As I note above, it might be useful as a form of natural pest control -- release the fearless mice into the wild to breed with normal mice, and hope the next generation gets eaten by predators at a higher rate, thus at least temporarily reducing the population. Might be useful in the way that, say, releasing ladybugs every year can help keep the aphids down to a mere horde -- not a permanent solution, nor severe enough to unbalance the ecology, but effective enough to reduce their numbers from "pest" to "no longer a problem".
I think this depends on having the "fear of snakes" gene, which some folks evidently have, and others don't. I've observed that some humans freak at the sight of certain critters -- snakes, spiders, worms, whatever, and it's just the way they're wired.
Frex, when my mom sees a snake, she literally screams and jumps onto the nearest high object, then stands there screaming and pointing at it *exactly* like wild monkeys do -- and it's clearly hardwired behaviour. She says she did it the very first time she ever saw a snake.
Similarly, no one has ever chased my neighbour around with a spider, but she has an unnatural and clearly hardwired fear of them -- she sees them as ~10 times their actual size, too. Doesn't matter if intellectually she knows a given spider is harmless, emotionally she sees it as Godzilla and it's coming to get her!!
OTOH, I've never had any such fears; in fact seeing/hearing a rattlesnake triggers a definite predator response in me (my instant and natural response is to find and kill it).
I had another thought -- release some of these into the wild to breed with normal-fearful mice, to make them more "lunchable" for predators, as a natural method of rodent control. Might be particularly useful in areas where you can't use poison bait.
Side thought: I wonder if there's a similar gene that occurs occasionally in wild cottontail rabbits? Sometimes we see a batch of 'em that are just plain stupid-fearless, way beyond the norm. Needless to say, they tend not to make it to maturity (which is a good thing when you're overrun with Starving Attack Rabbits).
"By leading people to best practices, we can start deprecating (and later removing) outmoded functionality."
I totally HATE when apps do that. It's exactly like you say about mutating menus -- what they hide or remove is invariably something I use every day, but now have to either dumbster-dive** for, or find a workaround to replace. This is one major reason why I've become very reluctant to upgrade my major apps.
** "Dumbster-dive": having to root around in the bowels of the UI to find the necessities they've hidden from us in the name of dumbing it down for their notion of "typical" users. Here's a clue, folks -- some apps, and I suspect Photoshop is one of them, have NO "typical" users, because everyone uses it for slightly different jobs, along different workflow paths. And some users do so many different things that they have NO "typical" workflow, so no matter how the menus mutate, they will ALWAYS be wrong for the use of the moment.
(This is why one of the first things I do with WinXP is turn off the fucking "customized start menu" shit!)
"No more "on the Internet, no one knows if you're a dog". We know."
In that case, you ought to know that no kennel owner in their right mind puts a street address on their website. Doing so is an open invitation to have your animals poisoned or stolen by some nutjob.
I find WHOIS useful for flagging probable-fraud, because something just won't match what it apparently should -- wrong country, known bad host, obviously mismatched contact info, etc. Between WHOIS and Netcraft, I can generally determine if a domain/site/email/whatever is bogus or not, even if it looks legit on the surface.
So... having wrong info in WHOIS is, in its own way, just as useful as having correct info.
However, fingerprinting the tiles (a perfect medium for preserving prints) and the store employees might have been very interesting... of course one would need to call local law enforcement about that.
Regardless, as some pointed out, once he paid for the replacement drive, the manager TAKING it from him was theft, pure and simple. Doesn't matter about ANY of the surrounding circumstances, nor that he's still in the store. Was time to call the police on that one.
I remember a video of Dolby creating an early tape-loop electronic piece. Every time the tape went around, he'd add one more note. It wasn't very good as music (in fact it was boring, and rather unpleasant to the ear), but it was interesting to watch its birth.
As to unexpected geeks of a sort, pro sports is full of them. Many, perhaps most pro football and baseball players are lawyers, engineers, and even doctors in the off season.
Because of this very practice, I've been saying for years that domain registrars (and any associated or shell companies) should not be allowed to own ANY domains other than those directly related to their business.
And if caught violating this, they should immediately be fined 3x the value of the domains (defined as either the cost to register them, or the price the registrar is offering to sell them for, which ever is greater) AND they should be defrocked and put out of the registrar business for at least a painful period, and possibly forever.
But I strongly suspect there is presently more money in squatting and reselling than there is in ordinary domain registration, both for the registrars and for ICANN. Money always wins.
Well, a lot of people can't see the problem without the analogies. So while not necessarily accurate, they can be useful. (Tho I suspect in most cases it's just preaching to the choir, and anyone else has made up their minds already, regardless of any arguments or analogies we can present.)
Revamp would help, but better to trash them and start over, or at least revert to the simple and practical copyright laws of our Founding Fathers (which by now would be much the same as "starting over"). For whatever flaws their outlook had, they always made one critical recognition: ANYTHING that gets too big and too powerful (gov't or private interest) is likely to become a Problem to the People.
