I would love to see Outlook gone too, for those reasons and more (slow and barely functional search!). But Outlook has really great support for copying/pasting parts of other Office documents (things like images and tables), which GMail isn't as good at. I find myself using that feature a lot.
Can you give a specific example of this? I couldn't find much information except for this article which claims that the old system (which is being phased out) is that the deduction limits are lowered at a rate of 3% of whatever your income over the AGI limit is. So gaining $2000 would lose you $60 in deductions. Even if that's $60 per specific deduction, you'd still need 33 of them to make up the difference. This year the phase-out was reduced to 1%, and next year it's gone. So if even if there was a (small) problem, it sounds like it's gone now.
I could be totally wrong, of course. Please feel free to enlighten me if I am.
If the employees took anymore home in pay, it would have bumped us up a tax bracket and we would have made less after taxes.
This is not how taxes work. Tax brackets are always incremental, meaning you pay the same tax on e.g. the first $15,000 regardless of how much additional money you make.
I remember from the Usenet Physics FAQ that quarks are normally bound together too tightly to be observed (although that article is almost fifteen years old). Is this an exception or is something else going on? Have other single quarks been observed too?
Oh yeah, the NBA, CIA, and Odwalla is spying on you when you use credit/debit cards.
If it weren't for this comment, I never would have known that the National Basketball Association and a juice company turned Coca-Cola subsidiary were spying on my credit card transactions. Thanks, Coryking.
Another reason is that different devices naturally want to work from different voltages, but you can't step voltage up or down if it's DC.
Sure you can. You don't think all the electronics in a car run on 12V, do you? The bigger problem with running off of DC is that the voltages are typically lower, which means more current (= thicker house wiring and more safety issues). Doing efficient DC-DC conversion costs more, but the wall warts I see around me are less than 50% efficient to begin with, so even cheap regulators shouldn't be any worse.
We've seen people hugging, fondling, urinating, staring and even coming out of sex shops.
How is that a problem? Everybody hugs, fondles, urinates, and stares, and more than few people have been to a sex shop. The real problem is that a lot of people don't see *enough* of that stuff to know that it doesn't mean anything.
In many cases, the solution to the problems of honesty and transparency is more honesty and transparency.
How do they make you pay a monthly fee for broadcast reception, anyway? What's to keep you from just finding a used receiver and listening all you want?
Funny how it's never the non-elites who have the shitty ideas like "let's kill 6 million people because we don't agree with their political views".
Sure it is! I don't agree with the grandparent comment either, but plenty of non-elites have advocated, say, turning the Middle East into a "glass parking lot".
I have met many intelligent people, and I have to disagree. I think you're misunderstanding the nature of intelligence. Avoiding error and groupthink takes a great deal of training and self-discipline, not just raw ability. The difference I've found is that intelligent people are better at making their low-quality ideas sound good through rationalization and are more likely to put stock in intellectual-sounding explanations. A good example of this is the way some people use a hazy understanding of quantum mechanics or evolutionary biology to justify their own pre-existing prejudices and superstitions.
That's not to say that intelligence is useless or that expertise in some specific area doesn't make you more knowledgeable than anyone else. But they're not "get out of fail free" cards for human nature.
Recognize that intelligent, tech-savvy people are just as much a font of ignorance, error, and groupthink as anyone else. Study the psychology of learning and decision making and discover that most of what you call "idiocy" is actually the same set of heuristics and biases that make us intelligent in the first place applied in situations where they don't work. Now, for the real mind-binder -- start looking at what you think you know and how you came to know it. How much of it is based on your own direct research and controlled experimentation? How much of it is based on incomplete information or a biased investigation? How much of it is just stuff your friends happen to believe?
The answer is "almost all of it". Turns out it's really hard to actually *know* anything at all, even from a practical standpoint. We get away with being wrong most of the time because there are few direct consequences for most of our beliefs (when was the last time your political opinions really mattered?). And once you understand how easy you are to fool, it becomes a lot easier to see how other people can make the same mistakes, and how often they're the ones who are right, not you.
But before you do any of that, drop the Slashdot Superiority Complex. There are few things in this story more ridiculous than the implicit idea that the world should be run by the same people who write comments on tech news sites.
