Several years ago, I was seeing a shrink who had me take the MMPI. Back then, the test asked multiple questions about hearing voices in your head, including the true/false statement: "I hear a voice in my head." I made the mistake of answering 'true' to this (I hear my own voice in my head all the time, don't you?) and spent months being asked questions like "Do you feel compelled to drive your car off a bridge because the voices in your head tell you to?"
Soon the shrinks can ask "Did you spend all your money/sacrifice your sister's pet gerbil/go postal because the voices in your head told you to?" and how the heck are the shrinks gonna know whether the voices are organic or mechanical? Time to buy stock in GlaxoSmithKline...
OK, so Walmart sells boxes without any OS installed...here we have a system with no OS, almost identical to this Mandrake system, except that the no OS system uses SDRAM instead of DDRAM...but the Mandrake box is a dollar cheaper...what am I missing here?
Is anyone seeing the price difference The Register mentioned in their article saying that the Mandrake boxes were a little more expensive than the no-OS boxes? If this is the case, is the money going back to Mandrake or is the money going to Wal-mart for going to the time and trouble of installing an operating system?
Instead of going out and downloading a bunch of pirated music (not that you would ever do that, I'm sure) or buying a bunch of music at outrageous prices before you have heard anything off of the CD, try looking at EMusic's electronic section. They have hundreds of electronica artists, and they do a pretty good job of providing recommendations if you like an artist. They do a trial of 50 free MP3s and then it's something like $15 a month, download all you want. You'll definitely want a high-speed connection to take advantage of this site, though - it's pretty addictive.
Was that a dig at Microsoft or a dig at himself for not being able to maintain a stable computer? I'm expecting any minute now a flood of posts "Well, I CAN maintain" blah blah blah
I beg your pardon, MY senses are morally upstanding, although I don't know about yours...
You can learn more about circadian rhythms here (they claim the cycle is 25 hours, in case you don't actually feel like reading through their tutorial)
Colorado recently enacted (law went into effect Monday) a No-call list that is maintained by an outside company. Lots of amusing tidbits in this and this article, including that 790,000 people have signed up for the list (sign-up was available before the law took effect), and that 600 complaints were received in the first two days the law was in effect. Fines don't come into place until the third offense, but the AG has already warned some companies to stop.
The Colorado No-call list can be joined here or by calling 1-888-249-9097.
Unfortunately, if you don't already live in Colorado, most of the residents don't want you to move here (if you live here you know what I mean).
Just because you can use something for one of its intended uses does not relieve you of responsibility for its other uses. When a computer owner takes the responsibility of hooking a computer up to the internet, he should also take responsibility for making sure that there can be no malicious use of it--or be willing to face the consequences when someone else (i.e. the government or someone distributing a white-hat virus) takes it upon themselves to stop the irresponsible user from inflicting themselves on others. Living in a free society requires taking responsibility for one's own actions, even if (some might argue especially if), one didn't know that what he/she was doing could be harmful to others.
Bottom line, if you're not tech-savvy enough to secure your own computer, either get tech-savvy enough or hire someone trustworthy to do it (you'd be amazed how many broke nerd college students will secure your computer and check it on a regular basis for a pizza every time they work on it--my husband would have starved in college otherwise)...but I'm guessing I'm preaching to the choir here...
(not saying that my dad is some super-parent, but this is one of the fonder memories I have of my childhood)
My father was in college when I was young (until I was 7 or 8). Sometimes he would read his college-level textbooks to me. Since I didn't know any better, and I thought Dad was God (partly because he always told me, "I'm God, I know everything"), I didn't realize that the college textbooks were supposed to be over my head. Bottom line, for me anyway, was that it didn't especially matter what we were doing together for quality time so much as that we were spending quality time together. I am NOT an advocate of pushing your child to learn things that are beyond what is appropriate to fulfill your own fantasies, I just believe that kids are capable of understanding and enjoying a lot more than we give them credit for, especially when the teacher is a loving parent who is sharing their time with them instead of sending them off for lessons with someone who doesn't know them and doesn't have an emotional investment.
