The Swiss ball idea is interesting, but it seems to me that one could achieve the same effect by taking a secretary's chair (swivel chair on casters, no arms) and removing the back; older chairs have adjustable-height backs that can be pulled entirely out of the chair seat. Not only might this be cheaper, it would look a little less odd to coworkers than sitting on an inflated spheroid might.
I have some arthritis in my hands, and the Logitech Trackman Marble FX is the only trackball out there that seems to have been designed for a human hand. They're so good that I own two -- one for home, one for work.
Now, if I could just find a Linux driver for it...(sigh) There's as much chance of my being able to *write* a driver as there is of flying to the moon in my pickup truck.
What a stupid choice of person to name suitcases after. Amelia may have a certain cachet as America's premier '30's aviatrix, but hey...will your luggage ever arrive at its destination?
...for lack of a better term: Bush's campaign management team are really shooting themselves in the foot over this one by not thinking through the perceptions they generate in going after Exley (the guy who did the parody site). Whenever you counterattack, never create a martyr or an underdog whose cause the press can trumpet. Not only are Bush and co. going to be perceived as trying to beat up on a little guy; they're allowing the Washington Post to call undue attention to a parody site that would've remained relatively obscure instead.
Bush's "some freedoms...limited" remark is symptomatic of his hot-headedness. Plenty of us/.ers are liberal/libertarian enough that the freedom-limiting stance is anathema anyway, but I for one don't want a President who reacts to perceived slurs in this fashion -- he ought to save his temper tantrums for a punching bag in the office.
it would probably start out as a part of the Air Force
Yep...right up US Hwy 378 from me in Sumter, SC, at Shaw AFB, is the home of "the Fighting 609th," the 609th Information Warfare Squadron. I think they've been featured on the Discovery Channel.
The Marines are technically part of the Navy, although... they tend to do just as much stuff seperately as they do together.
OK, here's the deal, basically: (1) Both are overseen at the Cabinet level by the Dep't of the Navy (the SecNav), and the two branches have complementary missions. The Corps are naval light infantry with supporting air wings of their own. There's also some overlap in tactical air: Marine squadrons rotating into carrier air wings, Navy providing some CAS for Marine ground missions. (2) *Part* of the Navy, the 'phibs, are effectively the Corps' "chauffeurs" and the Corps does a lot of the security at Navy bases and aboard the larger ships (generally anything big enough to be a flag for a battle group, like a carrier). (3) A lot of strategic and support functions, like medical, legal, administrative, and chaplains, are Navy for Marine Corps and USN alike.
I've never screwed my hat on for a living (Marines are called "jarheads" by sailors looking to start fistfights;D ) but my mostly-Navy family has a retarded^H^H^Hretired Marine officer in it, although we don't talk about him much.
So...whaddya suppose the USCF enlisted insignia will look like? Chevrons with a string of ones and zeroes instead of stars, "crows," crossed rifles etc?
The Yorktown...every time I think of her, I imagine a tense voice over the 1MC: "Conn, CIC! Windows NT close aboard, designate Raid One, threat axis is...oh, forget it!"
Why don't tech writers write plainly about what is going on?
Whoa!! Don't paint all us TWs with that broad brush, quonzar. Most of us have never been within hollering distance of Redmond. Quite honestly, the TWs at M$ may never have even thought to question the difference between "previewing" and "opening" email--until now. Given the newly obsolete conventional wisdom that opening an email can't hurt you, I'd have to say this one falls under the "Hey, who knew?" category of goof.
OTOH, with M$, who knows? An M$ tech editor I knew told me that the writers are sort of isolated from the rest of the editorial team -- I'm not sure what she meant, because that's not a sensible way to produce documentation. Any M$ TWs or TEs out there, please correct my ignorance.
The Blackbirds are at Davis-Monthan, I think. Not the graveyard part where they chop up the airframes for scrap; they're carefully mothballed for the next time they're needed. They've already been out of service and back in again for Desert Storm.
And what the other guy wrote abt the synth-ap radar, that makes sense. Lake Murray is mostly less than 100 feet (~32 m) deep, and I do know that multiple images of the same target can be composited using software to get a synthetically sharpened image with the "noise" reduced. Still, when I heard abt using radio-wavelength ANYTHING to image thru water, I about flipped.
