy on about.com documented how he shaves his genitals with a staight razor. Ditto someone's head. I guess it depends on how steady a hand you have, eh?
I'm not saying you can't cut yourself, 'cause you most certainly can. But it's not the danger many people seem to think it is.
I agree with supporting heirloom seeds -- we now get our seeds almost exclusively from Native Seeds.
As to breaking the law by propogating patented/copyrighted plants, suing may be fine for commercial farmers and other companies, but enforcement of your average gardener will be as practical as the MPAA/RIAA policing peer-to-peer. A few examples will be made, but if there's demand, people will propogate the plants. Simple as that.
My wife likes to garden. As such, we have a dozen of the current catalogs in the house at any given time.
One year, were ordered thornless blackberries. When they arrived, there was a type of crude EULA included. They basically said that we weren't allowed to propgate the blackberry vines, which is exceedingly easy to do.
Had those vines survived the summer, I would have passed out cuttings to every one in my family, just to spite em.;-)
Better yet, go with a good ol' fashioned double-edged safety razor or a straight razor. I just got got myself a new straight razor setup (razor, strop, hone, brush, etc.), and while I haven't yet achieved that super close shave everyone talks about, I'm steadily improving.
With a straight razor, you really have no consumables for the rest of your life. Well, unless you count soap -- but who doesn't have soap (we make our own anyway).
If you're not hauling lumber or soil you don't need a shiny F150 truck.
Based on cars I've driven in the past, I'd say that the average mid-sized sedan hits in the 20-to-30 mpg mark. Just to verify this, I checked the 2005 Ford Taurus on fueleconomy.gov and it says they get 20/27, 19/27, and 15/20 depending on the model.
I drive a big, shiny '99 Dodge Ram 2500 Turbo Diesel (Cummins 24-valve). Gross weight is 5900 pounds. I can haul about a ton in the back, or tow 5 tons. Can seat six people.
My fuel efficiency? 18/22 mpg. It's my family's sole car. It takes me to work, picks up groceries, and hauls the occasional load of lumber or ton of alfalfa hay (for the cow).
So in your opinion, am I an example of an Evil Polluter? Just curious. I mean, I *could* buy an average mid-sized car, but still burn the same ammount of fuel. But the truck has so much better utility value.
The newer trucks -- particularly the diesels -- get damned good mileage for their weight/size. It's those Hummers/H2s and Suburbans/Excursions that really suck ass in the MPG ratings. So lay off us truck owners.:)
The BBB is a sham -- it's an organization put together by the businesses themselves. There's no requirement for a business to register with the BBB.
If you're dealing with a utility or a telecomm company and not getting anywhere, call your states Public Utility Commission (the "PUC"). Whenever I've done this, the Evil Company in question jumps. They may not always concede if the rules with the state are in their favor, but at least you can grin at the knowledge that *somebody* at that company had to deal with a lot of paperwork if you filed a formal complaint.
My most recent "victory" was against Questar Gas (natural gas utility). Somebody at the PUC convinced them to address my complaint, in spite of the rules siding with them, just so nobody (at PUC or Questar) would need to file the paperwork.
I attended Purdue University. One year I lived in Carey Quad, which happned to border the football stadium. Our parking lot was pimped out as premium parking during home games, so the actual residents got kicked out (ticketed, otherwise) so the alums could park.
I lost count at how many poor lot attendants I ripped a new one each Saturyday morning when I'd tried to park in the lot that I paid extra for (above and beyond standard room & board). I finally pitched such a fit in the office that they refunded a substantial amount of my parking fee.:)
I can't see how they had the right to deny our parking to begin with, but it seems that deep-pocketed alums are worth more than tuition-paying students.
To this day I laugh my ass off whenever I get a plea-with-the-alums-for-money notice in the mail. Like that evil university will ever get another cent of my money.
A Windows distribution contains a handful of programs.
So why the hell does a fresh install of Windows XP take up over 1GB out of the box?!?
Talk about bloat.
I use VMware on my home machines (which run Linux). I have at least one version of every Windows release from WfWg 3.11 to ME, from NT 3.51 (anyone know were to get 3.1 these days?) to XP and 2003. These are for testing scenarios and playing around for nolstalgia's sake (sometimes it's fun to fire up DESQView on DOS 6.22, for example).
