I've never used one but a friend of mine in Denmark did and he said he was getting good wifi signals upto a kilometer away. Google "Slotted waveguide" and check it out, easy to build, cheap and they supposedly work really well. I don't know what the tree cover is around there, but it's a cheap, quick solution to test, and you can build a working test version out of cardboard and aluminum foil. If it works, you build one for real, if it doesn't, you haven't wasted too much time, effort or money testing it out.
Probably a good idea, but as I said, I heard the story from other people and never saw the guy myself. Hell, since I heard it from different people, it might not always be the same guy. You now officially know as much about it as I do, so if you want to go to the cops, be my guest. As for getting the ex-girlfriend to go - let's just say that she doesn't take my calls any more.
You're right though, if I ran into this guy, I might be tempted to call the cops. (Or rob him, what's he going to do about it?)
I've lived in Madrid for four years and have heard this story from several different people including an ex girlfriend.
A tourist looking guy with an American accent will approach people on the street with a sob story about how was robbed or otherwise lost his trekking backpack and included in the loss was his passport and wallet. His mother is sending him a Western Union Money transfer, but he can't collect it without ID. He then asks if he can call the USA with your name and passport number, have the money wired to you (his mom is always "at the Western Union right now!"). You accept and collect the money transfer at zero cost to you - fees are paid on the other end, and then turn the cash over to this guy. I've heard the sum of 275 euros up to over 800. He even offers 50 euros to reluctant people.
My ex-girlfriend fell for it, and then by coincidence bumped into the same guy two years later, so he's being doing this for a while. I didn't know her the first time she fell for it, but the second time she bumped into the guy, we both assumed it was something to do with drugs but now I'm guessing it probably had something to do with Money Mules.
Interesting that they actually use intermediates on the other end at least some of the time.
Also, The Money Mules would be a great name for an 90's cover band.
Steven Baxter in his novel "Space" presented the idea of the solar system being thick with dozens of examples of massive alien resource extraction projects - that there was tonnes of evidence of alien life right here in our own solar system, but we never thought to look for it. It's a good piece of hard SF, but he raises a good point - the evidence was right there, but we didn't know it was evidence. I'm not suggesting that that's the case IRL, but it's food for thought.
People make jokes (or serious observations) about "Why would they even want to talk to us?" but the truth is it's probably more like, why bother coming all the way over here unless they need something. Maybe not everyone wants to talk, or they don't bother devoting huge resources to building transmitters for the same reason we don't - they have better things to allocate resources to. Space could be teeming with life, there could advanced civilizations within 20 light years of here, but we haven't built massive laser or radio systems to contact them, why should we assume that they will. Hell, we can't even track all the near earth asteroids in space, you could fly a ship inside the lunar orbit and photograph the earth and how would we possibly know? Unless we happened to be aiming the right telescope at the right spot at the right time, they could be flying all over the place, and as long as they're not using Orion engines, we'd never know.
I think that Fermi's paradox isn't a paradox at all. If we had an Apollo scale program specifically dedicated to searching for evidence of alien life, searching the skys, conducting archeology on the moon, Mars and Venus etc, we'd find the evidence if it were there. If we devoted HUGE resources to finding and contacting alien life, we probably would if it were there to contact. But we don't because we need to eat and most people would prefer to have an XBox 360 than spend their money ensuring humanity has first contact in the next 50 generations. And the aliens are probably the exact same. Until there's an intelligent race in the universe that decides it's number 1 priority is to find and contact other aliens, we'll probably all just wonder about it and get back to what we've categorized as more important.
I think that there's probably no paradox, it's just that no one out there thinks it's important enough to bother.
There is some indirect evidence that the Clovis culture died out even if some of the Folsom people were ancestors of the Clovis people. You say that the Folsom point is derivative of the Clovis point when most sources that compare the two note that the Folsom point was inferior to the Clovis. The vast majority of Folsom points were found using rock quarried from relatively local sources, where as the Clovis points are often found thousands of kilometers from the rock quarries that the stone originated from. Clovis peoples valued higher quality stone enough that they either traveled or engaged in VERY long distance trade to get it. They produced some of the most sophisticated stone tools ever developed by human beings, only really being surpassed by Pre-Colombian native Americans almost ten thousand years later. Finally, Clovis points with nearly identical workmanship have been found from Alberta to California to Patagonia and as far east as Floria - points that have been dated to within hundreds of years of years of each other. All of this indicates a sophisticated, wide ranging, traveling culture.
The Folsom people by contrast didn't leave evidence of this type of wide ranging travel and sophistication, a change that seems to have happened quite quickly. Archaeologists have speculated that climate change led to conditions that were more hostile to longer distance travel - forcing them to use lower quality stone and thus simpler stone work techniques, but the evidence does seem to indicate the death of the Clovis culture (if not the people themselves). The true reasons for the sudden culture change will probably never be known. If there's good evidence of a Pliestocine comet explosion then it almost definitely was a nail in the coffin of the Clovis peoples.
