FUD is way oldschool from long before Slashdot. Any old *.advocacy UseNet groups would sling FUD around like politicians sling mud.
EULA I believe is actually coined from within EULAs themselves (ie, "This End User Licence Agreement ("EULA")..." (gotta love nested quotes and parentheses, too)).
MS/M$ also predates Slashdot. It was often used my Mac Advocacy folks way back in the day.
OSS and F/OSS (yes, the F is for Free) are newer, coined by the free/open source software communities, of which Slashdot is a major feature.
Like "singe" with a 'g' sound instead of a 'j' sound at the end? ('i' as in 'tin').
Or "sing" like "sigh" with an 'ng' at the end? ('i' as in 'pine').
It helps if you elongate the word - sing a long note of "siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing!" and see what vowel sound you're making while you sustain the note.
And for my foreign, non-English ear, the pronounciation of the 'a' and 'e' vowels are completely distinct.
This is why is happens: phonetics. I myself often have trouble remembering which it should be because of this.
In American English, at least all the dialects I've personally heard, because the emphasis is on the first syllable, the second vowel is often neglected, and since the "a" is is pronounced as a nondescript "uh" in this context (as in both syllables of 'butter'), and the word comes off akin to "gram-rrr".
R is itself a semivowel, which can be pronounced alone without the use of any other vowels, though it isn't properly written that way. The closest vowel combination to a stand-alone "R" is "er", which is itself very close to the "ar" (with 'a' as 'uh', thus 'uhr') in "grammar", hence the easy confusion.
I once drew up a thing that you might find useful, deliniating the different vowel and dipthong sounds used in American English, arrayed in order by similarity, and the stupidly large assortment of different written letters that can make those sounds. This is from memory so it might be a bit off...
VOWEL SOUND - LETTER EXAMPLES
ee - "e" in "be", "i" in "sing", "y" in "very", "ea" in "eat", "ee" in "bee".
ih - "i" in "bit"
aa - "a" in "bat"
ah - "o" in "bot", "a" in "car", "augh" as in "caught", "ough" as in "ought", "aw" as in "law"
eh - "e" as in "bet"
uh - "u" as in "but", "a" as in "a thing".
oh - "o" as in "note", "ow" as in "throw", "oa" as in "oats", "eau" as in French
ouh -"oo" as in "book"
oo - "u" as in "dude", "o" as in "do", "oo" as in "pool", "ew" as in "new", "ough" as in "through", "w" as in "now" (as part of a dipthong)
And there are two dipthongs that sometimes get single-letter representations in English (the rest are just combinations of the above base sounds):
ee/oo dipthong - "u" as in "butane" (pronounced like "you" the second person pronoun)
ah/ee dipthong - "i" as in "kite" (pronounced like "I" the first person pronoun)
Seriously, English pronunciation is just fucked up in the namespace (amongst many other places). We need like twice as many written vowels as we've got to represent all the sounds.
Security is, by its very nature, nothing more than making certain things a pain in the ass in order to prevent them from being done. This applies to computers, to the physical world, everywhere. The stronger the security, the less the convenience, and vice versa.
Granted, the degree of inconvenience and thus security is (intentionally) disproportional from authorized users to authorized users - those who have/know the key are less inconvenienced and thus less restricted than those who don't - but there is still the inconvenience of having to keep or remember the key, and to unlock the system when you want to use it. If you use a multiple-key solution, the security gets even better but it's even more inconvenient. That's the nature of the beast.
The only perfect security is to "completely inconvenience" everyone - just kill 'em all, or destroy whatever they're trying to access. The only perfect convenience is to completely unsecure the system. These are obviously unwanted polar extremes, and the solution lies somewhere in between them - where depends entirely on context. You'd just got to find some system which makes certain things inconvenient enough that most security breaches won't be likely.
This could be a combination of physical and digital systems, even - say local login requires no authentiation but remote login is restricted, that way you've got to break the physical security in the building or the digital security over the net, but either way there is some security keeping unauthorized users out.
But if you've got the GP's hypothetical "I want to be able to log in from anywhere and do whatever I want without authentication!" user, then *anything* that will grant their wish will allow *anyone* to log in from anywhere and do whatever they want. There is no solution which could give them what they want and keep any semblance of security. The technology hasn't failed: the specs being demanded are flawed and impossible to match.
