If that happened, everybody would ditch OnStar in about fifteen minutes flat. It's the same reason why the automated toll collection systems, which can easily tell your average speed, don't issue a ticket for averaging an illegally high speed. Everybody would stop using it.
I have a friend who told me that they did precisely this on some toll road in the New York/New Jersey/Commute Hell area. If the timestamps on entering and exiting some particular stretch of the highway were under some certain threshold, you got an automatic fine notice mailed to the registered owner of the vehicle. Apparently it was quite common practise to stop for coffee or some form of breakfast at a joint close to the exit point, to make up for the time gained by, uh, spirited driving.
Come on, that isn't going to do squat...even if it does get someone's attention, it sure won't be the CEO, it will be some hairy sysadmin with a neckbeard who has a clue. Not to mention that fighting abuse with abuse is a ridiculous way to feel better about yourself.
This is akin to trying to empty the coffers of the Texaco/Shell Oil Co by running around to every gas station you can find and jamming a rock in the little button thingy of the top-up-your-tires-air-compressor machine, and then turning on their water spigot and running away. In other words, it's wasting something that is miniscule to them that they probably have fixed costs for anyway.
Using the google cache (remove the keywords at the end of the above URL to get rid of the highlighting), I think we should keep this information online, to show how we feel about crap court decisions.
I have created a mirror: missvermont.dessent.net, please grab these files and mirror them if you agree. I will be forced to remove the contents if they are slashdotted, so please mirror!
Are you f*cking kidding me? I loathe their design. I assume you mean their regular pages, not the "we were slashdotted, so go away" temporary site.
Let's see: they list the page numbers in a big long list of numbers, with no next or previous button anywhere. Worse, they've decided that links shouldn't be underlined (even though that's a usability no-no), and to add insult to injury the link color is dark blue and the text color is black. In other words, to flip pages, you first have to determine which page you're currently on by picking out the ONE black (nonlinked) page number in a long list of dark blue page numbers (the rest of the pages.)
Add to that the fact that the search is a piece of crap, you can really only search on one term. So if you're looking for Dark Angel episodes, you'd better search on "dark" or "angel" but heavens not "dark angel."
There's no way to see more than 20 results on one page. It would help out their server load if you could see more on one page, with less page flipping.
Torrentse is a neat page but it's about as far away from what I'd call good design or good usability.
Agreed. Slashdot's pathetic search function can't even search the body of comments, just the title. When is the title of a post ever really that meaningful? Hardly ever. There are a bunch of times I remember some tidbit in a post but unless it was moderated up, or appears at the top of a thread (and thus is included in the ".shtml" archive version of the page which Google spiders), it's almost completely impossible to find.
Or how about the ability to force the search on stories to only match ALL keywords? I know you can order by some nebulous score, but how hard really would it be to add the option to say "find stores that contain all of the following keywords" and then sort that by date? Come on folks, slashdot.org/search.pl is a pathetic piece of crap.
I'm sure there are arguments as to why this is ("too much database load" is a popular one), or "patches are always welcome" is another popular copout.
Do you think ISPs want spammers, spammers are a pain in the ass to deal with, they are the squeeky wheel at an ISP and they rarely pay their bills after bitching about everything.
Are you sure you know what you're talking about? If they could get away with it, ISPs would love to host spammers. ISPs can charge a premium to the spammers in return for "bulletproof hosting", it's called a Pink Contract. In fact the only reason that many spammer havens (Verio, UUnet, etc.) boot their spammers is when the check bounces. You can watch it like clockwork in n.a.n-a.e near the first of the month. But until then, spammer money is just as green as everyone else's.
Modify your DNS such that the highest- and lowest-priority MX records are both your primary mailserver, or whichever one has all your blocking configured.
Peaked at around 180 kb/s using BitTorrent. At the time I'm also seeding the Matrix reloaded telesync at around 20 kb/s, but not downloading much.
