On your search result, Wolfram|Alpha helpfully gives additional information, including "direct travel times." Unfortunately, the travel time for a car moving at 55 mph is given as "0 years." Not too helpful, that.
Because influenza viruses mutate when organisms catch them and the virus is allowed to commingle with whatever else the animal has in its system. Thus, considering that this H1N1 influenza seems to be fairly virulent, preventing as many people/animals from catching it as possible seems like a worthwhile goal, to prevent it from acquiring new properties. The influenza strain responsible for the very-deadly 1918 flu pandemic was a strain of H1N1.
They "switched" everyone to the new homepage a month or two ago, without asking. You need to opt OUT if you want to see the article layout without all the bugs.
Really? Wave allows multiple people to edit the same document at the same time, across company lines... AFIK, this is not anywhere on the radar at Microsoft.
Everybody seems to be forgetting that after Notes, Ray Ozzie invented Groove, which is now owned by Microsoft (which is currently in the process of integrating it with SharePoint).
I think this is mainly a problem for people who like to use the "old"/. layout but who still use the new, "dynamic" homepage index.
The pages with the style sheet problems appear to be the ones with human-readable URLs. If you turn off the dynamic homepage, the links to stories will still be the old-style, numeric URLs. Those URLs still give you the non-broken style sheet.
Alternatively, you can use the dynamic homepage, then click on a story link, then find a link on that page that uses the numeric URL for the same story. Usually, one of the links right below the summary will have the right one. Because that's a PITA, however, I've decided to opt out of the new homepage.
Unless Intel decides to get as serious about the embedded world as they have been historically about the desktop, this amounts to last rites for Wind River... At this point, I'll take Linux with a GCC toolchain over VxWorks for any embedded project just to avoid the single-company support choke point and the costs and hassles with licensing.
You're aware that Wind River has offered its own optimized Linux distro for embedded systems for years now, including extensions for real-time systems? And that it runs on ARM and XScale?
The genius/. programmers who continually mess up the UI have done it again.
It's all part of the game of/., where everybody pretends they know about a subject (like Web programming) and then promptly demonstrate what idiots they really are.
My best advice is that you shouldn't click on any URL that includes the subject of the post in it... try to find a link that still uses the old, numeric URLs. For example, this will probably have no subject lines:
What does Scientology do... that the Catholic church doesn't?
Many things. Many, many things. DISCLAIMER: I am not a Catholic, and my interpretation of their beliefs is meant only as a guideline and can probably be waved away as fatally inept by any real Catholic. Furthermore I think recent stories about Catholic abuse of children are abhorrent and are probably the greatest crisis the Church has faced since Martin Luther.
That said... here's just one example.
The Catholic church requires believers to confess their sins. Similarly, the so-called Church of Scientology requires believers to undergo a process that it calls "auditing," in which the believer talks frankly about past events. What's the difference?
Well, when the Scientologists do it, I am told, the subject is asked a series of questions, called a "process." The answers to your questions are written down in the form of notes, which are then compiled and permanently retained in a "preclear folder." You can only move on to a new process -- a new set of questions -- when the objective of the previous set of questions has been achieved (to the interviewer's satisfaction). No other guidance or evaluation of the subject is supposedly given, and the auditing process as a whole takes as long as is necessary, i.e. the subject may have to go home, come back later, and continue the same specific process until the interviewer (with the help of a religious object called an "E-meter") says it's time to move on to the next stage. The goal of auditing is said to be to identify memories of the subject's "thetan," both from the present and past lives, which are inhibiting the subject's full abilities (in other words, those things that make the subject a bad and ineffective person). The subject is told that only ongoing and successful practice of Scientology can free them from those bad qualities which oppress them. And furthermore, practicing costs money.