Two books that I remember fondly from my childhood, and that still serve as good reference books for number theory, are Mathematical Circus and Mathematical Magic Show, both by Martin Gardner. These were both really fun books that are also challenging reading for an adult. I originally picked them up because I thought they had cool names (kids love magic shows and circuses, ya know), and I picked them up again a few years ago and still found them entertaining and very informative. The author doesn't just write math books either--he is a well-known creator of puzzles and brainteasers and has done some annotated versions of literary classics. He seems to teach critical thinking rather than rote mathematics.
this is the same government agency that was too busy trying to shut down bonsaikitten.com to pay attention to terrorist threats to destroy multiple buildings just seven months later...
I got the same message - I wanted to find a store and call to find out how much one of these bad boys cost - no stores within 300 miles of Denver, CO. Does anyone live within 300 miles of one of their stores?
Course, at the rate the forest fires are going, soon there won't be ANYTHING within 300 miles of Denver...
Yeah, I know they say that they are using multiple cameras and just using tweening to fill in gaps between frames, but when you start sticking little stuff in, how do you know what's real and what's not?
Made me think of the character in Stranger in a Strange Land, can't remember her name, but she was a trained witness of some sort and would not testify, for example that a house was white on all sides unless she had seen all sides of the house and then she wouldn't testify that the sides of the house she could no longer see had stayed white. Granted, that's a little extreme, but the average Joe is gonna believe what he sees is true, and this is mucking with that truth just a little bit. If this is used in court, is an expert going to be able to testify that only certain parts were added? Wouldn't that seem a little odd to a jury, "Hi, we're going to show you a videotape of something that happened and you're going to have to take it as gospel...AFTER we tell you that we added a few little bits to it."?
Course, I'm paranoid, if someone tells me they mucked with it a little bit, I'm gonna assume they added exactly what they wanted me to see...
The story they are running is pretty much a reprint of an AP wire story (I noticed it on our local paper's webpage before coming here). I've looked at a couple of other websites for news about this (trying to understand the babble in the abovementioned copyright.gov article made my head spin) and, at best, there is a neutral tone to the articles, and this is the only news-type website I've seen so far that has come out against the fees.
One interesting thing in the articles--there is a 30-day appeal period. If anyone has any suggestions about how to influence the appeal, through donations to help pay lawyers, where to send letters, etc., now would be the time to speak up...
from the copyright.gov article: However, the Librarian concluded that the CARP misinterpreted some aspects of the RIAA/Yahoo! agreement. One of the most significant errors by the CARP was its conclusion that the parties must have agreed that radio retransmissions have a tremendous positive promotional impact on sales of phonorecords - an impact that it did not find Internet-only transmissions have - and that this promotional impact explained the decision of RIAA and Yahoo! to set a higher rate for Internet-only transmissions. In fact, both the broadcasters (who benefitted from the CARP's conclusion regarding promotional value) and RIAA agree that there was no evidence in the record to support the conclusion that RIAA and Yahoo! considered and made adjustments for promotional value for radio retransmissions. The Librarian agreed with the Register of Copyrights that the CARP's conclusion about promotional value was arbitrary and was not supported by the evidence in the record, which provided no basis for concluding that radio retransmissions provide a promotional value that Internet-only transmissions do not provide.
RIAA is once again ignoring the fact that Internet radio transmissions provide MORE benefit to them by being able to reach MORE people at a lower cost. I've bought music from only hearing a single on a spinner.com broadcast--I'm a heck of a lot more likely to buy a CD if I can see who is playing than if I have to guess at who it might be.
Now that I've vented, can someone please explain to me how retroactive unspecified charges can be applied? If the IRS were to say, "We're going to tax you next year, but we're not going to decide how much those taxes are going to be for a couple of years and then you'll have to pony up the dough," I would think someone would take them to court and manage to get the charges wiped. Can someone with some real background in this explain this to me? Also, what am I missing with the label "Non-Commercial Broadcaster"? Does this mean that if you weren't making ANY money off of your broadcasts, you have to pay a lower rate? (Not that having to pay despite making no money doesn't suck...)
And why the heck was Yahoo selected to negotiate on this? Sure they've got a broadcast service, but they have money to blow, unlike Joe Schmo broadcasting out of their basement...