FYI, those of you for whom this is your first exposure to BitTorrent, you may be interested in the FAQ page that I've been working on. BT info seems to be sort of spread out all over the place and I'm trying to get contain it all at one spot.
research has revealed that the blueprint for a perfect feature must have: action 30pc, comedy 17pc, good v evil 13pc, love/sex/romance 12pc, special effects 10pc, plot 10pc and music 8pc.... was commissioned by diet Coke to carry out the research in order to better understand what the British public love about popular movies.
...and 50 parts delicious, refreshing, original Diet Coke!
you by e-mail or a mobile phone and, say, send you a message if it 'hears' a strange noise inside your home. It can also remember the side effects of medication.
I can see it now:
From: mitsubot@example.com To: brian-at-work@example.com
Dear Brian,
The cat just knocked over a flower pot which made a loud sound. I'm scared. Please come home soon. By the way, remember to be on the lookout for fecal urgency, loose stools, and increased heart rate now that you're taking Propecia.
Yes, it uses the standard FM radio band, but it uses the unutilized parts of each channel, so it's compatible with analog FM broadcasts. The FCC approved this tech last October, and a radio consortium (iBiquity) has developed the tech. News article link. The receiver chip is manufactured by National Semiconductor. It will be a nation-wide service, since it requires cooperation from the FM broadcasters, so Clear Channel et. al. are involved (I think they are large backers of iBiquity.) This also means there'll be some sort of monthly service charge.
FYI, the Microsoft watch will have a 28-MHz ARM9 processor, 512 kbytes of ROM and 384 kbytes of RAM.
Download links
on
Real DRM
·
· Score: 3, Informative
FYI, here is the link to real.com's site where you can download any previous version. I recommend using RealPlayer (v8), it was the last one before RealOne. Yes, you have to disable some things during the install and in the settings dialog. But it's not that hard and once you've done that, it will not take over any file associations, nor will it load any helpers at startup. Most of the complaints that I've seen about Real's crap is related to RealOne player. If you must use their junk, use RealPlayer. Heck, you could even download RealPlayer v4 if you wanted a pre-evil version.
A 2D object's area (or "volume" if you will, since there are only two dimensions) changes as x^2 as you scale the object. A 3D object's volume changes as x^3 as you scale the object. An object with fractal dimension has a volume that scales as some non-integer power as you scale the object.
Yeah, but since you will pay all your bills to the same company, the checks will just come with the "Pay to the order of:" pre-printed, for your convenience. No other options are available. Why would you want to pay anyone else, anyway?
Yes, it's possible, and has been done recently by some guys in CS at Berkeley. Breaking captchas had always been posed as an open challenge to the AI/image processing community.
In fact, a couple of months ago there was a link that made its way through the blogs about a site where someone had made a recreation of the Brazil-style terminal, with a typewriter keyboard and fresnel lense. I think it used a working Mac SE as the guts -- very retro. The link is here, but it's coming up 503 at the moment.[Google cache, no images] Hopefully it's only down temporarily.
File this under "only if desperate." It costs $325 to install (currently being waived) and then an ongoing $40/month, and you still have to continue your current dialup ISP service (probably around $20/mo, depending.)
It does nothing for the upstream link, which is probably okay for most things, but remember that opening a web page can involve lots of connections and POTS modems are not known for their low latency. At the most, you get 256 kbps downstream, keyword being "at most."
They advertise that the internet service will be "just as good as your TV reception", which isn't a strong statement to me. I realize that they're talking about digital TV and not analog TV (probably?) and that digital TV is supposed to be much more immune to interference. Still, it's something you have to live with.
Oh, and it's Windows 98SE or later only, with no support for anything else. This means they're probably using some custom funky TCP/IP stack. Whew, sign me up.
The review talks about the issues with trying to partition a hard drive to install linux. I suppose most people would reformat and repartition to do this, but not having a real install CD, or not wanting to reinstall is a big downer.
