A robot handling a knife, making a cutting, stabbing or puncturing motion, with a human in the path of the knife, will necessarily be cut, stabbed and/or punctured.
In retaliation you mean? I could understand the human getting cut, stabbed, or punctured, but I don't understand why you think the robot handling the knife would be cut, stabbed, or punctured.
Or maybe you just don't understand how prepositional phrases work.
I still play Civilization Call to Power. It is my all time favorite addiction. I don't pull it out often because when I do I can easily play all night and not even realize that dawn has arrived. But I do pull it out occasionally and I'm glad I can play it without worrying about whether the company will still let me.
I guess I'm bad for the games industry by enjoying a game that's so old, but I won't even contemplate buying a game with DRM because I just don't trust that I'd be able to play it long after it stops being the hit new thing.
I knew nothing about Opera acquiring them and there was nothing particularly wrong with fastmail.fm, but there was nothing particularly good about them either. I was hoping to get spam filtering good enough that I could have my phone alert me about new mail but even after months of training their spam filter it still let through far too much spam.
I have resorted to just leaving Thunderbird running on a desktop computer to delete spam and manually checking my phone when I feel like it instead of having it chirp every time a new email comes in. Thunderbird is a lousy mail client, but it catches at least as much spam as fastmail.fm's spam filter did.
I think fastmail.fm has a very small niche. For most people there's not really a compelling case to made for them.
Either you know nothing about the old Bell System or you've got a really bizarre definition of the word "nothing".
The Bell System was a technical achievement on a par with building railroads across the US or building the Interstate Highway System.
Now, one may certainly argue about how much profit margin was "deserved" or "earned" as a result of that technical achievement. However, if you're going to describe the construction of a unified system of hardware, standards and maintenance procedures providing reliable telephone service across the entire United States, plus pioneering trans-oceanic telecommunications, plus pioneering work on the transistor, the laser, television, Unix, and a myriad of other technologies as "nothing" then I'm going to have to ask to see your credentials. I'd be surprised if you could name one thing you've done in your life that compares to the least of Ma Bell's accomplishments.
The solution is pretty simple. Don't use personal computers for business use.
If I'm a patient at your hospital I'm barely comfortable relying on the hospital's IT department to keep my medical information secure. I certainly don't want to rely on a myriad of clueless doctors, nurses, and miscellaneous technicians and administrators all maintaining or failing to maintain their own home computers.
I hope that if my medical information is leaked through any hospital employee's personal computer that I will be able to sue them for millions. It's just irresponsible to leave the handling of sensitive data to the random computer skills of people who are mostly employed for their non-computer skills.
I hope that most hospital employees are skilled in medical fields but I don't expect them to be particularly skilled with computers or to really care that much about computer security. I expect the hospital's IT department to be extremely vigilant about computer security so that the medical personnel can focus on healing patient.
It will require more than duct tape and £500 to resurrect his server after a slashdotting.
Why? What sort of computer sustains physical damage from high utilization? Unless he overclocked it foolishly I expect that it will resume functioning at no cost whatsoever once the incoming requests drop to a low enough rate.
I bet you're wishing that your connection had dropped out just before you clicked submit so that you wouldn't have uploaded that incomplete comment. Too bad that your connection was so reliable that it successfully uploaded your comment as soon as you hit the button.
I hate to burst your bubble, but those distances are not invariant. It's not like the speed of light which is the same everywhere and for everyone. The distance that Walmart and KMart are from your home is absolutely irrelevant to anybody who doesn't live in your home (which at last count was almost everyone on the planet.)
When evaluating decisions of a company with a target market of an entire country or planet it's really necessary to consider people who live outside of your own mom's basement. If you can't comprehend that, it's a pretty good indication of WHY you're living in your mom's basement.
To bad the link just goes to an advertisement page that doesn't load and there isn't even a picture of this wacky new phone. Oh well, I guess I just don't care that much.
The point about the gas is that I have never in my life stopped to put $5 worth of gas in my car. I started driving around the time gas was $1/gallon and I wouldn't have stopped for five gallons of gas then. I fill the tank when it gets below 1/4 tank. With the rental I had to make an extra stop at a gas station because the needle had dropped a sliver from where it started. Hardly anything, but not worth risking the $30 penalty if U-Haul decided to enforce the written contract.