It would be a lot easier to deal with if every piece of portable consumer electronics had a hard reset available to the user. But no, every time my iPod seizes up (dead battery, but I'm running on an AC adapter) I have to open the case and disconnect the battery to actually get it to turn off.
Actually, you can. You use a device called a Time Domain Reflectometer, which sends a pulse down the line and times how long it takes a reflection to come back.
2 * Distance = Speed of light * Round trip time
To find the location of the fault to within ten feet you need a timer with about a 20 nanosecond resolution, which equates to a 50 MHz counter -- not too difficult.
Frankly, I don't remember having to acquire many patches before the latter half of the 90s for PC games.
There wasn't really a good way to distribute patches prior to the late 90s. When Microsoft was forced to change the disk compression program in MS-DOS 6 due to a lawsuit, it actually had to mail floppies to everyone. It wasn't until widespread adoption of the internet that people could reasonably be expected to play a version of the game different from what came in the box.
You should learn the full history of the period before posting comments like this. The manifesto you cite was written in 1920 during Hitler's early involvement as a subordinate member of the NSDAP. While the party did start out with socialist ideas, Hitler mainly used them to pander to the working class. Fast-forward a decade to see Hitler suppressing both socialists and communists. In between there were plenty of backroom meetings with wealthy businessmen whose support Hitler also needed to rise to power. Neither Hitler nor his Germany were socialist.
This is mostly irrelevant, though, since the key element of fascism(s) is extreme nationalism (and in Hitler's case, racism). Socialism, on the other hand, is an international ideology. It's not a false dichotomy.
However, the GP comment is still incorrect. Spreading around the risk of corporate failure is a form of socialism. It is the nature of unregulated corporate capitalism that risks are socialized while profits are privatized.
1. A man-in-the-middle attack isn't a good model for cracking DRM since one side in the exchange is totally compromised.
2. The user keys have to be entered by the user since all mass-produced disks are identical. This isn't necessary but it helps.
You can decode the client messages by feeding the software a user-created public key whose private key you also possess. You can decode the server messages using a legitimate key that you purchase. The all-clear message must be algorithmically related to the client message and the algorithm must be contained in the client -- otherwise the software couldn't recognize it due to problem #2 above. With the message formats, the algorithm, and a pair of user-supplied keys, you can fake a validation server. Crack accomplished.
In real life, I doubt anyone would actually do this. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure it would be far easier to change the part of the client software that checks for a valid message to always return the all-clear. Nothing on the internet can prevent you from doing that.
The real security in that arrangement comes from this part:
When the software launches (and perhaps at certain major intervals in the software), it sends the license key (and a randomly generated "salt") to an SSL-encrypted server hosted by the manufacturer, which verifies the key and the fact that nobody else is using it at the time, then sends a PKI-signed "okay" message (with the date and salt for uniqueness) back to the software.
A global system that checks whether a license is being used by multiple computers at once is all you need. There's no point in adding encryption on top of it since you're still basically sending the product key from the back of the DVD case. Heck, let it run on five computers at once, it's doesn't matter. The weak point in the piracy scheme is that you have a very small number of distributors purchasing copies to feed a very large number of downloaders. Millions of copies will be downloaded but there will only be a handful of keys. Invalidate those keys and you make piracy much more difficult.
I think the reason it's news is that's it's possible to objectively compare the iPhone ad to reality. Hair improvement is much more subjective and varies much more from person to person, so it's harder to say what the reality really is.
Care to provide a list? I did a bit of Googling and found nothing like what you're talking about. In fact, what I've read about the book of Job contradicts what you're saying -- scholars agree that the Satan there is portrayed as a servant of God, not an opponent. There's also a reference in Revelations which is talking about the future, not the past. Meanwhile, grace is the direct subject of psalms and parables -- hardly the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I would love to see Outlook gone too, for those reasons and more (slow and barely functional search!). But Outlook has really great support for copying/pasting parts of other Office documents (things like images and tables), which GMail isn't as good at. I find myself using that feature a lot.