So I would like to just remind everyone of Parted, the GNU partition utility. It can create, resize, move, and delete most filesystems. The notable exception is NTFS. If you follow that link there's a nice chart that shows exactly what Parted can do with each filesystem.
So if your Windows is on a FAT partition, parted can resize it such that you don't have to reformat, much like Partition Magic, but it's of course free. And, you don't need a working Linux system to install it, there are bootable floppy images available for download. It's main drawback is the user interface, but if you read the Docs first you should be able to do most simple operations without really understanding the details.
If Dr. Sagan was around I'm sure he would point out that debunking crackpottery encourages critical thinking. That was pretty much the whole point of his book The Demon Haunted World, the idea that we are constantly bombarded by claims, arguments, and pitches. By taking on arguments logically rather than emotionally you can separate the legitmate claims from the pseudoscience. These sort of skills have wide relevance in our modern world. Every person that has ever been subjected to an infomercial, a verbal sales pitch, a car sales pitch, a print ad (or about a thousand other forms of persuasive speech) would benefit from logical, critical thinking. Additionally, you are much better at constructing valid arguments if you understand logic and reason, and aren't forced to make emotional appeals, ad hominem attacks, etc. to convince someone of your viewpoint.
You're right: no, we don't need another exchange client, and no most linux users don't really need to connect to an Exchange server (but that's debateable if you're trying to run linux on your desktop at a company and need to use the Exchange calendaring functions as well -- not sure how far Evolution is on this matter.)
But that's not the point. The point is that people are sick of being locked into MS for their groupware. You can vary the clients all you want (although it seems the true viable alternatives to Outlook are few), but you still need the big expensive Exchange server. Sure you can run a standard IMAP server on whatever platform you wish, but you lose all the handy calendar/meeting/scheduling that almost every corporate PC user has become dependent on.
So the only way to really break out of this condition is to write a new mail system, one that includes both a client and a server component, and has all the required functionality. That's my take on what this guy's going for, and why he isn't just trying to write something that's "mostly compatible" or "could almost replace Exchange."
Slashdot Mirror
I have a friend who told me that they did precisely this on some toll road in the New York/New Jersey/Commute Hell area. If the timestamps on entering and exiting some particular stretch of the highway were under some certain threshold, you got an automatic fine notice mailed to the registered owner of the vehicle. Apparently it was quite common practise to stop for coffee or some form of breakfast at a joint close to the exit point, to make up for the time gained by, uh, spirited driving.
Worms 2: The Reckoning
Coming soon to theatres near you
The slashdot editors are notoriously bad, but I'm pretty sure they're not paid, right?
Like hell they're not... It's their full time job running slashdot.
Come on, that isn't going to do squat...even if it does get someone's attention, it sure won't be the CEO, it will be some hairy sysadmin with a neckbeard who has a clue. Not to mention that fighting abuse with abuse is a ridiculous way to feel better about yourself.
This is akin to trying to empty the coffers of the Texaco/Shell Oil Co by running around to every gas station you can find and jamming a rock in the little button thingy of the top-up-your-tires-air-compressor machine, and then turning on their water spigot and running away. In other words, it's wasting something that is miniscule to them that they probably have fixed costs for anyway.
Get a life, HTH, HAND.
Mirror this if you object to the court decision!
Using the google cache (remove the keywords at the end of the above URL to get rid of the highlighting), I think we should keep this information online, to show how we feel about crap court decisions.
I have created a mirror: missvermont.dessent.net, please grab these files and mirror them if you agree. I will be forced to remove the contents if they are slashdotted, so please mirror!
Remember, shiny side out! Always shiny side out!
Are you f*cking kidding me? I loathe their design. I assume you mean their regular pages, not the "we were slashdotted, so go away" temporary site.
Let's see: they list the page numbers in a big long list of numbers, with no next or previous button anywhere. Worse, they've decided that links shouldn't be underlined (even though that's a usability no-no), and to add insult to injury the link color is dark blue and the text color is black. In other words, to flip pages, you first have to determine which page you're currently on by picking out the ONE black (nonlinked) page number in a long list of dark blue page numbers (the rest of the pages.)
