Mod parent up, this is a correct counter-example to the original post which seems to buy into Bell's rhetoric.
In fact Teksavvy even gives its customers a choice of which routing they would prefer, unlimited over Cogent or 100gb/month over Peer 1 (lower latency)!
Sadly I just started watching it, I have to say the name turned me off initially, but having watched a few episodes the characters are amazing and I love the humour.
I switched to them when Rogers started throttling all encrypted traffic (to throttle bittorrent believe it or not) and I've never looked back. They have great customer service and you aren't going to get better upload speeds (despite what Bell/Rogers advertise). If you go for their premium service rather than the unlimited you also get much lower latency. They take Bell to task whenever something needs to happen, e.g. something is wrong with your line, and are cheaper than the major ISPs to boot.
I personally know at least 6 people who have switched to TekSavvy from either Bell/Rogers in the last year, and haven't heard a bad thing from any of them.
Although it seems counter-intuitive, character recognition (even with your filtering) is a relatively easy problem for a computer to solve. The hard problem is segmentation. It is relatively easy for a human to segment characters when they are somehow joined together, by artifacts or occlusion, it can be very hard to do with current methods.
Hence all good modern captchas have moved away from character recognition captchas (such as yours) to segmentation based captchas. You only need to read the wikipedia article on CAPTCHAs to see some examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha.
Well you are welcome any time. Just release your twisted fantasies about all police being corrupt and/or evil and/or stupid and join the rest of us in reality where most police in democratic societies are good people just trying to do their jobs. It's not hard, let go of your hate. You misunderstand, I don't harbour any such opinion, in fact I agree that most police are probably good people trying to do their jobs, and I've never had a problem with any of them personally.
However as I pointed out (and has been pointed out by many psychological experiments) power often does something bad to good people, and all it takes is one cop to get pissed off at you, and despite all their training there have been incidents where Tasers and other non-lethal weapons have been the instrument they've decided to use to act on that anger.
To think that cops in the US are good while cops in other countries are bad is very naive.
See how it works now? Some police are good, some are bad, and you can generally tell which are which by the societies they live in. I wish I lived in your world. In the real one there is no such distinction and psychology tells us that in a position of authority often the worst comes out in even the best people, the Stanford prison experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_expe riment) is one of the more famous examples of this.
Oh, and let's not get into the differences between THE SUN, a gigantic nuclear blast-furnace bright enough to light up the entire damn SOLARSYSTEM and be seen from BILLIONS of miles away, and an LED light about the size of a pea that runs off a AA battery. Just like the "pointing a laser at your eye" argument the OP made, it's an apples and oranges comparison that is neither germane nor logical. It's an extreme example, but your post implies that only a laser can permanently blind, while this is obviously not true.
There really should be a down-mod for "stupid, illogical thinking" I think it would apply well to your post. What a logical and clever thought. Thanks.
So what we have here is a non-lethal weapon designed to harmlessly incapacitate an individual, allowing law enforcement to take them into custody without exchanging gunfire or risking serious injury or loss of life. You are completely missing the point. Your last comment completely describes what the Taser is meant to be, but the whole point is that once someone in authority has a means to "subdue" a person with what they think is a method that cannot result in any permanent physical damage, they lose control, and inevitably cause more damage than would have been done with a lethal weapon which has clear and serious consequences. We've seen this with Tasers already.
Picture it, one crowd is protesting with a police force armed with lethal weapons, and non-lethal weapons that leave bruises, the other is protesting with a police force armed with LEDs. The first is not going to fire on a crowd except in self-defense, to do otherwise would be crazy, it would also be a bit difficult to go around and give everyone a bashing. The second is getting impatient and gets out an LED bazooka, and decides to put the brightness up a bit because it's a bright day, oh and they aren't sure if everyone had their eyes open the first time, so they fire it a few times just to be sure.
Or more likely, a middle-eastern looking youth is spotted in a library on a university campus, when asked for his student ID he says he doesn't have it, and won't leave. Someone calls security, security approaches him and tells him to leave. The youth says he won't leave, the security personnel get pissed off and pull out their handy LED weapon, and hold it a centimeter or so from his eye. They repeatedly flash him as he shouts out at them.