Do I have permission to copy the content of your site to my browser history directory, and if so, how long do I have permission to keep it? Can I show a copy of an html document that is stored in my browser history to my mother? What about my neighbor? Or the dude in another country I happen to be chatting with online?
IANAL blah blah blah, but once you open your files up to being downloaded and stored by a browser, you've pretty much given up the right to tell people they can't be re-distributed--I would think the best you could hope for is that people would re-distribute them, in whole, the way you originally released them.
If the user never turns the computer on, it won't crash...
Seriously, calling a crash a user error does not make it not the developer's problem--for instance, I shouldn't be able to do something with a defined function in Excel that causes Excel to crap out, and starts causing other software on my Win98 machine to act buggy (happened two days ago).
That said, I run Win98 on my gaming machine at home and have had periods of months where I have not had to reboot. Usually the only time I have to reboot is (a) power failure reboots for me, (b) I've played way too much Civ3--only game that seems to do it, or (c) I have been using another Microsoft product, i.e. an Office product especially. I don't know why the heck they can't seem to get those to work properly...
No, you can still rent videotapes, but rental places seem to be moving more toward DVD also. Probably, I'm guessing, because the resale value is higher--when they have to dump the 100 copies of whatever stupid teen flick they purchased so that they could satisfy their "Always available for rental" policy, they can charge more for a DVD that is in good shape vs. their scratchy, twisted up VHS tape.
Geocities has done a good enough job of killing the number of ad impressions a site can generate by limiting the amount of bandwidth a site can use up. No need for help from Slashdot.
if we assume that this guy/gal/armadillo/whatever that wrote Nimda would be forced to make financial reparations for the havoc it wreaked, would that amount be greater or less than what he/she/it could collect from Microsoft for suing for theft of intellectual property? It might make financial sense for the author to come forward now...
I think instead of buying lottery tickets, I'm gonna start writing viruses and hoping that MS accidentally ships one...
It seems like they are right on target for understanding what The Onion does: Fabricate offbeat news to make money. I'm glad they have reached the wisdom and recognition levels my 7-year-old niece possesses.
We'll know if they've really figured out that The Onion is NOT a news source if they stop accusing Bill Gates of poisoning the water supply, although they might get the same impression from certain other web sites. Oh dear, I can see it now: Yu Bin not only quoting Joe Klein from The Onion, but getting his substantiation from/.!
Don't give 'em enough hard drive space on their PCs to store all their stuff on. If all you have to give them is a 20-gig hard drive, partition it down and make all the partitions but one inaccessible, then fill the remaining partition with so much uninstallable bloatware that they have less than a gig of space to work with. Map two network drives for them, one that is 'personal' (not everyone has access to it, and with limited space so you're not hosting someone's MP3 collection and someone else's photo gallery) and one that is storage space that other people can get to for documents that need shared.
This will only work if you have a decently fast network that is very reliable, and enough hard drive storage on your network to accomodate all the work people would normally store on their PCs. If you implement this, you really don't want to get into this situation. You also need to make sure that your backup system really works--if it fails, you're not gonna have the wrath of one angry user whose computer crashed descending upon you, you're gonna have the entire company sneaking into your house at night to slit your throat...but you didn't write to Slashdot about how to maintain your network, did you?
I would think that if the teachers would get off their lazy rear ends and walk around the classrooms during tests, it would do a lot to deter students from using pre-programmed banned formulas, or at least make the students very very nervous.
Another deterrent, I would think, would be to let the students know before the test that the pre-programmed formulas were banned, then, at the end of the test, or maybe at the end of the NEXT test, check for cheats. It would only take once, I think...
I'm probably just bitter because I never had a math class where graphing calculators were allowed. And I was slack-jawed at the previous comment referring to geometry as an honors class--it was required at the urban, 60% African-American high school I attended. Youse guys are making me scared to send my kid to public school.
I'm not that...I'm not sure what word to use, bargaining? We talked about it last night, he is going to try to get most of the packing done this weekend:)
Slashdot Mirror
Several years ago, I was seeing a shrink who had me take the MMPI. Back then, the test asked multiple questions about hearing voices in your head, including the true/false statement: "I hear a voice in my head." I made the mistake of answering 'true' to this (I hear my own voice in my head all the time, don't you?) and spent months being asked questions like "Do you feel compelled to drive your car off a bridge because the voices in your head tell you to?"