You maintain a hotspot (with two SSIDs, one with a 10 digit WEP key, the other open) and let people access your hotspot over the open SSID. In turn, you either get half the revenue generated on your hotspot, or you get free access to any other hotspot operated by FON. If you live in a high density area (near a Starbucks, big apartment etc) you can subsidize your hotspot, if you don't you get free wifi roaming. If you're not interested in either, don't get the router. It's not like Time Warner is going to force you to sign up.
They charge $2 a day for access and don't have density in the US yet (they're bigger in Europe and Asia) but they seem to be growing. Personally, I've run across one FON hotspot when I actually needed one, and found two more when I didn't really need access or had a wired connection, but there's a Starbucks near my house (in Toronto) where the Chinese restaurant next door runs a FON access point. I've never been (don't like Starbucks coffee) but my friends use the FON signal all the time.
Ultimately, what this means is that Time Warner is allowing (encouraging?) people to maintain open access points, and will update their terms of service to reflect this.
Is that possible? Could they do key word searches and then transmit adds relevant to my conversation to the screen? I use Gmail and they scan my email and for some reason that really doesn't bother me. But my phone calls? I mean, they're probably really just trying to create a really cool delivery platform for different Google mobile apps, and integrate cool location specific stuff. Right?
Basically, the law is bullshit for prevention, and what ever mouth breather they have as a consultant to this has to know it. There's no real way to prevent people from registering a bullshit email address or using multiple addresses. So it won't prevent a damn thing and it won't help them catch anyone. So what good is this law? Well, the one thing I can think of is that when, by other means, the police catch a sex offender re-offending, showing that they were using a different address than the one they registered will help build a case that they were deliberately trying to conceal their activities and were trying to evade the mandated consequences of being a sex offender.
So, this will help them strengthen the very occasional weak case where other evidence doesn't pan out. Which is stupid, if I'm right (and I'm probably not, I'll freely admit that) then the law fails completely to do what it sets out to do but will be trumpeted as a success if a single DA gets a single prosecution that he might otherwise have missed. Ignorant people making bullshit laws that occasionally and accidentally provide some small unintended benefit to someone while failing to do what they set out to, and calling that success. Ain't politics grand!
Nothing in your post seems like a flame to me. I agree with pretty much everything you said and understand completely about your decision to move to a nearby town. Like wise to the other guy who responded to me who also rides a bike. I'm lucky enough to have recently moved to Madrid which has an excellent metro system and unbelievable urban density to support further metro development. I can walk to everything I need and I take the metro to work. And there are thousands of people like me, or cyclists who ride to work. Hell thousands, probably millions. But in every major city in the western world, come rush hour, every major highway in town jams up with hundreds of thousands of cars. (Madrid included, traffic here is a nightmare beyond anything I ever saw in Canada, where I'm originally from.) But that's not my point. My point is that the majority of people in cities in North America really just can't not drive, and can't not drive allot. So it's going to take something big to really change the problems associated with all that driving - pollution, wasted time and productivity, highways that cut ugly, semi-impassable barriers through urban areas, the cost of fuel etc.
Actually, as much as I have the smog and oil wars and the ugly highway cutting through the park I take my dog to, what I think about the most on a day to day basis are the poor bastards who waste 2 hours or more of their day, every week day, sitting in traffic. 10 hours a week just sitting there, really not doing anything. I just don't have that kind of free time, and if I did I wouldn't ever waste it commuting. I resent the 15 minutes each way I spend on the metro, and since I'm not driving, I can read. When I try to imagine the lost sleep, lost time at home... it just seems so horrible. Hell, I only need to take the metro 5 stops and I'm thinking about moving somewhere walking distance. My time is worth WAY more to me than my bank balance and I would pay allot more for an apartment nearer work if it meant an hour and a half or more free time every day.
But, judging by the number of cars on the highway every day, that's just me.
The vast majority of cities in North America (I'm including Canada here) are designed around driving. If we did a poll of/. users, I bet that the majority don't have a store within reasonable walking distance of their house that carries more than the basic essentials. (Sure you CAN walk to your local grocery store, but could you really do it all the time?) When you have to drive to buy bread and milk, you can't really not drive all the time.
More over, a house in suburbia is seen by enough people as sort of a birthright and enough people are just generally hostile to the idea of living in higher urban density areas even though it's really the only way to really reduce dependency on cars. People talk about transit which doesn't work well in suburbia because the spread out population means lots of buses that are mostly empty or else living too far from the bus routes for the bus to be useful. Metros and street cars are even less viable in spread out suburbs. Home delivery solves the problem to some degree, but you really can't organize cities around the idea of home delivery.