As for your claim that a very bright light source with a relatively high divergence from a large distance can not cause permanent damage, I think you need to look directly at the Sun a bit more.
If only, welcome to Canada, please open your wallet so that our virtual monopoly of wireless infrastructure (Bell and Rogers) can rip you off at their pleasure (repeat en francais).
Want unlimited wireless internet? No problem rogers will glady take $60 a month for a blackberry unlimited plab + the hundreds of dollars you rack up at 5cents/kb when you find out they really meant 25mb!
Luckily I have a hiptop and managed to get the Fido $20 plan rogers is quickly trying to get rid of now they took over Fido, and I'm posting from now. Of course when they find out I used it for this I might be capped at 25mb too...
Honestly I think I'd much rather buy a $400US video card for my PC.
Maybe I just don't get the appeal of a console, but being policed by a DRM protected system, spoon fed expensive content/games and restricted to a TV or forced to buy a HDTV with a lower resolution than my monitor doesn't appeal to me at all.
Drop a Thinkpad and a VAIO and I know which one my money is on...
This is yet another story in the past year that makes me wonder if Slashdot really has just become an advertising venue, willingly, or through negligence.
Nonsense - you weren't required to buy a license with an original IBM PC, why do you think the original IBM PC booted into a (Microsoft) Basic Interpreter if it couldn't find a bootable floppy?
On a totally unrelated matter thats where Microsoft made it's first money:). Supplying many of the then new 'personal' computers with a basic interpreter, of which the IBM PC was just one.
It seems that most people are forgetting a very important fact - flash memory has a limited number of writes. For normal usage (e.g. sd card/usb memory key) you will never encounter these, but as soon as you do something like this...
This just doesn't make sense to me, instead of caching in system memory (how the power savings are done in linux laptop-mode) they are caching to flash which is slower, the only advantage is the data won't be lost in flash.
However what about swap? Does the flash cache distinguish between swapfile writes/normal data? If not you just bought a hard drive with a very short lifetime. Even if it only uses flash for normal data writes, this drive will have a considerably shorter lifetime.
Although I'm just a co-op student, and I personally use Gentoo for everything at work. The percentage of employees at IBM in total using Linux probably isn't that high, but a lot of the support needed for it is there. Although IBM has their own Fedora/Redhat based distribution for people to use with Sametime, Notes, etc functionality in there are even support groups for Gentoo, Debian, and Mandrake to name a few. Each of these has ported Notes and Sanity (the internal Linux Sametime client - which IMHO is much better than Sametime). The Gentoo group even has a portage overlay. How many other companies can claim such a Linux (nevermind the other internal open source projects) community in-house?
The problem is not with IBM despite everything everyone is saying here - it is the same problem experienced outside the company. People are habit forming. Windows is one of those habits. Breaking habits takes time and good reason. Despite this a lot of people I know here plan to switch to Linux or at least try it, especially when I tell them about my experiences, and I've acted as 'Gentoo Support' for a few people making such a transition here. Many need more convincing on "Yes you can do that in Linux" mind you.
I think the question posed by this article, and many people's conclusions are unfair - Linux support at IBM is probably higher than the general population outside IBM and rapidly climbing. Also this formal initiative was only set a year ago. How is that not a success?
But my X800 PE doesn't like it. Well in fact I've played UT2004 in linux for over an hour but as soon as I came back into X-windows things jsut hang and often just hang as soon as X starts. I'm using Xorg on Gentoo. I've just given up and disabled GLX and at least that way I get the 2d acceleration. But this is ridiculous, if you are stupid enough to spend as much as me on a graphics card you at least expect it to work where you want it to:-).
Main reason I bought an ATI is because they are a Canadian company based in the same City as I am - and its impossible to get a 6800 Ultra up here. But if they don't improve their Linux drivers I know my next purchase won't be an ATI card...
Spending $100 on what is now a 10 year old handheld honestly does not sound to me much like a fix, but its nice to know someone is still looking out for these things.