Can you give a specific example of this? I couldn't find much information except for this article which claims that the old system (which is being phased out) is that the deduction limits are lowered at a rate of 3% of whatever your income over the AGI limit is. So gaining $2000 would lose you $60 in deductions. Even if that's $60 per specific deduction, you'd still need 33 of them to make up the difference. This year the phase-out was reduced to 1%, and next year it's gone. So if even if there was a (small) problem, it sounds like it's gone now.
I could be totally wrong, of course. Please feel free to enlighten me if I am.
If the employees took anymore home in pay, it would have bumped us up a tax bracket and we would have made less after taxes.
This is not how taxes work. Tax brackets are always incremental, meaning you pay the same tax on e.g. the first $15,000 regardless of how much additional money you make.
Amen. It would be nice if we had the ability to filter stories by tag so I could drop everything that has "microsoft", "riaa", etc.
I remember from the Usenet Physics FAQ that quarks are normally bound together too tightly to be observed (although that article is almost fifteen years old). Is this an exception or is something else going on? Have other single quarks been observed too?
Oh yeah, the NBA, CIA, and Odwalla is spying on you when you use credit/debit cards.
If it weren't for this comment, I never would have known that the National Basketball Association and a juice company turned Coca-Cola subsidiary were spying on my credit card transactions. Thanks, Coryking.
Another reason is that different devices naturally want to work from different voltages, but you can't step voltage up or down if it's DC.
Sure you can. You don't think all the electronics in a car run on 12V, do you? The bigger problem with running off of DC is that the voltages are typically lower, which means more current (= thicker house wiring and more safety issues). Doing efficient DC-DC conversion costs more, but the wall warts I see around me are less than 50% efficient to begin with, so even cheap regulators shouldn't be any worse.
We've seen people hugging, fondling, urinating, staring and even coming out of sex shops.
How is that a problem? Everybody hugs, fondles, urinates, and stares, and more than few people have been to a sex shop. The real problem is that a lot of people don't see *enough* of that stuff to know that it doesn't mean anything.
In many cases, the solution to the problems of honesty and transparency is more honesty and transparency.
*shrug* It worked fine until today.
Is something wrong with the site preferences? I disabled YRO but I see several of its stories on the front page.
Wasn't it really to make efficient use of centralized mainframes? I've never heard anything about the phone company being involved.
How do they make you pay a monthly fee for broadcast reception, anyway? What's to keep you from just finding a used receiver and listening all you want?
Isn't memetics dead, or at least no longer of interest? I thought the main journal had shut down and Susan Blackmore et al had moved on.
Funny how it's never the non-elites who have the shitty ideas like "let's kill 6 million people because we don't agree with their political views".
Sure it is! I don't agree with the grandparent comment either, but plenty of non-elites have advocated, say, turning the Middle East into a "glass parking lot".
I have met many intelligent people, and I have to disagree. I think you're misunderstanding the nature of intelligence. Avoiding error and groupthink takes a great deal of training and self-discipline, not just raw ability. The difference I've found is that intelligent people are better at making their low-quality ideas sound good through rationalization and are more likely to put stock in intellectual-sounding explanations. A good example of this is the way some people use a hazy understanding of quantum mechanics or evolutionary biology to justify their own pre-existing prejudices and superstitions.
That's not to say that intelligence is useless or that expertise in some specific area doesn't make you more knowledgeable than anyone else. But they're not "get out of fail free" cards for human nature.
Recognize that intelligent, tech-savvy people are just as much a font of ignorance, error, and groupthink as anyone else. Study the psychology of learning and decision making and discover that most of what you call "idiocy" is actually the same set of heuristics and biases that make us intelligent in the first place applied in situations where they don't work. Now, for the real mind-binder -- start looking at what you think you know and how you came to know it. How much of it is based on your own direct research and controlled experimentation? How much of it is based on incomplete information or a biased investigation? How much of it is just stuff your friends happen to believe?
The answer is "almost all of it". Turns out it's really hard to actually *know* anything at all, even from a practical standpoint. We get away with being wrong most of the time because there are few direct consequences for most of our beliefs (when was the last time your political opinions really mattered?). And once you understand how easy you are to fool, it becomes a lot easier to see how other people can make the same mistakes, and how often they're the ones who are right, not you.