So basically, people HAVE to drive. Sure they can drive less, even much less, but there's sort of a basic minimum amount of driving that will always have to exist in a city that is designed around driving. Either the culture needs to change, and in some places that seems to be starting, or automobile efficiency needs to be greatly improved.
Or else we can just accept that at some point we're screwed.
I really didn't know there was a BitTorrent Corporation, I didn't know that they were trying to be all legitimate and everything, but I don't think I'll use their store, buy their content or even really notice that they're doing anything. I'm using uTorrent (and formerly ABC after I switched from Azureus) and visiting a small list of torrent sites semi-regularly and generally going about my business. Does this effect the average user like me in any way?
I'm also curious, if Peerguardian or the like has blocked ports to any of these companies, would this affect their new BitTorrent service? I haven't really looked at the block lists in Peerguardian but I'm pretty sure some movie companies are in there. Are they trying to backdoor their way around block lists or are they really planning on distributing their content on open networks? Just curious.
Seriously. I forgot. I have a couple of Republican friends here and their number one complaint about Spain is that everyone just assumes that you're going to be ashamed of Bush and you'll want to join along in the Bush bashing. If you're the type who'll defend Bush, or one of those My Country Right or Wrong types, be prepared for long awkward pauses in conversation, outright hostility or people looking at you like you're a cretin. Europeans don't hate Americans. Seriously. But they hate Bush with the white-hot burning intensity of ten thousand suns. Either join in in the effigy burning, or learn to stay away from political conversations.
I wish were kidding here. Mod me as Flamebait if you want, but I'm here on the ground and I'm calling it like I see it.
It's not easy. Pretty much no one here will consider you unless you already have your working papers and you're fully legal to work in Spain. Pretty much there are enough qualified British and Irish people showing up looking for better weather, working hours, looking to be with spouses etc. that there's little incentive to bother sponsoring when there are so many other people here.
Also, forget about trying to get a job here without being here. It's one of those things that is technically possible, but you're talking close to lottery odds. Either you find a way to get here and get here legally, or forget it. Sorry man, I'm here now, and it's not easy. However, I wanted it enough that I am here. If you want it, make it happen. That said, in Spain, go to Barcelona if you want to work. Madrid is an awesome city, but Barcelona seems more serious about everything and the economy seems better. Just an observation since I've only lived in Madrid.
I won't speak for the rest of Europe, but Spain is tough going. Remember, unemployment here is extensive and there are lots of Europeans competing with you for those jobs. Leverage the English angle, as much as Americans are being told that the entire world loathes them (it doesn't) everyone here wants to speak English and every employer wants fluent English employees. Also, if you don't speak Spanish well, right there, 80% of your employability vanishes.
Just laying it out for you. Hope this helps.
Re:No One Lives Forever
on
Humor in Games?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The writing and voice acting in that game were priceless. Every gaurd you snuck up on was in the middle of a hilarious conversation. Dozens and dozens of times I found myself sitting in a shadow waiting for them to finish before I killed them. (Strange sentence.) The cut scenes, general camp of the game and some of the in game details were well done too. All in all, probably the best combination of comdey in an action game that I've seen. (Also one of the most amazing games I've ever played. Why this didn't do better I'll never understand.)
I was thinking a while back that non-voters are shirking their duty to the democracy they live in and had sort of the opposite idea. Give out an exemption receipt for the $100 Non-Vote tax. Don't vote, and you pay an extra $100 on your taxes at the year-end. Vote, and you're forgiven the tax. Sends a clear message to non-voters that they are a drain on society, but no fear because they're paying society back.
Thanks. Trial and error, and a determination to succeed with a high tolerance for being rejected. If I made it to 30 without learning something I'd have to be some kind of jackass.
Is like asking for Linux advice at a singles bar. You might luck out and find someone who knows what they're talking about, but are you really going to wade through the uselessness in the meantime. Not to say that the/. crowd are useless for dating... just... well. Damn man. If this is your idea of a good place to go for dating advice, your problems go deeper than being shy or something.
The best advice you'll get is varying degrees of go ahead and try the online stuff, or leave your house. Since you asked, here is a little more. It's probably bad advice, but it's worked for me.
Have something interesting to talk about that: a) isn't you, and b) isn't technology related. If you can't talk at length, with insight and clarity about three subjects, you're risking being uninteresting. Go out and learn, you'll meet a girl while doing it.
Be confident. I can't stress how much being confident (or successfully faking confidence) matters. People have seen me with girls WAY WAY WAY out of my league and openly wondered how the hell I did it. Easy. Confidence. I faked it for so long that it became real.
Smile allot, and the second you actually get a ray of interest from the girl, cool it. Don't be the fawning twerp. Don't go all ga-ga. Relax, talk to her and don't so much as think about sex or have your eyes wander below her jaw line. Guys who are hard up often show it, and sexual desperation is a HUGE turn off. (For women, that is. Guys love it.)