My point was that there are two disadvantages to renting a truck. 1) The cost of rental. 2) The time spent driving to and from the rental place plus the extra stop at a gas station to put in a mere gallon or two of gas.
Hauling stuff to the dump / stuff from Home Depot / stuff from a big box store? Rent a van for $20.
FYI, that $20 is only if you keep it in the parking lot of the place you rent from. I just rented from U-Haul a couple weeks ago and despite that big "rent me for $20" emblazoned on the side the charge on my credit card was approx $95. Plus I had to stop off at a gas station to put $5 worth of gas in it before returning it because they charge something like a $30 penalty if you return it with less gas than it had in it when you rented it. I guess some U-Haul places may also sell gas, but this one didn't so it was an extra stop and more time wasted. That's on top of the time spent driving to and from the U-Haul place which amounted to an additional half hour of driving that I wouldn't have done if I'd had my own vehicle that could haul the one item that I needed to transport.
If you only haul stuff once a year it's still a savings, but if you're carting stuff around a few times a month it's very easy for truck rental to exceed the monthly loan payment on a small/midsize SUV or mini-van.
I think the most reasonably priced option is smarthome.com's Insteon products but they're still fairly pricy. It's hard to justify replacing all the switches and outlets in a home because the price per is so much higher than just a typical dumb switch or outlet from Home Depot.
The Insteon stuff can be hacked a bit but the company is not at all OSS friendly. They're much more interested in business partners then they are in end users. They'd much rather sell big expensive packages and commercial systems.
However, pretty much all other options are either even more expensive or else the really primitive X10 stuff that just isn't very good.
I just recently bought my first couple of ebooks from O'Reilly.
I am completely unwilling to buy anything with DRM, but O'Reilly's ebooks are available simultaneously in PDF, ePub and Mobi formats. I downloaded the ePub version to Stanza on my iPhone and copied the PDF version to my desktop and verified that I can read it with no problem on an non-Internet-connected computer.
I'm happy and will probably buy more. I've bought four ebooks from O'Reilly including two that were at a very nice price of $9.99 and two that were more expensive. I've read one of them all the way through on my iPhone and I've started two others.
As long as I'm guaranteed that I can read the book forever on any device that supports an standard format such as PDF regardless of whether a company still exists I'm ok with it. I'm not going to buy any book, music, or movie that requires my reading/viewing device to seek authorization from some server over the Internet.
Hey Paul... Matlock is on. You should move to the TV room with the others. Today is pepper steak day and we know how much you love pepper steak.
What do you mean by "is on"? I've never seen Matlock in the "Now Showing" list on my Tivo or the "Watch Recordings" list on my Mythtv box so as far as I know it doesn't exist. I haven't watched anything in the last five years that wasn't on one of those two lists.
However, I assume that if the TV producers or stations could stop me from setting the playback speed on Mythtv to 1.1X and hitting the commercial skip button they wouldn't hesitate to do so.
Now if only I could figure out how to send a URL to Mythtv and have it pull shows from websites and display them on the "Watch Recordings" screen with the same playback speed control and commercial skip functions that would be terrific. I suspect it's possible but just more complicated than I have the time to figure out.
To bring this post back on topic, "The Sad State of the Mobile Web" is that it's actually still simple enough that it can be used as the viewer prefers it rather than giving the publisher iron clad control of his/her audience. To me there's nothing sad at all about that. To me the sad state is the non-mobile web where we are seeing more and more websites trying to manage their viewers the way a farmer manages livestock. I don't think there's any doubt that a lot of marketers, advertisers, and MBAs (not mutually exclusive groups) desperately want to channel the entire web browsing audience along a path that they define and control.
Anything that puts the brakes on flash only websites is a good thing in my opinion. I just wish that there were more users of phones that supported HTML really well but didn't do Javascript so that there would be more pressure on web developers to make their pages accessible.
It seems to be an overwhelming human tendency to put form above function and the only thing preventing web developers from tying everything up in an impenetrable Gordian knot is the ever smaller number of old computers and phones that they might grudgingly spare an occasional though on.
Personally I wish browser plugins had never been invented. I've got a video player, a PDF reader, and all sorts of other applications and my browser knows how to launch them just fine. It annoys me every time some "clever" web developer finds some new way to force my computer to open a PDF inside my browser with restricted controls instead of dispatching it to my PDF reader with full functionality.