It's like designing a house without any locks because those damn keys are just so inconvenient - fine, but don't expect the doors to magically keep people out of the house while you're away. There is no lock that could possibly be created that will keep something secure without inconveniencing the user to provide some sort of key.
I think the reason why the grandparent poster would be upset by refusal of a patent because he didn't use a lawyer is that, if he had done it right in all other ways, requiring a lawyer is an arbitrary barrier to entry. If the response he got had said "This is wrong, that is wrong, this other thing is wrong. We recommend you seek a patent lawyer", then that would be one thing; but saying "This is wrong, that is wrong, and you need to use a lawyer" puts using a lawyer as a neccesary prerequisite even with all the other requisites of proper application. What if [this] and [that] were fine? Would he have gotten a response "Author did not use a patent lawyer. Application rejected."?
To use your doctor analogy, it would be like if you accidentally cut yourself and, unless you went to the hospital and had it professionally treated (when a simple bandage would do), your insurance would refuse further treatment of that limb because it was not treated by an authorized medical professional, even if you treated it perfectly well yourself. Or say, if you got a fix-it ticket for your car for something simple that you know how to fix yourself, but you were *required* to have the dealer fix it.
Such arbitrary barriers to entry are fascist constructs in the literal sense of the word (fascism has corporatism as a major componant). It's the government enforcing the use of certain industries' services even when the individuals could perform those services themselves; a cartel between the public and private behemoths, in essence.
As a personal aside, to touch on some of your comments about lawyers being needed due to the complexity of law: I consider that a sign of a fundamentally flawed system. Any government whose laws necessitate the use of lawyers is too complex and opaque. An average citizen of a country should reasonably be able to understand the laws he is expected to obey in full; otherwise, he cannot justifiably be held accountable for the infraction or violation of those laws.
If ignorance of the law is no excuse, as our government claims it to be, then the law should be so simple and obvious that we can teach it in its entirity to our children in school, so by the time they are adults and held responsible, they know in full what they are responsible for.
This is another effect of the same universal problem that has affected all of human civilization since history began, and manifests itself most obviously in politics. Namely:
A couple of evil/manipulative/powerful people can take the vast hordes of stupid/gullible/trusting people and make all sort of problems for the everybody involved, including all those of us who don't fit neatly into either category and often other evil/powerful people as well. Hell, even the evil/powerful ones at the top lose out in the very long term, as civilization (or in this case, the internet) eventually collapses out from underneath them...
You probably shouldn't go to work anywhere that has Union employees, then. They can file a grievance against you and your supervisor if you piss them off. The worst part is that you can't do anything about this other than leave the company.
Yeah, well I dislike unions as much as I dislike corporations and governments. Big monolithic anything just rubs me wrong and I avoid them as much as possible.
If my friend had simply apologized and left the chair where it was, he could have waited until the Union guys left at 5 and moved the chair to his office.
Well, aside from the union guy being an asshat and immediately filing a complaint for daring to question him, I'd probably have done about the same if I were stuck in that situation. If he was gonna be an obstinant ass about it, I'd say OK, I'll put in a work order, then wait for him to leave, and then move the chair anyway.
The moral of the story is that you have to pick your battles, and trying to educate the masses just isn't a good idea.
For the most part I don't bother. If someone wants to be ignorant of their own accord, let them, their funeral. But if it's causing me grief then I've got every right in the world to argue my position until they either prove me wrong (which I'll accept if they've got a good coutnerargument) or concede themselves.
Try "Did I print it from the web? No." Technically true, but most people that equate the internet as being the web won't see that other services also can run over it, like FTP or iDisk or whatever you're using.
But technically I *am* using the web. I've got a small amount of FTP space with http access from my local ISP. I FTP in to upload the files there, but I just point any web browser to my (HTML-less) public_html directory, which returns a directory listing with the files I put in there. iDisk and FTP and such rely too much on the assumption that the client will have usable software; this method lets me grab my files from any web browser regardless of other aspects of the system (unless it's got boneheaded security measures like Kinkos).
beware: a lot of folks don't like being educated. Particularly when they are in the nominal position of authority. So you might be wise to chose your battles.
Yeah, but I (A) Don't care if I offend people by politely informing them of things, cause if they're gonna be that way then deserve worse anyway, and (B) Make sure that I'm never 'under' any 'authority figures' who would treat me that way.
Trained staff monkeys in the writing lab ultimately answer to the dean of the Media Arts department, who's a friend of mine; my bosses pay me to know more than them in my field, so I'm just doing my job there and they appreciate it; etc. If I'm ever in a situation where (politely!) offering true information is going to get me in some sort of trouble, I make sure that that situation changes very shortly.