Soon the shrinks can ask "Did you spend all your money/sacrifice your sister's pet gerbil/go postal because the voices in your head told you to?" and how the heck are the shrinks gonna know whether the voices are organic or mechanical? Time to buy stock in GlaxoSmithKline...
OK, so Walmart sells boxes without any OS installed...here we have a system with no OS, almost identical to this Mandrake system, except that the no OS system uses SDRAM instead of DDRAM...but the Mandrake box is a dollar cheaper...what am I missing here?
Is anyone seeing the price difference The Register mentioned in their article saying that the Mandrake boxes were a little more expensive than the no-OS boxes? If this is the case, is the money going back to Mandrake or is the money going to Wal-mart for going to the time and trouble of installing an operating system?
Instead of going out and downloading a bunch of pirated music (not that you would ever do that, I'm sure) or buying a bunch of music at outrageous prices before you have heard anything off of the CD, try looking at EMusic's electronic section. They have hundreds of electronica artists, and they do a pretty good job of providing recommendations if you like an artist. They do a trial of 50 free MP3s and then it's something like $15 a month, download all you want. You'll definitely want a high-speed connection to take advantage of this site, though - it's pretty addictive.
Was that a dig at Microsoft or a dig at himself for not being able to maintain a stable computer? I'm expecting any minute now a flood of posts "Well, I CAN maintain" blah blah blah
I beg your pardon, MY senses are morally upstanding, although I don't know about yours...
You can learn more about circadian rhythms here (they claim the cycle is 25 hours, in case you don't actually feel like reading through their tutorial)
lists a phone number to call. Unfortunately, whoever wrote the webpage does not know the difference between an e-mail address and a URL.
Colorado recently enacted (law went into effect Monday) a No-call list that is maintained by an outside company. Lots of amusing tidbits in this and this article, including that 790,000 people have signed up for the list (sign-up was available before the law took effect), and that 600 complaints were received in the first two days the law was in effect. Fines don't come into place until the third offense, but the AG has already warned some companies to stop.
The Colorado No-call list can be joined here or by calling 1-888-249-9097.
Unfortunately, if you don't already live in Colorado, most of the residents don't want you to move here (if you live here you know what I mean).
Just because you can use something for one of its intended uses does not relieve you of responsibility for its other uses. When a computer owner takes the responsibility of hooking a computer up to the internet, he should also take responsibility for making sure that there can be no malicious use of it--or be willing to face the consequences when someone else (i.e. the government or someone distributing a white-hat virus) takes it upon themselves to stop the irresponsible user from inflicting themselves on others. Living in a free society requires taking responsibility for one's own actions, even if (some might argue especially if), one didn't know that what he/she was doing could be harmful to others.
Bottom line, if you're not tech-savvy enough to secure your own computer, either get tech-savvy enough or hire someone trustworthy to do it (you'd be amazed how many broke nerd college students will secure your computer and check it on a regular basis for a pizza every time they work on it--my husband would have starved in college otherwise)...but I'm guessing I'm preaching to the choir here...
(not saying that my dad is some super-parent, but this is one of the fonder memories I have of my childhood)
My father was in college when I was young (until I was 7 or 8). Sometimes he would read his college-level textbooks to me. Since I didn't know any better, and I thought Dad was God (partly because he always told me, "I'm God, I know everything"), I didn't realize that the college textbooks were supposed to be over my head. Bottom line, for me anyway, was that it didn't especially matter what we were doing together for quality time so much as that we were spending quality time together. I am NOT an advocate of pushing your child to learn things that are beyond what is appropriate to fulfill your own fantasies, I just believe that kids are capable of understanding and enjoying a lot more than we give them credit for, especially when the teacher is a loving parent who is sharing their time with them instead of sending them off for lessons with someone who doesn't know them and doesn't have an emotional investment.