When phones catch up fully with modern desktops it may well signal the end of the open, accessible, web. The "professionals" would sure like to make the web just another version of TV where they control everything and our only choice is to use it their way or turn off the set.
If it's not a web server and he's typing www as the first part of the name of an smtp or irc or other type of server then I agree that your boss is dense. On the other hand, if you're setting up a web server and you don't make the first component of the name www then I would have to say that you are dense and you're not really doing your job properly.
And before you start going on about multipurpose servers I'm going to cut you off and say that if you don't know how to configure CNAME records you should get the heck out of the DNS server configuration files.
$ORIGIN mydomain.com. server1 IN A 1.2.3.4 www.server1 IN CNAME server1 smtp.server1 IN CNAME server1 ldap.server1 IN CNAME server1 server2 IN A 1.2.3.5 www.server2 IN CNAME server2 nntp.server2 IN CNAME server2 irc.server2 IN CNAME server2:wq rndc reload
What's the point of involving twitter if you're sending a direct message? Why not just send the message directly and skip the step of sharing your message with twitter? Private? In what sense is a message that you send unencrypted to a company you have no contractual relationship with private? If Twitter isn't using your messages to somehow make money I can't imaging why not. They may not have a good plan, but I can't believe they don't have some scheme in mind to make money off of your messages.
If you feel the need to broadcast your messages to twits then you might as well use Twitter, but I just can't see why you would bother to go through them for communications that don't actually benefit from their feature. (I use the word feature in the singular since as far as I know Twitter only has one feature.)
75 Angstroms per minute seems extremely slow and 7 Angstroms per page sounds like they're using very small pieces of paper. Perhaps you should have used the preview button before submitting your post.
in your scenario, they would still be a sex offender.
Yes, but not a registered sex offender. That was the point. Assuming they successfully disposed of the body they could still be convicted of murder but it would be much harder to prove rape. The murder charge would carry jail time, but there is a significant possibility of them eventually being released from jail and from that point on they would be in the clear. On the other hand, the sex offender charge would be a life sentence. Only part of that sentence would be jail time, but the time after release from jail could very well be worse than the time spent in jail.
This relates to the "law of unintended consequences". We all agree that rape is bad, but assuming that rape has been committed the current state of law provides incentive for murder. Having committed rape, the perpetrator is very likely better off killing and disposing of the victim rather than releasing them.
The screenshots are odd. They all look the same to me and they look like a login page to that forum, not anything to do with Google at all.
On a side note, does anyone know how to completely disable Firefox from opening new tabs without permission? I've tried to disable it every way I can and I've mostly got it, but every so often I run into a website like this Ubuntu forum that somehow nevertheless manages to force Firefox to open a new tab.
Why is it that web "designers" can't understand that I have perfectly functional "Open in New Tab" and "Open in New Window" options if the right click menu if I want to do so and if I don't use those options it's specifically because I DON'T want to open a new tab or window.
Seriously does anyone else have issues with how convoluted it really is to add mp3 files to an ipod touch? Add a folder to your library, wait while itunes chugs and makes a COPY of each file before syncing. Hit sync a few times and agree to all your old settings being overwritten (when all it really does is update).
PEBKAC
Whether iTunes copies files or not is a user configurable setting. Personally I want iTunes to manage it's copy of my library without touching the original files. In my case the original files (ripped with EAC and LAME) are a backup on separate physical disc from my iTunes library.
My smart playlist "Recent Additions" contains everything with a "Date Added" property within the last 30 days and is automatically synced to my iPhone. So I don't even need to have my iPhone connected when I add stuff to my iTunes library and they'll still get loaded onto my iPhone whenever I happen to connect it.
So your issues with how convoluted it is are purely based out of your own ignorance. For me it's two steps: 1) drag file to iTunes. 2) Plug in iPhone cable.
Slashdot Mirror
A robot handling a knife, making a cutting, stabbing or puncturing motion, with a human in the path of the knife, will necessarily be cut, stabbed and/or punctured.
In retaliation you mean? I could understand the human getting cut, stabbed, or punctured, but I don't understand why you think the robot handling the knife would be cut, stabbed, or punctured.