Add to that the fact that the search is a piece of crap, you can really only search on one term. So if you're looking for Dark Angel episodes, you'd better search on "dark" or "angel" but heavens not "dark angel."
There's no way to see more than 20 results on one page. It would help out their server load if you could see more on one page, with less page flipping.
Torrentse is a neat page but it's about as far away from what I'd call good design or good usability.
Agreed. Slashdot's pathetic search function can't even search the body of comments, just the title. When is the title of a post ever really that meaningful? Hardly ever. There are a bunch of times I remember some tidbit in a post but unless it was moderated up, or appears at the top of a thread (and thus is included in the ".shtml" archive version of the page which Google spiders), it's almost completely impossible to find.
Or how about the ability to force the search on stories to only match ALL keywords? I know you can order by some nebulous score, but how hard really would it be to add the option to say "find stores that contain all of the following keywords" and then sort that by date? Come on folks, slashdot.org/search.pl is a pathetic piece of crap.
I'm sure there are arguments as to why this is ("too much database load" is a popular one), or "patches are always welcome" is another popular copout.
Sheesh.
Are you sure you know what you're talking about? If they could get away with it, ISPs would love to host spammers. ISPs can charge a premium to the spammers in return for "bulletproof hosting", it's called a Pink Contract. In fact the only reason that many spammer havens (Verio, UUnet, etc.) boot their spammers is when the check bounces. You can watch it like clockwork in n.a.n-a.e near the first of the month. But until then, spammer money is just as green as everyone else's.
Modify your DNS such that the highest- and lowest-priority MX records are both your primary mailserver, or whichever one has all your blocking configured.
Or, drop the secondaries completely.
Peaked at around 180 kb/s using BitTorrent. At the time I'm also seeding the Matrix reloaded telesync at around 20 kb/s, but not downloading much.
FYI, those of you for whom this is your first exposure to BitTorrent, you may be interested in the FAQ page that I've been working on. BT info seems to be sort of spread out all over the place and I'm trying to get contain it all at one spot.
Diet Coke, making your movies... better.
It's actually a bug in PHP.
http://www.privoxy.org/faq/trouble.html#BLANKPAGE
I can see it now:
From: mitsubot@example.com
To: brian-at-work@example.com
Dear Brian,
The cat just knocked over a flower pot which made a loud sound. I'm scared. Please come home soon. By the way, remember to be on the lookout for fecal urgency, loose stools, and increased heart rate now that you're taking Propecia.
Love,
Your Robot
Yes, it uses the standard FM radio band, but it uses the unutilized parts of each channel, so it's compatible with analog FM broadcasts. The FCC approved this tech last October, and a radio consortium (iBiquity) has developed the tech. News article link. The receiver chip is manufactured by National Semiconductor. It will be a nation-wide service, since it requires cooperation from the FM broadcasters, so Clear Channel et. al. are involved (I think they are large backers of iBiquity.) This also means there'll be some sort of monthly service charge.
FYI, the Microsoft watch will have a 28-MHz ARM9 processor, 512 kbytes of ROM and 384 kbytes of RAM.
FYI, here is the link to real.com's site where you can download any previous version. I recommend using RealPlayer (v8), it was the last one before RealOne. Yes, you have to disable some things during the install and in the settings dialog. But it's not that hard and once you've done that, it will not take over any file associations, nor will it load any helpers at startup. Most of the complaints that I've seen about Real's crap is related to RealOne player. If you must use their junk, use RealPlayer. Heck, you could even download RealPlayer v4 if you wanted a pre-evil version.
A 2D object's area (or "volume" if you will, since there are only two dimensions) changes as x^2 as you scale the object. A 3D object's volume changes as x^3 as you scale the object. An object with fractal dimension has a volume that scales as some non-integer power as you scale the object.