I'm a modern day George Washington; I cannot tell a lie. I mean that practically; it makes me so uncomfortable to directly and "honestly" state something that I know to be false that it's very clear to an observer that I must be lying. My brain is very intolerant of blatant contradictions in itself.
Now, circumlocution and saying something that is technically true but sounds, to someone who's not listening carefully, like I'm saying something else entirely... that I can do. And I have in some cases when I'm really in a hurry. But when I've got time to spare I'd rather educate the ignorant masses so that maybe next time they won't bother me or someone trying to do what I'm doing.
Bad taste to follow up to one's own post, and getting off the topic of PDFs, but it might be interesting to note for anyone who likes to send files to themselves over the net as I do:
Apparently Kinkos computer policy is to universally ban any directory listings (like "http://www.localisp.com/~someuser/transferfiles/" , with no index.html in there) or direct links to PDFs (possibly other files) not referred from an HTML page (like typing "http://www.localisp.com/~someuser/transferfiles/m ypaper.pdf" directly into the address bar). So my usual strategy of sending things to myself through my own webspace doesn't work if I want to print something from a Kinkos.
It's amazing how many Joe Average Users don't seem to grok a statement like "my OS can turn anything into a PDF".
At my old college, I used to use the school's writing lab to print any papers I needed for class, since I don't do enough printing to be worth keeping my old inkjet fed with ink. However, I'm also using a G4 tower with no CD burner, and I've not had any real need for removable media since I can always transfer anything I want over the internet; put it on my webspace and download from wherever.
However, in the lab at school, there was a "no printing off the internet" policy. Nothing technical to enforce it, just a rule for the staff; the print queue from the lab computers is monitored by some staff person and each job is has to be approved before it will print. So often times I'd be standing there at the printing waiting for my job to come out and the Print Queue Nazi and I would have a conversation like this:
"Are you waiting for your job to print?" "Yeah." "What's the file called?" "Philosophy Final." "Did you get this off the internet?" "Technically, but I put it there. Why?" "There's no printing off the internet allowed." "I didn't download this from some website. That's my homework. That's my final due in 15 minutes. I made that, uploaded it to my space, and downloaded it here to print." "Why didn't you just upload a Word file?" "Cause I didn't use Word." "Then how did you write that?"
I then have to proceed to explain that there are other word processors besides Word, which they don't have and thus couldn't read my file, but that my OS can turn anything I want into a PDF that can be read just about anywhere, and that yes, in fact, some of us mere mortals DO have their own presence on the internet and I can put damn well whatever I please up there and grab it from anywhere I need! If it's so hard for him to grok I could go nextdoor to the CS lab, download it there, burn a CD, bring THAT back in here to print off of and he'll still bitch at me cause it's a PDF and not a.DOC.
Thankfully at this point there's usually a line of people waiting for their print jobs and the trained staff monkey will just print my paper for me anyway.
I have to say this is about the least interesting/offensive/disturbing/annoying/anything type of troll I have ever seen. I'm a bit disappointed in you. Not that I really care anyway.
At least Natalie Portman / Beowulf Clusters / Old People In Korea were sometimes funny. Well, maybe not the Old People In Korea ones.
I've been noticing a good number of Slashdot posts lately featuring this "[tt]" string somewhere in the text, usually in the subject; sometimes as above, just bracketing an existing "tt" in a normal word, and other times as a preface, as in "[tt]: Some subject goes here".
Is this some new Slashdotism I'm not familair with? My first assumption was that it had something to do with troll tagging ala "first posts" but not all the messages seem to be trolls, not even most of them...
Same deal here. I've been a Mac user since the Mac Plus, and that was one of only two machines (all Macs) I've owned since that have ever gotten a virus. I don't ever recall what that one was but it was pretty easily fixed.
The only virus I've gotten in anything resembling "recent" times was the SevenDust virus I got on an old Performa sometime back in the mid-late 90's or so... That one would have been a bitch to get rid of, if I hadn't have had a bootable system CD with recent antivirus software on it.
Aside from those two cases, antivirus software on the Mac has been in my experience a complete waste of time. And both times, the viruses only spread because I got an valid executable file from someone I know (on floppy back on the plus, online with SevenDust) who happened to have been infected by somehow he knew, etc. None of this spread-through-exploits crap or social-engineering malware spam. Just good, old-fashioned sex.