Or maybe you just don't understand how prepositional phrases work.
I still play Civilization Call to Power. It is my all time favorite addiction. I don't pull it out often because when I do I can easily play all night and not even realize that dawn has arrived. But I do pull it out occasionally and I'm glad I can play it without worrying about whether the company will still let me.
I guess I'm bad for the games industry by enjoying a game that's so old, but I won't even contemplate buying a game with DRM because I just don't trust that I'd be able to play it long after it stops being the hit new thing.
I knew nothing about Opera acquiring them and there was nothing particularly wrong with fastmail.fm, but there was nothing particularly good about them either. I was hoping to get spam filtering good enough that I could have my phone alert me about new mail but even after months of training their spam filter it still let through far too much spam.
I have resorted to just leaving Thunderbird running on a desktop computer to delete spam and manually checking my phone when I feel like it instead of having it chirp every time a new email comes in. Thunderbird is a lousy mail client, but it catches at least as much spam as fastmail.fm's spam filter did.
I think fastmail.fm has a very small niche. For most people there's not really a compelling case to made for them.
Either you know nothing about the old Bell System or you've got a really bizarre definition of the word "nothing".
The Bell System was a technical achievement on a par with building railroads across the US or building the Interstate Highway System.
Now, one may certainly argue about how much profit margin was "deserved" or "earned" as a result of that technical achievement. However, if you're going to describe the construction of a unified system of hardware, standards and maintenance procedures providing reliable telephone service across the entire United States, plus pioneering trans-oceanic telecommunications, plus pioneering work on the transistor, the laser, television, Unix, and a myriad of other technologies as "nothing" then I'm going to have to ask to see your credentials. I'd be surprised if you could name one thing you've done in your life that compares to the least of Ma Bell's accomplishments.
The solution is pretty simple. Don't use personal computers for business use.
If I'm a patient at your hospital I'm barely comfortable relying on the hospital's IT department to keep my medical information secure. I certainly don't want to rely on a myriad of clueless doctors, nurses, and miscellaneous technicians and administrators all maintaining or failing to maintain their own home computers.
I hope that if my medical information is leaked through any hospital employee's personal computer that I will be able to sue them for millions. It's just irresponsible to leave the handling of sensitive data to the random computer skills of people who are mostly employed for their non-computer skills.
I hope that most hospital employees are skilled in medical fields but I don't expect them to be particularly skilled with computers or to really care that much about computer security. I expect the hospital's IT department to be extremely vigilant about computer security so that the medical personnel can focus on healing patient.
It will require more than duct tape and £500 to resurrect his server after a slashdotting.
Why? What sort of computer sustains physical damage from high utilization? Unless he overclocked it foolishly I expect that it will resume functioning at no cost whatsoever once the incoming requests drop to a low enough rate.
I bet you're wishing that your connection had dropped out just before you clicked submit so that you wouldn't have uploaded that incomplete comment. Too bad that your connection was so reliable that it successfully uploaded your comment as soon as you hit the button.
If it only uses power when changing the screen why does it need a sleep mode? That seems like a contradiction.
I hate to burst your bubble, but those distances are not invariant. It's not like the speed of light which is the same everywhere and for everyone. The distance that Walmart and KMart are from your home is absolutely irrelevant to anybody who doesn't live in your home (which at last count was almost everyone on the planet.)
When evaluating decisions of a company with a target market of an entire country or planet it's really necessary to consider people who live outside of your own mom's basement. If you can't comprehend that, it's a pretty good indication of WHY you're living in your mom's basement.
To bad the link just goes to an advertisement page that doesn't load and there isn't even a picture of this wacky new phone. Oh well, I guess I just don't care that much.
35 miles.
The point about the gas is that I have never in my life stopped to put $5 worth of gas in my car. I started driving around the time gas was $1/gallon and I wouldn't have stopped for five gallons of gas then. I fill the tank when it gets below 1/4 tank. With the rental I had to make an extra stop at a gas station because the needle had dropped a sliver from where it started. Hardly anything, but not worth risking the $30 penalty if U-Haul decided to enforce the written contract.
My point was that there are two disadvantages to renting a truck. 1) The cost of rental. 2) The time spent driving to and from the rental place plus the extra stop at a gas station to put in a mere gallon or two of gas.
