you do realize that Firefox originated as a branch off of Seamonkey because it was thought that Seamonkey had become too bloated?
That might have been true when Firefox branched off but if you add up the resources used by Firefox and Thunderbird you'll find that Seamonkey is lighter. Since it is based on the same version of Gecko (the renderer) it is more or less in the same league speed-wise. Many Firefox-extensions work - or can be made to work - in Seamonkey as well.
I have used most current browsers in Linux - Firefox, Seamonkey, Opera, Arora, Midori, Epiphany, Chromium, Konqueror and some others - and have concluded that Seamonkey fits my needs best. It is fast enough, works well with 20+ tabs per window and includes a well-integrated email client while keeping resource consumption within acceptable limits for my main systems (8 year old IBM Thinkpad T23's). It has enough features all by itself but even so it is flexible enough to add even more by using extensions (including everyone's favorite Adblock+).
So you see there is no need for a sarcasm detector. Things change. Firefox has suffered from the second system effect in version 2.x where resource consumption went up while reliability went down. The 3.x branch has undone most of the damage but it still takes more to run both Firefox as well as Thunderbird than it does to run Seamonkey.
But how does that affect the patriotism of the whistleblower, as GP mentioned?
Patriot comes from the latin word 'Patria' which means fatherland. In my book a patriot defends what his country stands for. If the government acts in ways which do not fit I see no reason why it would be unpatriotic to attempt to bring the government to shame. If you want to (ab)use Latin to create a word for someone who supports the government you could use 'Administratiot' or 'Governiot' but maybe the word 'Idiot' would be more suitable?
"Nucular" is the vernacular in half the country. I'm sorry you don't understand the concept of dialects, and you can go to hell if you want to judge me based on my accent.
All I can say is that this fits in with that rightwing extremist shop ad you have in your sig. It reinforces the stereotype. Would you walk around in a t-shirt reading something along the lines you just uttered?
"Nucular or go to hell"?
"Praise the lord and pass the nucular bombs"?
"Nucular Choctaw Bingo"?
Of course nucular is just plain wrong no matter which dialect you speak or accent you have. At least that is what I learned at school...
Saw{mill|fish} is just a window manager. It is not a desktop environment. In gnome terms it compares to metacity, not the whole gnome desktop. If you want to run just a window manager you can do that with any of the available window managers. If you like programming your window manager in Lisp then saw{mill|fish} is a good choice but there are many other extensible window managers out there.
I run a gnome desktop without all those memory-hogging misfeatures like indexing. It has a 17 pixel high gnome panel on the top so the rest of the screen is completely free for useful stuff. Use a theme with small window borders (eg. Mist or Metabox) instead of those huge gaudy monstrosities which many distributions seem to favour. Well-configured gnome is actually one of the least cluttered desktop environments I have found.
No, it means people in GB travel on smaller roads or in busy traffic, both situations which require more attention from the driver to avoid accidents. It actually shows that US drivers are more accident-prone, not less. This fact is staved by the statistics: the US sees about 9 deaths per billion kilometers, and the UK sees 6.3 deaths. Even though those UK miles are driven on more challenging roads than those in the US.
This question was never published and thus never answered. Anyone out there with experience in this field? That IR-interface currently sits on front of the meter doing nothing at all while it would create the possibility to eg. create an accurate power use graph, power quality data - I'm on the far end of a long air cable so that is sometimes an issue - and more interesting things. I guess I'm not the only one interested in these things?
If you can milk over $500,000/year from a business (government is a form of business) over the course of a decade without anyone crying foul about it, would you not do it?
No, d*mnit, I would not. Those who do are crooks, plain and simple. They are leaching public funds for their own profit. They should be tried and if found guilty made to pay - in money or otherwise.
If this is the holy grail of free market capitalism - grab what you can as long as you can and damn the rest - why then are people still surprised when news of these practices surface? Those suits are only pursuing their right to happiness and prosperity after all?
If only the role models for society were not like this. If only...
But you've been completely wrong, it's exactly like calling what you excrete food.
Well, around here you might not eat what your excrete but you can drive your car on it. Or your tractor if you happen to be a farmer, have enough livestock and ignore the stupid tax laws which still keep farmers from running their machinery on locally produced biogas...
fluffy bunny wind generators and happy little solar panels
Yeah. You said it. Those damn hippies with their bunnies and all. Real men use smoke-belching coal plants and that's the way it is.
