"... will no longer be able to access their e-mail through the third party Web site. Instead, Yahoo! and other third party e-mail will be accessed directly at the MyFairPoint.net portal."
Sounds pretty straight forward to me. You wont be able to go to mail.yahoo.com,
Yahoo is NOT a "third party website". Yahoo is first party, Fairpoint is second party. Verizon is the third party that is being shut down. So you WILL be able to use Yahoo directly, as previous. You just won't be able to use Verizon's portal to Yahoo, and apparently Fairpoint will put up their own portal to replace it.
The story is not written clearly, but the Slashdot headline and summary is obviously, to anyone who thinks about it, wildly wrong. How could an American ISP block access to Yahoo and expect to get away with that? Yahoo would sue them for a start.
Two of my favorite movies this year were Batman and James Bond. But how much of that is due to the authors of the original series? Zilch, IMHO. The Bond movie could have been altered very slightly and passed for Mission Impossible or Bourne Identity.
Try reading some of Fleming's novels. The original Bond in his novels is far more like the one portrayed in "Casino Royale" than any of the previous movies (except perhaps Connery's "From Russia With Love"). And The recent Batman movies certainly do owe a lot to comic writers like Frank Miller.
it's never been clear to me what the "professional editorial staff" actually did, besides stick a comment on some stories
I had editing powers there, and actually I am a professional editor elsewhere, but I wasn't paid at Technocrat. Anyway, when I did do some editing mainly it was deleting spammy submissions (a lot of crap from India mainly) and cleaning up the text and coding of the submissions that were worth posting. And I also wrote and sourced a few stories from various news sites. I think Zogger was very active in doing that.
But I did find the shutdown rather abrupt. The cash outgoings must have been trivial, considering the low traffic. Perhaps he just grew tired of monitoring it when much of the conversation was of no interest to him, and didn't want to leave it to evolve into something he liked even less. Would have been nice if he'd given some notice and perhaps asked if anyone wanted to take it over for a nominal amount.
That new format was slashcode, but looking at the most recent archives, he was only getting a couple posts per story (prolly mostly from twitter). Of course, slashcode's moderation system exists to try to separate the cream from the milk, but at the volumes he was getting, it was all just yogurt.
There was no one called "twiter" posting on Technocrat that I noticed, and I was a regular there. Of course, he/she could have used a (different) pseudonym, I don't follow his posts here so I wouldn't know how to determine that. And the volume was low, there was no need for moderation in the slashdot sense of modding posts up or down. It was an event to get more than 10 comments on a post.
Actually Bruce had changed the code base a few months ago, I didn't pay much attention, but it was different from Slash in several ways. (Had rich formatting in comments, e.g.)
find a solution that doesn't prevent someone in Omaha from opening a document for legitimate use and is not a solution that can easily be disabled or hacked around.
No, you can't. If you want people to be able to read it, they can copy it. You can make it more cumbersome but nothing can prevent screenshots. You can waste a lot of time and money, but the best you will achieve is being able to say "we tried". Because you cannot succeed. You can't distribute a document and at the same time expect it to remain secret.
Bear in mind, the publisher will almost certainly NOT want you to do anything with typesetting (fonts, spacing, kerning, etc.). They will do all of that in-house. All they'll want from you is your deathless prose, typed into a pre-set template, or sent to them as raw text.
Sucks, but there it is.
I wouldn't say "sucks", but I work on the editing and layout end of the process. Having an author kibitzing on the layout is what sucks. What we need from the author is a functional layout: so we know what level of heading is intended; not "18 point bold Arial".
I've worked on hundreds of books and I cannot recall ANY authors, including University professors, who had a clue about how to use their tools of choice (as they all had written their manuscripts before bothering to consult the publisher), they all used Word, and most of them like a typewriter. None had a clue what a "style" was or how to use it consistently. You were likely to find paragraphs of body text styled as "Heading 1", reformatted to be 12 point Times.
I normally spent half a day cleaning up crap like that before I could export the file out of Word and start the actual layout.
The ones who did think they knew about layout were even worse though. They try to tell me that "Arial is a great body text", "two spaces are required after a full stop", "underlining is how I want to emphasise", "the text should be at least 14 points to make it easy to read", "my name should be bigger", etc, etc. If you don't know why this kind of thing causes DTP people to grind their teeth, just take my word for it. You do require a degree of stubborn egomania to get a book written and published, but you also have to know when to take advice from people who have more experience.
I visit a random website in Firefox under XP, I count how long it takes to load. I do this several times. I then visit the same pages under a Linux distro.