Compare now to how the Catholics do it. You go into a Catholic church and you sit down in a space nearby to the priest. Generally, the priest is partially concealed from you so you do not have to look him in the eye. He might ask you a couple of simple questions about whether you've been practicing Catholic ritual, and then he tells you to begin. That is, he asks you nothing specific -- you just say what you personally feel you need to say. He might ask you to clarify. But generally, the process should take five minutes or less, if you've been doing it regularly. Then he may give you some advice about penance -- something realistic that you can do to make up for your sins, which might just be observance of some ritual -- and then he says, essentially: "If you do these things I have said, and you've been honest about your confession, then God is going to pretty much forget about everything you've said here for the rest of your life and all of eternity. There may be some Purgatory stuff to deal with, but it could have been a lot worse. Do those things and your burden is lifted, effective today; now go home to your family." Total monetary charges incurred: Zero.
Kinda different, don't you think? Can you see the difference in psychological impact, the subtle manipulation that the Scientologist undergoes? People talk about "Catholic guilt," but that's nothing compared to what the Scientologists put you through.
That's what's so insidious about Scientology -- the way they can manipulate nonbelievers as well as believers. Superficially, all ritual looks the same to a nonbeliever -- that is, it just seems ridiculous -- which is why Scientologists get away with their brainwashing and other manipulative practices. People look at them and say "they're a bunch of kooks, just like all the others." And the Scientologists smile and say, "That's right. See? We're just like all the others." But it ain't true. Diss Catholics if you must, but don't make the mistake of using Catholicism as an excuse to turn a blind eye to the abuses of Scientology.
Actually, many Catholics do still believe in indulgences. It's the selling of indulgences that was a historical abuse, one that has long since been abolished. (And by historical, we're talking about before the Council of Trent, not the 1970s.)
Basically, if confession and participating in the other Catholic sacraments is like washing your hands, being granted a plenary indulgence is like getting a full antimicrobial scrubdown before surgery at a hospital. In and of itself, it has absolutely nothing to do with money.
I'm not the GP, but I'd like you to explain what you mean.
If you search Google for "Mormon cult," you will find many, many pages that insist that the LDS Church is a cult. If you dig into those pages, however, you will find that most of them are written by evangelicals and Christian fundamentalist sects.
One very common practice on many of these sites is to begin with the dictionary definition of "cult" and use that as "proof" that Mormonism is a cult. There exist, however, very sophisticated definitions and many, many well-reasoned and elaborate essays and explanations of cult beliefs that offer much more proof than the dictionary. It is these definitions that are used when Scientology is described as a cult. The same guidelines don't apply so readily to Mormonism, however.
In fact, the usual objections to Mormonism used to label them as a cult are that they are not true Christians, so-called, and therefore must be a cult. Christian fundamentalists claim that Mormons don't accept the Bible as the undisputed word of God, that they don't believe in the Trinity, that they have different traditions not set out in the Bible, and so on. All of that may be true, but it just makes them bad Christians (in somebody's eyes). It doesn't make them a cult.
Now, I'm not a Mormon and I can't really speak for the wisdom of their beliefs, or lack thereof. But your flip comment seems to be suggesting that Mormons do the things that Scientologists do, such as "splitting up families and taking children from their parents" -- that's just crazy talk, when in modern times Mormons typically have even bigger families than Catholics.
I'm sure Mormons believe many things that you don't believe. But just because you call them a cult doesn't make it so -- it just makes you a religious zealot. So what are you talking about?
For better or for worse, one can go to a Catholic priest or a Protestant minister and get lessons on their branch of Christianity for free.
Hell, for that matter, one can often go to a Catholic priest or a Protestant minister -- or a Jewish rabbi for that matter -- and get a free meal and a place to sleep along with the lessons. As others have said before me, you ever seen a Scientology soup kitchen?
A friend of mine recently had a pair of Mormons come to his front door and ask to talk to him about the Bible. He, a confirmed nonbeliever, told them he was willing to talk to them... for fifty bucks. Completely calmly, they replied that they couldn't give him money, but if he needed some help with something -- say, the garbage taken out, or the dishes cleaned up, or some furniture moved, or something -- then they would happy to help him with that first, and one of them could make coffee to drink during the talk, too. He still declined, but I suggest this to you: Next time you meet a Scientologist and they ask you to take their stupid little "personality test," tell them you'll do it... for one dollar. See what you get.