Tell me... how much power do you use in your house? Being a real man it will probably be a lot as real men use incandescent bulbs instead of CFL and will have nothing to do with other hippy inventions.
Your house probably has a roof area of around 100 square meters. Sorry for that communist unit, real men use square feet of course... that would be around 900 square feet. Say that you put some happy little solar panels on half of that roof. These are really happy panels with an efficiency of about 25%. Those happy little panels would create about 28W/sq.ft. if you live somewhere where the sun puts about 111W/sq.ft. on the ground. They do this for around 8 hours per day, a low estimate. That ends up being 100 KWh per day. You could also go with less happy panels with a lower efficiency of 13% and still get ~50 KWh.
Hey, maybe even a real man like you would have difficulty going through 50 KWh per day. Especially since real men would not use that power to charge their cheerful electric car or something.
Stand back a while and empty your mind. Now look at what sort of hell on earth the profit motive creates when it is allowed to run wild in essential sectors like health care. What is the advantage of running health cost insurance in a profit-driven system? Does the quality of health care go up? That does not seem to be the case. Do the costs of providing health care go down? This does not seem to be the case, the opposite is true. Does it lead to universal access to health care? No, it does not.
If your house is on fire and you do not have fire insurance should the fire brigade just let it burn down and let you perish?
If you get robbed and you did not sign police insurance should the cops refuse to hear your case?
Why then should health care insurance be handed over to profit-driven companies? What is the profit? Who profits?
The companies do. Society as a whole does not. Why should those companies profit on the back of society? Who gave them the right?
Assuming you have raw disk access I'd just dd the entire filesystem out over the serial port. If you have slip on that machine I'd create a slip link between the Altos and a Linux (or *BSD) box so you can use TCP. Once you have the whole disk image in an image you can use whatever tools available to extract the data.
Anyone who works with power tools knows by now that there are many cases where it does not make any sense to pay the premium for a brand like Makita. Why pay 4 times the price for a tool when you can buy three replacements should the less expensive version decide to call it a day?
Now I do make an exception for dangerous stuff like buzz saws - the Skilsaw I bought 15 years ago still works like new - but for the most part I just get whatever seems the most solid at the best price. Often the most solid tool is actually one of the cheaper models as the more expensive stuff tends to be overdesigned and contain too much plastic for my liking. I use the stuff on the farm to repair and build everything that needs to be repaired or built - which is a lot.
Strange the way people seem to make the same typo. The i is rather close to the p but not next to it, so why do so many people put a 'i' in front of the word 'phone'? The summary did not mention any specific phone, just that this technology might be shrunk to fit in a phone.
Don't be an iTool or iDroid! Use normal words! A phone is a phone and does not need a vowel prepended to become viable. If this scanner technology ever comes to fruition the Apple-branded version of it would most likely be hobbled by some agreement with content publishers so it could not be used to 'walk into Borders, scan a few books' as it would check some embedded watermark and refuse to scan more than 1 page.
Ah, the old population density bird... it still won't fly. Population density in Sweden - where I live - is lower than that in the US. Mobile telecommunications is quite popular here as you probably know. Ericsson and Nokia are well-known names in the field of mobile telecmmunications. Nokia from Finland, Ericsson from Sweden.
Population density in Sweden comes to about 57 heads per square mile. Finland is lower with 44. Norway is even lower with 39.
The USA has a population density of 84 heads per square mile. Those heads are somewhat more spread out than they are in Scandinavia because of urban sprawl so in the end the USA probably poses the same challenge as Scandinavia when it comes to rolling out mobile networks. So... what are you waiting for?
So? Both Volkswagen as well as Fiat have produced cars for years now which can do 100 km on less than 3 liter of diesel at that speed. Don't forget that the efficiency of a diesel stems partly from the high compression ratio and the absense of a throttle valve. It is certainly possible to create a petrol engine which can achieve this level of efficiency, even though the energy density of petrol is slightly lower than that of diesel. As to whether the system this article is about is snake oil or not I don't know but there is nothing impossible about driving 100 km on less than 3 liters of fuel. Or 2 for that matter.
There have been tablet PC's on the market for more than 20 years now. Is there any reason why those can not be used by your salesfolk to show the app to potential customers? Why does it take an Apple-branded tablet to make this concept viable? Existing tablet PC's give you all the freedom in the world to set them up just right for your demonstrations. They can be tethered as well so - assuming that the salesperson has a non-Apple branded 3G phone - there would not even be a need for that extra wireless card...