Two books that I remember fondly from my childhood, and that still serve as good reference books for number theory, are Mathematical Circus and Mathematical Magic Show, both by Martin Gardner. These were both really fun books that are also challenging reading for an adult. I originally picked them up because I thought they had cool names (kids love magic shows and circuses, ya know), and I picked them up again a few years ago and still found them entertaining and very informative. The author doesn't just write math books either--he is a well-known creator of puzzles and brainteasers and has done some annotated versions of literary classics. He seems to teach critical thinking rather than rote mathematics.
this is the same government agency that was too busy trying to shut down bonsaikitten.com to pay attention to terrorist threats to destroy multiple buildings just seven months later...
I got the same message - I wanted to find a store and call to find out how much one of these bad boys cost - no stores within 300 miles of Denver, CO. Does anyone live within 300 miles of one of their stores?
Course, at the rate the forest fires are going, soon there won't be ANYTHING within 300 miles of Denver...
Yeah, I know they say that they are using multiple cameras and just using tweening to fill in gaps between frames, but when you start sticking little stuff in, how do you know what's real and what's not?
Made me think of the character in Stranger in a Strange Land, can't remember her name, but she was a trained witness of some sort and would not testify, for example that a house was white on all sides unless she had seen all sides of the house and then she wouldn't testify that the sides of the house she could no longer see had stayed white. Granted, that's a little extreme, but the average Joe is gonna believe what he sees is true, and this is mucking with that truth just a little bit. If this is used in court, is an expert going to be able to testify that only certain parts were added? Wouldn't that seem a little odd to a jury, "Hi, we're going to show you a videotape of something that happened and you're going to have to take it as gospel...AFTER we tell you that we added a few little bits to it."?
Course, I'm paranoid, if someone tells me they mucked with it a little bit, I'm gonna assume they added exactly what they wanted me to see...
It's much harder to pirate a paper book than it is to pirate an e-book.
The story they are running is pretty much a reprint of an AP wire story (I noticed it on our local paper's webpage before coming here). I've looked at a couple of other websites for news about this (trying to understand the babble in the abovementioned copyright.gov article made my head spin) and, at best, there is a neutral tone to the articles, and this is the only news-type website I've seen so far that has come out against the fees.
One interesting thing in the articles--there is a 30-day appeal period. If anyone has any suggestions about how to influence the appeal, through donations to help pay lawyers, where to send letters, etc., now would be the time to speak up...
from the copyright.gov article: However, the Librarian concluded that the CARP misinterpreted some aspects of the RIAA/Yahoo! agreement. One of the most significant errors by the CARP was its conclusion that the parties must have agreed that radio retransmissions have a tremendous positive promotional impact on sales of phonorecords - an impact that it did not find Internet-only transmissions have - and that this promotional impact explained the decision of RIAA and Yahoo! to set a higher rate for Internet-only transmissions. In fact, both the broadcasters (who benefitted from the CARP's conclusion regarding promotional value) and RIAA agree that there was no evidence in the record to support the conclusion that RIAA and Yahoo! considered and made adjustments for promotional value for radio retransmissions. The Librarian agreed with the Register of Copyrights that the CARP's conclusion about promotional value was arbitrary and was not supported by the evidence in the record, which provided no basis for concluding that radio retransmissions provide a promotional value that Internet-only transmissions do not provide.
RIAA is once again ignoring the fact that Internet radio transmissions provide MORE benefit to them by being able to reach MORE people at a lower cost. I've bought music from only hearing a single on a spinner.com broadcast--I'm a heck of a lot more likely to buy a CD if I can see who is playing than if I have to guess at who it might be.
Now that I've vented, can someone please explain to me how retroactive unspecified charges can be applied? If the IRS were to say, "We're going to tax you next year, but we're not going to decide how much those taxes are going to be for a couple of years and then you'll have to pony up the dough," I would think someone would take them to court and manage to get the charges wiped. Can someone with some real background in this explain this to me? Also, what am I missing with the label "Non-Commercial Broadcaster"? Does this mean that if you weren't making ANY money off of your broadcasts, you have to pay a lower rate? (Not that having to pay despite making no money doesn't suck...)
And why the heck was Yahoo selected to negotiate on this? Sure they've got a broadcast service, but they have money to blow, unlike Joe Schmo broadcasting out of their basement...