Instant messenger and good email. If you give good IM, and give good email, you can get laid. Think about how geeks got laid in the past. Poetry, prose and love letters. Seriously. Don't write poetry in your Gaim window, or emails about bodice ripping, but write well. Also, remember, you can say things in IM or email that you can't say in person. If she's thinking romantic thoughts about you when you're not around (even if you're in her IM window), you're half way there. I had an ex girlfriend who I used to write a little haiku for at the end of every email. She went crazy for it, and sometimes I could slip something in there "just to make the flow and syllables work. I didn't actually mean it baby." But she knew I did. Sounds corny, but it was pure gold.
Finally, I don't know why this works, but be self deprecating a little. It seems like some sort of magic formula for me, but damn it works.
Anyway, best of luck with the whole dating thing and best of luck with the/. advice.
Personally I think its a fantastic idea. I've had a pet rat myself, and known a couple of other people who had them. They're smart as hell, easy to train and they're cheap. I've heard of aid workers in Africa training rats to find mines in mine fields. They're too small to set the mine off, but can sniff out the explosives like a dog. If you can train a mine sniffing rat, a human sniffing rat should be easy.
Using animals as workers is actually something I like the idea of. Like mixing llamas in with sheep. The llamas will adopt the sheep as it's flock and the sheep aren't afraid of the llama. But a llama can and will kick a coyote's ass if one comes sniffing around. (And literally kick the coyote's ass.) I do feel sorry for the people that have to volunteer to lie under rubble while they're training the rats though, but hey, its for a good cause. (How would you put that on your resume? Well yes, for 6 months last year I was employed as a trapped earthquake victim for rat training. No, seriously.)
Touche. Here in Spain where I'm living now it's not so bad. Somewhat in Portugal where I've been allot lately. South America (where I'm originally). Canada to some degree, although not as much as it should be. CBC really, the rest of the Newspapers and TV favor one party or the other.
It's funny, the second I saw this article I thought that there were going to be two basic responses from Amercians. Response A) The rest of the world gets no say (to varying degrees of rudeness). And B) See, Bush is undermining us abroad (with varying degrees of Bush-bashing).
It's funny because both are 100% percent correct, and each will be used to support arguments that disagree with each other. In particular, while I agree that the rest of the world gets no say, and wouldn't for a second suggest changing that, to gruffly deny that we don't all have a stake is laughable. The world is a small place, and getting - relatively - smaller. More people, more interconnected economies, better communication, more, faster and easier travel, shared environmental and social problems etc. What happens in the US affects the rest of us, just as what happens to the rest of us affects the US. Even if we don't live in the "Axis of Evil". The rest of the world sees the outsider looking in perspective of Bush and we don't like what we see. Also, the much of the rest of the world still has laws about media fairness and impartiality and so we don't get relentless repetition of the GOP's weekly talking points passing as news. Bias check, I'm left wing by the standards of a country that has been called Soviet Canuckistan by you Americans. So by American standards that places me three steps to the left of Psycho-pinko-commie-freaks. By Canadian standards I'm part of the third largest political party in the country.
I digress. We want to see Bush out because I, and most of the rest of the world, perceive Bush and the types of things that have happened under him as negative, destructive and dangerous. I frankly don't know much about Kerry, and thanks to the American media's relentless refusal to actually discuss issues and focus on election platforms, neither do most Americans. Ask yourself next time you see the media focusing on medals, ribbons, type setting etc - Do you really know anything about either candidate's platforms? Really really? Do you know Kerry's? Bush's? If not, why not? Shouldn't that bother you? This is an election isn't it? And as much as the spin machine wants to talk about easily misconstrued things like character and "flip-flopping", platform and issues matter. And shouting "Terrorist" over and over isn't an issue, it isn't a platform, and if you elect the candidate that insists on doing it...well, the rest of the world will have to wait four for years to get what we want and you'll get four more years of Bush. Enjoy them and try not to bomb anything.
Will be the next internet holy war, I'm sure of it. This will make Apple vs. PC or vi vs. emacs look like a playground bicker. BTW, Blue is for pansies, orange IS the S+ark mouse.
How can a [small] man like me suggest new strategies to these NASA/SETI guys?
Easy. Study science for 4 years undergrad, then 3 years grad, distinguish yourself in the field and then call them and arrange a meeting. People who can't be bothered to do that are usually dillitants who think they're smarter than they really are. There are some brillant people out there who get great ideas outside of their field, but there are also hundreds of crackpots, weirdos and just misinformed people who seem to think that they've figured it out. The 7 years of school weeds out most of those. General tips. Never mention god. Don't tell them: "This is obviously a waste! since a) they obviously don't think so, and b) it isn't. Also, and this is a guess, but age a couple of years.