Why does that Apple on the back of the device suddenly make it a viable choice? This does not seem rational, especially given the restrictions which Apple-branded mobile products are know for and which started this whole thread in the first place.
In that case you should have your hearing checked. When something does not work in Linux the reaction is 'make it work, the source is available, did you file a bug report' - a marked difference I'd say. For the average user the end result might be similar but in Linux' case all it takes is a not so average user to make it work.
Another very big difference becomes apparent when that user finally makes it work while another similar user makes his Apple-branded product do the same...
Given a solid implementation the Linux user will see his work spread to different distributions. He (or she of course) will receive praise from users and developers alike.
The Apple user will see his work derided as a hack by the Apple faithful. He (or she) will be branded as a hacker and possibly pirate in the common media sense of the word as he will have breached several license agreements to be able to make the thing do what it should. He will also see his work been made ineffective with the next firmware release and will read stern warnings about 'unauthorized firmware modifications' being the cause of 'bricked' products.
I doubt that in 5 years I am going to use any piece of electronics I own now
Why on earth would you not use anything as young as 5 years? I'm typing this on a 2002 Thinkpad T32, works fine. The machine is surrounded by a few 1999 Virgin Webplayers which I'm working on, they work fine as well. The newest piece of computing hardware here is the mentioned Thinkpad together with a few other similar machines. They work fine. The only things needing replacement are the hard drives which do tend to crap out after a few years but for the rest these machines just work. A PIII-m 1.2 GHz has enough power for modern applications - bar games which I don't play so who cares.
A blanket statement - or is it an intention - to only use 'new' hardware just makes you sound like a marketing tool. Ooooh, shiny new, gotta have...
This came up in the Dutch 'Volkskrant' (newspaper, literally "people's paper"). It purported to show some live video of the phone 'launch'. I did not get to see this video, instead I was told that my browser and platform were not supported so sorry this Silverlight video is not for you.
Funny, that. This browser and platform have no problems showing video. I guess this phone is just not for me...
Silly Microsoft. You can not even show a video without building walls around it and still you want me to believe you can build a phone to interact with the real world?
Ha. Good one. Pull the other one, it's got bells on it...
'Twas early in the spring when I decide to go For to work up in the woods in North Ontar-i-o; And the unemployment office said they'd send me through To the Little Abitibi with the survey crew
And the black flies, the little black flies, Always the black fly no matter where you go; I'll die with the black fly a-pickin' my bones, In North Ontar-i-o-i-o, in North Ontar-i-o.
And the man Black Tobey was the captain of the crew And he said, I'm gonna tell you boys, what we're gonna do: They want to build a power dam; we must find a way For to make the Little Ab flow around the other way
With the black flies, the little black flies, Always the black fly no matter where you go; I'll die with the black fly a-pickin' my bones, In North Ontar-i-o-i-o, in North Ontar-i-o.
So we survey to the east, survey to the west, Couldn't make our minds up how to do it best; Little Ab, Little Ab, what shall I do? I'm all but goin' crazy with the survey crew
And the black flies, the little black flies, Always the black fly no matter where you go; I'll die with the black fly a-pickin' my bones, In North Ontar-i-o-i-o, in North Ontar-i-o.
It was blackfly, blackfly, everywhere, A-crawlin' in your whiskers, crawlin' in your hair; Swimmin' in the soup, swimmin' in the tea, And the devil take the blackfly, let me be.
Black flies, the little black flies, Always the black fly no matter where you go; I'll die with the black fly a-pickin' my bones, In North Ontar-i-o-i-o, in North Ontar-i-o.
Black Tobey fell to swearin'; the work went slow, The state of our morale was a-gettin' pretty low; The flies swarmed heavy; hard to catch your breath, As you staggered up and down the trail a-talkin' to yourself
With the black flies, the little black flies, Always the black fly no matter where you go; I'll die with the black fly a-pickin' my bones, In North Ontar-i-o-i-o, in North Ontar-i-o.
Well now, the bull cook's name was Blind River Joe, If it hadn't been for him we'd 've never pulled through; 'Cause he bound up our bruises and he kidded us for fun, And he lathered us with bacon grease and balsam gum.
And the black flies, the little black flies, Always the black fly no matter where you go; I'll die with the black fly a-pickin' my bones, In North Ontar-i-o-i-o, in North Ontar-i-o.