Last I checked (a few years ago admittatly), ALL FireWire-equipped Macs work with Target Disk Mode. So even with a Mini or even a PowerMac, he could have just used that trick.
I figured I may have been misspelling sentence, but I was too lazy to double-check. I get the feeling I may be misspelling "misspelling too", but again, can't be bothered.
I didn't catch the misspelling of 'deprecated' and again, I really don't care.
To the linguist AC above, perhaps you'd like it better if I said "ain't" for anything other than "am not" (and apparently "are not" according to someone's link) makes no etymological sense? I'm all for natural evolution of language through the logical recombination of words and their parts (I make up new words all the time that make perfect sense knowing their roots and such), but just misusing a word doesn't seem a very bright way to evolve a language.
And to Radi-0-head, you don't even want to know about my sex life. If I did you'd probably want a new pair of eyeballs afterwards.
Not to be a grammar Nazi (I probably can't even spell grammar), but "ain't" is a word, it's just depracated in modern English due to frequeny misusage (such as in the TANSTAAFL acronym). "Ain't" (or an't) is a contraction for "am not", and thus the only proper usage of it would be in the form of "I ain't...". "Is not..." and "are not.." are misusages. But technically, I ain't making any major errors in this sentance.
(And for those actual grammar Nazis out there, yes, beginning a sentance with "but" or "and" is technically acceptable as well, so don't come bitching at me about that last sentance. Or anything else for that matter. This post is offered "as is" with no guarantee of grammar, spelling, or factual correctness. YMMV).
Ah! You have at last solved for me one of the great mysteries of life - why the universe has not yet been destroyed by abuttered-cat generator failure.
You see, the hypothesized use of a buttered cat as a source of energy could in fact by exploited if only some means of levitation were introduced - no matter the means nor the amount of energy required. If you drop your buttered cat, affixed to a variable-height rod which runs into an electric generator, above a levitation device powered by the output from the generator, the buttered cat's spin as it descends will inevitable produce enough energy for the levitation device to cause the cat to slow in its descent, hovering at level and producing an indefinite power flow to the generator.
If power is siphoned off the generator to some other use, the levitation device will weaken and the cat will fall some, spinning faster and generating more power, enough to stall its descent again. As such, the more power drawn from this Buttered-Cat Generator, the greater its power output.
However, should the levitation device ever fail, I hypothesized that the buttered cat should fall and, and the moment of impact, spin infinitely fast, so as to allow both the cats feet and the buttered side of the toast to strike the ground simultaneously. Obviously, an infinite spin would require an infinite amount of energy, which would cause the complete and total destruction of the universe as energy lost to radiation - an infinite amount thereof - spread across the universe at c.
I have long since wondered how it is that this has not yet happened. The only solutions imaginable thus far were that no civilization had yet built a buttered-cat generator, or that they had maintained it so perfectly that failure had not yet occurred, or perhaps that somewhere, one had already failed, and he wave of destruction has merely not yet reached us.
But thanks to your brilliant mastery of common sense, the solution is clear to me now: the buttered cat is not an invulnerable system, and would destroy itself well before the moment of impact. In fact it is questionable whether it could fall far enough to generate enough spin to even power the levitation device.
This does have interesting applications as a weapons technology, however; should one manage to sufficiently reinforce the buttered-cat and lob it at a target, the amount of kinetic energy in the torn-apart fragments of cat and toast could possibly rival any conventional weaponry available today, and be produced at a significantly lower cost...
Tricorders are used all over the place, so much so that they usually just don't mention it by name. Every time you see someone whip out some little doodad and take a reading off something - that's a tricorder. Every time they're down on a planet wandering around looking at some handheld doodad trying to get their bearings like a compass - that's a tricorder.
It's so ubiquitous they just don't talk about it, it's just used as a part of day to day life in Trek. Like shoes or something. You don't see people talking about shoes either, do you?
Slashdot Mirror
FUD is way oldschool from long before Slashdot. Any old *.advocacy UseNet groups would sling FUD around like politicians sling mud.
EULA I believe is actually coined from within EULAs themselves (ie, "This End User Licence Agreement ("EULA")..." (gotta love nested quotes and parentheses, too)).
MS/M$ also predates Slashdot. It was often used my Mac Advocacy folks way back in the day.
OSS and F/OSS (yes, the F is for Free) are newer, coined by the free/open source software communities, of which Slashdot is a major feature.