What you'e comparing is not "internet speed", but the speed of two different versions of Firefox on two different operating systems. Look at the Firefox forums and you'll see lots of posts about settings and options that can drastically affect its operation -- e.g. recent anti-phishing features will try to check out a site before dispalying it. Even if you install both version at the same time, the Windows and Linux versions will inevitably operate differently and have different defaults. Could simply be caching or operation of a plugin. Who knows.
If you want to compare "Internet speed", check out some of the sites at DSL reports to get a quick indication of your connection's speed.
If you'd said "Firefox on Linux is 5X slower than on Windows", I might have raised my eyebrows, but not bothered to argue. But saying "Internet is 5x slower" is just wrong.
I'll admit it does work after some fiddling and tweaking to get things to work (like speakers), if you don't mind your internet being 5x slower then on XP.
OK, I know audio can be a hassle, but Internet? In my experience, once you get it working, it works 100%. Just how are you measuring "5x slower"?
If you are breaking the law how on earth should you be allowed to keep breaking the law? Sorry, but if you break the law then the ISP sure as heck has the right to blackball you.
Whether you were "breaking the law" is determined by a court, not an ISP or the RIAA. What is their standard of proof? What avenues of appeal, if any, do you have?
Anyone here remember those old dot matrix ribbon printers from the 80's and early 90's? Remember how bad their print quality was?
Actually, I thought their print quality was pretty good. Of course, after a few thousand pages it tended to fade out -- but ribbons are very cheap. We used these in our office for printing mostly invoices and accounting reports. Cheaper than laser, much cheaper than inkjet, and the ink is permanent and waterproof, doesn't dry up and clog like inkjets. But slow and noisy.
Most dot matrices have a "letter quality" mode, which printed at higher resolution. However, if you were using Windows, it converts a page to an image and print it as a giant bitmap, using Windows Truetype fonts which did look crappy at dot matrix resolution, and taking much, much longer than using the printer fonts. DOS programs with their own printer drivers were much more suitable, (I used Word 5 -- Microsoft offers it as a free download) though there are Windows workarounds (eg, FTprint.
But for my personal use (as I do DTP and graphics) now I have a HP Laserjet.
It's interesting that every single person in the article is against it except for a dnc congressman.
Duh. They're all business lobbyists. Whereas the congressmen you sneer at represent the people who voted for him, a lot more of whom are employees rather than employers.
I only wish that I had the option of joining a union.
Re:In defense of 24 (but not torture)
on
Torture in Games
·
· Score: 1
the show is quite critical of the American intelligence community (with Bauer being about the only character it defends).
The thing is that people in the government and military identify with Jack (see the articles I cited), they think that those pure in heart (like Jack, and themselves, because everyone like to think they are) can torture and get truthful results.
Re:In defense of 24 (but not torture)
on
Torture in Games
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I note that all the times you cite when torture didn't work, the victim was innocent or at least ignorant. The point is when Jack tortures someone he always gets results. This all underlies the idea that torture works, that it reveals truth. All of which those who actually have experience of it (not myself, fortunately) will tell you is complete bullshit.
Re:Does it always produce true responses?
on
Torture in Games
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· Score: 1
It would be amusing to have the player run off in search of random football players;)
Very interesting... I hadn't heard that story. I recently saw the movie Rendition, and the prisoner in that gives the name of an Egyptian World Cup football team as his "terrorist accomplices". Most of the events in that are based on real cases, I hadn't realised they were referencing McCain though.
Re:In defense of 24 (but not torture)
on
Torture in Games
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
So, I would argue, might the TV show 24. Look how often the torture on that show doesn't work out as planned.
Seems to work just about all the time -- unless it's Jack being tortured. And the creators of the show exhibit no such agenda.
Jack Bauer--played by Kiefer Sutherland--was an inspiration at early "brainstorming meetings" of military officials at Guantanamo in September of 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial new interrogation techniques including water-boarding, sexual humiliation, and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer "gave people lots of ideas." Michael Chertoff, the homeland-security chief, once gushed in a panel discussion on 24 organized by the Heritage Foundation that the show "reflects real life."
This past November, U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, flew to Southern California to meet with the creative team behind 24. Finnegan, who was accompanied by three of the most experienced military and F.B.I. interrogators in the country, arrived on the set as the crew was filming....
Finnegan and the others had come to voice their concern that the show's central political premise--that the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the country's securitywas having a toxic effect. In their view, the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers. "I'd like them to stop," Finnegan said of the show's producers. "They should do a show where torture backfires."
I cannot think of a single circumstance in Doctor Who where one has been left in the dark (or even in the shade) if one has not watched Torchwood and/or Sarah Jane. Not one.