And at last the job was over; Black Tobey said we're through With the Little Abitibi and the survey crew! 'Twas a wonderful experience and this I know: I'll never go again to North Ontar-i-o
With the black flies, the little black flies, Always the black fly no matter where you go; I'll die with the black fly a-pickin' my bones, In North Ontar-i-o-i-o, in North Ontar-i-o. And the black flies, the little black flies, Always the black fly no matter where you go; I'll die with the black fly a-pickin' my bones, In North Ontar-i-o-i-o, in North Ontar-i-o.
I have camped just about anywhere in the Netherlands, one of those countries which do not allow 'free camping'. Once I had my tent set up next to a forest path in the province of Limburg (bordering Belgium, in the south) when a police officer came by on his bicycle. I happened to be cooking some food. Guess what the policeman did?
He wished me a pleasant dinner and cycled off.
Those rules about 'free camping' are in the books and will be enforced against those who misbehave by littering, making noise, destroying stuff or camping in places where it is clearly not wanted. If you keep a low profile (both figuratively and literaly - take a small tent and a bicycle or backpack, don't camp in groups) you'll probably find you get the same reaction.
Now I live in Sweden where we have 'allemansrätt' (the "everymans's right" mentioned above) so the whole point is moot. Yay for freedom!
normalizing quality of life in the US down to the rest of the world
I see what you are getting at but you do seem to equate economic power with quality of life. While there is a correlation between these two it is not as simple as you seem to imply. Next to purchasing power the quality of life 'score' depends on things like affordable and good quality health care (the US lacks the former), low crime rates, affordable and high standard education (the US lacks the former again and is slipping back on the latter) and many other factors. It should not come as a surprise then that the US actually does not score more than average when it comes to quality of life. The top is dominated by European countries and cities.
Search The Fine Web for references, there are plenty.
...a deaf judge seems to have presided over a case against Men at Work in which it is claimed that their song 'Down Under' plagiarizes a song from 1935 named 'Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree'. I listened to that song. It is nothing at all like the flute riff in 'Down Under'. Still... TheyWon. What do you think?
Sheez, I don't know how you people manage to live in this dirty, stinky world. That line about cyclists being smelly and dirty is getting really, really old. If it were true you would not be able to enter most Dutch schools, let alone houses. Let me tell you from experience that that whole smelly-cyclist-story is mostly based on nonsense and seems to be not much more than an excuse to keep driving that car instead of cycling.
That your cow-orkers would not be able to survive cycling 16 km should be a temporary thing. Get them in shape and they'll be able and possibly willing. And talking about smelliness and out-of-shape colleagues... I'd rather sit next to someone who has cycled 16 km than next to a MacDonalds regular with the shape of a car seat in his ass...
Slashdot Mirror
That might have been true when Firefox branched off but if you add up the resources used by Firefox and Thunderbird you'll find that Seamonkey is lighter. Since it is based on the same version of Gecko (the renderer) it is more or less in the same league speed-wise. Many Firefox-extensions work - or can be made to work - in Seamonkey as well.
I have used most current browsers in Linux - Firefox, Seamonkey, Opera, Arora, Midori, Epiphany, Chromium, Konqueror and some others - and have concluded that Seamonkey fits my needs best. It is fast enough, works well with 20+ tabs per window and includes a well-integrated email client while keeping resource consumption within acceptable limits for my main systems (8 year old IBM Thinkpad T23's). It has enough features all by itself but even so it is flexible enough to add even more by using extensions (including everyone's favorite Adblock+).
So you see there is no need for a sarcasm detector. Things change. Firefox has suffered from the second system effect in version 2.x where resource consumption went up while reliability went down. The 3.x branch has undone most of the damage but it still takes more to run both Firefox as well as Thunderbird than it does to run Seamonkey.
Patriot comes from the latin word 'Patria' which means fatherland. In my book a patriot defends what his country stands for. If the government acts in ways which do not fit I see no reason why it would be unpatriotic to attempt to bring the government to shame. If you want to (ab)use Latin to create a word for someone who supports the government you could use 'Administratiot' or 'Governiot' but maybe the word 'Idiot' would be more suitable?
Maybe I wrote the wrong book?
All I can say is that this fits in with that rightwing extremist shop ad you have in your sig. It reinforces the stereotype. Would you walk around in a t-shirt reading something along the lines you just uttered?
" Nucular or go to hell "?