GPL is likewise a F/OSS term, for the GNU General Public License, see http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html for details.
HTH. YMMV. HAND.
How do you pronounce it then?
Like "singe" with a 'g' sound instead of a 'j' sound at the end? ('i' as in 'tin').
Or "sing" like "sigh" with an 'ng' at the end? ('i' as in 'pine').
It helps if you elongate the word - sing a long note of "siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing!" and see what vowel sound you're making while you sustain the note.
I found this sometime aeons ago and just Google'd a copy of it online here...
t ion.shtml
http://www.mipmip.dsl.pipex.com/tidbits/pronuncia
Oh, and I forgot an important dipthong:
eh/ee
- "a" as in "gate".
And for my foreign, non-English ear, the pronounciation of the 'a' and 'e' vowels are completely distinct.
This is why is happens: phonetics. I myself often have trouble remembering which it should be because of this.
In American English, at least all the dialects I've personally heard, because the emphasis is on the first syllable, the second vowel is often neglected, and since the "a" is is pronounced as a nondescript "uh" in this context (as in both syllables of 'butter'), and the word comes off akin to "gram-rrr".
R is itself a semivowel, which can be pronounced alone without the use of any other vowels, though it isn't properly written that way. The closest vowel combination to a stand-alone "R" is "er", which is itself very close to the "ar" (with 'a' as 'uh', thus 'uhr') in "grammar", hence the easy confusion.
I once drew up a thing that you might find useful, deliniating the different vowel and dipthong sounds used in American English, arrayed in order by similarity, and the stupidly large assortment of different written letters that can make those sounds. This is from memory so it might be a bit off...
VOWEL SOUND
- LETTER EXAMPLES
ee
- "e" in "be", "i" in "sing", "y" in "very", "ea" in "eat", "ee" in "bee".
ih
- "i" in "bit"
aa
- "a" in "bat"
ah
- "o" in "bot", "a" in "car", "augh" as in "caught", "ough" as in "ought", "aw" as in "law"
eh
- "e" as in "bet"
uh
- "u" as in "but", "a" as in "a thing".
oh
- "o" as in "note", "ow" as in "throw", "oa" as in "oats", "eau" as in French
ouh
-"oo" as in "book"
oo
- "u" as in "dude", "o" as in "do", "oo" as in "pool", "ew" as in "new", "ough" as in "through", "w" as in "now" (as part of a dipthong)
And there are two dipthongs that sometimes get single-letter representations in English (the rest are just combinations of the above base sounds):
ee/oo dipthong
- "u" as in "butane" (pronounced like "you" the second person pronoun)
ah/ee dipthong
- "i" as in "kite" (pronounced like "I" the first person pronoun)
Seriously, English pronunciation is just fucked up in the namespace (amongst many other places). We need like twice as many written vowels as we've got to represent all the sounds.
Security is, by its very nature, nothing more than making certain things a pain in the ass in order to prevent them from being done. This applies to computers, to the physical world, everywhere. The stronger the security, the less the convenience, and vice versa.
Granted, the degree of inconvenience and thus security is (intentionally) disproportional from authorized users to authorized users - those who have/know the key are less inconvenienced and thus less restricted than those who don't - but there is still the inconvenience of having to keep or remember the key, and to unlock the system when you want to use it. If you use a multiple-key solution, the security gets even better but it's even more inconvenient. That's the nature of the beast.
The only perfect security is to "completely inconvenience" everyone - just kill 'em all, or destroy whatever they're trying to access. The only perfect convenience is to completely unsecure the system. These are obviously unwanted polar extremes, and the solution lies somewhere in between them - where depends entirely on context. You'd just got to find some system which makes certain things inconvenient enough that most security breaches won't be likely.
This could be a combination of physical and digital systems, even - say local login requires no authentiation but remote login is restricted, that way you've got to break the physical security in the building or the digital security over the net, but either way there is some security keeping unauthorized users out.
But if you've got the GP's hypothetical "I want to be able to log in from anywhere and do whatever I want without authentication!" user, then *anything* that will grant their wish will allow *anyone* to log in from anywhere and do whatever they want. There is no solution which could give them what they want and keep any semblance of security. The technology hasn't failed: the specs being demanded are flawed and impossible to match.
It's like designing a house without any locks because those damn keys are just so inconvenient - fine, but don't expect the doors to magically keep people out of the house while you're away. There is no lock that could possibly be created that will keep something secure without inconveniencing the user to provide some sort of key.