Just to warn you these things (and nearly every other psion handheld) had a design flaw where after closing and opening the machine enough the thin screen cable would break. I should know - I own a psion 3a and a psion 5 and both died this fateful death. The replacement screen cable is not readily available and users would regularly be charged for a whoel new lcd screen (back in their time about $200+).
Psion handhelds were great mnachines otherwise, way ahead of their time, especially the OS. You can even run linux to some degree on the 5 series. Anyway I hope you don't encounter this problem quickly and your psion lives a longer life than mine.
This week I lost a 9800 pro, I just got a waterblock for it and my water system, and removed the stock fan/heatsink and attatched the waterblock. I then re-filled the water system not realizing how much water I had lost when emptying. On re-filling I started and tested using ATI tool where I noticed I was getting worse perfoemance, I quickly turned off the computer but it was too late - there was no water circulation since the pump wasn't fully immersed.
At first jsut the DVI port didn't work and I used the VGA port with no problems, but the next day the card would crash on entering Windows. I had some Tweakmonster ramsinks attatched to the ram so I coudln't return it to ATI for service unless they came off. I had diluted the AS thermal epoxy but apparenlty not enough, after using the freezer trick to make the epoxy brittle 3/8 of the heatsinks came off no porblem, but the 4rth came off with the memory chip:'(.
Needless to say I jsut have to buy a new video card now, but the whoel episode was highly frustrating and unlike things that usually happen to me. I was doing this all after not so much sleep, but still I shoudl hve been more cautious!
Despite all this, the worst incident to ever happen to me was a few years back when lightning surged thorugh my cable line, frying my cable modem, nic and motherboard. I was not happpy and the cable company denied all while replacing my modem for free). I learnt then a UPS is a sound investment.
VIA (the national train service in Canada) already has this on thier first class cars,
see here.
I've seen one go by while I was at the train station on day waiting for the commuter train but it was going by a bit too quickly for me to try to grab a connection with my axim x3i:P
Slashdot Mirror
In fact Teksavvy even gives its customers a choice of which routing they would prefer, unlimited over Cogent or 100gb/month over Peer 1 (lower latency)!
http://www.teksavvy.com/en/resdsl.asp?ID=7&mID=1
http://savejpod.ca/petition/
Sadly I just started watching it, I have to say the name turned me off initially, but having watched a few episodes the characters are amazing and I love the humour.
I switched to them when Rogers started throttling all encrypted traffic (to throttle bittorrent believe it or not) and I've never looked back. They have great customer service and you aren't going to get better upload speeds (despite what Bell/Rogers advertise). If you go for their premium service rather than the unlimited you also get much lower latency. They take Bell to task whenever something needs to happen, e.g. something is wrong with your line, and are cheaper than the major ISPs to boot.
I personally know at least 6 people who have switched to TekSavvy from either Bell/Rogers in the last year, and haven't heard a bad thing from any of them.
Hence all good modern captchas have moved away from character recognition captchas (such as yours) to segmentation based captchas. You only need to read the wikipedia article on CAPTCHAs to see some examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha.
The T20 was made in Mexico.. I call BS on you
Actually the T20 (and A20/X20) the poster had were made in Mexico.. IBM switched to China for manufacturing later
One wonders how many executives read Slashdot... or even how many people within talking distance in the company hierarchy for that matter.
However as I pointed out (and has been pointed out by many psychological experiments) power often does something bad to good people, and all it takes is one cop to get pissed off at you, and despite all their training there have been incidents where Tasers and other non-lethal weapons have been the instrument they've decided to use to act on that anger.
To think that cops in the US are good while cops in other countries are bad is very naive.
What a logical and clever thought. Thanks.
Picture it, one crowd is protesting with a police force armed with lethal weapons, and non-lethal weapons that leave bruises, the other is protesting with a police force armed with LEDs. The first is not going to fire on a crowd except in self-defense, to do otherwise would be crazy, it would also be a bit difficult to go around and give everyone a bashing. The second is getting impatient and gets out an LED bazooka, and decides to put the brightness up a bit because it's a bright day, oh and they aren't sure if everyone had their eyes open the first time, so they fire it a few times just to be sure.