"Praise the lord and pass the nucular bombs"?
"Nucular Choctaw Bingo"?
Of course nucular is just plain wrong no matter which dialect you speak or accent you have. At least that is what I learned at school...
Saw{mill|fish} is just a window manager. It is not a desktop environment. In gnome terms it compares to metacity, not the whole gnome desktop. If you want to run just a window manager you can do that with any of the available window managers. If you like programming your window manager in Lisp then saw{mill|fish} is a good choice but there are many other extensible window managers out there.
I run a gnome desktop without all those memory-hogging misfeatures like indexing. It has a 17 pixel high gnome panel on the top so the rest of the screen is completely free for useful stuff. Use a theme with small window borders (eg. Mist or Metabox) instead of those huge gaudy monstrosities which many distributions seem to favour. Well-configured gnome is actually one of the least cluttered desktop environments I have found.
No, it means people in GB travel on smaller roads or in busy traffic, both situations which require more attention from the driver to avoid accidents. It actually shows that US drivers are more accident-prone, not less. This fact is staved by the statistics: the US sees about 9 deaths per billion kilometers, and the UK sees 6.3 deaths. Even though those UK miles are driven on more challenging roads than those in the US.
Let me take this opportunity to dig up my attempt at an 'Ask Slashdot' from more than 3 years ago:
How to monitor your electricity meter
This question was never published and thus never answered. Anyone out there with experience in this field? That IR-interface currently sits on front of the meter doing nothing at all while it would create the possibility to eg. create an accurate power use graph, power quality data - I'm on the far end of a long air cable so that is sometimes an issue - and more interesting things. I guess I'm not the only one interested in these things?
No, d*mnit, I would not. Those who do are crooks, plain and simple. They are leaching public funds for their own profit. They should be tried and if found guilty made to pay - in money or otherwise.
If this is the holy grail of free market capitalism - grab what you can as long as you can and damn the rest - why then are people still surprised when news of these practices surface? Those suits are only pursuing their right to happiness and prosperity after all?
If only the role models for society were not like this. If only...
Well, around here you might not eat what your excrete but you can drive your car on it. Or your tractor if you happen to be a farmer, have enough livestock and ignore the stupid tax laws which still keep farmers from running their machinery on locally produced biogas...
Yeah. You said it. Those damn hippies with their bunnies and all. Real men use smoke-belching coal plants and that's the way it is.
Tell me... how much power do you use in your house? Being a real man it will probably be a lot as real men use incandescent bulbs instead of CFL and will have nothing to do with other hippy inventions.
Your house probably has a roof area of around 100 square meters. Sorry for that communist unit, real men use square feet of course... that would be around 900 square feet. Say that you put some happy little solar panels on half of that roof. These are really happy panels with an efficiency of about 25%. Those happy little panels would create about 28W/sq.ft. if you live somewhere where the sun puts about 111W/sq.ft. on the ground. They do this for around 8 hours per day, a low estimate. That ends up being 100 KWh per day. You could also go with less happy panels with a lower efficiency of 13% and still get ~50 KWh.
Hey, maybe even a real man like you would have difficulty going through 50 KWh per day. Especially since real men would not use that power to charge their cheerful electric car or something.
Stand back a while and empty your mind. Now look at what sort of hell on earth the profit motive creates when it is allowed to run wild in essential sectors like health care. What is the advantage of running health cost insurance in a profit-driven system? Does the quality of health care go up? That does not seem to be the case. Do the costs of providing health care go down? This does not seem to be the case, the opposite is true. Does it lead to universal access to health care? No, it does not.
If your house is on fire and you do not have fire insurance should the fire brigade just let it burn down and let you perish?
If you get robbed and you did not sign police insurance should the cops refuse to hear your case?
Why then should health care insurance be handed over to profit-driven companies? What is the profit? Who profits?
The companies do. Society as a whole does not. Why should those companies profit on the back of society? Who gave them the right?
Assuming you have raw disk access I'd just dd the entire filesystem out over the serial port. If you have slip on that machine I'd create a slip link between the Altos and a Linux (or *BSD) box so you can use TCP. Once you have the whole disk image in an image you can use whatever tools available to extract the data.
Anyone who works with power tools knows by now that there are many cases where it does not make any sense to pay the premium for a brand like Makita. Why pay 4 times the price for a tool when you can buy three replacements should the less expensive version decide to call it a day?