"Shark" jokes and such aside...
I think the reason why the grandparent poster would be upset by refusal of a patent because he didn't use a lawyer is that, if he had done it right in all other ways, requiring a lawyer is an arbitrary barrier to entry. If the response he got had said "This is wrong, that is wrong, this other thing is wrong. We recommend you seek a patent lawyer", then that would be one thing; but saying "This is wrong, that is wrong, and you need to use a lawyer" puts using a lawyer as a neccesary prerequisite even with all the other requisites of proper application. What if [this] and [that] were fine? Would he have gotten a response "Author did not use a patent lawyer. Application rejected."?
To use your doctor analogy, it would be like if you accidentally cut yourself and, unless you went to the hospital and had it professionally treated (when a simple bandage would do), your insurance would refuse further treatment of that limb because it was not treated by an authorized medical professional, even if you treated it perfectly well yourself. Or say, if you got a fix-it ticket for your car for something simple that you know how to fix yourself, but you were *required* to have the dealer fix it.
Such arbitrary barriers to entry are fascist constructs in the literal sense of the word (fascism has corporatism as a major componant). It's the government enforcing the use of certain industries' services even when the individuals could perform those services themselves; a cartel between the public and private behemoths, in essence.
As a personal aside, to touch on some of your comments about lawyers being needed due to the complexity of law: I consider that a sign of a fundamentally flawed system. Any government whose laws necessitate the use of lawyers is too complex and opaque. An average citizen of a country should reasonably be able to understand the laws he is expected to obey in full; otherwise, he cannot justifiably be held accountable for the infraction or violation of those laws.
If ignorance of the law is no excuse, as our government claims it to be, then the law should be so simple and obvious that we can teach it in its entirity to our children in school, so by the time they are adults and held responsible, they know in full what they are responsible for.
This is another effect of the same universal problem that has affected all of human civilization since history began, and manifests itself most obviously in politics. Namely:
A couple of evil/manipulative/powerful people can take the vast hordes of stupid/gullible/trusting people and make all sort of problems for the everybody involved, including all those of us who don't fit neatly into either category and often other evil/powerful people as well. Hell, even the evil/powerful ones at the top lose out in the very long term, as civilization (or in this case, the internet) eventually collapses out from underneath them...
You probably shouldn't go to work anywhere that has Union employees, then. They can file a grievance against you and your supervisor if you piss them off. The worst part is that you can't do anything about this other than leave the company.
Yeah, well I dislike unions as much as I dislike corporations and governments. Big monolithic anything just rubs me wrong and I avoid them as much as possible.
If my friend had simply apologized and left the chair where it was, he could have waited until the Union guys left at 5 and moved the chair to his office.
Well, aside from the union guy being an asshat and immediately filing a complaint for daring to question him, I'd probably have done about the same if I were stuck in that situation. If he was gonna be an obstinant ass about it, I'd say OK, I'll put in a work order, then wait for him to leave, and then move the chair anyway.
The moral of the story is that you have to pick your battles, and trying to educate the masses just isn't a good idea.
For the most part I don't bother. If someone wants to be ignorant of their own accord, let them, their funeral. But if it's causing me grief then I've got every right in the world to argue my position until they either prove me wrong (which I'll accept if they've got a good coutnerargument) or concede themselves.
Try "Did I print it from the web? No." Technically true, but most people that equate the internet as being the web won't see that other services also can run over it, like FTP or iDisk or whatever you're using.
But technically I *am* using the web. I've got a small amount of FTP space with http access from my local ISP. I FTP in to upload the files there, but I just point any web browser to my (HTML-less) public_html directory, which returns a directory listing with the files I put in there. iDisk and FTP and such rely too much on the assumption that the client will have usable software; this method lets me grab my files from any web browser regardless of other aspects of the system (unless it's got boneheaded security measures like Kinkos).
beware: a lot of folks don't like being educated. Particularly when they are in the nominal position of authority. So you might be wise to chose your battles.
Yeah, but I (A) Don't care if I offend people by politely informing them of things, cause if they're gonna be that way then deserve worse anyway, and (B) Make sure that I'm never 'under' any 'authority figures' who would treat me that way.
Trained staff monkeys in the writing lab ultimately answer to the dean of the Media Arts department, who's a friend of mine; my bosses pay me to know more than them in my field, so I'm just doing my job there and they appreciate it; etc. If I'm ever in a situation where (politely!) offering true information is going to get me in some sort of trouble, I make sure that that situation changes very shortly.
