But then people will sue Nintendo when they smash their guitar on a chair and break the Wiimote!
Re:Clippy did its job... Unfortunatly.
on
The Death of Clippy
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· Score: 4, Funny
I think what bugs me most about Clippy these days is that one of my coworkers uses Word with it turned on...and her speakers turned up. Way up.
So every time she saves a file, I hear: "*click* *clank* *ker-chunk*"
Yes, she's quite inconsiderate about making noise - all day I hear "AAHAAHHHH! I DON'T KNOW HOW ANYONE GETS ANYTHING DONE AROUND HERE!!" (referring to the amount of email she gets), and similar things. Yeah, thanks for spreading the disruption around, lady.
My boss is no help - well, more correctly, she sympathizes, but she also realizes that we're never going to be able to change this woman's behavior, so the rest of us have to suffer or use headphones and turn the music WAY up to drown out her rantings.
That's what I was wondering, too - the brick converts the power to relatively low voltage DC, so I don't know why there'd be any AC current inside a laptop...
Your comment made me curious about the population of Massachusetts outside the Boston Metropolitan Area, so I thought I'd look up the numbers quickly:
Population of Massachusetts in 2005: 6,433,367 (source)
Population of the Boston Metropolitan Statistical Area for those parts in Massachusetts in 2005: 3,997,744 (source)
So, over 60% of the people in Massachusetts are in or near Boston.
Just kidding.:) I'm no expert on parking systems, but from what I've read these systems are new in the manner in which they work - each car is on a tray that can go in all sorts of directions independently of all the other cars, while the older ones mentionedabove just have fixed trays and the whole mechanism rotates (or elevates) into the proper position to find the car.
So do you change the oil in your car regularly? How do you know to do that? Hmm...you learned to take care of your car. You want to avoid worrying about it, yet you took the time to learn how to take care of it. Isn't that interesting?
Besides, you should notice a weird noise that your engine is making - you might not know what it is, but why would you ignore it instead of getting it checked?
This is kind of the same thing, to me - people should take some time to understand the security of what they're doing. They don't have to be Bruce Schneier (spelling?), but a few hours isn't going to hurt and may actually help them in the long run. When I do something new, I take a little time to learn about it before diving in.
I'm torn on the issue. I see what you're saying and don't disagree, but on the other hand if I had a long term condition I might not be in to see the doctor on a regular basis, and therefore might not be aware that a new treatment is available that could help. For those people I think the ads are helpful.
But I'm sure more people are in the "Hey, doctor, gimme this!" category.
Okay, thanks to you and everyone else that responded. I guess it was a dumb question since I got 22 replies! But no flames, so it must not have been TOO dumb.;)
I didn't think of the remote server aspect. Reading these replies makes me very glad I use Linux at home, with FTP turned off and a strong firewall in place. I was thinking along the lines of so many people that have adult entertainment images stored on their hard drives, but the difference is that's not illegal.
There's one point about these arguments I don't understand...
Why are the child porn types writing software that magically puts child porn on random people's computers? I'm really not clear about what they're accomplishing there, other than potentially hurting their business by bringing child pornography into the spotlight.
I can see porn sites writing malware that provides porn popups (advertisements for their sites), but those (to me) aren't "images" as much as "software". I'm sure they aren't downloading a free gig of porn to the victim's computer - they wouldn't be making money that way!
The way some of these stories and comments are written, it sounds like someone examining the computer found dozens of pictures of kiddie porn on there, and the explanation is "the virus did it!"...but I don't see the motive in writing a virus to do that...a popup or two, yes, but not dozens of images.
What am I missing here? Are people just finding malware that's popping up ads, but phrasing it poorly?
Not really. Sun gave away (or sold cheaply, don't remember which) an earlier version of their operating system that ran on Intel machines. I don't remember whether it was SunOS, Solaris, or whatever, and I don't want to call it something because I'll probably pick the wrong name and version number, and I don't see my copy nearby.