If you're dumb enough to spend thousands of dollars on something called a 'Thetin meter' then it's your fault.. not the seller's, then again it's France:P..
So there should be no laws against fraud? Ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes, Madoff... all that should be completely legal, because it's the victim's fault?
Indeed. I took a chemistry course at a junior college a year or two ago and the very first rules they gave us were things like:
Nobody works in this room outside class time.
Nobody works on their own experiments. You do the assignment and nothing else.
After all that stuff, then they told us things like where the eye-rinse station was, or how to operate the emergency shower. But that stuff came first.
I think you're missing the point. If they required every passenger to arrive at the airport naked, cavity searched them before allowing them to board, and allowed no luggage of any kind, we wouldn't need to spend billions outfitting our airports with these high-tech scanners. Where do you draw the line where human dignity, process efficiency, and common sense outweigh a totally unproven security measure?
Meanwhile, twelve times as many people die of the flu each year -- that's the plain, old, ordinary, non-swine flu -- than died on all the planes and buildings on 9/11 combined. Twelve 9/11s, every single year. I don't see anyone clamoring for us to outfit buildings and airports with anti-microbial spray booths, do you?
These scanners are hand-waving, nothing more. There's nothing to prove that they're doing anything to improve security in the skies... nothing to prove that me emptying my pockets completely makes you any safer than me merely removing a perfectly ordinary, functioning wristwatch. It's all a load of government contractors getting rich by selling gizmos to the government. We, the people, get inconvenienced; we get degraded as human beings; and we get to pick up the tab for it. It's total bullshit.
In short, Hemingway is a poor model for clear writing, especially when writing non-fiction.
Eh? Poor choice there, considering Hemingway is renowned for his blunt, economical writing style. The average Hemingway sentence probably contains about 12 words. Hemingway also spent time as a print journalist. You probably mean someone like Hawthorne, as another commenter suggested.
Sure, the scan was "painless," as the parent says. As in, I didn't feel my skin tingling or anything. But "relatively quickly" is pretty goddamn relative.
Here's how it worked: As usual, I put all my metal items into the front pocket of my carry-on, took off my shoes, passed urine and blood samples to the TSA officer (just kidding -- or am I?), and put my bag onto the conveyor belt. Then I waited.
Station One was a line of three people (at the time). The front person in line was instructed to keep his or her feet behind a yellow line. Directly ahead was a big booth of clear plastic. We each waited our turn to get to the front of the line and wait for a TSA officer to instruct us to proceed to Station Two.
Station Two, you step up and into the booth itself. There are little feet marks on the floor of the booth that instruct you where to put your feet. You stand there, and you wait.
Station Three, after a minute or two, a TSA person comes along and instructs you that you may now put your hands on two hand-marks on the wall. Basically, you're now in a position not unlike how you stand when you're being frisked by a cop. Once the TSA officer is satisfied that you're doing it right (it isn't hard), the officer walks away, and you wait.
After another minute or two and a couple of thumping sounds, the officer comes back and tells you that you can now step down out of the booth... and over to Station Four. I now notice that I am AGAIN standing in line behind the three people who were in line ahead of me. AGAIN we have to stand behind a yellow line, and all of the officers are acting like that yellow line is a Really Big Deal. Each person waits a minute or two until the TSA officer reappears and instructs them, individually, that they have passed the test and may collect their belongings.
Except I didn't pass.
In my case, the TSA officer approached me and informed me that they would need to see what was in my left front pocket. What was in my left front pocket was, not totally without precedent, my wallet. As it turns out, while the old scanners required you to remove all metal objects from your person, the new scanners now require you to remove EVERY object from your person, no matter what it is. They can tell if you're circumcised or not, but apparently they cannot tell that an oblong, slightly curved object of porous, nonmetallic material carried in the pocket of a man's trousers might possibly be his wallet.
