Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. (Wiki quote)
A clever-sounding quote is not necessarily the same as wisdom or good advice. That's a great quote that people can pull out when they're being malicious and they want people to think they're not. It also keeps people from asking questions, which is generally not a good thing.
I'm also reminded of Godwin's Law about mentioning Hitler. It's generally used incorrectly (e.g. "If you compare someone to Hitler, you automatically lose.) The real law (according to Wikipedia) states "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." All this really seems to say to me is that people online get into heated arguments, and that the inevitable result of heated arguments online is that someone will call someone the worst name they could think of - Hitler. So basically, if you invoke Godwin's Law thinking that anyone automatically comparing someone to Hitler (like, say, someone with Fascist tendencies), you're the idiot because you don't know what Godwin's Law says. Sure, *most* people comparing someone to Hitler are going to be doing so only for shock value in the heat of an argument, but when you're talking about a politician with Fascist tendences, then, yeah, that comparison may be a valid point. If you don't keep track of those kinds of tendencies of people in positions of power, that's exactly what you could wind up with.
But I digress.
We've all seen the legal action against major tech companies about anti-competitive behaviour, price-fixing, and what-not, the emails from within Microsoft, etc. I'd think that at this point, anyone blindly assuming incompetence instead of malice on the part of a BigCo is kinda stupid.
The only clever saying I can think of that should pretty much always work is, "Question Authority."
Issue One: IE8 RC1, when in standards mode, no longer reserves space for the vertical scrollbar if it isn't needed by the current content, rather like Firefox. Unlike Firefox, the '-moz-scrollbars-vertical', IE8 wants 'overflow-y: scroll;' in the body portion of the CSS. The problem: IE6 and IE7 both react... badly to that, by putting a *second* vertical scrollbar to the left of the main one, but which only spans from the top of the canvas to the bottom of the content (not the bottom of the canvas). Note, the overflow-y thing DOES work in FF3 (didn't bother testing in FF2).
Pedantic-Man's(tm) Solution: Use the following CSS conditional statement for the body tag in your CSS*:
<!--[if IE 8]>
overflow-y: scroll;
<![endif]-->
Go ahead and keep the -moz-scrollbars-vertical in your html tag in your CSS for FF, and enjoy the sweet taste of multi-browser happiness.
Pedantic-Man(tm) is talking about ampersand-trade-semicolon, 'trademark,' not ampersand-reg-semicolon, 'all rights reserved.'
Pedantic-Man(tm) has to be a stickler for the legalities, you know. It's kinda implied by the name.:)
Please note: Pedantic-Man(tm) is trademarked by Fly By Night, Ltd.(tm), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Harkonnen Heavy Industries(tm). Discontinue reading posts by Pedantic-Man(tm) if any of the following symptoms occur: itching, vertigo, dizziness, tingling in extremities, loss of balance or coordination, slurred speech, temporary blindness, profuse sweating, or heart palpitations. Pedantic-Man(tm) may stick to certain types of skin. When not in use, Pedantic-Man(tm) should be returned to his special container and kept under refrigeration... Failure to do so relieves the makers of Pedantic-Man(tm), Fly By Night, Ltd.(tm), and its parent company Harkonnen Heavy Industries(tm), of any and all liability.
Special permission is granted to the readers of Slashdot to taunt Pedantic-Man(tm), as he feeds on taunts. Taunts fed to Pedantic-Man(tm) automatically become the property of Pedantic-Man(tm).
My phone has Shutter Tone options that include Chimp, Quack, Flix, Boing, and Click.
Since we all know what this law it about, it should include a 'Grunt' option. Perhaps modify that face recognition feature that cameras come with to also know if it's an upskirt picture, and switch to that sound automatically. Or a wolf whistle. Context-sensitive camera(phone) noises - it's the wave of the future, a whole new paradigm!
The great thing about this law is that with all the people making clicking noises with their cameraphones & cameras, my Model M keyboard won't be any more annoying than anything else. w00t!
I would be most disappointed if I was required to replace a muzzle brake (aka "loudener") with one that converted the solid "BA-WHOOOOOM" into a wimpy "bang".