True, by design. However the scenes in the Torchwood Hub, the Rift; and Sarah Jane's attic and Mr Smith would have been a bit mysterious if you hadn't been following them, I think. And it also helped to have seen the Jon Pertwee (with young Sarah Jane) and Tom Baker encounters with Davros.
Apparently (I've heard, but not seen stated by the BBC) the Doctor will never appear on Torchwood, as that's an "adult" programme and they don't want to encourage kids to tune into the kinky sex and violence (Captain John, Jack and Ianto....) So in the finale of Torchwood, we HEARD the Tardis, Jack disappeared, but that's as much as we will see in that show.
It's not the page size that's the issue, it's the printers page metrics. These include DPI and Printable surface area. For instance, some printers can print to the very edge of the page, others have an area where they can't print to.
DPI doesn't matter for Truetype (it will LOOK different, but the characters should print the same size and position, just more or less sharp -- I've used Truetype on a dot matrix, slow but the same layout as a laser). And everything else is down to page size and layout, which in Word seems to be part of the document, it does not automatically adjust (at least not in the versions of Word I use).
Again, I have not noticed Word spontaneously reformatting pages when I change printers.
Slashdot Mirror
No. The ironic reading is not the only interpretation. You're blinded by hindsight.
Insensitive clod.
Actually, that would be you. Why kibbitz on this exchange that did not involve you just to sneer?
Pretentious asshole.
Wrong. That's a convention, not a requirement. Try http://slashdot.org/ for example.
Yahoo is NOT a "third party website". Yahoo is first party, Fairpoint is second party. Verizon is the third party that is being shut down. So you WILL be able to use Yahoo directly, as previous. You just won't be able to use Verizon's portal to Yahoo, and apparently Fairpoint will put up their own portal to replace it.
The story is not written clearly, but the Slashdot headline and summary is obviously, to anyone who thinks about it, wildly wrong. How could an American ISP block access to Yahoo and expect to get away with that? Yahoo would sue them for a start.
I'll take your word for it, though I never noticed them. But certainly not "most of the posts" were made by him as the previous poster asserted.
Try reading some of Fleming's novels. The original Bond in his novels is far more like the one portrayed in "Casino Royale" than any of the previous movies (except perhaps Connery's "From Russia With Love"). And The recent Batman movies certainly do owe a lot to comic writers like Frank Miller.
I had editing powers there, and actually I am a professional editor elsewhere, but I wasn't paid at Technocrat. Anyway, when I did do some editing mainly it was deleting spammy submissions (a lot of crap from India mainly) and cleaning up the text and coding of the submissions that were worth posting. And I also wrote and sourced a few stories from various news sites. I think Zogger was very active in doing that.
But I did find the shutdown rather abrupt. The cash outgoings must have been trivial, considering the low traffic. Perhaps he just grew tired of monitoring it when much of the conversation was of no interest to him, and didn't want to leave it to evolve into something he liked even less. Would have been nice if he'd given some notice and perhaps asked if anyone wanted to take it over for a nominal amount.
There was no one called "twiter" posting on Technocrat that I noticed, and I was a regular there. Of course, he/she could have used a (different) pseudonym, I don't follow his posts here so I wouldn't know how to determine that. And the volume was low, there was no need for moderation in the slashdot sense of modding posts up or down. It was an event to get more than 10 comments on a post.
Actually Bruce had changed the code base a few months ago, I didn't pay much attention, but it was different from Slash in several ways. (Had rich formatting in comments, e.g.)
No, you can't. If you want people to be able to read it, they can copy it. You can make it more cumbersome but nothing can prevent screenshots. You can waste a lot of time and money, but the best you will achieve is being able to say "we tried". Because you cannot succeed. You can't distribute a document and at the same time expect it to remain secret.
Sucks, but there it is.
I wouldn't say "sucks", but I work on the editing and layout end of the process. Having an author kibitzing on the layout is what sucks. What we need from the author is a functional layout: so we know what level of heading is intended; not "18 point bold Arial".
I've worked on hundreds of books and I cannot recall ANY authors, including University professors, who had a clue about how to use their tools of choice (as they all had written their manuscripts before bothering to consult the publisher), they all used Word, and most of them like a typewriter. None had a clue what a "style" was or how to use it consistently. You were likely to find paragraphs of body text styled as "Heading 1", reformatted to be 12 point Times. I normally spent half a day cleaning up crap like that before I could export the file out of Word and start the actual layout.
