I don't know how many times I sat down to watch a TiVo'd episode of Futurama, only to discover that what was recorded was the last 20 minutes of some stupid NFL game.
That's nothing compared to the time I was TiVo'ing an episode of Family Guy and got a special message from the President!
In Fox's defense, though, they do appear to be airing a post-game special called "The OT" for the purpose of handling the game's run-over. It airs during that hour that they never schedule the game to last until, but always does.
There are probably 31,415,927 different deus ex Farnsworth contraptions that could undo that entire last episode and make everyone forget it ever happened.
If you add numbers to the name of the scanned JPG, you get the rest of the sequence of letters not linked to from the main page:
Named (Andrej Preston) can take above mentioned objects at District State prosecutor office in Ljubljana in 15 days from receiving this letter. After 15 days, all objects will be destroyed.
Named (Andrej Preston) can take above mentioned objects at District State prosecutor office in Ljubljana in 5 days from receiving this letter. After 5 days, all objects will be destroyed.
Objects at District State prosecutor office in Ljubljana have been impounded.
Objects at District State prosecutor office in Ljubljana have been crushed into a cube.
Named (Andrej Preston) can take previously mentioned cube at District State prosecutor office in Ljubljana in 30 days from receiving this letter.
Maybe at first they'll have to produce the files through literally aiming a video camera at their monitor and using a stereo microphone for sound... but I seriously doubt it.
He arguably robbed from the rich and gave to the poor...
Stood up to the Man and gave him what for!
The Man of the Year that all Slashdot hates,
The hero of Redmond the man they call Gates!
1. Why would a student have to write down a SSN for a book loan, but not have to write down the class for which he is requesting the book?
The UMass system when I was there asked for your SSID/student ID and the various other pieces of information, but not what class you were doing it for (you could include it as optional information). The reason is that they really don't care if you're reading it for a class, multiple related classes or for your own personal improvement.
2. If he *did* have to write down his class, then why would the [DoHS] waste resources on this case?
See 1
3. Why would a book by Mao be on a watch list? The article mentioned that the student had been abroad for a significant amount of time; it was probably a totality of the evidence. (Note: not justifying the situation, just saying how it probably came about)
4. Why does it seem just a little too convenient that this unnamed student is being investigated by the NSA while doing research for a class on "fascism and totalitarianism"? The course is Ideologies of Power, as has been pointed out. Fascism and totaliarianism might be part of the course or an Honors' Colloquium, which typically takes part of the course and creates a focused presentation, research paper or discussion group for an extra credit plus honors credit in the area of the course. This would also explain why a course text was not available in the UMass Library system.
5. Why are none of Robert PontBriand's classes (the professor in question, according to TFA) listed as "fascism and totalitarianism"? See 4
The only problem with all these studies with species that can't communicate is that there's more than one explanation for observed behaviour.
In other news, hamsters can only tolerate 12 hours of constant fluorescent light before being driven insane by it. One hamster, who had been exposed to 16 hours per day for 60 days, was quoted as saying "I knew once I stopped struggling in that water, they'd put me in the box, man! And you don't ever want to go back to that box!"
Unidentified sources within the 16-hour per day hamster camp have stated that it's gotten so bad, even the reflection of the light from the plexiglass walls is antagonizing. It's driven the hamsters from their normal comfort zone into the wide-open middle of the box, where predators, if they existed, would be able to attack and where the only hope of escape is to run faster than the hamster next to you; as such, the hamsters have been gorging on sugar-water for quick-burning fuel.
Enough with the Christian bashing. Nothing in the article stated that the men that beat this professor were Christian. (snip)
Why is it that every ethnocentric/religious/sexually-oriented/whatever else group in the world these days is treated with respect except Christians? We're easy targets, sure, and it's not unexpected. After all, 6000 of us were covered in pitch and set on fire to light Roman streets in one fell swoop under Emperor Nero. Why should we expect any different treatment now?
I'm sorry. Did you just compare being covered in pitch and lit on fire with hearing a joke about the type of Christians who would beat a guy up on the road due to a disagreement?
Don't get me wrong. I'm from Massachusetts. I'm Catholic. My senior year religion teacher (a Brother... religious type guy) had to resign after the first class and leave because he failed to register as a sex offender. I learned about it while in Washington D.C. from a national news paper. I have actual pictures of me in first grade with Cardinal Bernard Law. Hell, I was an altar boy in a church that was under his purview.