I was escorted to Station Five -- yes, that's right, YET ANOTHER high-security yellow line where I needed to position my feet -- where I was told to wait for a different TSA officer. No doubt this one had a higher security clearance of the type that would allow her to examine the mysterious object. I was instructed to remove the object from my pocket. I did so using my left hand, then rotated my hand slowly so that the object was visible in my palm, revealing that the object was some kind of flat, oblong device made out of black leather. Visibly alarmed, the TSA officer informed me that she would need to open the object for inspection. Disassembly of the device revealed a number of very thin, flat, rectangular plastic objects. Some of them were printed with the logos of major financial institutions. At least one of the rectangular pieces of plastic had my photograph printed on it. In fact, this was the same flat, rectangular piece of plastic that I had showed to a TSA officer about fifteen minutes ago, at Station One. Satisfied, the officer told me I could collect my things.
So all in all, my experience is that this form of security theater is not only LESS secure than the old system -- because it yields even more, and stupider, false positives -- but it takes longer. Compare to my flight home from Mexico on the same voyage. This was for a flight FROM Mexico TO the United States, mind you -- and yet the officers on the Mexico side practically waved us through the metal detectors. I swear I saw it beep once or twice and the officer just gave the pa
Then I guess you should have read the actual terms before you posted, hmm?
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Wolfram Alpha doesn't just provide you with knowledge. It provides you with a new kind of knowledge. Any knowledge you gain from it must be attributed to Stephen Wolfram... because he invented it. It is actually safer to attribute all citations to Stephen Wolfram, in fact, because he is smarter than you.
Jesus! Frustrated book editor much?
on
Front End Drupal
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· Score: 0, Troll
While I appreciate book reviews on/. that actually take the time to say something critical about the book, this one is just ridiculous.
Every chapter ends with a summary, and not a single one of them is useful or needed. Any unique information conveyed in them should have been merged with the introductory paragraphs for the respective chapters, which is where readers would be looking anyway to see what each chapter addresses.
Yes. Agree completely. Nobody would ever be looking for what a chapter addresses in the summary.
The book has numerous minor problems, including grammatical and stylistic errors, such as dashes incorrectly performing the duty of semicolons, some URLs missing the root directory slash, and excessive use of exclamation marks (more than a dozen before even reaching the second chapter).
Really? Seriously? Since you claim to be a writer, you of all people should know that stylistic "errors," such as using too many exclamation marks, are really just different stylistic preferences. Similarly, opinion differs about the trailing slash on URLs. And as for dashes vs. semicolons, you might want to get your head out of your Shakespeare First Folio and read a magazine sometime.
As is typical in a first edition, the book contains several errata:
...which is why most readers feel perfectly comfortable overlooking them. Honestly, has anybody (except you) ever looked at a diagram and gnashed their teeth at poor capitalization?
Scattered throughout the manuscript are tips, each indicated with a pencil tip icon. These help to break up the text visually, and provide valuable guidance. The contrast between the black text and the dark gray background could certainly be improved...
Seriously?? Seriously?? OK, I've never met William Shatner, though I'm fully willing to admit that I'm no William Shatner; nonetheless (note my use of a semicolon there), I mean it sincerely when I say GET A LIFE.
It took almost 3 months to get the sound working on Ubuntu (TOS-link). Even to this day I'm scared that if I lose the system I'll lose the configuration- it required editing different accounts, adding new packages, modifying them in a non-standard fashion, adding options that weren't documented...
I had exactly this problem when setting up an Ubuntu system to run MythTV, where I still had a usable desktop on one monitor while the TV sound went over SPDIF and the picture showed up on a CRT TV. It took a ton of hacking, a ton of reconfiguring, a ton of scratching my head when something that worked five minutes ago all of a sudden wasn't working again.
My eventual solution? Keep a journal. If you're going to experiment with a Linux system that's "in perpetual R&D mode," as another poster put it, might as well approach it like a scientist would.
BTW, my result is also the same as yours -- the same thing works pretty much effortlessly when I use Windows Media Center, but that has plenty of annoyances of its own.
Slashdot Mirror
On your search result, Wolfram|Alpha helpfully gives additional information, including "direct travel times." Unfortunately, the travel time for a car moving at 55 mph is given as "0 years." Not too helpful, that.