As I recall, the deal was, you ordered it and paid for shipping, they waited 6 weeks, then sent it overnight. Yeah, thanks for charging me $50 for overnight shipping AFTER waiting 6 weeks. If I'd really needed the software, after 6 weeks of waiting, another few days wouldn't have mattered.
Oh, I just found the box, Solaris 2.6, May '98. I never did get around to installing it. Wonder if I could eBay it...
Or, better yet, of Universal's lawsuits over the game "Donkey Kong" when it first came out - I saw someone mention it on/. the other day. If you're not familiar with the story, it's a pretty good read. Briefly, Universal sued on the grounds that Donkey Kong was a rip off of King Kong, and lost in part because they'd argued in another recent case that King Kong was a public domain character.
Can we exaggerate the vertical 20 times, then print pictures of that in textbooks?
Re:Aliens, ghosts, and gods never leave evidence .
on
UFOs In the News
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· Score: 1
No, 12 isn't enough. It'd be easy to convince 12 people to pull a prank like this (not saying that it is a prank, but we shouldn't rule out the possibility).
Anyway, regarding your comments on the travelers, that was pretty much my point - no one else has reported these lights, only the 12 people that probably were working in close proximity to each other. Travelers, like pilots and air traffic controllers, are another group of people you would expect to see something if it had been there, since O'Hare is such a busy airport. (I didn't mention travelers initially because I thought it'd be obvious.)
Re:Aliens, ghosts, and gods never leave evidence .
on
UFOs In the News
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· Score: 2, Insightful
From the article: "...estimated by different accounts to be 6 feet to 24 feet in diameter..." That's, uh, quite a variance.
Also, a dozen people sounds great, but... O'Hare is the busiest airport in the US now, I believe - and no one else noticed this thing? Also, the 12 people worked for the same airline, so it's possible they would all be relatively close to each other while working. What about people in other parts of the airport?
Airline pilots and air traffic controllers tend to be observant and cautious for obvious reasons... and none of them noticed anything?
I like the lights-on-clouds explanation - it would explain why 12 people near each other might see something very odd, but no one else would - it's some sort of reflection from a light source in or near the airport. Then whatever it was that was generating the light for the reflection moves, and *poof* the UFO disappears up into the clouds at a dizzying speed.
Both lanes should be moving at approximately the same speed. Cars should basically spaced in "opposite" lanes - i.e., the cars in both lanes should be next to a gap. When the lane ends, the cars in the ending lane simply slide into the gaps, and no one has to slam on brakes.
That's a proper merge.
Your efforts to merge in early screw that up because then you'll open a new gap in front of you and the guy behind you will open a gap and the car that was behind you in the old lane will move up and fill in where you were. Presto: traffic jam in the continuing lane. Then people in the continuing lane get annoyed and jump in front of someone in the next lane over, so the jam spills into that lane, too.
Uh, merging in at the end is exactly what they SHOULD be doing. Think of it as a "zipper" that closes at the end of the lane. It works out better for people in both lanes. The people that merge in early actually make the continuing lane slower for everyone.
(1) My first thought wouldn't be brute force. I think I'd try a few tentative swings or whatever to see what happens then go from there.
(2) I assume the strap frays a bit or something before it snaps - people couldn't notice that?
I was working in a hardware store (not the computer kind, the nuts and bolts and plumbing and paint and electrical kind) when they were switching to a computerized POS system. As part of that, they handed me a wireless scanner that cost upwards of $10,000 at the time, and said, "The person that drops this has to call the owner of the chain and tell him." Needless to say, I was very careful with it...even though it had a wrist strap. I didn't rely on the wrist strap to keep me from dropping it. I don't see why a game controller would be any different. Common sense indicates that if it slips out of my hand - even if the wrist strap DOESN'T break but just slips over my hand - I'm going to have to replace it at my own expense.
(3) This would make the controller extremely touchy, I'd think. Haven't you ever moved your mouse and had it go farther than you'd expected? Frustrating when playing a game.
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But then people will sue Nintendo when they smash their guitar on a chair and break the Wiimote!
I think what bugs me most about Clippy these days is that one of my coworkers uses Word with it turned on...and her speakers turned up. Way up.