I'm a modern day George Washington; I cannot tell a lie. I mean that practically; it makes me so uncomfortable to directly and "honestly" state something that I know to be false that it's very clear to an observer that I must be lying. My brain is very intolerant of blatant contradictions in itself.
Now, circumlocution and saying something that is technically true but sounds, to someone who's not listening carefully, like I'm saying something else entirely... that I can do. And I have in some cases when I'm really in a hurry. But when I've got time to spare I'd rather educate the ignorant masses so that maybe next time they won't bother me or someone trying to do what I'm doing.
Bad taste to follow up to one's own post, and getting off the topic of PDFs, but it might be interesting to note for anyone who likes to send files to themselves over the net as I do:
" , with no index.html in there) or direct links to PDFs (possibly other files) not referred from an HTML page (like typing "http://www.localisp.com/~someuser/transferfiles/m ypaper.pdf" directly into the address bar). So my usual strategy of sending things to myself through my own webspace doesn't work if I want to print something from a Kinkos.
Apparently Kinkos computer policy is to universally ban any directory listings (like "http://www.localisp.com/~someuser/transferfiles/
It's amazing how many Joe Average Users don't seem to grok a statement like "my OS can turn anything into a PDF".
.DOC.
At my old college, I used to use the school's writing lab to print any papers I needed for class, since I don't do enough printing to be worth keeping my old inkjet fed with ink. However, I'm also using a G4 tower with no CD burner, and I've not had any real need for removable media since I can always transfer anything I want over the internet; put it on my webspace and download from wherever.
However, in the lab at school, there was a "no printing off the internet" policy. Nothing technical to enforce it, just a rule for the staff; the print queue from the lab computers is monitored by some staff person and each job is has to be approved before it will print. So often times I'd be standing there at the printing waiting for my job to come out and the Print Queue Nazi and I would have a conversation like this:
"Are you waiting for your job to print?"
"Yeah."
"What's the file called?"
"Philosophy Final."
"Did you get this off the internet?"
"Technically, but I put it there. Why?"
"There's no printing off the internet allowed."
"I didn't download this from some website. That's my homework. That's my final due in 15 minutes. I made that, uploaded it to my space, and downloaded it here to print."
"Why didn't you just upload a Word file?"
"Cause I didn't use Word."
"Then how did you write that?"
I then have to proceed to explain that there are other word processors besides Word, which they don't have and thus couldn't read my file, but that my OS can turn anything I want into a PDF that can be read just about anywhere, and that yes, in fact, some of us mere mortals DO have their own presence on the internet and I can put damn well whatever I please up there and grab it from anywhere I need! If it's so hard for him to grok I could go nextdoor to the CS lab, download it there, burn a CD, bring THAT back in here to print off of and he'll still bitch at me cause it's a PDF and not a
Thankfully at this point there's usually a line of people waiting for their print jobs and the trained staff monkey will just print my paper for me anyway.
Found you.
g type of troll I have ever seen. I'm a bit disappointed in you. Not that I really care anyway.
I have to say this is about the least interesting/offensive/disturbing/annoying/anythin
At least Natalie Portman / Beowulf Clusters / Old People In Korea were sometimes funny. Well, maybe not the Old People In Korea ones.
I've been noticing a good number of Slashdot posts lately featuring this "[tt]" string somewhere in the text, usually in the subject; sometimes as above, just bracketing an existing "tt" in a normal word, and other times as a preface, as in "[tt]: Some subject goes here".
Is this some new Slashdotism I'm not familair with? My first assumption was that it had something to do with troll tagging ala "first posts" but not all the messages seem to be trolls, not even most of them...
Same deal here. I've been a Mac user since the Mac Plus, and that was one of only two machines (all Macs) I've owned since that have ever gotten a virus. I don't ever recall what that one was but it was pretty easily fixed.
The only virus I've gotten in anything resembling "recent" times was the SevenDust virus I got on an old Performa sometime back in the mid-late 90's or so... That one would have been a bitch to get rid of, if I hadn't have had a bootable system CD with recent antivirus software on it.
Aside from those two cases, antivirus software on the Mac has been in my experience a complete waste of time. And both times, the viruses only spread because I got an valid executable file from someone I know (on floppy back on the plus, online with SevenDust) who happened to have been infected by somehow he knew, etc. None of this spread-through-exploits crap or social-engineering malware spam. Just good, old-fashioned sex.