Honestly, to me, the best sound any weapons makes is the sound of a round being loaded by a pump-action shotgun, although I *do* really like the fake sound those 'silenced' MP5s make in the movies. Maybe if I had a pump-action shotgun that had a speaker that would make that sound? Yeah, that would be awesome...
My worry is what the cop will do after he hears your phone click when you catch him beating the shit out of somebody. Makes it a little hard to conceal that you just caught him in action.
Excellent point! Here's my tip: while you're taking pictures of the beating, make sure you yell loudly such things as, "Yeah, that's it, beat the shit outta that scumbag!" Get the law on your side, man. When dealing with police, I'm reminded of the old adage, "You don't have to be faster than the Eagle, you just have to be faster than the pigeon next to you." (or words to that effect) Make sure you're the one taking the pictures of the beating, and not one of the people IN the picture.
Of course, said friend later died in a shootout with the police at a meth lab so I guess he wasn't born into the deep end of the gene pool.....
That's the best thing about the gene pool - there's no lifeguard. I really wish they'd take those warning stickers off hairdryers and such, though. Some of these 'tards are living long enough to reproduce.
>> If they want everyone to respect their law, they should lead by example and prevent their CCTVs from filming without people knowing.
> There's a small loophole there - CCTV's do not use film!
Pedantic-Man(tm) approves! It should also be noted that Pedantic-Man's VW TDI (diesel) has no 'gas' pedal.:)
ps to Slashdot - I gotta tell ya, Pedantic-Man(tm) wants his HTML character entity for the trademark symbol to work. SO stupid to filter that out; you're allowing the Greater Than symbol. Gah.
Open a command prompt and type "OPTIMIZE" and hit the Enter or Return key (doesn't matter which).
If you get an error, type "OVERRIDE" or "SECURITY OVERRIDE" and then try the optimize command again.
Make sure you type these in all-caps (it's best just to leave the caps lock key on all the time, really).
After the optimization sequence is complete, reboot your computer. The best way to do this is to simply pull the power plug on the back of the machine and then plug it back in. Do this a few times just to make sure it's rebooted everything correctly.
If this doesn't work, go online from another computer and buy a Mac or something from Dell.
-- note that you'll need product keys to install, and probably some crack to authorize it.
Incorrect. Without a product key, it will be a 30-day trial. WITH product key, it works until August 1, 2009.
Also, don't believe some of the sites that say that it won't install unless you already have Vista SP1 installed. It won't *UPGRADE* an *EXISTING* installation unless said installation is Vista SP1. You can do a custom install onto an unformatted partition.
is there a chance that the NASA chiefs are pushing for Ares specifically because it will require a complete reworking of the infrastructure and launch support systems?
And, that's not necessarily even a bad thing if they are (aside from the ethical problem with it, of course), if the end-result is something that better meets the long-term needs of what we want NASA to be doing. The question of what we want NASA to be doing is, of course, the zillion dollar question, which is going to be reevaluated by the Obama team. I'd like to see much more emphasis placed on manned spaceflight WELL beyond LEO. I want humans to be a 2+ planet species. Doing nothing but going to LEO, and designing your entire space industry around going to LEO is far from optimal for that goal. But, that's MY goal. *shrug*
Whether or not the design is better is largely irrelevant to this debate; what is relevant is the DIRECT team are failing to take into account the overhead of switching projects and switching managers at this stage. Regardless of which was the better approach, DIRECT lost the debate some time ago, and revisiting it now (even if it results in a better vehicle in the long run) isn't going to make anything either cheaper or quicker.
This is short-sighted thinking. If DIRECT would result in a better platform in the long run, then it's likely worth the pain of switching mid-stream (if you can even consider the status of Ares 'mid'-stream yet). Let's use Netscape Navigator/Firefox as an analogy. NN5 was fairly far along when it became apparent it wasn't a platform that would be worth using in the long run. Even though it was very far along (way more than 'mid'-stream!), the decision to junk the codebase was made, and now we have Firefox. Same deal. If you think long-term, which is HUGELY important with regard to something like a space program, then you'll wind up saving enormous amounts of time and money by switching to the better long-term platform.