Now I do make an exception for dangerous stuff like buzz saws - the Skilsaw I bought 15 years ago still works like new - but for the most part I just get whatever seems the most solid at the best price. Often the most solid tool is actually one of the cheaper models as the more expensive stuff tends to be overdesigned and contain too much plastic for my liking. I use the stuff on the farm to repair and build everything that needs to be repaired or built - which is a lot.
Strange the way people seem to make the same typo. The i is rather close to the p but not next to it, so why do so many people put a 'i' in front of the word 'phone'? The summary did not mention any specific phone, just that this technology might be shrunk to fit in a phone.
Don't be an iTool or iDroid! Use normal words! A phone is a phone and does not need a vowel prepended to become viable. If this scanner technology ever comes to fruition the Apple-branded version of it would most likely be hobbled by some agreement with content publishers so it could not be used to 'walk into Borders, scan a few books' as it would check some embedded watermark and refuse to scan more than 1 page.
iPhone?
Why on earth did you have to mention that thing in your posting?
If this continues I suggest a corollary to Godwin's law: mention anything fruity out of context and you're out of the game.
Ah, the old population density bird... it still won't fly. Population density in Sweden - where I live - is lower than that in the US. Mobile telecommunications is quite popular here as you probably know. Ericsson and Nokia are well-known names in the field of mobile telecmmunications. Nokia from Finland, Ericsson from Sweden.
Population density in Sweden comes to about 57 heads per square mile. Finland is lower with 44. Norway is even lower with 39.
The USA has a population density of 84 heads per square mile. Those heads are somewhat more spread out than they are in Scandinavia because of urban sprawl so in the end the USA probably poses the same challenge as Scandinavia when it comes to rolling out mobile networks. So... what are you waiting for?
So? Both Volkswagen as well as Fiat have produced cars for years now which can do 100 km on less than 3 liter of diesel at that speed. Don't forget that the efficiency of a diesel stems partly from the high compression ratio and the absense of a throttle valve. It is certainly possible to create a petrol engine which can achieve this level of efficiency, even though the energy density of petrol is slightly lower than that of diesel. As to whether the system this article is about is snake oil or not I don't know but there is nothing impossible about driving 100 km on less than 3 liters of fuel. Or 2 for that matter.
There have been tablet PC's on the market for more than 20 years now. Is there any reason why those can not be used by your salesfolk to show the app to potential customers? Why does it take an Apple-branded tablet to make this concept viable? Existing tablet PC's give you all the freedom in the world to set them up just right for your demonstrations. They can be tethered as well so - assuming that the salesperson has a non-Apple branded 3G phone - there would not even be a need for that extra wireless card...
Why does that Apple on the back of the device suddenly make it a viable choice? This does not seem rational, especially given the restrictions which Apple-branded mobile products are know for and which started this whole thread in the first place.
In that case you should have your hearing checked. When something does not work in Linux the reaction is 'make it work, the source is available, did you file a bug report' - a marked difference I'd say. For the average user the end result might be similar but in Linux' case all it takes is a not so average user to make it work.
Another very big difference becomes apparent when that user finally makes it work while another similar user makes his Apple-branded product do the same...
Why on earth would you not use anything as young as 5 years? I'm typing this on a 2002 Thinkpad T32, works fine. The machine is surrounded by a few 1999 Virgin Webplayers which I'm working on, they work fine as well. The newest piece of computing hardware here is the mentioned Thinkpad together with a few other similar machines. They work fine. The only things needing replacement are the hard drives which do tend to crap out after a few years but for the rest these machines just work. A PIII-m 1.2 GHz has enough power for modern applications - bar games which I don't play so who cares.
A blanket statement - or is it an intention - to only use 'new' hardware just makes you sound like a marketing tool. Ooooh, shiny new, gotta have...
This came up in the Dutch 'Volkskrant' (newspaper, literally "people's paper"). It purported to show some live video of the phone 'launch'. I did not get to see this video, instead I was told that my browser and platform were not supported so sorry this Silverlight video is not for you.
Funny, that. This browser and platform have no problems showing video. I guess this phone is just not for me...
Silly Microsoft. You can not even show a video without building walls around it and still you want me to believe you can build a phone to interact with the real world?
Ha. Good one. Pull the other one, it's got bells on it...