The ones who did think they knew about layout were even worse though. They try to tell me that "Arial is a great body text", "two spaces are required after a full stop", "underlining is how I want to emphasise", "the text should be at least 14 points to make it easy to read", "my name should be bigger", etc, etc. If you don't know why this kind of thing causes DTP people to grind their teeth, just take my word for it. You do require a degree of stubborn egomania to get a book written and published, but you also have to know when to take advice from people who have more experience.
What you'e comparing is not "internet speed", but the speed of two different versions of Firefox on two different operating systems. Look at the Firefox forums and you'll see lots of posts about settings and options that can drastically affect its operation -- e.g. recent anti-phishing features will try to check out a site before dispalying it. Even if you install both version at the same time, the Windows and Linux versions will inevitably operate differently and have different defaults. Could simply be caching or operation of a plugin. Who knows.
If you want to compare "Internet speed", check out some of the sites at DSL reports to get a quick indication of your connection's speed.
If you'd said "Firefox on Linux is 5X slower than on Windows", I might have raised my eyebrows, but not bothered to argue. But saying "Internet is 5x slower" is just wrong.
OK, I know audio can be a hassle, but Internet? In my experience, once you get it working, it works 100%. Just how are you measuring "5x slower"?
Whether you were "breaking the law" is determined by a court, not an ISP or the RIAA. What is their standard of proof? What avenues of appeal, if any, do you have?
Yes, as in Greenland, or the WHOLE FUCKING CONTINENT ANTARCTICA.
Don't worry about Archimedes, just remember your primary school geography.
Actually, I thought their print quality was pretty good. Of course, after a few thousand pages it tended to fade out -- but ribbons are very cheap. We used these in our office for printing mostly invoices and accounting reports. Cheaper than laser, much cheaper than inkjet, and the ink is permanent and waterproof, doesn't dry up and clog like inkjets. But slow and noisy.
Most dot matrices have a "letter quality" mode, which printed at higher resolution. However, if you were using Windows, it converts a page to an image and print it as a giant bitmap, using Windows Truetype fonts which did look crappy at dot matrix resolution, and taking much, much longer than using the printer fonts. DOS programs with their own printer drivers were much more suitable, (I used Word 5 -- Microsoft offers it as a free download) though there are Windows workarounds (eg, FTprint.
But for my personal use (as I do DTP and graphics) now I have a HP Laserjet.
Duh. They're all business lobbyists. Whereas the congressmen you sneer at represent the people who voted for him, a lot more of whom are employees rather than employers.
I only wish that I had the option of joining a union.
The thing is that people in the government and military identify with Jack (see the articles I cited), they think that those pure in heart (like Jack, and themselves, because everyone like to think they are) can torture and get truthful results.
I note that all the times you cite when torture didn't work, the victim was innocent or at least ignorant. The point is when Jack tortures someone he always gets results. This all underlies the idea that torture works, that it reveals truth. All of which those who actually have experience of it (not myself, fortunately) will tell you is complete bullshit.
Very interesting... I hadn't heard that story. I recently saw the movie Rendition, and the prisoner in that gives the name of an Egyptian World Cup football team as his "terrorist accomplices". Most of the events in that are based on real cases, I hadn't realised they were referencing McCain though.
Seems to work just about all the time -- unless it's Jack being tortured. And the creators of the show exhibit no such agenda.
See this Slate article, for example:
Amnd teh New Yorker:
Very interesting, but it doesn't happen to me. Maybe I've turned off some default setting that does this.
True, by design. However the scenes in the Torchwood Hub, the Rift; and Sarah Jane's attic and Mr Smith would have been a bit mysterious if you hadn't been following them, I think. And it also helped to have seen the Jon Pertwee (with young Sarah Jane) and Tom Baker encounters with Davros.
Apparently (I've heard, but not seen stated by the BBC) the Doctor will never appear on Torchwood, as that's an "adult" programme and they don't want to encourage kids to tune into the kinky sex and violence (Captain John, Jack and Ianto....) So in the finale of Torchwood, we HEARD the Tardis, Jack disappeared, but that's as much as we will see in that show.
It's CIO, not CEO. If a CIO is so clueless, don't waste time on this, concentrate on getting your resume in order.
DPI doesn't matter for Truetype (it will LOOK different, but the characters should print the same size and position, just more or less sharp -- I've used Truetype on a dot matrix, slow but the same layout as a laser). And everything else is down to page size and layout, which in Word seems to be part of the document, it does not automatically adjust (at least not in the versions of Word I use).
Again, I have not noticed Word spontaneously reformatting pages when I change printers.
My name is The MASTER. I had an accident, and I woke up in the year 100 trillion. Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time? Now to take over the world...