As for the other gasses we don't know here - we know all the elements that exist and many that don't exist (ones that we created in labs but don't exist in nature) so we have a pretty solid idea of what possible gasses there are out there. Oxygen breathing, carbon based, water dependent life is possible since we've seen it (us). Carbon and water have special and unique properties that make them ideal for creating life as we know it. If we start looking for "whatever" how will we know we've found it?
Slashdot Mirror
I've never used one but a friend of mine in Denmark did and he said he was getting good wifi signals upto a kilometer away. Google "Slotted waveguide" and check it out, easy to build, cheap and they supposedly work really well. I don't know what the tree cover is around there, but it's a cheap, quick solution to test, and you can build a working test version out of cardboard and aluminum foil. If it works, you build one for real, if it doesn't, you haven't wasted too much time, effort or money testing it out.
Good luck.
Probably a good idea, but as I said, I heard the story from other people and never saw the guy myself. Hell, since I heard it from different people, it might not always be the same guy. You now officially know as much about it as I do, so if you want to go to the cops, be my guest. As for getting the ex-girlfriend to go - let's just say that she doesn't take my calls any more.
You're right though, if I ran into this guy, I might be tempted to call the cops. (Or rob him, what's he going to do about it?)
I've lived in Madrid for four years and have heard this story from several different people including an ex girlfriend.
A tourist looking guy with an American accent will approach people on the street with a sob story about how was robbed or otherwise lost his trekking backpack and included in the loss was his passport and wallet. His mother is sending him a Western Union Money transfer, but he can't collect it without ID. He then asks if he can call the USA with your name and passport number, have the money wired to you (his mom is always "at the Western Union right now!"). You accept and collect the money transfer at zero cost to you - fees are paid on the other end, and then turn the cash over to this guy. I've heard the sum of 275 euros up to over 800. He even offers 50 euros to reluctant people.
My ex-girlfriend fell for it, and then by coincidence bumped into the same guy two years later, so he's being doing this for a while. I didn't know her the first time she fell for it, but the second time she bumped into the guy, we both assumed it was something to do with drugs but now I'm guessing it probably had something to do with Money Mules.
Interesting that they actually use intermediates on the other end at least some of the time.
Also, The Money Mules would be a great name for an 90's cover band.
Steven Baxter in his novel "Space" presented the idea of the solar system being thick with dozens of examples of massive alien resource extraction projects - that there was tonnes of evidence of alien life right here in our own solar system, but we never thought to look for it. It's a good piece of hard SF, but he raises a good point - the evidence was right there, but we didn't know it was evidence. I'm not suggesting that that's the case IRL, but it's food for thought.
People make jokes (or serious observations) about "Why would they even want to talk to us?" but the truth is it's probably more like, why bother coming all the way over here unless they need something. Maybe not everyone wants to talk, or they don't bother devoting huge resources to building transmitters for the same reason we don't - they have better things to allocate resources to. Space could be teeming with life, there could advanced civilizations within 20 light years of here, but we haven't built massive laser or radio systems to contact them, why should we assume that they will. Hell, we can't even track all the near earth asteroids in space, you could fly a ship inside the lunar orbit and photograph the earth and how would we possibly know? Unless we happened to be aiming the right telescope at the right spot at the right time, they could be flying all over the place, and as long as they're not using Orion engines, we'd never know.
I think that Fermi's paradox isn't a paradox at all. If we had an Apollo scale program specifically dedicated to searching for evidence of alien life, searching the skys, conducting archeology on the moon, Mars and Venus etc, we'd find the evidence if it were there. If we devoted HUGE resources to finding and contacting alien life, we probably would if it were there to contact. But we don't because we need to eat and most people would prefer to have an XBox 360 than spend their money ensuring humanity has first contact in the next 50 generations. And the aliens are probably the exact same. Until there's an intelligent race in the universe that decides it's number 1 priority is to find and contact other aliens, we'll probably all just wonder about it and get back to what we've categorized as more important.
I think that there's probably no paradox, it's just that no one out there thinks it's important enough to bother.
That would be Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes.
There is some indirect evidence that the Clovis culture died out even if some of the Folsom people were ancestors of the Clovis people. You say that the Folsom point is derivative of the Clovis point when most sources that compare the two note that the Folsom point was inferior to the Clovis. The vast majority of Folsom points were found using rock quarried from relatively local sources, where as the Clovis points are often found thousands of kilometers from the rock quarries that the stone originated from. Clovis peoples valued higher quality stone enough that they either traveled or engaged in VERY long distance trade to get it. They produced some of the most sophisticated stone tools ever developed by human beings, only really being surpassed by Pre-Colombian native Americans almost ten thousand years later. Finally, Clovis points with nearly identical workmanship have been found from Alberta to California to Patagonia and as far east as Floria - points that have been dated to within hundreds of years of years of each other. All of this indicates a sophisticated, wide ranging, traveling culture.