Guess that's why my friend in Germany is planning to move elsewhere -- he says the regulations and restrictions are getting so bizarre that normal people can't live there anymore.
Crap, that's a scary post. And I think you're right. It's not that we now have more to be suspicious about; it's that now it's far easier to maintain suspicions.
My sister's company does business worldwide, including China, and this is what she has to say about China's new capitalism:
It isn't capitalism at all. It's designed *entirely* to suck money out of the rest of the world, even if doing so is at the expense of the average Chinese. And it will end the moment it ceases to benefit China.
While I also don't entire agree with Ron Paul's positions, I think he could do a lot to counterbalance a system that has swung WAY too far in the other direction.
After all, even were he President, no way in hell is he going to get all of his own agenda -- there will be many compromises and many battles he can't win. But if he wins a few important ones, I think we'll all be better off. And given what Congress is like, there is absolutely NO danger of going TOO far in Ron Paul's political direction, if for no other reason than that there are too many entrenched special interests.
Well, see, that's the point. It does not matter WHO you are afraid of -- the terrorist goal is for you to BE afraid. If you're afraid of your own government, so much the better for any real terrorists -- since everyone will be looking the wrong way and will simply not see a REAL threat til it's too late, being too busy cavity-searching their own innocent citizens.
One of those weird car analogies just came to mind...
So you buy a car (a PC) and go to put gasoline (an OS) in it. Most of the time the gasoline burns in the expected way and you can get on down the road. Occasionally the gasoline is contaminated with water or the octane level isn't what was claimed, and your car sputters and chokes and you wind up at the mechanic, thinking something major has gone wrong. Rarely, instead of burning in the usual controlled way, the gasoline explodes, taking your car and immediate neighbourhood with it.
That's a nasty thought. If the search index becomes remotely searchable (which sounds like a "good feature" if you don't think beyond your company walls) WHO ELSE WILL EXPLOIT IT? M$ probably doesn't give two shits about your personal data, but some credit card fraudist in East Crudville probably DOES.
Slashdot Mirror
Meaning the principle might be useful toward treating the irrational and disabling phobias some people suffer from, in some cases triggered by odors.
As I note above, it might be useful as a form of natural pest control -- release the fearless mice into the wild to breed with normal mice, and hope the next generation gets eaten by predators at a higher rate, thus at least temporarily reducing the population. Might be useful in the way that, say, releasing ladybugs every year can help keep the aphids down to a mere horde -- not a permanent solution, nor severe enough to unbalance the ecology, but effective enough to reduce their numbers from "pest" to "no longer a problem".
I think this depends on having the "fear of snakes" gene, which some folks evidently have, and others don't. I've observed that some humans freak at the sight of certain critters -- snakes, spiders, worms, whatever, and it's just the way they're wired.
Frex, when my mom sees a snake, she literally screams and jumps onto the nearest high object, then stands there screaming and pointing at it *exactly* like wild monkeys do -- and it's clearly hardwired behaviour. She says she did it the very first time she ever saw a snake.
Similarly, no one has ever chased my neighbour around with a spider, but she has an unnatural and clearly hardwired fear of them -- she sees them as ~10 times their actual size, too. Doesn't matter if intellectually she knows a given spider is harmless, emotionally she sees it as Godzilla and it's coming to get her!!
OTOH, I've never had any such fears; in fact seeing/hearing a rattlesnake triggers a definite predator response in me (my instant and natural response is to find and kill it).
I had another thought -- release some of these into the wild to breed with normal-fearful mice, to make them more "lunchable" for predators, as a natural method of rodent control. Might be particularly useful in areas where you can't use poison bait.
Side thought: I wonder if there's a similar gene that occurs occasionally in wild cottontail rabbits? Sometimes we see a batch of 'em that are just plain stupid-fearless, way beyond the norm. Needless to say, they tend not to make it to maturity (which is a good thing when you're overrun with Starving Attack Rabbits).
Except that holding down SHIFT doesn't always work. Don't know why, it just doesn't.
Never thought of autorun in connection with a newly-installed HD before, tho!!
Easy way to install malware: include it on the floppy or CD that is used to prep the HD.
Yeah, but are you sure you're not a zombie?!
On that note, from TFA:
"By leading people to best practices, we can start deprecating (and later removing) outmoded functionality."
I totally HATE when apps do that. It's exactly like you say about mutating menus -- what they hide or remove is invariably something I use every day, but now have to either dumbster-dive** for, or find a workaround to replace. This is one major reason why I've become very reluctant to upgrade my major apps.
** "Dumbster-dive": having to root around in the bowels of the UI to find the necessities they've hidden from us in the name of dumbing it down for their notion of "typical" users. Here's a clue, folks -- some apps, and I suspect Photoshop is one of them, have NO "typical" users, because everyone uses it for slightly different jobs, along different workflow paths. And some users do so many different things that they have NO "typical" workflow, so no matter how the menus mutate, they will ALWAYS be wrong for the use of the moment.