I've heard all sort of pedophilia jokes involving altar boys that make me groan and wince and be down-right disgusted with the tone. I'm not a martyr. I'm not going to invoke their sacrifice to make myself look better or try to shame the other person into silence. They deserve more respect than that.
Man, those 5 digit UIDs are the true elite. I mean, look at that thing! Slashdot cuts off my.sig at 120 characters, and Tackhead's got a freakin' creed for his.
AC says what:
The 1GB shuffle was originally priced at $149. They later dropped the price. The article doesn't say when this happened - it sometimes takes a few months for these cases to come to trial, so it could have been a while ago.
The article states that he used the software November 16; the iPod shuffle price drop was during the summer. The article says he purchased an iPod, then went back and was purchasing another $149 version as $4.99 headphones. He purchased the iPod as a CD player for $24.99. It is likely the second part is mistaken, as the grandparent pointed out.
So, where is an ipod for $149.99??? Not the Nano. Not the shuffle. There is no such animal. Is this the standard "Capitalize on the ipod name" story? I want answers! I want fact checkers!
I believe you are correct. Dollars to donuts they didn't mean iPod, but rather iPod headphones. This, of course, makes the fraud less obvious, since it was switching expensive headphones for cheap headphones, not iPod for cheap headphones.
I'm not going to disagree with you. But, I want to analyze your situation more closely.
You are headed through a green light when, being an observant and defensive driver, you notice somebody running the perpendicular red light and about to hit you. (snip, snip) If you'd rather reduce your speed and crash as opposed to increasing your speed to avoid an accident I'd prefer you stay off the public roads.
Let's look carefully at your situation. Someone's coming through, let's say they don't see the light. When they see me, are they going to swerve towards me or away from me? If I accelerate, am I now out of their trajectory or are they now coming right for me again?
I think that you're absolutely right when you say " Driving is a complex activity involving the need to make split second decisions"; even this situation, played out 100 times, could yield many different correct answers. My starting point is "I'll brake, unless X, Y, Z." I have accelerated out of situations before, but my default is to the brake unless I think that's going to make situations worse because I'm thinking about what happens after the first situation when the adrenaline's dying down... You can hit someone after accelerating to get out of a situation, but not after stopping to avoid that same situation.
I drive a 1989 Mercury Cougar with duct-tape in place of weather stripping on the back window. I guess it's understandable that you could come up with a situation where hitting the gas is necessary and I couldn't.
Honestly, where do people get the idea that careening down city streets at 80mph is a smart way to transport people to the hospital?
Never did. But I'm in Indiana, aka "just left of the middle of nowhere". In good weather, you could go 150 for 10 minutes down some of these backroads without seeing anyone or anything but corn or whatever they're grow. No one was saying down downtown NY at 80 mph is a good idea, but 80 mph on county or state highways assuming decent weather and a familiarity of where the danger areas are... It's still dangerous, but it's a matter of assessing the risks and how important those 50 seconds are.
It would, and my car (a 1989 Mercury Cougar) has the old-school (non-GPS) variant on that called a speed alarm. Basically, you set the alarm at your cruising speed and it tells you when you've gone 5 mph over the set speed with a little beep (it starts flashing as soon as you go over, if I remember correctly).
The problem with it is that it's not directly connected to the thought of speeding. There have been many-a-time that I've heard the beeping and thought "What the hell?", even though I personally set the speed I wanted to go not five minutes earlier.
If you're going to help people remember that pushing the gas pedal right now may not be the best of ideas, then the least distracting and most direct way to do it is to rig the gas pedal in this manner.
Besides, in order to get over the noise of the radio and cell phone, do you know how loud that sucker would have to be?
Although there's an idea... If you speed, you don't get any music or radio. Because, obviously, you need all your attention on the road right then.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know how many times I sat down to watch a TiVo'd episode of Futurama, only to discover that what was recorded was the last 20 minutes of some stupid NFL game.
That's nothing compared to the time I was TiVo'ing an episode of Family Guy and got a special message from the President!
In Fox's defense, though, they do appear to be airing a post-game special called "The OT" for the purpose of handling the game's run-over. It airs during that hour that they never schedule the game to last until, but always does.
There are probably 31,415,927 different deus ex Farnsworth contraptions that could undo that entire last episode and make everyone forget it ever happened.
I don't buy the "hits" so the songs I'd purchase would probably come out cheaper than $.99.