But the progression of bloat as you progress up the version path amazes me. DOS 6.22 w/ WfWG 3.11 takes up like 12MB. A full install of the original Win95 retail distribution takes about 30MB, which is what I use most of the time in VMWare because it's so lean and fast compared to newer versions, even after installing IE5.5, the
last version you can get for Win95.
Yes, a full install of a modern Linux distro is approaching 6GB (a full Fedora Core 3 install), but you have everything and the kitchen sink, so you can't complain. Plus it's possible to trim the fat and take out what you don't need, as the GUIs, browsers, etc. are not intimately tied to the OS itself.
That's a cool site. However, I was unable to find a kit for the 1100.
I bought mine in May of 1999, and I'm still on the original toner cart. It still prints well. I suffered the multi-page feed problem a few years ago, but HP sent a free gadget to jam down into the paper holder and it's done reasonably well since.
More recently, it has stopped feeding envelopes, which is irritataing. I now print address labels, but I'd love to get it printing straint onto envelopes again.
The PCs in my high school senior year (1990) were 286s attached to a Novell network. All of the DOS programs were managed by Direct Access, a menu system.
Once a few of us "discovered" you cold actually get into the configuration screen, they enabled the password function. However, I somehow figured out that if you passed the flag "/255" to the menu program, that would bypass the password. I remember "borrowing" a copy of Direct Access to take home and figure out how to break the password thing.
The instructor figured out that a few of us were bored to tears in required "keyboarding" class, so we got to take an experimental email-based Pascal course at the U. of Michigan. Since I was at an Army base in Stuttgart (go Patch Panthers!) at the time, the class-by modem was pretty cool at the time.
I was horrified to get a notice from Paytrust recently about them joining with Intuit. I assume they were bought by Intuit.
Intuit has gotten so anti-consumer over the years. I almost wish Microsoft had won the lawsuit between the two companies, just out of spite.
When the Quicken yearly upgrade routine began in the late 90's, I migrated to GNUCash, then evenually went to using a basic OpenOffice spreadsheet for my account handling. I had been a loyal, paying user since the DOS days.
I was a major Turbo Tax paying customer for many years, too. Then they pulled that stupid DRM scheme a few years back. I tried an alternative suggested by a Slashdot poster (Tax Act, I think?), but that was only for a year, as I felt it was an inferior product. The next year, I went to H&R Block, which I'll proabably continue to do until I can file a EZ form again (maybe in a few years).
I absolutely love Paytrust -- I manage all of my bills and loans with it. However, I'm drafting a letter to physically mail to them once I've converted all of my accounts to an alternative or back to the check and post office routine again. I must tell them that Intuit has proven itself to be anti consumer, so I can't in god faith remain with an affiliated company.
I doubt they'll take notice, though. Such a shame.
Slashdot Mirror
We're all full of crap, so *that* particular fact doesn't change anything. If you wish to claim what he's saying is *wrong* then have at it and offer a refutation.
I applaud your opinions and think they deserve to be shared with a broader audience than Slashdot.
I know I'm one of a dying breed of modem-only users, but it's still bloody annoying! I can HTTP PUT files just fine 'till the cows come home, so I wonder just was javascript voodoo gmail uses under the hood.
Take the asteroid sequence in ESB -- fabulous! You get a sense of real depth and motion, to the point of tipping back and forth in your seat and feeling your stomach drop at times, like watching those roller coaster films on an IMAX screen. That was all done with models and real cameras.
Take the asteroid/ring belt scene in Clones. Visually, it's a nice piece of eye candy, to be sure. But I was immediately struck by how flat and/or soulless it felt as compared to the ESB scene. There was no spacial impact, if you get my meaning.
I don't know if it's a fundamental flaw in CG vs real models and cameras, but until it's solved, I really think models are better in some cases.
However, the creature CG effects can be done pretty well. I think the CG Yoda in Clones was 95% there. I'm really hoping the latest movie will have it nailed.
Well, insurance is a sham, too -- especially auto liability. Let's not let another sham get a foothold in this country.
Give me a foo.tar.Z file from the early 80s and I can still uncompress it. Give me a foo.zip from a mid-80's BBS archive and I can still see what's insite.
Also, see graphics formats.
Personally, information on illegal activities can serve a useful purpose. I personally think that recreational drug use is fine, so long as the user doesn't harm anyone other than themself. When I was in college, I pondered the wisdom of trying LSD or X. As the web was pretty new in those days (early '90s), good info was hard to find, though usenet was -- and still is -- a good resource. I stumbled onto hyperreal.org and spent many nights reading up on thorough summaries of the 2 drugs as well as people's experience with them.