The Folsom people by contrast didn't leave evidence of this type of wide ranging travel and sophistication, a change that seems to have happened quite quickly. Archaeologists have speculated that climate change led to conditions that were more hostile to longer distance travel - forcing them to use lower quality stone and thus simpler stone work techniques, but the evidence does seem to indicate the death of the Clovis culture (if not the people themselves). The true reasons for the sudden culture change will probably never be known. If there's good evidence of a Pliestocine comet explosion then it almost definitely was a nail in the coffin of the Clovis peoples.
Yes, you are missing something.
You maintain a hotspot (with two SSIDs, one with a 10 digit WEP key, the other open) and let people access your hotspot over the open SSID. In turn, you either get half the revenue generated on your hotspot, or you get free access to any other hotspot operated by FON. If you live in a high density area (near a Starbucks, big apartment etc) you can subsidize your hotspot, if you don't you get free wifi roaming. If you're not interested in either, don't get the router. It's not like Time Warner is going to force you to sign up.
They charge $2 a day for access and don't have density in the US yet (they're bigger in Europe and Asia) but they seem to be growing. Personally, I've run across one FON hotspot when I actually needed one, and found two more when I didn't really need access or had a wired connection, but there's a Starbucks near my house (in Toronto) where the Chinese restaurant next door runs a FON access point. I've never been (don't like Starbucks coffee) but my friends use the FON signal all the time.
Ultimately, what this means is that Time Warner is allowing (encouraging?) people to maintain open access points, and will update their terms of service to reflect this.
Is that possible? Could they do key word searches and then transmit adds relevant to my conversation to the screen? I use Gmail and they scan my email and for some reason that really doesn't bother me. But my phone calls? I mean, they're probably really just trying to create a really cool delivery platform for different Google mobile apps, and integrate cool location specific stuff. Right?
For completion's sake, Buckaroo was a Half Japanese/Rockstar/Neuro-Surgeon/Particle Physicist/Adventurer and part time crime fighter. Like me.
Basically, the law is bullshit for prevention, and what ever mouth breather they have as a consultant to this has to know it. There's no real way to prevent people from registering a bullshit email address or using multiple addresses. So it won't prevent a damn thing and it won't help them catch anyone. So what good is this law? Well, the one thing I can think of is that when, by other means, the police catch a sex offender re-offending, showing that they were using a different address than the one they registered will help build a case that they were deliberately trying to conceal their activities and were trying to evade the mandated consequences of being a sex offender.
So, this will help them strengthen the very occasional weak case where other evidence doesn't pan out. Which is stupid, if I'm right (and I'm probably not, I'll freely admit that) then the law fails completely to do what it sets out to do but will be trumpeted as a success if a single DA gets a single prosecution that he might otherwise have missed. Ignorant people making bullshit laws that occasionally and accidentally provide some small unintended benefit to someone while failing to do what they set out to, and calling that success. Ain't politics grand!
Nothing in your post seems like a flame to me. I agree with pretty much everything you said and understand completely about your decision to move to a nearby town. Like wise to the other guy who responded to me who also rides a bike. I'm lucky enough to have recently moved to Madrid which has an excellent metro system and unbelievable urban density to support further metro development. I can walk to everything I need and I take the metro to work. And there are thousands of people like me, or cyclists who ride to work. Hell thousands, probably millions. But in every major city in the western world, come rush hour, every major highway in town jams up with hundreds of thousands of cars. (Madrid included, traffic here is a nightmare beyond anything I ever saw in Canada, where I'm originally from.) But that's not my point. My point is that the majority of people in cities in North America really just can't not drive, and can't not drive allot. So it's going to take something big to really change the problems associated with all that driving - pollution, wasted time and productivity, highways that cut ugly, semi-impassable barriers through urban areas, the cost of fuel etc.
Actually, as much as I have the smog and oil wars and the ugly highway cutting through the park I take my dog to, what I think about the most on a day to day basis are the poor bastards who waste 2 hours or more of their day, every week day, sitting in traffic. 10 hours a week just sitting there, really not doing anything. I just don't have that kind of free time, and if I did I wouldn't ever waste it commuting. I resent the 15 minutes each way I spend on the metro, and since I'm not driving, I can read. When I try to imagine the lost sleep, lost time at home... it just seems so horrible. Hell, I only need to take the metro 5 stops and I'm thinking about moving somewhere walking distance. My time is worth WAY more to me than my bank balance and I would pay allot more for an apartment nearer work if it meant an hour and a half or more free time every day.
But, judging by the number of cars on the highway every day, that's just me.
The vast majority of cities in North America (I'm including Canada here) are designed around driving. If we did a poll of /. users, I bet that the majority don't have a store within reasonable walking distance of their house that carries more than the basic essentials. (Sure you CAN walk to your local grocery store, but could you really do it all the time?) When you have to drive to buy bread and milk, you can't really not drive all the time.