Random Google for "Koalas Kill People" returned this:
e lo sitodiablo.html
http://www.koalabearsarebears.freewebspace.com/
Vampire Koalas, Tribble Peeps, and the Four Cupcakes of the Apocalypse.
I think my fever must be getting worse...
Last I checked (a few years ago admittatly), ALL FireWire-equipped Macs work with Target Disk Mode. So even with a Mini or even a PowerMac, he could have just used that trick.
Please see the disclaimer in my previous post.
I figured I may have been misspelling sentence, but I was too lazy to double-check. I get the feeling I may be misspelling "misspelling too", but again, can't be bothered.
I didn't catch the misspelling of 'deprecated' and again, I really don't care.
To the linguist AC above, perhaps you'd like it better if I said "ain't" for anything other than "am not" (and apparently "are not" according to someone's link) makes no etymological sense? I'm all for natural evolution of language through the logical recombination of words and their parts (I make up new words all the time that make perfect sense knowing their roots and such), but just misusing a word doesn't seem a very bright way to evolve a language.
And to Radi-0-head, you don't even want to know about my sex life. If I did you'd probably want a new pair of eyeballs afterwards.
Not to be a grammar Nazi (I probably can't even spell grammar), but "ain't" is a word, it's just depracated in modern English due to frequeny misusage (such as in the TANSTAAFL acronym). "Ain't" (or an't) is a contraction for "am not", and thus the only proper usage of it would be in the form of "I ain't...". "Is not..." and "are not.." are misusages. But technically, I ain't making any major errors in this sentance.
(And for those actual grammar Nazis out there, yes, beginning a sentance with "but" or "and" is technically acceptable as well, so don't come bitching at me about that last sentance. Or anything else for that matter. This post is offered "as is" with no guarantee of grammar, spelling, or factual correctness. YMMV).
Hey, is that downtown San Luis Obispo?
Your name and your sig are remarkably appropriate.
Ah! You have at last solved for me one of the great mysteries of life - why the universe has not yet been destroyed by abuttered-cat generator failure.
You see, the hypothesized use of a buttered cat as a source of energy could in fact by exploited if only some means of levitation were introduced - no matter the means nor the amount of energy required. If you drop your buttered cat, affixed to a variable-height rod which runs into an electric generator, above a levitation device powered by the output from the generator, the buttered cat's spin as it descends will inevitable produce enough energy for the levitation device to cause the cat to slow in its descent, hovering at level and producing an indefinite power flow to the generator.
If power is siphoned off the generator to some other use, the levitation device will weaken and the cat will fall some, spinning faster and generating more power, enough to stall its descent again. As such, the more power drawn from this Buttered-Cat Generator, the greater its power output.
However, should the levitation device ever fail, I hypothesized that the buttered cat should fall and, and the moment of impact, spin infinitely fast, so as to allow both the cats feet and the buttered side of the toast to strike the ground simultaneously. Obviously, an infinite spin would require an infinite amount of energy, which would cause the complete and total destruction of the universe as energy lost to radiation - an infinite amount thereof - spread across the universe at c.
I have long since wondered how it is that this has not yet happened. The only solutions imaginable thus far were that no civilization had yet built a buttered-cat generator, or that they had maintained it so perfectly that failure had not yet occurred, or perhaps that somewhere, one had already failed, and he wave of destruction has merely not yet reached us.
But thanks to your brilliant mastery of common sense, the solution is clear to me now: the buttered cat is not an invulnerable system, and would destroy itself well before the moment of impact. In fact it is questionable whether it could fall far enough to generate enough spin to even power the levitation device.
This does have interesting applications as a weapons technology, however; should one manage to sufficiently reinforce the buttered-cat and lob it at a target, the amount of kinetic energy in the torn-apart fragments of cat and toast could possibly rival any conventional weaponry available today, and be produced at a significantly lower cost...
1). We're already used to it being free
2.) The payment barrier still sucks [...]
5.) Profit!
Three, sir!
Tricorders are used all over the place, so much so that they usually just don't mention it by name. Every time you see someone whip out some little doodad and take a reading off something - that's a tricorder. Every time they're down on a planet wandering around looking at some handheld doodad trying to get their bearings like a compass - that's a tricorder.
It's so ubiquitous they just don't talk about it, it's just used as a part of day to day life in Trek. Like shoes or something. You don't see people talking about shoes either, do you?