(This is why one of the first things I do with WinXP is turn off the fucking "customized start menu" shit!)
Interesting re Photoshop's behaviour. Probably explains why it's so pig-slow compared to every other image editor out there. :(
I've noticed that. It's as if they took seriously the old Soviet jape, "All things not compulsory are forbidden."
It doesn't state that we have a right to breathe in the Constitution either, so maybe they should stop breathing...
"No more "on the Internet, no one knows if you're a dog". We know."
In that case, you ought to know that no kennel owner in their right mind puts a street address on their website. Doing so is an open invitation to have your animals poisoned or stolen by some nutjob.
I find WHOIS useful for flagging probable-fraud, because something just won't match what it apparently should -- wrong country, known bad host, obviously mismatched contact info, etc. Between WHOIS and Netcraft, I can generally determine if a domain/site/email/whatever is bogus or not, even if it looks legit on the surface.
So... having wrong info in WHOIS is, in its own way, just as useful as having correct info.
However, fingerprinting the tiles (a perfect medium for preserving prints) and the store employees might have been very interesting... of course one would need to call local law enforcement about that.
Regardless, as some pointed out, once he paid for the replacement drive, the manager TAKING it from him was theft, pure and simple. Doesn't matter about ANY of the surrounding circumstances, nor that he's still in the store. Was time to call the police on that one.
I remember a video of Dolby creating an early tape-loop electronic piece. Every time the tape went around, he'd add one more note. It wasn't very good as music (in fact it was boring, and rather unpleasant to the ear), but it was interesting to watch its birth.
As to unexpected geeks of a sort, pro sports is full of them. Many, perhaps most pro football and baseball players are lawyers, engineers, and even doctors in the off season.
Because of this very practice, I've been saying for years that domain registrars (and any associated or shell companies) should not be allowed to own ANY domains other than those directly related to their business.
And if caught violating this, they should immediately be fined 3x the value of the domains (defined as either the cost to register them, or the price the registrar is offering to sell them for, which ever is greater) AND they should be defrocked and put out of the registrar business for at least a painful period, and possibly forever.
But I strongly suspect there is presently more money in squatting and reselling than there is in ordinary domain registration, both for the registrars and for ICANN. Money always wins.
Well, a lot of people can't see the problem without the analogies. So while not necessarily accurate, they can be useful. (Tho I suspect in most cases it's just preaching to the choir, and anyone else has made up their minds already, regardless of any arguments or analogies we can present.)
Revamp would help, but better to trash them and start over, or at least revert to the simple and practical copyright laws of our Founding Fathers (which by now would be much the same as "starting over"). For whatever flaws their outlook had, they always made one critical recognition: ANYTHING that gets too big and too powerful (gov't or private interest) is likely to become a Problem to the People.
Guess that's why my friend in Germany is planning to move elsewhere -- he says the regulations and restrictions are getting so bizarre that normal people can't live there anymore.
Crap, that's a scary post. And I think you're right. It's not that we now have more to be suspicious about; it's that now it's far easier to maintain suspicions.
My sister's company does business worldwide, including China, and this is what she has to say about China's new capitalism:
It isn't capitalism at all. It's designed *entirely* to suck money out of the rest of the world, even if doing so is at the expense of the average Chinese. And it will end the moment it ceases to benefit China.
"Why are there 50 pink flamingos in your front yard?"
"To keep the bears away. You don't see any bears, do you??"
While I also don't entire agree with Ron Paul's positions, I think he could do a lot to counterbalance a system that has swung WAY too far in the other direction.
After all, even were he President, no way in hell is he going to get all of his own agenda -- there will be many compromises and many battles he can't win. But if he wins a few important ones, I think we'll all be better off. And given what Congress is like, there is absolutely NO danger of going TOO far in Ron Paul's political direction, if for no other reason than that there are too many entrenched special interests.
I'm reminded of this Groachi saying:
No population -- no popular unrest!
Well, see, that's the point. It does not matter WHO you are afraid of -- the terrorist goal is for you to BE afraid. If you're afraid of your own government, so much the better for any real terrorists -- since everyone will be looking the wrong way and will simply not see a REAL threat til it's too late, being too busy cavity-searching their own innocent citizens.
One of those weird car analogies just came to mind ...
So you buy a car (a PC) and go to put gasoline (an OS) in it. Most of the time the gasoline burns in the expected way and you can get on down the road. Occasionally the gasoline is contaminated with water or the octane level isn't what was claimed, and your car sputters and chokes and you wind up at the mechanic, thinking something major has gone wrong. Rarely, instead of burning in the usual controlled way, the gasoline explodes, taking your car and immediate neighbourhood with it.
That's a nasty thought. If the search index becomes remotely searchable (which sounds like a "good feature" if you don't think beyond your company walls) WHO ELSE WILL EXPLOIT IT? M$ probably doesn't give two shits about your personal data, but some credit card fraudist in East Crudville probably DOES.