Because influenza viruses mutate when organisms catch them and the virus is allowed to commingle with whatever else the animal has in its system. Thus, considering that this H1N1 influenza seems to be fairly virulent, preventing as many people/animals from catching it as possible seems like a worthwhile goal, to prevent it from acquiring new properties. The influenza strain responsible for the very-deadly 1918 flu pandemic was a strain of H1N1.
They "switched" everyone to the new homepage a month or two ago, without asking. You need to opt OUT if you want to see the article layout without all the bugs.
Really? Wave allows multiple people to edit the same document at the same time, across company lines... AFIK, this is not anywhere on the radar at Microsoft.
Everybody seems to be forgetting that after Notes, Ray Ozzie invented Groove, which is now owned by Microsoft (which is currently in the process of integrating it with SharePoint).
I think this is mainly a problem for people who like to use the "old" /. layout but who still use the new, "dynamic" homepage index.
The pages with the style sheet problems appear to be the ones with human-readable URLs. If you turn off the dynamic homepage, the links to stories will still be the old-style, numeric URLs. Those URLs still give you the non-broken style sheet.
Alternatively, you can use the dynamic homepage, then click on a story link, then find a link on that page that uses the numeric URL for the same story. Usually, one of the links right below the summary will have the right one. Because that's a PITA, however, I've decided to opt out of the new homepage.
Unless Intel decides to get as serious about the embedded world as they have been historically about the desktop, this amounts to last rites for Wind River ... At this point, I'll take Linux with a GCC toolchain over VxWorks for any embedded project just to avoid the single-company support choke point and the costs and hassles with licensing.
You're aware that Wind River has offered its own optimized Linux distro for embedded systems for years now, including extensions for real-time systems? And that it runs on ARM and XScale?
I challenge you to prove that Sotomayor favors F5 Networks customers.
(Hey come on, news for nerds, someone had to bring it back...)
The genius /. programmers who continually mess up the UI have done it again.
It's all part of the game of /., where everybody pretends they know about a subject (like Web programming) and then promptly demonstrate what idiots they really are.
My best advice is that you shouldn't click on any URL that includes the subject of the post in it ... try to find a link that still uses the old, numeric URLs. For example, this will probably have no subject lines:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/06/01/1859223/Laser-Blast-Makes-Regular-Light-Bulbs-Super-Efficient
While this one will have them:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/06/01/1859223
Find it strange that a bug this simple could go unnoticed for days? You must be new here.
Didn't say they offered to drink the coffee. And sure, they could have been Witnesses. I wasn't there.
What does Scientology do ... that the Catholic church doesn't?
Many things. Many, many things. DISCLAIMER: I am not a Catholic, and my interpretation of their beliefs is meant only as a guideline and can probably be waved away as fatally inept by any real Catholic. Furthermore I think recent stories about Catholic abuse of children are abhorrent and are probably the greatest crisis the Church has faced since Martin Luther.
That said... here's just one example.
The Catholic church requires believers to confess their sins. Similarly, the so-called Church of Scientology requires believers to undergo a process that it calls "auditing," in which the believer talks frankly about past events. What's the difference?
Well, when the Scientologists do it, I am told, the subject is asked a series of questions, called a "process." The answers to your questions are written down in the form of notes, which are then compiled and permanently retained in a "preclear folder." You can only move on to a new process -- a new set of questions -- when the objective of the previous set of questions has been achieved (to the interviewer's satisfaction). No other guidance or evaluation of the subject is supposedly given, and the auditing process as a whole takes as long as is necessary, i.e. the subject may have to go home, come back later, and continue the same specific process until the interviewer (with the help of a religious object called an "E-meter") says it's time to move on to the next stage. The goal of auditing is said to be to identify memories of the subject's "thetan," both from the present and past lives, which are inhibiting the subject's full abilities (in other words, those things that make the subject a bad and ineffective person). The subject is told that only ongoing and successful practice of Scientology can free them from those bad qualities which oppress them. And furthermore, practicing costs money.