More over, a house in suburbia is seen by enough people as sort of a birthright and enough people are just generally hostile to the idea of living in higher urban density areas even though it's really the only way to really reduce dependency on cars. People talk about transit which doesn't work well in suburbia because the spread out population means lots of buses that are mostly empty or else living too far from the bus routes for the bus to be useful. Metros and street cars are even less viable in spread out suburbs. Home delivery solves the problem to some degree, but you really can't organize cities around the idea of home delivery.
So basically, people HAVE to drive. Sure they can drive less, even much less, but there's sort of a basic minimum amount of driving that will always have to exist in a city that is designed around driving. Either the culture needs to change, and in some places that seems to be starting, or automobile efficiency needs to be greatly improved.
Or else we can just accept that at some point we're screwed.
I really didn't know there was a BitTorrent Corporation, I didn't know that they were trying to be all legitimate and everything, but I don't think I'll use their store, buy their content or even really notice that they're doing anything. I'm using uTorrent (and formerly ABC after I switched from Azureus) and visiting a small list of torrent sites semi-regularly and generally going about my business. Does this effect the average user like me in any way?
I'm also curious, if Peerguardian or the like has blocked ports to any of these companies, would this affect their new BitTorrent service? I haven't really looked at the block lists in Peerguardian but I'm pretty sure some movie companies are in there. Are they trying to backdoor their way around block lists or are they really planning on distributing their content on open networks? Just curious.
Seriously. I forgot. I have a couple of Republican friends here and their number one complaint about Spain is that everyone just assumes that you're going to be ashamed of Bush and you'll want to join along in the Bush bashing. If you're the type who'll defend Bush, or one of those My Country Right or Wrong types, be prepared for long awkward pauses in conversation, outright hostility or people looking at you like you're a cretin. Europeans don't hate Americans. Seriously. But they hate Bush with the white-hot burning intensity of ten thousand suns. Either join in in the effigy burning, or learn to stay away from political conversations.
I wish were kidding here. Mod me as Flamebait if you want, but I'm here on the ground and I'm calling it like I see it.
It's not easy. Pretty much no one here will consider you unless you already have your working papers and you're fully legal to work in Spain. Pretty much there are enough qualified British and Irish people showing up looking for better weather, working hours, looking to be with spouses etc. that there's little incentive to bother sponsoring when there are so many other people here.
Also, forget about trying to get a job here without being here. It's one of those things that is technically possible, but you're talking close to lottery odds. Either you find a way to get here and get here legally, or forget it. Sorry man, I'm here now, and it's not easy. However, I wanted it enough that I am here. If you want it, make it happen. That said, in Spain, go to Barcelona if you want to work. Madrid is an awesome city, but Barcelona seems more serious about everything and the economy seems better. Just an observation since I've only lived in Madrid.
I won't speak for the rest of Europe, but Spain is tough going. Remember, unemployment here is extensive and there are lots of Europeans competing with you for those jobs. Leverage the English angle, as much as Americans are being told that the entire world loathes them (it doesn't) everyone here wants to speak English and every employer wants fluent English employees. Also, if you don't speak Spanish well, right there, 80% of your employability vanishes.
Just laying it out for you. Hope this helps.
The writing and voice acting in that game were priceless. Every gaurd you snuck up on was in the middle of a hilarious conversation. Dozens and dozens of times I found myself sitting in a shadow waiting for them to finish before I killed them. (Strange sentence.) The cut scenes, general camp of the game and some of the in game details were well done too. All in all, probably the best combination of comdey in an action game that I've seen. (Also one of the most amazing games I've ever played. Why this didn't do better I'll never understand.)
I was thinking a while back that non-voters are shirking their duty to the democracy they live in and had sort of the opposite idea. Give out an exemption receipt for the $100 Non-Vote tax. Don't vote, and you pay an extra $100 on your taxes at the year-end. Vote, and you're forgiven the tax. Sends a clear message to non-voters that they are a drain on society, but no fear because they're paying society back.
Thanks. Trial and error, and a determination to succeed with a high tolerance for being rejected. If I made it to 30 without learning something I'd have to be some kind of jackass.
The best advice you'll get is varying degrees of go ahead and try the online stuff, or leave your house. Since you asked, here is a little more. It's probably bad advice, but it's worked for me.
Have something interesting to talk about that: a) isn't you, and b) isn't technology related. If you can't talk at length, with insight and clarity about three subjects, you're risking being uninteresting. Go out and learn, you'll meet a girl while doing it.
Be confident. I can't stress how much being confident (or successfully faking confidence) matters. People have seen me with girls WAY WAY WAY out of my league and openly wondered how the hell I did it. Easy. Confidence. I faked it for so long that it became real.