That sound you hear in the background is thousands of executives worldwide laughing at your naiveté.
All of them.
They'd just be highly unstable.
Imagine the chicks you could pick up wearing one of these babies :-)
Yeah, but then you have to deal with them yelling "Put me down, put me down!"
If you add numbers to the name of the scanned JPG, you get the rest of the sequence of letters not linked to from the main page:
Named (Andrej Preston) can take above mentioned objects at District State prosecutor office in Ljubljana in 15 days from receiving this letter. After 15 days, all objects will be destroyed.
Named (Andrej Preston) can take above mentioned objects at District State prosecutor office in Ljubljana in 5 days from receiving this letter. After 5 days, all objects will be destroyed.
Objects at District State prosecutor office in Ljubljana have been impounded.
Objects at District State prosecutor office in Ljubljana have been crushed into a cube.
Named (Andrej Preston) can take previously mentioned cube at District State prosecutor office in Ljubljana in 30 days from receiving this letter.
If you've turned off all of Zonk's postings.
CmdrTaco, do you want to admit something???
Maybe at first they'll have to produce the files through literally aiming a video camera at their monitor and using a stereo microphone for sound... but I seriously doubt it.
Yeah, that would be silly!
He arguably robbed from the rich and gave to the poor...
Stood up to the Man
and gave him what for!
The Man of the Year
that all Slashdot hates,
The hero of Redmond
the man they call Gates!
1. Why would a student have to write down a SSN for a book loan, but not have to write down the class for which he is requesting the book?
The UMass system when I was there asked for your SSID/student ID and the various other pieces of information, but not what class you were doing it for (you could include it as optional information). The reason is that they really don't care if you're reading it for a class, multiple related classes or for your own personal improvement.
2. If he *did* have to write down his class, then why would the [DoHS] waste resources on this case?
See 1
3. Why would a book by Mao be on a watch list?
The article mentioned that the student had been abroad for a significant amount of time; it was probably a totality of the evidence. (Note: not justifying the situation, just saying how it probably came about)
4. Why does it seem just a little too convenient that this unnamed student is being investigated by the NSA while doing research for a class on "fascism and totalitarianism"?
The course is Ideologies of Power, as has been pointed out. Fascism and totaliarianism might be part of the course or an Honors' Colloquium, which typically takes part of the course and creates a focused presentation, research paper or discussion group for an extra credit plus honors credit in the area of the course. This would also explain why a course text was not available in the UMass Library system.
5. Why are none of Robert PontBriand's classes (the professor in question, according to TFA) listed as "fascism and totalitarianism"?
See 4
You're a Monster...
And you're the reason all of my children will have subdermal implants.
All of the parenting, none of the scorn.
The big fight this winter is evil vs. evil.
Never choose the lesser of two evils because that's the one that will lose.
Not to worry... It uses the most advanced weeble technology.
The only problem with all these studies with species that can't communicate is that there's more than one explanation for observed behaviour.
In other news, hamsters can only tolerate 12 hours of constant fluorescent light before being driven insane by it. One hamster, who had been exposed to 16 hours per day for 60 days, was quoted as saying "I knew once I stopped struggling in that water, they'd put me in the box, man! And you don't ever want to go back to that box!"
Unidentified sources within the 16-hour per day hamster camp have stated that it's gotten so bad, even the reflection of the light from the plexiglass walls is antagonizing. It's driven the hamsters from their normal comfort zone into the wide-open middle of the box, where predators, if they existed, would be able to attack and where the only hope of escape is to run faster than the hamster next to you; as such, the hamsters have been gorging on sugar-water for quick-burning fuel.
All that water from melting glaciers has to go somewhere.
Enough with the Christian bashing. Nothing in the article stated that the men that beat this professor were Christian. (snip)
Why is it that every ethnocentric/religious/sexually-oriented/whatever else group in the world these days is treated with respect except Christians? We're easy targets, sure, and it's not unexpected. After all, 6000 of us were covered in pitch and set on fire to light Roman streets in one fell swoop under Emperor Nero. Why should we expect any different treatment now?
I'm sorry. Did you just compare being covered in pitch and lit on fire with hearing a joke about the type of Christians who would beat a guy up on the road due to a disagreement?