So every time she saves a file, I hear: "*click* *clank* *ker-chunk*"
Yes, she's quite inconsiderate about making noise - all day I hear "AAHAAHHHH! I DON'T KNOW HOW ANYONE GETS ANYTHING DONE AROUND HERE!!" (referring to the amount of email she gets), and similar things. Yeah, thanks for spreading the disruption around, lady.
My boss is no help - well, more correctly, she sympathizes, but she also realizes that we're never going to be able to change this woman's behavior, so the rest of us have to suffer or use headphones and turn the music WAY up to drown out her rantings.
She and Clippy deserve each other.
That's what I was wondering, too - the brick converts the power to relatively low voltage DC, so I don't know why there'd be any AC current inside a laptop...
Read the source links, it's clearly delineated what counties are in.
Your comment made me curious about the population of Massachusetts outside the Boston Metropolitan Area, so I thought I'd look up the numbers quickly:
Population of Massachusetts in 2005: 6,433,367 (source)
Population of the Boston Metropolitan Statistical Area for those parts in Massachusetts in 2005: 3,997,744 (source)
So, over 60% of the people in Massachusetts are in or near Boston.
As an American, let me just say...
:) I'm no expert on parking systems, but from what I've read these systems are new in the manner in which they work - each car is on a tray that can go in all sorts of directions independently of all the other cars, while the older ones mentionedabove just have fixed trays and the whole mechanism rotates (or elevates) into the proper position to find the car.
I'll kill you for that!
Just kidding.
So do you change the oil in your car regularly? How do you know to do that? Hmm...you learned to take care of your car. You want to avoid worrying about it, yet you took the time to learn how to take care of it. Isn't that interesting?
Besides, you should notice a weird noise that your engine is making - you might not know what it is, but why would you ignore it instead of getting it checked?
This is kind of the same thing, to me - people should take some time to understand the security of what they're doing. They don't have to be Bruce Schneier (spelling?), but a few hours isn't going to hurt and may actually help them in the long run. When I do something new, I take a little time to learn about it before diving in.
It's all in the marketing! Because, after all, who is against life or choices?
I'm torn on the issue. I see what you're saying and don't disagree, but on the other hand if I had a long term condition I might not be in to see the doctor on a regular basis, and therefore might not be aware that a new treatment is available that could help. For those people I think the ads are helpful.
But I'm sure more people are in the "Hey, doctor, gimme this!" category.
Gah, got an extra angle bracket in there. Should've left the BR in instead of removing it! Capitol Building
Not any more: White HouseCapitol Building
It's just building something. Whether it's engines, model railroads, new programs, or anything else - some people just enjoy building things.
...or maybe we enjoy doing it?
I think you misread - he said no one UNDER 30 reads comics. :)
Okay, thanks to you and everyone else that responded. I guess it was a dumb question since I got 22 replies! But no flames, so it must not have been TOO dumb. ;)
I didn't think of the remote server aspect. Reading these replies makes me very glad I use Linux at home, with FTP turned off and a strong firewall in place. I was thinking along the lines of so many people that have adult entertainment images stored on their hard drives, but the difference is that's not illegal.
There's one point about these arguments I don't understand...
Why are the child porn types writing software that magically puts child porn on random people's computers? I'm really not clear about what they're accomplishing there, other than potentially hurting their business by bringing child pornography into the spotlight.
I can see porn sites writing malware that provides porn popups (advertisements for their sites), but those (to me) aren't "images" as much as "software". I'm sure they aren't downloading a free gig of porn to the victim's computer - they wouldn't be making money that way!
The way some of these stories and comments are written, it sounds like someone examining the computer found dozens of pictures of kiddie porn on there, and the explanation is "the virus did it!"...but I don't see the motive in writing a virus to do that...a popup or two, yes, but not dozens of images.
What am I missing here? Are people just finding malware that's popping up ads, but phrasing it poorly?