(additional story link where Epstein confirms this)
Yeah, but since you will pay all your bills to the same company, the checks will just come with the "Pay to the order of:" pre-printed, for your convenience. No other options are available. Why would you want to pay anyone else, anyway?
Yes, it's possible, and has been done recently by some guys in CS at Berkeley. Breaking captchas had always been posed as an open challenge to the AI/image processing community.
NY Times article
Berkeley press release
Computer vision pages (w/papers)
Greg's page on breaking Gimpy
In fact, a couple of months ago there was a link that made its way through the blogs about a site where someone had made a recreation of the Brazil-style terminal, with a typewriter keyboard and fresnel lense. I think it used a working Mac SE as the guts -- very retro. The link is here, but it's coming up 503 at the moment. [Google cache, no images] Hopefully it's only down temporarily.
Indeed, and there was a slashdot article about that this summer.
There's also this story about the physics students who rigged up a reactor in a day for the Univ. of Chicago's annual scavenger hunt.
File this under "only if desperate." It costs $325 to install (currently being waived) and then an ongoing $40/month, and you still have to continue your current dialup ISP service (probably around $20/mo, depending.)
It does nothing for the upstream link, which is probably okay for most things, but remember that opening a web page can involve lots of connections and POTS modems are not known for their low latency. At the most, you get 256 kbps downstream, keyword being "at most."
They advertise that the internet service will be "just as good as your TV reception", which isn't a strong statement to me. I realize that they're talking about digital TV and not analog TV (probably?) and that digital TV is supposed to be much more immune to interference. Still, it's something you have to live with.
Oh, and it's Windows 98SE or later only, with no support for anything else. This means they're probably using some custom funky TCP/IP stack. Whew, sign me up.
The review talks about the issues with trying to partition a hard drive to install linux. I suppose most people would reformat and repartition to do this, but not having a real install CD, or not wanting to reinstall is a big downer.
So I would like to just remind everyone of Parted, the GNU partition utility. It can create, resize, move, and delete most filesystems. The notable exception is NTFS. If you follow that link there's a nice chart that shows exactly what Parted can do with each filesystem.
So if your Windows is on a FAT partition, parted can resize it such that you don't have to reformat, much like Partition Magic, but it's of course free. And, you don't need a working Linux system to install it, there are bootable floppy images available for download. It's main drawback is the user interface, but if you read the Docs first you should be able to do most simple operations without really understanding the details.
If Dr. Sagan was around I'm sure he would point out that debunking crackpottery encourages critical thinking. That was pretty much the whole point of his book The Demon Haunted World, the idea that we are constantly bombarded by claims, arguments, and pitches. By taking on arguments logically rather than emotionally you can separate the legitmate claims from the pseudoscience. These sort of skills have wide relevance in our modern world. Every person that has ever been subjected to an infomercial, a verbal sales pitch, a car sales pitch, a print ad (or about a thousand other forms of persuasive speech) would benefit from logical, critical thinking. Additionally, you are much better at constructing valid arguments if you understand logic and reason, and aren't forced to make emotional appeals, ad hominem attacks, etc. to convince someone of your viewpoint.
You're right: no, we don't need another exchange client, and no most linux users don't really need to connect to an Exchange server (but that's debateable if you're trying to run linux on your desktop at a company and need to use the Exchange calendaring functions as well -- not sure how far Evolution is on this matter.)
But that's not the point. The point is that people are sick of being locked into MS for their groupware. You can vary the clients all you want (although it seems the true viable alternatives to Outlook are few), but you still need the big expensive Exchange server. Sure you can run a standard IMAP server on whatever platform you wish, but you lose all the handy calendar/meeting/scheduling that almost every corporate PC user has become dependent on.
So the only way to really break out of this condition is to write a new mail system, one that includes both a client and a server component, and has all the required functionality. That's my take on what this guy's going for, and why he isn't just trying to write something that's "mostly compatible" or "could almost replace Exchange."