The archive today is even better. I never knew that nutmeg was hallucinagenic. :)
In the end, I decided against trying either drug. The strongest thing in college I ever did was Everclear. But at least I was able to make an *informed* decision, for myself. Governments have no right to take that ability away from me.
Screw the tabs. Give me a lean term window and I'll run screen for my multi-term needs. Tabs, what a lame idea for a terminal program.
When I went into the office (before I started telecommuting) I'd park in a lot on campus (worked at a large university) that was close to a mile from my building. In the morning, that was mostly a downhill walk; likewise an uphill walk at the end of the day.
So, 1.9 miles of brisk walking I wouldn't otherwise take at the cost of maybe 10 minutes each way.
Next, I stopped using the elevator for getting to my 4th floor office. I *usually* took the stairs down, but when I started taking them *up* every time I returned to the building, I got a short workout.
It may not seem like much, but over the course of a couple of months, I could notice my short-windedness disappearing. I didn't see a weight loss, but I felt a touch better.
As I was told, Yoda went to hang out in exile on Degobah, and some bad-ass in the Dark Side camp came by to punch Yoda's ticket. Yoda, of course, being the Crouching Yoda Flying Jedi that he is, soundly defeated said enemy in the cave. This supposedly explained why the Dark Side imprint was there during Luke's (failed) test in ESB. It also might explain why the most powerful Good Side Jedia went so many years undetected by Vader and Palpatine, as the Dark Side imprint cloaked him some how.
But that's just what I heard -- I never read the books.
And is it me, or should it be obvious to the Jedi that Anakin "bringing balance to the Force" really means increasing the number of Dark Siders or wiping out the Good Side? I mean, there are some odd glances between Yoda and Mace Windu in the first two movies, so maybe they already know what's coming but don't tell anyone 'cause fate is already written. Maybe this stuff is obvious to anyone with half a brain (characters in the movie as well as the fans), but it seems poorly written and/or presented in the films.
In the research I've done combing the net, I've read instances of shaving pretty much everything. Some guys on the cycling newsgroups talk about how great straight razors are on the legs because they simply don't clog up. You can shave one large area with a single stroke, unlike your average double/triple/quadruple bladed monstrosity from Gillette.
On the weirder side, some guy on about.com documented how he shaves his genitals with a staight razor. Ditto someone's head. I guess it depends on how steady a hand you have, eh?
I'm not saying you can't cut yourself, 'cause you most certainly can. But it's not the danger many people seem to think it is.
As to breaking the law by propogating patented/copyrighted plants, suing may be fine for commercial farmers and other companies, but enforcement of your average gardener will be as practical as the MPAA/RIAA policing peer-to-peer. A few examples will be made, but if there's demand, people will propogate the plants. Simple as that.
One year, were ordered thornless blackberries. When they arrived, there was a type of crude EULA included. They basically said that we weren't allowed to propgate the blackberry vines, which is exceedingly easy to do.
Had those vines survived the summer, I would have passed out cuttings to every one in my family, just to spite em. ;-)
This IP stuff is indeed getting silly.
With a straight razor, you really have no consumables for the rest of your life. Well, unless you count soap -- but who doesn't have soap (we make our own anyway).
Based on cars I've driven in the past, I'd say that the average mid-sized sedan hits in the 20-to-30 mpg mark. Just to verify this, I checked the 2005 Ford Taurus on fueleconomy.gov and it says they get 20/27, 19/27, and 15/20 depending on the model.
I drive a big, shiny '99 Dodge Ram 2500 Turbo Diesel (Cummins 24-valve). Gross weight is 5900 pounds. I can haul about a ton in the back, or tow 5 tons. Can seat six people.
My fuel efficiency? 18/22 mpg. It's my family's sole car. It takes me to work, picks up groceries, and hauls the occasional load of lumber or ton of alfalfa hay (for the cow).
So in your opinion, am I an example of an Evil Polluter? Just curious. I mean, I *could* buy an average mid-sized car, but still burn the same ammount of fuel. But the truck has so much better utility value.
The newer trucks -- particularly the diesels -- get damned good mileage for their weight/size. It's those Hummers/H2s and Suburbans/Excursions that really suck ass in the MPG ratings. So lay off us truck owners. :)
Not having red TFA, is this artist's label an RIAA member?