Ahhh, blackflies... they even have a song dedicated to 'm by Wade Hemsworth:
The blackfly song
'Twas early in the spring when I decide to go
For to work up in the woods in North Ontar-i-o;
And the unemployment office said they'd send me through
To the Little Abitibi with the survey crew
And the black flies, the little black flies,
Always the black fly no matter where you go;
I'll die with the black fly a-pickin' my bones,
In North Ontar-i-o-i-o, in North Ontar-i-o.
And the man Black Tobey was the captain of the crew
And he said, I'm gonna tell you boys, what we're gonna do:
They want to build a power dam; we must find a way
For to make the Little Ab flow around the other way
With the black flies, the little black flies,
Always the black fly no matter where you go;
I'll die with the black fly a-pickin' my bones,
In North Ontar-i-o-i-o, in North Ontar-i-o.
So we survey to the east, survey to the west,
Couldn't make our minds up how to do it best;
Little Ab, Little Ab, what shall I do?
I'm all but goin' crazy with the survey crew
And the black flies, the little black flies,
Always the black fly no matter where you go;
I'll die with the black fly a-pickin' my bones,
In North Ontar-i-o-i-o, in North Ontar-i-o.
It was blackfly, blackfly, everywhere,
A-crawlin' in your whiskers, crawlin' in your hair;
Swimmin' in the soup, swimmin' in the tea,
And the devil take the blackfly, let me be.
Black flies, the little black flies,
Always the black fly no matter where you go;
I'll die with the black fly a-pickin' my bones,
In North Ontar-i-o-i-o, in North Ontar-i-o.
Black Tobey fell to swearin'; the work went slow,
The state of our morale was a-gettin' pretty low;
The flies swarmed heavy; hard to catch your breath,
As you staggered up and down the trail a-talkin' to yourself
With the black flies, the little black flies,
Always the black fly no matter where you go;
I'll die with the black fly a-pickin' my bones,
In North Ontar-i-o-i-o, in North Ontar-i-o.
Well now, the bull cook's name was Blind River Joe,
If it hadn't been for him we'd 've never pulled through;
'Cause he bound up our bruises and he kidded us for fun,
And he lathered us with bacon grease and balsam gum.
And the black flies, the little black flies,
Always the black fly no matter where you go;
I'll die with the black fly a-pickin' my bones,
In North Ontar-i-o-i-o, in North Ontar-i-o.
And at last the job was over; Black Tobey said we're through
With the Little Abitibi and the survey crew!
'Twas a wonderful experience and this I know:
I'll never go again to North Ontar-i-o
With the black flies, the little black flies,
Always the black fly no matter where you go;
I'll die with the black fly a-pickin' my bones,
In North Ontar-i-o-i-o, in North Ontar-i-o.
And the black flies, the little black flies,
Always the black fly no matter where you go;
I'll die with the black fly a-pickin' my bones,
In North Ontar-i-o-i-o, in North Ontar-i-o.
I have camped just about anywhere in the Netherlands, one of those countries which do not allow 'free camping'. Once I had my tent set up next to a forest path in the province of Limburg (bordering Belgium, in the south) when a police officer came by on his bicycle. I happened to be cooking some food. Guess what the policeman did?
He wished me a pleasant dinner and cycled off.
Those rules about 'free camping' are in the books and will be enforced against those who misbehave by littering, making noise, destroying stuff or camping in places where it is clearly not wanted. If you keep a low profile (both figuratively and literaly - take a small tent and a bicycle or backpack, don't camp in groups) you'll probably find you get the same reaction.
Now I live in Sweden where we have 'allemansrätt' (the "everymans's right" mentioned above) so the whole point is moot. Yay for freedom!
...a deaf judge seems to have presided over a case against Men at Work in which it is claimed that their song 'Down Under' plagiarizes a song from 1935 named 'Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree'. I listened to that song. It is nothing at all like the flute riff in 'Down Under'. Still... They Won. What do you think?
Sheez, I don't know how you people manage to live in this dirty, stinky world. That line about cyclists being smelly and dirty is getting really, really old. If it were true you would not be able to enter most Dutch schools, let alone houses. Let me tell you from experience that that whole smelly-cyclist-story is mostly based on nonsense and seems to be not much more than an excuse to keep driving that car instead of cycling.
That your cow-orkers would not be able to survive cycling 16 km should be a temporary thing. Get them in shape and they'll be able and possibly willing. And talking about smelliness and out-of-shape colleagues... I'd rather sit next to someone who has cycled 16 km than next to a MacDonalds regular with the shape of a car seat in his ass...