Or more likely, a middle-eastern looking youth is spotted in a library on a university campus, when asked for his student ID he says he doesn't have it, and won't leave. Someone calls security, security approaches him and tells him to leave. The youth says he won't leave, the security personnel get pissed off and pull out their handy LED weapon, and hold it a centimeter or so from his eye. They repeatedly flash him as he shouts out at them.
As for your claim that a very bright light source with a relatively high divergence from a large distance can not cause permanent damage, I think you need to look directly at the Sun a bit more.
Try Minimo, and if you are using google maps you might as well use Maemo Mapper anyway.
http://www.petitiononline.com/rogersbb/petition.ht ml
Luckily I have a hiptop and managed to get the Fido $20 plan rogers is quickly trying to get rid of now they took over Fido, and I'm posting from now. Of course when they find out I used it for this I might be capped at 25mb too ...
Maybe I just don't get the appeal of a console, but being policed by a DRM protected system, spoon fed expensive content/games and restricted to a TV or forced to buy a HDTV with a lower resolution than my monitor doesn't appeal to me at all.
Drop a Thinkpad and a VAIO and I know which one my money is on...
This is yet another story in the past year that makes me wonder if Slashdot really has just become an advertising venue, willingly, or through negligence.
On a totally unrelated matter thats where Microsoft made it's first money :). Supplying many of the then new 'personal' computers with a basic interpreter, of which the IBM PC was just one.
This just doesn't make sense to me, instead of caching in system memory (how the power savings are done in linux laptop-mode) they are caching to flash which is slower, the only advantage is the data won't be lost in flash.
However what about swap? Does the flash cache distinguish between swapfile writes/normal data? If not you just bought a hard drive with a very short lifetime. Even if it only uses flash for normal data writes, this drive will have a considerably shorter lifetime.
The problem is not with IBM despite everything everyone is saying here - it is the same problem experienced outside the company. People are habit forming. Windows is one of those habits. Breaking habits takes time and good reason. Despite this a lot of people I know here plan to switch to Linux or at least try it, especially when I tell them about my experiences, and I've acted as 'Gentoo Support' for a few people making such a transition here. Many need more convincing on "Yes you can do that in Linux" mind you.
I think the question posed by this article, and many people's conclusions are unfair - Linux support at IBM is probably higher than the general population outside IBM and rapidly climbing. Also this formal initiative was only set a year ago. How is that not a success?
Main reason I bought an ATI is because they are a Canadian company based in the same City as I am - and its impossible to get a 6800 Ultra up here. But if they don't improve their Linux drivers I know my next purchase won't be an ATI card...
Spending $100 on what is now a 10 year old handheld honestly does not sound to me much like a fix, but its nice to know someone is still looking out for these things.
Psion handhelds were great mnachines otherwise, way ahead of their time, especially the OS. You can even run linux to some degree on the 5 series. Anyway I hope you don't encounter this problem quickly and your psion lives a longer life than mine.
The UPS i own have ethernet protection, so I protect my lan through that from the cable modem.
...and excuse my bad typing, I'm on my Mac G3 at the moment and I can't type for my life on this keyboard :P
At first jsut the DVI port didn't work and I used the VGA port with no problems, but the next day the card would crash on entering Windows. I had some Tweakmonster ramsinks attatched to the ram so I coudln't return it to ATI for service unless they came off. I had diluted the AS thermal epoxy but apparenlty not enough, after using the freezer trick to make the epoxy brittle 3/8 of the heatsinks came off no porblem, but the 4rth came off with the memory chip :'(.
Needless to say I jsut have to buy a new video card now, but the whoel episode was highly frustrating and unlike things that usually happen to me. I was doing this all after not so much sleep, but still I shoudl hve been more cautious!
Despite all this, the worst incident to ever happen to me was a few years back when lightning surged thorugh my cable line, frying my cable modem, nic and motherboard. I was not happpy and the cable company denied all while replacing my modem for free). I learnt then a UPS is a sound investment.
Very impressive though nonetheless...
I've seen one go by while I was at the train station on day waiting for the commuter train but it was going by a bit too quickly for me to try to grab a connection with my axim x3i :P