Compare now to how the Catholics do it. You go into a Catholic church and you sit down in a space nearby to the priest. Generally, the priest is partially concealed from you so you do not have to look him in the eye. He might ask you a couple of simple questions about whether you've been practicing Catholic ritual, and then he tells you to begin. That is, he asks you nothing specific -- you just say what you personally feel you need to say. He might ask you to clarify. But generally, the process should take five minutes or less, if you've been doing it regularly. Then he may give you some advice about penance -- something realistic that you can do to make up for your sins, which might just be observance of some ritual -- and then he says, essentially: "If you do these things I have said, and you've been honest about your confession, then God is going to pretty much forget about everything you've said here for the rest of your life and all of eternity. There may be some Purgatory stuff to deal with, but it could have been a lot worse. Do those things and your burden is lifted, effective today; now go home to your family." Total monetary charges incurred: Zero.
Kinda different, don't you think? Can you see the difference in psychological impact, the subtle manipulation that the Scientologist undergoes? People talk about "Catholic guilt," but that's nothing compared to what the Scientologists put you through.
That's what's so insidious about Scientology -- the way they can manipulate nonbelievers as well as believers. Superficially, all ritual looks the same to a nonbeliever -- that is, it just seems ridiculous -- which is why Scientologists get away with their brainwashing and other manipulative practices. People look at them and say "they're a bunch of kooks, just like all the others." And the Scientologists smile and say, "That's right. See? We're just like all the others." But it ain't true. Diss Catholics if you must, but don't make the mistake of using Catholicism as an excuse to turn a blind eye to the abuses of Scientology.
Actually, many Catholics do still believe in indulgences. It's the selling of indulgences that was a historical abuse, one that has long since been abolished. (And by historical, we're talking about before the Council of Trent, not the 1970s.)
Basically, if confession and participating in the other Catholic sacraments is like washing your hands, being granted a plenary indulgence is like getting a full antimicrobial scrubdown before surgery at a hospital. In and of itself, it has absolutely nothing to do with money.
I'm not the GP, but I'd like you to explain what you mean.
If you search Google for "Mormon cult," you will find many, many pages that insist that the LDS Church is a cult. If you dig into those pages, however, you will find that most of them are written by evangelicals and Christian fundamentalist sects.
One very common practice on many of these sites is to begin with the dictionary definition of "cult" and use that as "proof" that Mormonism is a cult. There exist, however, very sophisticated definitions and many, many well-reasoned and elaborate essays and explanations of cult beliefs that offer much more proof than the dictionary. It is these definitions that are used when Scientology is described as a cult. The same guidelines don't apply so readily to Mormonism, however.
In fact, the usual objections to Mormonism used to label them as a cult are that they are not true Christians, so-called, and therefore must be a cult. Christian fundamentalists claim that Mormons don't accept the Bible as the undisputed word of God, that they don't believe in the Trinity, that they have different traditions not set out in the Bible, and so on. All of that may be true, but it just makes them bad Christians (in somebody's eyes). It doesn't make them a cult.
Now, I'm not a Mormon and I can't really speak for the wisdom of their beliefs, or lack thereof. But your flip comment seems to be suggesting that Mormons do the things that Scientologists do, such as "splitting up families and taking children from their parents" -- that's just crazy talk, when in modern times Mormons typically have even bigger families than Catholics.
I'm sure Mormons believe many things that you don't believe. But just because you call them a cult doesn't make it so -- it just makes you a religious zealot. So what are you talking about?
Or, to put it another way, a checkered past is at least 50 percent better than a black past.
For better or for worse, one can go to a Catholic priest or a Protestant minister and get lessons on their branch of Christianity for free.
Hell, for that matter, one can often go to a Catholic priest or a Protestant minister -- or a Jewish rabbi for that matter -- and get a free meal and a place to sleep along with the lessons. As others have said before me, you ever seen a Scientology soup kitchen?
A friend of mine recently had a pair of Mormons come to his front door and ask to talk to him about the Bible. He, a confirmed nonbeliever, told them he was willing to talk to them ... for fifty bucks. Completely calmly, they replied that they couldn't give him money, but if he needed some help with something -- say, the garbage taken out, or the dishes cleaned up, or some furniture moved, or something -- then they would happy to help him with that first, and one of them could make coffee to drink during the talk, too. He still declined, but I suggest this to you: Next time you meet a Scientologist and they ask you to take their stupid little "personality test," tell them you'll do it ... for one dollar. See what you get.