But before you do any of that, drop the Slashdot Superiority Complex. There are few things in this story more ridiculous than the implicit idea that the world should be run by the same people who write comments on tech news sites.
It would be a lot easier to deal with if every piece of portable consumer electronics had a hard reset available to the user. But no, every time my iPod seizes up (dead battery, but I'm running on an AC adapter) I have to open the case and disconnect the battery to actually get it to turn off.
Actually, you can. You use a device called a Time Domain Reflectometer, which sends a pulse down the line and times how long it takes a reflection to come back.
2 * Distance = Speed of light * Round trip time
To find the location of the fault to within ten feet you need a timer with about a 20 nanosecond resolution, which equates to a 50 MHz counter -- not too difficult.
Thank you for writing this interesting and detailed comment.
Frankly, I don't remember having to acquire many patches before the latter half of the 90s for PC games.
There wasn't really a good way to distribute patches prior to the late 90s. When Microsoft was forced to change the disk compression program in MS-DOS 6 due to a lawsuit, it actually had to mail floppies to everyone. It wasn't until widespread adoption of the internet that people could reasonably be expected to play a version of the game different from what came in the box.
You should learn the full history of the period before posting comments like this. The manifesto you cite was written in 1920 during Hitler's early involvement as a subordinate member of the NSDAP. While the party did start out with socialist ideas, Hitler mainly used them to pander to the working class. Fast-forward a decade to see Hitler suppressing both socialists and communists. In between there were plenty of backroom meetings with wealthy businessmen whose support Hitler also needed to rise to power. Neither Hitler nor his Germany were socialist.
This is mostly irrelevant, though, since the key element of fascism(s) is extreme nationalism (and in Hitler's case, racism). Socialism, on the other hand, is an international ideology. It's not a false dichotomy.
However, the GP comment is still incorrect. Spreading around the risk of corporate failure is a form of socialism. It is the nature of unregulated corporate capitalism that risks are socialized while profits are privatized.
Okay, now I understand. Two problems:
1. A man-in-the-middle attack isn't a good model for cracking DRM since one side in the exchange is totally compromised.
2. The user keys have to be entered by the user since all mass-produced disks are identical. This isn't necessary but it helps.
You can decode the client messages by feeding the software a user-created public key whose private key you also possess. You can decode the server messages using a legitimate key that you purchase. The all-clear message must be algorithmically related to the client message and the algorithm must be contained in the client -- otherwise the software couldn't recognize it due to problem #2 above. With the message formats, the algorithm, and a pair of user-supplied keys, you can fake a validation server. Crack accomplished.
In real life, I doubt anyone would actually do this. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure it would be far easier to change the part of the client software that checks for a valid message to always return the all-clear. Nothing on the internet can prevent you from doing that.
The real security in that arrangement comes from this part:
When the software launches (and perhaps at certain major intervals in the software), it sends the license key (and a randomly generated "salt") to an SSL-encrypted server hosted by the manufacturer, which verifies the key and the fact that nobody else is using it at the time, then sends a PKI-signed "okay" message (with the date and salt for uniqueness) back to the software.
A global system that checks whether a license is being used by multiple computers at once is all you need. There's no point in adding encryption on top of it since you're still basically sending the product key from the back of the DVD case. Heck, let it run on five computers at once, it's doesn't matter. The weak point in the piracy scheme is that you have a very small number of distributors purchasing copies to feed a very large number of downloaders. Millions of copies will be downloaded but there will only be a handful of keys. Invalidate those keys and you make piracy much more difficult.
I think the reason it's news is that's it's possible to objectively compare the iPhone ad to reality. Hair improvement is much more subjective and varies much more from person to person, so it's harder to say what the reality really is.
Care to provide a list? I did a bit of Googling and found nothing like what you're talking about. In fact, what I've read about the book of Job contradicts what you're saying -- scholars agree that the Satan there is portrayed as a servant of God, not an opponent. There's also a reference in Revelations which is talking about the future, not the past. Meanwhile, grace is the direct subject of psalms and parables -- hardly the same thing.