Not really. Sun gave away (or sold cheaply, don't remember which) an earlier version of their operating system that ran on Intel machines. I don't remember whether it was SunOS, Solaris, or whatever, and I don't want to call it something because I'll probably pick the wrong name and version number, and I don't see my copy nearby.
As I recall, the deal was, you ordered it and paid for shipping, they waited 6 weeks, then sent it overnight. Yeah, thanks for charging me $50 for overnight shipping AFTER waiting 6 weeks. If I'd really needed the software, after 6 weeks of waiting, another few days wouldn't have mattered.
Oh, I just found the box, Solaris 2.6, May '98. I never did get around to installing it. Wonder if I could eBay it...
Or, better yet, of Universal's lawsuits over the game "Donkey Kong" when it first came out - I saw someone mention it on /. the other day. If you're not familiar with the story, it's a pretty good read. Briefly, Universal sued on the grounds that Donkey Kong was a rip off of King Kong, and lost in part because they'd argued in another recent case that King Kong was a public domain character.
Can we exaggerate the vertical 20 times, then print pictures of that in textbooks?
No, 12 isn't enough. It'd be easy to convince 12 people to pull a prank like this (not saying that it is a prank, but we shouldn't rule out the possibility).
Anyway, regarding your comments on the travelers, that was pretty much my point - no one else has reported these lights, only the 12 people that probably were working in close proximity to each other. Travelers, like pilots and air traffic controllers, are another group of people you would expect to see something if it had been there, since O'Hare is such a busy airport. (I didn't mention travelers initially because I thought it'd be obvious.)
From the article: "...estimated by different accounts to be 6 feet to 24 feet in diameter..." That's, uh, quite a variance.
Also, a dozen people sounds great, but... O'Hare is the busiest airport in the US now, I believe - and no one else noticed this thing? Also, the 12 people worked for the same airline, so it's possible they would all be relatively close to each other while working. What about people in other parts of the airport?
Airline pilots and air traffic controllers tend to be observant and cautious for obvious reasons... and none of them noticed anything?
I like the lights-on-clouds explanation - it would explain why 12 people near each other might see something very odd, but no one else would - it's some sort of reflection from a light source in or near the airport. Then whatever it was that was generating the light for the reflection moves, and *poof* the UFO disappears up into the clouds at a dizzying speed.
You misunderstood what I meant.
Both lanes should be moving at approximately the same speed. Cars should basically spaced in "opposite" lanes - i.e., the cars in both lanes should be next to a gap. When the lane ends, the cars in the ending lane simply slide into the gaps, and no one has to slam on brakes.
That's a proper merge.
Your efforts to merge in early screw that up because then you'll open a new gap in front of you and the guy behind you will open a gap and the car that was behind you in the old lane will move up and fill in where you were. Presto: traffic jam in the continuing lane. Then people in the continuing lane get annoyed and jump in front of someone in the next lane over, so the jam spills into that lane, too.
If no one left the lane until the merge point, they wouldn't be able to pass.
Uh, merging in at the end is exactly what they SHOULD be doing. Think of it as a "zipper" that closes at the end of the lane. It works out better for people in both lanes. The people that merge in early actually make the continuing lane slower for everyone.
(1) My first thought wouldn't be brute force. I think I'd try a few tentative swings or whatever to see what happens then go from there.
(2) I assume the strap frays a bit or something before it snaps - people couldn't notice that?
I was working in a hardware store (not the computer kind, the nuts and bolts and plumbing and paint and electrical kind) when they were switching to a computerized POS system. As part of that, they handed me a wireless scanner that cost upwards of $10,000 at the time, and said, "The person that drops this has to call the owner of the chain and tell him." Needless to say, I was very careful with it...even though it had a wrist strap. I didn't rely on the wrist strap to keep me from dropping it. I don't see why a game controller would be any different. Common sense indicates that if it slips out of my hand - even if the wrist strap DOESN'T break but just slips over my hand - I'm going to have to replace it at my own expense.
(3) This would make the controller extremely touchy, I'd think. Haven't you ever moved your mouse and had it go farther than you'd expected? Frustrating when playing a game.