Do I have permission to copy the content of your site to my browser history directory, and if so, how long do I have permission to keep it? Can I show a copy of an html document that is stored in my browser history to my mother? What about my neighbor? Or the dude in another country I happen to be chatting with online?
IANAL blah blah blah, but once you open your files up to being downloaded and stored by a browser, you've pretty much given up the right to tell people they can't be re-distributed--I would think the best you could hope for is that people would re-distribute them, in whole, the way you originally released them.
If the user never turns the computer on, it won't crash...
Seriously, calling a crash a user error does not make it not the developer's problem--for instance, I shouldn't be able to do something with a defined function in Excel that causes Excel to crap out, and starts causing other software on my Win98 machine to act buggy (happened two days ago).
That said, I run Win98 on my gaming machine at home and have had periods of months where I have not had to reboot. Usually the only time I have to reboot is (a) power failure reboots for me, (b) I've played way too much Civ3--only game that seems to do it, or (c) I have been using another Microsoft product, i.e. an Office product especially. I don't know why the heck they can't seem to get those to work properly...
No, you can still rent videotapes, but rental places seem to be moving more toward DVD also. Probably, I'm guessing, because the resale value is higher--when they have to dump the 100 copies of whatever stupid teen flick they purchased so that they could satisfy their "Always available for rental" policy, they can charge more for a DVD that is in good shape vs. their scratchy, twisted up VHS tape.
Geocities has done a good enough job of killing the number of ad impressions a site can generate by limiting the amount of bandwidth a site can use up. No need for help from Slashdot.
if we assume that this guy/gal/armadillo/whatever that wrote Nimda would be forced to make financial reparations for the havoc it wreaked, would that amount be greater or less than what he/she/it could collect from Microsoft for suing for theft of intellectual property? It might make financial sense for the author to come forward now...
I think instead of buying lottery tickets, I'm gonna start writing viruses and hoping that MS accidentally ships one...
It seems like they are right on target for understanding what The Onion does: Fabricate offbeat news to make money. I'm glad they have reached the wisdom and recognition levels my 7-year-old niece possesses.
/.!
We'll know if they've really figured out that The Onion is NOT a news source if they stop accusing Bill Gates of poisoning the water supply, although they might get the same impression from certain other web sites. Oh dear, I can see it now: Yu Bin not only quoting Joe Klein from The Onion, but getting his substantiation from
Don't give 'em enough hard drive space on their PCs to store all their stuff on. If all you have to give them is a 20-gig hard drive, partition it down and make all the partitions but one inaccessible, then fill the remaining partition with so much uninstallable bloatware that they have less than a gig of space to work with. Map two network drives for them, one that is 'personal' (not everyone has access to it, and with limited space so you're not hosting someone's MP3 collection and someone else's photo gallery) and one that is storage space that other people can get to for documents that need shared.
This will only work if you have a decently fast network that is very reliable, and enough hard drive storage on your network to accomodate all the work people would normally store on their PCs. If you implement this, you really don't want to get into this situation. You also need to make sure that your backup system really works--if it fails, you're not gonna have the wrath of one angry user whose computer crashed descending upon you, you're gonna have the entire company sneaking into your house at night to slit your throat...but you didn't write to Slashdot about how to maintain your network, did you?
I would think that if the teachers would get off their lazy rear ends and walk around the classrooms during tests, it would do a lot to deter students from using pre-programmed banned formulas, or at least make the students very very nervous.
Another deterrent, I would think, would be to let the students know before the test that the pre-programmed formulas were banned, then, at the end of the test, or maybe at the end of the NEXT test, check for cheats. It would only take once, I think...
I'm probably just bitter because I never had a math class where graphing calculators were allowed. And I was slack-jawed at the previous comment referring to geometry as an honors class--it was required at the urban, 60% African-American high school I attended. Youse guys are making me scared to send my kid to public school.
I'm not that...I'm not sure what word to use, bargaining? We talked about it last night, he is going to try to get most of the packing done this weekend :)
The animators were right...he does look like a bouncing Sooperball, it is undignified, and I (and others I asked) found it more comical than amazing.