Smile allot, and the second you actually get a ray of interest from the girl, cool it. Don't be the fawning twerp. Don't go all ga-ga. Relax, talk to her and don't so much as think about sex or have your eyes wander below her jaw line. Guys who are hard up often show it, and sexual desperation is a HUGE turn off. (For women, that is. Guys love it.)
Instant messenger and good email. If you give good IM, and give good email, you can get laid. Think about how geeks got laid in the past. Poetry, prose and love letters. Seriously. Don't write poetry in your Gaim window, or emails about bodice ripping, but write well. Also, remember, you can say things in IM or email that you can't say in person. If she's thinking romantic thoughts about you when you're not around (even if you're in her IM window), you're half way there. I had an ex girlfriend who I used to write a little haiku for at the end of every email. She went crazy for it, and sometimes I could slip something in there "just to make the flow and syllables work. I didn't actually mean it baby." But she knew I did. Sounds corny, but it was pure gold.
Finally, I don't know why this works, but be self deprecating a little. It seems like some sort of magic formula for me, but damn it works.
/. advice.
Anyway, best of luck with the whole dating thing and best of luck with the
I'm in a playful mood right now. So do they only chase dogs without mercy, leaving the merciful dogs alone? Sorry, long day of ESL Teaching.
Personally I think its a fantastic idea. I've had a pet rat myself, and known a couple of other people who had them. They're smart as hell, easy to train and they're cheap. I've heard of aid workers in Africa training rats to find mines in mine fields. They're too small to set the mine off, but can sniff out the explosives like a dog. If you can train a mine sniffing rat, a human sniffing rat should be easy.
Using animals as workers is actually something I like the idea of. Like mixing llamas in with sheep. The llamas will adopt the sheep as it's flock and the sheep aren't afraid of the llama. But a llama can and will kick a coyote's ass if one comes sniffing around. (And literally kick the coyote's ass.) I do feel sorry for the people that have to volunteer to lie under rubble while they're training the rats though, but hey, its for a good cause. (How would you put that on your resume? Well yes, for 6 months last year I was employed as a trapped earthquake victim for rat training. No, seriously.)
Touche. Here in Spain where I'm living now it's not so bad. Somewhat in Portugal where I've been allot lately. South America (where I'm originally). Canada to some degree, although not as much as it should be. CBC really, the rest of the Newspapers and TV favor one party or the other.
It's funny, the second I saw this article I thought that there were going to be two basic responses from Amercians. Response A) The rest of the world gets no say (to varying degrees of rudeness). And B) See, Bush is undermining us abroad (with varying degrees of Bush-bashing).
It's funny because both are 100% percent correct, and each will be used to support arguments that disagree with each other. In particular, while I agree that the rest of the world gets no say, and wouldn't for a second suggest changing that, to gruffly deny that we don't all have a stake is laughable. The world is a small place, and getting - relatively - smaller. More people, more interconnected economies, better communication, more, faster and easier travel, shared environmental and social problems etc. What happens in the US affects the rest of us, just as what happens to the rest of us affects the US. Even if we don't live in the "Axis of Evil". The rest of the world sees the outsider looking in perspective of Bush and we don't like what we see. Also, the much of the rest of the world still has laws about media fairness and impartiality and so we don't get relentless repetition of the GOP's weekly talking points passing as news. Bias check, I'm left wing by the standards of a country that has been called Soviet Canuckistan by you Americans. So by American standards that places me three steps to the left of Psycho-pinko-commie-freaks. By Canadian standards I'm part of the third largest political party in the country.
I digress. We want to see Bush out because I, and most of the rest of the world, perceive Bush and the types of things that have happened under him as negative, destructive and dangerous. I frankly don't know much about Kerry, and thanks to the American media's relentless refusal to actually discuss issues and focus on election platforms, neither do most Americans. Ask yourself next time you see the media focusing on medals, ribbons, type setting etc - Do you really know anything about either candidate's platforms? Really really? Do you know Kerry's? Bush's? If not, why not? Shouldn't that bother you? This is an election isn't it? And as much as the spin machine wants to talk about easily misconstrued things like character and "flip-flopping", platform and issues matter. And shouting "Terrorist" over and over isn't an issue, it isn't a platform, and if you elect the candidate that insists on doing it...well, the rest of the world will have to wait four for years to get what we want and you'll get four more years of Bush. Enjoy them and try not to bomb anything.
Will be the next internet holy war, I'm sure of it. This will make Apple vs. PC or vi vs. emacs look like a playground bicker. BTW, Blue is for pansies, orange IS the S+ark mouse.
As for the other gasses we don't know here - we know all the elements that exist and many that don't exist (ones that we created in labs but don't exist in nature) so we have a pretty solid idea of what possible gasses there are out there. Oxygen breathing, carbon based, water dependent life is possible since we've seen it (us). Carbon and water have special and unique properties that make them ideal for creating life as we know it. If we start looking for "whatever" how will we know we've found it?