Don't get me wrong. I'm from Massachusetts. I'm Catholic. My senior year religion teacher (a Brother... religious type guy) had to resign after the first class and leave because he failed to register as a sex offender. I learned about it while in Washington D.C. from a national news paper. I have actual pictures of me in first grade with Cardinal Bernard Law. Hell, I was an altar boy in a church that was under his purview.
I've heard all sort of pedophilia jokes involving altar boys that make me groan and wince and be down-right disgusted with the tone. I'm not a martyr. I'm not going to invoke their sacrifice to make myself look better or try to shame the other person into silence. They deserve more respect than that.
Man, those 5 digit UIDs are the true elite. I mean, look at that thing! Slashdot cuts off my .sig at 120 characters, and Tackhead's got a freakin' creed for his.
AC grandparent: they fired a guy for blogging
... take your pick.
You're either a troll or newsworthy
Can't it be both? This is from January with Mark Jen, now of Plaxo.
AC says what: The 1GB shuffle was originally priced at $149. They later dropped the price. The article doesn't say when this happened - it sometimes takes a few months for these cases to come to trial, so it could have been a while ago.
The article states that he used the software November 16; the iPod shuffle price drop was during the summer. The article says he purchased an iPod, then went back and was purchasing another $149 version as $4.99 headphones. He purchased the iPod as a CD player for $24.99. It is likely the second part is mistaken, as the grandparent pointed out.
Forget the checker - with the prevalence of the self-checkout line I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often.
That's why they weigh everything after you scan it, to make sure what you scanned was what the barcode said it was.
So, where is an ipod for $149.99??? Not the Nano. Not the shuffle. There is no such animal. Is this the standard "Capitalize on the ipod name" story? I want answers! I want fact checkers!
I believe you are correct. Dollars to donuts they didn't mean iPod, but rather iPod headphones. This, of course, makes the fraud less obvious, since it was switching expensive headphones for cheap headphones, not iPod for cheap headphones.
I'm not going to disagree with you. But, I want to analyze your situation more closely.
You are headed through a green light when, being an observant and defensive driver, you notice somebody running the perpendicular red light and about to hit you.
(snip, snip)
If you'd rather reduce your speed and crash as opposed to increasing your speed to avoid an accident I'd prefer you stay off the public roads.
Let's look carefully at your situation. Someone's coming through, let's say they don't see the light. When they see me, are they going to swerve towards me or away from me? If I accelerate, am I now out of their trajectory or are they now coming right for me again?
I think that you're absolutely right when you say " Driving is a complex activity involving the need to make split second decisions"; even this situation, played out 100 times, could yield many different correct answers. My starting point is "I'll brake, unless X, Y, Z." I have accelerated out of situations before, but my default is to the brake unless I think that's going to make situations worse because I'm thinking about what happens after the first situation when the adrenaline's dying down... You can hit someone after accelerating to get out of a situation, but not after stopping to avoid that same situation.
I drive a suped up Z-28.
I drive a 1989 Mercury Cougar with duct-tape in place of weather stripping on the back window. I guess it's understandable that you could come up with a situation where hitting the gas is necessary and I couldn't.
Honestly, where do people get the idea that careening down city streets at 80mph is a smart way to transport people to the hospital?
Never did. But I'm in Indiana, aka "just left of the middle of nowhere". In good weather, you could go 150 for 10 minutes down some of these backroads without seeing anyone or anything but corn or whatever they're grow. No one was saying down downtown NY at 80 mph is a good idea, but 80 mph on county or state highways assuming decent weather and a familiarity of where the danger areas are... It's still dangerous, but it's a matter of assessing the risks and how important those 50 seconds are.
A noisemaker would be cheaper.
It would, and my car (a 1989 Mercury Cougar) has the old-school (non-GPS) variant on that called a speed alarm. Basically, you set the alarm at your cruising speed and it tells you when you've gone 5 mph over the set speed with a little beep (it starts flashing as soon as you go over, if I remember correctly).
The problem with it is that it's not directly connected to the thought of speeding. There have been many-a-time that I've heard the beeping and thought "What the hell?", even though I personally set the speed I wanted to go not five minutes earlier.
If you're going to help people remember that pushing the gas pedal right now may not be the best of ideas, then the least distracting and most direct way to do it is to rig the gas pedal in this manner.
Besides, in order to get over the noise of the radio and cell phone, do you know how loud that sucker would have to be?
Although there's an idea... If you speed, you don't get any music or radio. Because, obviously, you need all your attention on the road right then.