If you're dumb enough to spend thousands of dollars on something called a 'Thetin meter' then it's your fault.. not the seller's, then again it's France :P..
So there should be no laws against fraud? Ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes, Madoff ... all that should be completely legal, because it's the victim's fault?
Indeed. I took a chemistry course at a junior college a year or two ago and the very first rules they gave us were things like:
After all that stuff, then they told us things like where the eye-rinse station was, or how to operate the emergency shower. But that stuff came first.
* Space - it had a lot of it. (Competitors had more, though)
And no wireless. Lame.
Alas, I was born in Canada. I realize that this invalidates my entire argument, but I beg you please not to damage my /. karma.
I think you're missing the point. If they required every passenger to arrive at the airport naked, cavity searched them before allowing them to board, and allowed no luggage of any kind, we wouldn't need to spend billions outfitting our airports with these high-tech scanners. Where do you draw the line where human dignity, process efficiency, and common sense outweigh a totally unproven security measure?
Meanwhile, twelve times as many people die of the flu each year -- that's the plain, old, ordinary, non-swine flu -- than died on all the planes and buildings on 9/11 combined. Twelve 9/11s, every single year. I don't see anyone clamoring for us to outfit buildings and airports with anti-microbial spray booths, do you?
These scanners are hand-waving, nothing more. There's nothing to prove that they're doing anything to improve security in the skies ... nothing to prove that me emptying my pockets completely makes you any safer than me merely removing a perfectly ordinary, functioning wristwatch. It's all a load of government contractors getting rich by selling gizmos to the government. We, the people, get inconvenienced; we get degraded as human beings; and we get to pick up the tab for it. It's total bullshit.
In short, Hemingway is a poor model for clear writing, especially when writing non-fiction.
Eh? Poor choice there, considering Hemingway is renowned for his blunt, economical writing style. The average Hemingway sentence probably contains about 12 words. Hemingway also spent time as a print journalist. You probably mean someone like Hawthorne, as another commenter suggested.
Sure, the scan was "painless," as the parent says. As in, I didn't feel my skin tingling or anything. But "relatively quickly" is pretty goddamn relative.
Here's how it worked: As usual, I put all my metal items into the front pocket of my carry-on, took off my shoes, passed urine and blood samples to the TSA officer (just kidding -- or am I?), and put my bag onto the conveyor belt. Then I waited.
Station One was a line of three people (at the time). The front person in line was instructed to keep his or her feet behind a yellow line. Directly ahead was a big booth of clear plastic. We each waited our turn to get to the front of the line and wait for a TSA officer to instruct us to proceed to Station Two.
Station Two, you step up and into the booth itself. There are little feet marks on the floor of the booth that instruct you where to put your feet. You stand there, and you wait.
Station Three, after a minute or two, a TSA person comes along and instructs you that you may now put your hands on two hand-marks on the wall. Basically, you're now in a position not unlike how you stand when you're being frisked by a cop. Once the TSA officer is satisfied that you're doing it right (it isn't hard), the officer walks away, and you wait.
After another minute or two and a couple of thumping sounds, the officer comes back and tells you that you can now step down out of the booth ... and over to Station Four. I now notice that I am AGAIN standing in line behind the three people who were in line ahead of me. AGAIN we have to stand behind a yellow line, and all of the officers are acting like that yellow line is a Really Big Deal. Each person waits a minute or two until the TSA officer reappears and instructs them, individually, that they have passed the test and may collect their belongings.
Except I didn't pass.
In my case, the TSA officer approached me and informed me that they would need to see what was in my left front pocket. What was in my left front pocket was, not totally without precedent, my wallet. As it turns out, while the old scanners required you to remove all metal objects from your person, the new scanners now require you to remove EVERY object from your person, no matter what it is. They can tell if you're circumcised or not, but apparently they cannot tell that an oblong, slightly curved object of porous, nonmetallic material carried in the pocket of a man's trousers might possibly be his wallet.