Hauling stuff to the dump / stuff from Home Depot / stuff from a big box store? Rent a van for $20.
FYI, that $20 is only if you keep it in the parking lot of the place you rent from. I just rented from U-Haul a couple weeks ago and despite that big "rent me for $20" emblazoned on the side the charge on my credit card was approx $95. Plus I had to stop off at a gas station to put $5 worth of gas in it before returning it because they charge something like a $30 penalty if you return it with less gas than it had in it when you rented it. I guess some U-Haul places may also sell gas, but this one didn't so it was an extra stop and more time wasted. That's on top of the time spent driving to and from the U-Haul place which amounted to an additional half hour of driving that I wouldn't have done if I'd had my own vehicle that could haul the one item that I needed to transport.
If you only haul stuff once a year it's still a savings, but if you're carting stuff around a few times a month it's very easy for truck rental to exceed the monthly loan payment on a small/midsize SUV or mini-van.
I think the most reasonably priced option is smarthome.com's Insteon products but they're still fairly pricy. It's hard to justify replacing all the switches and outlets in a home because the price per is so much higher than just a typical dumb switch or outlet from Home Depot.
The Insteon stuff can be hacked a bit but the company is not at all OSS friendly. They're much more interested in business partners then they are in end users. They'd much rather sell big expensive packages and commercial systems.
However, pretty much all other options are either even more expensive or else the really primitive X10 stuff that just isn't very good.
I just recently bought my first couple of ebooks from O'Reilly.
I am completely unwilling to buy anything with DRM, but O'Reilly's ebooks are available simultaneously in PDF, ePub and Mobi formats. I downloaded the ePub version to Stanza on my iPhone and copied the PDF version to my desktop and verified that I can read it with no problem on an non-Internet-connected computer.
I'm happy and will probably buy more. I've bought four ebooks from O'Reilly including two that were at a very nice price of $9.99 and two that were more expensive. I've read one of them all the way through on my iPhone and I've started two others.
As long as I'm guaranteed that I can read the book forever on any device that supports an standard format such as PDF regardless of whether a company still exists I'm ok with it. I'm not going to buy any book, music, or movie that requires my reading/viewing device to seek authorization from some server over the Internet.
Hey Paul... Matlock is on. You should move to the TV room with the others. Today is pepper steak day and we know how much you love pepper steak.
What do you mean by "is on"? I've never seen Matlock in the "Now Showing" list on my Tivo or the "Watch Recordings" list on my Mythtv box so as far as I know it doesn't exist. I haven't watched anything in the last five years that wasn't on one of those two lists.
However, I assume that if the TV producers or stations could stop me from setting the playback speed on Mythtv to 1.1X and hitting the commercial skip button they wouldn't hesitate to do so.
Now if only I could figure out how to send a URL to Mythtv and have it pull shows from websites and display them on the "Watch Recordings" screen with the same playback speed control and commercial skip functions that would be terrific. I suspect it's possible but just more complicated than I have the time to figure out.
To bring this post back on topic, "The Sad State of the Mobile Web" is that it's actually still simple enough that it can be used as the viewer prefers it rather than giving the publisher iron clad control of his/her audience. To me there's nothing sad at all about that. To me the sad state is the non-mobile web where we are seeing more and more websites trying to manage their viewers the way a farmer manages livestock. I don't think there's any doubt that a lot of marketers, advertisers, and MBAs (not mutually exclusive groups) desperately want to channel the entire web browsing audience along a path that they define and control.
Anything that puts the brakes on flash only websites is a good thing in my opinion. I just wish that there were more users of phones that supported HTML really well but didn't do Javascript so that there would be more pressure on web developers to make their pages accessible.
It seems to be an overwhelming human tendency to put form above function and the only thing preventing web developers from tying everything up in an impenetrable Gordian knot is the ever smaller number of old computers and phones that they might grudgingly spare an occasional though on.
Personally I wish browser plugins had never been invented. I've got a video player, a PDF reader, and all sorts of other applications and my browser knows how to launch them just fine. It annoys me every time some "clever" web developer finds some new way to force my computer to open a PDF inside my browser with restricted controls instead of dispatching it to my PDF reader with full functionality.
When phones catch up fully with modern desktops it may well signal the end of the open, accessible, web. The "professionals" would sure like to make the web just another version of TV where they control everything and our only choice is to use it their way or turn off the set.