This, of course, assumes that DIRECT actually IS a better platform for the long-term, and meeting our future space exploration goals, etc., which is something I'm not qualified to opine about.
They stated it can be charged 1000 times. That means if you use your laptop every day you will need a new one in 2.7 years.
No, that means if you *charge* your laptop battery every day you'll need one that often (I didn't check your math, but that's not my point). If you use your laptop as a desktop replacement, as many Apple owners seem to do (especially that big honkin' 17" we're talking about), it's probably plugged-in all the time, and I'm hoping that Apple made it not recharge the battery all the time it's plugged in, so it may last much, much longer than that. It depends on how you use it. Not that I'm defending the idea of a non-removable battery (I think it's completely asinine), but let's not go overboard.
I'm more a fan of the ThinkPad way of doing things - one big main battery, with a removable optical drive that you can replace with a second battery. Now *that's* giving a user options.
True, one can bitch about that, but I'm wondering about how the tiers will be set up. Think about the possibility - the songs they like to push on the public are quite often the crappy ones, so will they price those higher because those are the ones they want to promote, and thus the other stuff (that's actually more likely to be good) will be cheaper? Something to hope for, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. (Wiki quote)
A clever-sounding quote is not necessarily the same as wisdom or good advice. That's a great quote that people can pull out when they're being malicious and they want people to think they're not. It also keeps people from asking questions, which is generally not a good thing.
I'm also reminded of Godwin's Law about mentioning Hitler. It's generally used incorrectly (e.g. "If you compare someone to Hitler, you automatically lose.) The real law (according to Wikipedia) states "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." All this really seems to say to me is that people online get into heated arguments, and that the inevitable result of heated arguments online is that someone will call someone the worst name they could think of - Hitler. So basically, if you invoke Godwin's Law thinking that anyone automatically comparing someone to Hitler (like, say, someone with Fascist tendencies), you're the idiot because you don't know what Godwin's Law says. Sure, *most* people comparing someone to Hitler are going to be doing so only for shock value in the heat of an argument, but when you're talking about a politician with Fascist tendences, then, yeah, that comparison may be a valid point. If you don't keep track of those kinds of tendencies of people in positions of power, that's exactly what you could wind up with.
But I digress.
We've all seen the legal action against major tech companies about anti-competitive behaviour, price-fixing, and what-not, the emails from within Microsoft, etc. I'd think that at this point, anyone blindly assuming incompetence instead of malice on the part of a BigCo is kinda stupid.
The only clever saying I can think of that should pretty much always work is, "Question Authority."
Yeah, but then I'd be living in Finland.
Not. Gonna. Happen.
Issue One: IE8 RC1, when in standards mode, no longer reserves space for the vertical scrollbar if it isn't needed by the current content, rather like Firefox. Unlike Firefox, the '-moz-scrollbars-vertical', IE8 wants 'overflow-y: scroll;' in the body portion of the CSS. The problem: IE6 and IE7 both react ... badly to that, by putting a *second* vertical scrollbar to the left of the main one, but which only spans from the top of the canvas to the bottom of the content (not the bottom of the canvas). Note, the overflow-y thing DOES work in FF3 (didn't bother testing in FF2).
Pedantic-Man's(tm) Solution: Use the following CSS conditional statement for the body tag in your CSS*:
<!--[if IE 8]>
overflow-y: scroll;
<![endif]-->
Go ahead and keep the -moz-scrollbars-vertical in your html tag in your CSS for FF, and enjoy the sweet taste of multi-browser happiness.
* Void where prohibited by law.
Pedantic-Man®, what are you talking about?
Pedantic-Man(tm) is talking about ampersand-trade-semicolon, 'trademark,' not ampersand-reg-semicolon, 'all rights reserved.'