I was escorted to Station Five -- yes, that's right, YET ANOTHER high-security yellow line where I needed to position my feet -- where I was told to wait for a different TSA officer. No doubt this one had a higher security clearance of the type that would allow her to examine the mysterious object. I was instructed to remove the object from my pocket. I did so using my left hand, then rotated my hand slowly so that the object was visible in my palm, revealing that the object was some kind of flat, oblong device made out of black leather. Visibly alarmed, the TSA officer informed me that she would need to open the object for inspection. Disassembly of the device revealed a number of very thin, flat, rectangular plastic objects. Some of them were printed with the logos of major financial institutions. At least one of the rectangular pieces of plastic had my photograph printed on it. In fact, this was the same flat, rectangular piece of plastic that I had showed to a TSA officer about fifteen minutes ago, at Station One. Satisfied, the officer told me I could collect my things.
So all in all, my experience is that this form of security theater is not only LESS secure than the old system -- because it yields even more, and stupider, false positives -- but it takes longer. Compare to my flight home from Mexico on the same voyage. This was for a flight FROM Mexico TO the United States, mind you -- and yet the officers on the Mexico side practically waved us through the metal detectors. I swear I saw it beep once or twice and the officer just gave the pa
Then I guess you should have read the actual terms before you posted, hmm?
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Wolfram Alpha doesn't just provide you with knowledge. It provides you with a new kind of knowledge. Any knowledge you gain from it must be attributed to Stephen Wolfram ... because he invented it. It is actually safer to attribute all citations to Stephen Wolfram, in fact, because he is smarter than you.
While I appreciate book reviews on /. that actually take the time to say something critical about the book, this one is just ridiculous.
Every chapter ends with a summary, and not a single one of them is useful or needed. Any unique information conveyed in them should have been merged with the introductory paragraphs for the respective chapters, which is where readers would be looking anyway to see what each chapter addresses.
Yes. Agree completely. Nobody would ever be looking for what a chapter addresses in the summary.
The book has numerous minor problems, including grammatical and stylistic errors, such as dashes incorrectly performing the duty of semicolons, some URLs missing the root directory slash, and excessive use of exclamation marks (more than a dozen before even reaching the second chapter).
Really? Seriously? Since you claim to be a writer, you of all people should know that stylistic "errors," such as using too many exclamation marks, are really just different stylistic preferences. Similarly, opinion differs about the trailing slash on URLs. And as for dashes vs. semicolons, you might want to get your head out of your Shakespeare First Folio and read a magazine sometime.
As is typical in a first edition, the book contains several errata:
...which is why most readers feel perfectly comfortable overlooking them. Honestly, has anybody (except you) ever looked at a diagram and gnashed their teeth at poor capitalization?
Scattered throughout the manuscript are tips, each indicated with a pencil tip icon. These help to break up the text visually, and provide valuable guidance. The contrast between the black text and the dark gray background could certainly be improved ...
Seriously?? Seriously?? OK, I've never met William Shatner, though I'm fully willing to admit that I'm no William Shatner; nonetheless (note my use of a semicolon there), I mean it sincerely when I say GET A LIFE.
It took almost 3 months to get the sound working on Ubuntu (TOS-link). Even to this day I'm scared that if I lose the system I'll lose the configuration- it required editing different accounts, adding new packages, modifying them in a non-standard fashion, adding options that weren't documented...
I had exactly this problem when setting up an Ubuntu system to run MythTV, where I still had a usable desktop on one monitor while the TV sound went over SPDIF and the picture showed up on a CRT TV. It took a ton of hacking, a ton of reconfiguring, a ton of scratching my head when something that worked five minutes ago all of a sudden wasn't working again.
My eventual solution? Keep a journal. If you're going to experiment with a Linux system that's "in perpetual R&D mode," as another poster put it, might as well approach it like a scientist would.
BTW, my result is also the same as yours -- the same thing works pretty much effortlessly when I use Windows Media Center, but that has plenty of annoyances of its own.