If it's not a web server and he's typing www as the first part of the name of an smtp or irc or other type of server then I agree that your boss is dense. On the other hand, if you're setting up a web server and you don't make the first component of the name www then I would have to say that you are dense and you're not really doing your job properly.
And before you start going on about multipurpose servers I'm going to cut you off and say that if you don't know how to configure CNAME records you should get the heck out of the DNS server configuration files.
$ORIGIN mydomain.com. :wq
server1 IN A 1.2.3.4
www.server1 IN CNAME server1
smtp.server1 IN CNAME server1
ldap.server1 IN CNAME server1
server2 IN A 1.2.3.5
www.server2 IN CNAME server2
nntp.server2 IN CNAME server2
irc.server2 IN CNAME server2
rndc reload
Or just pick up some AA batteries: http://www.buy.com/prod/energizer-ipodpowr2-energi-to-go-portable-ipod-charger-portable/q/loc/111/211278019.html
I paid a lot less than buy.com is charging in that link but maybe I caught it on sale.
What's the point of involving twitter if you're sending a direct message? Why not just send the message directly and skip the step of sharing your message with twitter? Private? In what sense is a message that you send unencrypted to a company you have no contractual relationship with private? If Twitter isn't using your messages to somehow make money I can't imaging why not. They may not have a good plan, but I can't believe they don't have some scheme in mind to make money off of your messages.
If you feel the need to broadcast your messages to twits then you might as well use Twitter, but I just can't see why you would bother to go through them for communications that don't actually benefit from their feature. (I use the word feature in the singular since as far as I know Twitter only has one feature.)
75 Angstroms per minute seems extremely slow and 7 Angstroms per page sounds like they're using very small pieces of paper. Perhaps you should have used the preview button before submitting your post.
in your scenario, they would still be a sex offender.
Yes, but not a registered sex offender. That was the point. Assuming they successfully disposed of the body they could still be convicted of murder but it would be much harder to prove rape. The murder charge would carry jail time, but there is a significant possibility of them eventually being released from jail and from that point on they would be in the clear. On the other hand, the sex offender charge would be a life sentence. Only part of that sentence would be jail time, but the time after release from jail could very well be worse than the time spent in jail.
This relates to the "law of unintended consequences". We all agree that rape is bad, but assuming that rape has been committed the current state of law provides incentive for murder. Having committed rape, the perpetrator is very likely better off killing and disposing of the victim rather than releasing them.
http://www.google.com/search?q=molecular+weight+of+58.44&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Third link, you don't even need to click on it, it's in the summary.
If people can argue whether or not they're living in the world similar to Orwell's 1984, they aren't.
If people can argue whether or not they're living in the world similar to Orwell's 1984, they aren't quite yet.
Check back in a couple years.
The screenshots are odd. They all look the same to me and they look like a login page to that forum, not anything to do with Google at all.
On a side note, does anyone know how to completely disable Firefox from opening new tabs without permission? I've tried to disable it every way I can and I've mostly got it, but every so often I run into a website like this Ubuntu forum that somehow nevertheless manages to force Firefox to open a new tab.
Why is it that web "designers" can't understand that I have perfectly functional "Open in New Tab" and "Open in New Window" options if the right click menu if I want to do so and if I don't use those options it's specifically because I DON'T want to open a new tab or window.
Seriously does anyone else have issues with how convoluted it really is to add mp3 files to an ipod touch? Add a folder to your library, wait while itunes chugs and makes a COPY of each file before syncing. Hit sync a few times and agree to all your old settings being overwritten (when all it really does is update).
PEBKAC
Whether iTunes copies files or not is a user configurable setting. Personally I want iTunes to manage it's copy of my library without touching the original files. In my case the original files (ripped with EAC and LAME) are a backup on separate physical disc from my iTunes library.
My smart playlist "Recent Additions" contains everything with a "Date Added" property within the last 30 days and is automatically synced to my iPhone. So I don't even need to have my iPhone connected when I add stuff to my iTunes library and they'll still get loaded onto my iPhone whenever I happen to connect it.
So your issues with how convoluted it is are purely based out of your own ignorance. For me it's two steps: 1) drag file to iTunes. 2) Plug in iPhone cable.