Pedantic-Man(tm) has to be a stickler for the legalities, you know. It's kinda implied by the name. :)
Please note: Pedantic-Man(tm) is trademarked by Fly By Night, Ltd.(tm), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Harkonnen Heavy Industries(tm). Discontinue reading posts by Pedantic-Man(tm) if any of the following symptoms occur: itching, vertigo, dizziness, tingling in extremities, loss of balance or coordination, slurred speech, temporary blindness, profuse sweating, or heart palpitations. Pedantic-Man(tm) may stick to certain types of skin. When not in use, Pedantic-Man(tm) should be returned to his special container and kept under refrigeration... Failure to do so relieves the makers of Pedantic-Man(tm), Fly By Night, Ltd.(tm), and its parent company Harkonnen Heavy Industries(tm), of any and all liability.
Special permission is granted to the readers of Slashdot to taunt Pedantic-Man(tm), as he feeds on taunts. Taunts fed to Pedantic-Man(tm) automatically become the property of Pedantic-Man(tm).
Pedantic-Man(tm), accept no substitutes!
My phone has Shutter Tone options that include Chimp, Quack, Flix, Boing, and Click.
Since we all know what this law it about, it should include a 'Grunt' option. Perhaps modify that face recognition feature that cameras come with to also know if it's an upskirt picture, and switch to that sound automatically. Or a wolf whistle. Context-sensitive camera(phone) noises - it's the wave of the future, a whole new paradigm!
The great thing about this law is that with all the people making clicking noises with their cameraphones & cameras, my Model M keyboard won't be any more annoying than anything else. w00t!
I would be most disappointed if I was required to replace a muzzle brake (aka "loudener") with one that converted the solid "BA-WHOOOOOM" into a wimpy "bang".
Honestly, to me, the best sound any weapons makes is the sound of a round being loaded by a pump-action shotgun, although I *do* really like the fake sound those 'silenced' MP5s make in the movies. Maybe if I had a pump-action shotgun that had a speaker that would make that sound? Yeah, that would be awesome...
You've illustrated an interesting parallel. How long before their "laws" say that our guns have to make a "bang" sound?
Mine goes, "pew pew pew!" I like that better than "bang."
My worry is what the cop will do after he hears your phone click when you catch him beating the shit out of somebody. Makes it a little hard to conceal that you just caught him in action.
Excellent point! Here's my tip: while you're taking pictures of the beating, make sure you yell loudly such things as, "Yeah, that's it, beat the shit outta that scumbag!" Get the law on your side, man. When dealing with police, I'm reminded of the old adage, "You don't have to be faster than the Eagle, you just have to be faster than the pigeon next to you." (or words to that effect) Make sure you're the one taking the pictures of the beating, and not one of the people IN the picture.
Of course, said friend later died in a shootout with the police at a meth lab so I guess he wasn't born into the deep end of the gene pool.....
That's the best thing about the gene pool - there's no lifeguard. I really wish they'd take those warning stickers off hairdryers and such, though. Some of these 'tards are living long enough to reproduce.
>> If they want everyone to respect their law, they should lead by example and prevent their CCTVs from filming without people knowing.
> There's a small loophole there - CCTV's do not use film!
Pedantic-Man(tm) approves! It should also be noted that Pedantic-Man's VW TDI (diesel) has no 'gas' pedal. :)
ps to Slashdot - I gotta tell ya, Pedantic-Man(tm) wants his HTML character entity for the trademark symbol to work. SO stupid to filter that out; you're allowing the Greater Than symbol. Gah.
...was before he even won the election, with his vote for FISA. :(
Open a command prompt and type "OPTIMIZE" and hit the Enter or Return key (doesn't matter which).
If you get an error, type "OVERRIDE" or "SECURITY OVERRIDE" and then try the optimize command again.
Make sure you type these in all-caps (it's best just to leave the caps lock key on all the time, really).
After the optimization sequence is complete, reboot your computer. The best way to do this is to simply pull the power plug on the back of the machine and then plug it back in. Do this a few times just to make sure it's rebooted everything correctly.
If this doesn't work, go online from another computer and buy a Mac or something from Dell.
Now get to work, sucker.
>>Having religious reasons behind ones bigotry doesn't change the fact that it's bigotry. See also: Middle East.
>Am I the only one that saw the irony in this statement?
So you think killing people in the name of Islam, the "religion of peace" makes sense? Well good on you, then.
I didn't vote yes on 8, but I know a lot of people who did, and their decision had little to do with any lack of sensitivity or exposure to diversity.