If you're dealing with a utility or a telecomm company and not getting anywhere, call your states Public Utility Commission (the "PUC"). Whenever I've done this, the Evil Company in question jumps. They may not always concede if the rules with the state are in their favor, but at least you can grin at the knowledge that *somebody* at that company had to deal with a lot of paperwork if you filed a formal complaint.
My most recent "victory" was against Questar Gas (natural gas utility). Somebody at the PUC convinced them to address my complaint, in spite of the rules siding with them, just so nobody (at PUC or Questar) would need to file the paperwork.
The State still has *some* teeth in it. :)
I attended Purdue University. One year I lived in Carey Quad, which happned to border the football stadium. Our parking lot was pimped out as premium parking during home games, so the actual residents got kicked out (ticketed, otherwise) so the alums could park.
I lost count at how many poor lot attendants I ripped a new one each Saturyday morning when I'd tried to park in the lot that I paid extra for (above and beyond standard room & board). I finally pitched such a fit in the office that they refunded a substantial amount of my parking fee. :)
I can't see how they had the right to deny our parking to begin with, but it seems that deep-pocketed alums are worth more than tuition-paying students.
To this day I laugh my ass off whenever I get a plea-with-the-alums-for-money notice in the mail. Like that evil university will ever get another cent of my money.
So why the hell does a fresh install of Windows XP take up over 1GB out of the box?!?
Talk about bloat.
I use VMware on my home machines (which run Linux). I have at least one version of every Windows release from WfWg 3.11 to ME, from NT 3.51 (anyone know were to get 3.1 these days?) to XP and 2003. These are for testing scenarios and playing around for nolstalgia's sake (sometimes it's fun to fire up DESQView on DOS 6.22, for example).
But the progression of bloat as you progress up the version path amazes me. DOS 6.22 w/ WfWG 3.11 takes up like 12MB. A full install of the original Win95 retail distribution takes about 30MB, which is what I use most of the time in VMWare because it's so lean and fast compared to newer versions, even after installing IE5.5, the last version you can get for Win95.
Yes, a full install of a modern Linux distro is approaching 6GB (a full Fedora Core 3 install), but you have everything and the kitchen sink, so you can't complain. Plus it's possible to trim the fat and take out what you don't need, as the GUIs, browsers, etc. are not intimately tied to the OS itself.
I bought mine in May of 1999, and I'm still on the original toner cart. It still prints well. I suffered the multi-page feed problem a few years ago, but HP sent a free gadget to jam down into the paper holder and it's done reasonably well since.
More recently, it has stopped feeding envelopes, which is irritataing. I now print address labels, but I'd love to get it printing straint onto envelopes again.
You mean like The Sims?
Offtopic, perhaps. But that chick's got the nicest ass I've seen all week. Thanks for the link. :)
Once a few of us "discovered" you cold actually get into the configuration screen, they enabled the password function. However, I somehow figured out that if you passed the flag "/255" to the menu program, that would bypass the password. I remember "borrowing" a copy of Direct Access to take home and figure out how to break the password thing.
The instructor figured out that a few of us were bored to tears in required "keyboarding" class, so we got to take an experimental email-based Pascal course at the U. of Michigan. Since I was at an Army base in Stuttgart (go Patch Panthers!) at the time, the class-by modem was pretty cool at the time.
My, how time flies..
I was horrified to get a notice from Paytrust recently about them joining with Intuit. I assume they were bought by Intuit.
Intuit has gotten so anti-consumer over the years. I almost wish Microsoft had won the lawsuit between the two companies, just out of spite.
When the Quicken yearly upgrade routine began in the late 90's, I migrated to GNUCash, then evenually went to using a basic OpenOffice spreadsheet for my account handling. I had been a loyal, paying user since the DOS days.
I was a major Turbo Tax paying customer for many years, too. Then they pulled that stupid DRM scheme a few years back. I tried an alternative suggested by a Slashdot poster (Tax Act, I think?), but that was only for a year, as I felt it was an inferior product. The next year, I went to H&R Block, which I'll proabably continue to do until I can file a EZ form again (maybe in a few years).
I absolutely love Paytrust -- I manage all of my bills and loans with it. However, I'm drafting a letter to physically mail to them once I've converted all of my accounts to an alternative or back to the check and post office routine again. I must tell them that Intuit has proven itself to be anti consumer, so I can't in god faith remain with an affiliated company.
I doubt they'll take notice, though. Such a shame.
So those of us who make saner career choices must always accomodate those of us who don't? For leisure activities, no less?