Having religious reasons behind ones bigotry doesn't change the fact that it's bigotry. See also: Middle East.
You need to rent Clash of the Titans to complete your education.
You know, I remembered that, and Animal House (a documentary about Greek life) right after I posted.
Don't they teach you kids Greek Mythology anymore?
That was the movie with Brad Pitt in it, right? I saw that and 300...what more do I need to know? :)
-- note that you'll need product keys to install, and probably some crack to authorize it.
Incorrect. Without a product key, it will be a 30-day trial. WITH product key, it works until August 1, 2009.
Also, don't believe some of the sites that say that it won't install unless you already have Vista SP1 installed. It won't *UPGRADE* an *EXISTING* installation unless said installation is Vista SP1. You can do a custom install onto an unformatted partition.
is there a chance that the NASA chiefs are pushing for Ares specifically because it will require a complete reworking of the infrastructure and launch support systems?
And, that's not necessarily even a bad thing if they are (aside from the ethical problem with it, of course), if the end-result is something that better meets the long-term needs of what we want NASA to be doing. The question of what we want NASA to be doing is, of course, the zillion dollar question, which is going to be reevaluated by the Obama team. I'd like to see much more emphasis placed on manned spaceflight WELL beyond LEO. I want humans to be a 2+ planet species. Doing nothing but going to LEO, and designing your entire space industry around going to LEO is far from optimal for that goal. But, that's MY goal. *shrug*
Whether or not the design is better is largely irrelevant to this debate; what is relevant is the DIRECT team are failing to take into account the overhead of switching projects and switching managers at this stage. Regardless of which was the better approach, DIRECT lost the debate some time ago, and revisiting it now (even if it results in a better vehicle in the long run) isn't going to make anything either cheaper or quicker.
This is short-sighted thinking. If DIRECT would result in a better platform in the long run, then it's likely worth the pain of switching mid-stream (if you can even consider the status of Ares 'mid'-stream yet). Let's use Netscape Navigator/Firefox as an analogy. NN5 was fairly far along when it became apparent it wasn't a platform that would be worth using in the long run. Even though it was very far along (way more than 'mid'-stream!), the decision to junk the codebase was made, and now we have Firefox. Same deal. If you think long-term, which is HUGELY important with regard to something like a space program, then you'll wind up saving enormous amounts of time and money by switching to the better long-term platform.
This, of course, assumes that DIRECT actually IS a better platform for the long-term, and meeting our future space exploration goals, etc., which is something I'm not qualified to opine about.
I, for one, won't sign up until it's given a cool name like 'Moab', 'Durango', or 'Rumplestilskin'
Isn't Windows 7's codename 'Vienna'? I love their little sausages - so tasty!
and a slick marketing campaign designed to fool me into upgrading.
That slick marketing campaign for Windows 7 was called 'Windows Vista'.
I simply cannot fathom why Apple keeps making these things without a number pad.
Dude, it's a Mac. Mac users can barely type -- they sure as hell don't need a number pad!
They stated it can be charged 1000 times. That means if you use your laptop every day you will need a new one in 2.7 years.
No, that means if you *charge* your laptop battery every day you'll need one that often (I didn't check your math, but that's not my point). If you use your laptop as a desktop replacement, as many Apple owners seem to do (especially that big honkin' 17" we're talking about), it's probably plugged-in all the time, and I'm hoping that Apple made it not recharge the battery all the time it's plugged in, so it may last much, much longer than that. It depends on how you use it. Not that I'm defending the idea of a non-removable battery (I think it's completely asinine), but let's not go overboard.
I'm more a fan of the ThinkPad way of doing things - one big main battery, with a removable optical drive that you can replace with a second battery. Now *that's* giving a user options.
Tiered Pricing.
True, one can bitch about that, but I'm wondering about how the tiers will be set up. Think about the possibility - the songs they like to push on the public are quite often the crappy ones, so will they price those higher because those are the ones they want to promote, and thus the other stuff (that's actually more likely to be good) will be cheaper? Something to hope for, anyway.
No new Mac Mini, though, that kinda hurt...