Forgive my flaming cyncism, but the way the legislative process really works in this country anymore is, it ain't really law until somebody sues and it's upheld. When I see a lawsuit over whether an e-sig is binding, I'll believe the technology's mature in all respects.
Fellow/.'ers, please feel invited to correct any ignorance on my part.
The Big E under pvt ownership??? C'mon, Neal!
on
Snow Crash
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· Score: 1
As wonderful as this book is in so many ways, the idea of the USS Enterprise becoming private property is, to put it mildly, a bit of a stretch. The USN Dept of Naval Reactors doesn't like to let anybody but the "made guys" see any of the workings of their steamkettles; likewise, other parts of the powertrain and elsewhere in the ship (arresting gear, comm stuff) is not for public consumption and can't be removed from the ship without a *major* overhaul that essentially turns it inside out. I don't think the DoD and the Navy would agree to risking a security breach like that when it's a more time-honored custom to turn a marginally-performing hull into razor blades.
Yep, the National Reconnaisance Office -- yer tax dollars at work.:)
Movies necessarily jazz up the presentation and create some false impressions thereby, but the NRO's "national technical means" are, well, pretty darn good. Although anybody who actually uses the stuff has signed an agreement saying they won't discuss or divulge performance capabilities of their toys, it's not unheard of to be able to ID specific persons (the right-shaped blur in the right place at the right time), and there have been some rumors about extremely-long-focal-length sats able to read license plates. (Hell, I heard somebody brag once about being able to read the Titleist logo and count the dimples on a golf ball, but that's millimeter resolution -- that doesn't seem likely.)
At wavelengths other than the visible EM spectrum, the capabilities get even more interesting -- like being able to tell what's at the *bottom* of a shallow body of water using radar. (Sounds like rubbish to me, but somebody swore that on a radar-sat image, he could see a crashed WW II B-25 Mitchell bomber at the bottom of Lake Murray in South Carolina. Personally, I think he looks at clouds a lot and says, "I see a doggie, a duckie, a Backfire bomber, and a fnord.")
To actually get candid answers from BG would best be left as an exercise for students of improvised field interrogation. (I recommend handcuffs and a set of jumper cables.)
Something that may be closer to many slashdot readers, myopia. Who wouldn't want to free theur children from the need to wear glasses? However, correlations have been found between myopia and intelligence. Is it because four-eyes like to read, or is there a genetic link between brain size and the size of the eyeball? If it comes down to an either or, do you pick between a brainy kid who may need glasses, or a less smart kid who doesn't?
George, don't forget that there's also a very tight correlation between the length of a person's thumb and his/her measured intelligence on the Stanford-Binet! As a baby's thumb gets longer, the rest of him/her grows up, and as he reaches maturity his/her IQ peaks as well.
Not to pick at ya; just pointing out how careful you have to be with statistically based arguments.
When -- not if -- human eugenic engineering becomes a reality, we'll undoubtedly be able to choose the babies' sex. I think that in the West, but even more so in Asian countries, there's a predilection for parents to favor sons over daughters. If this were to happen, the long-term social consequences of adolescent males with lessened chances of finding a mate make me think of Frank Herbert's The White Plague and Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age.
I've noticed from time to time that this extends to AOLers on/. as well. Back when we had the flap over "ni**er.com" and the NAACP, I got into a side discussion with a software engineer of African ancestry who pointed out that I could now understand how other's perceptions of oneself could be predjudiced by some relatively shallow cues.
It ain't stored in the clear on ANY of my three machines; I type it.
Your point's well taken, however. A sufficiently adept and motivated cracker could probably find a way to retrieve this off a client machine. Worse, I've heard (dunno if true) that AOHell can intercept a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff at the server end; if somebody's logging off one screen name and onto another, I wonder if they'd be vulnerable.
Further, I'd like to suggest that whether they recognize it in theory, they've tended not to enforce it in practice unless browbeaten into doing so (threats of revoking MFN status, and so forth). I understand from a Chinese student here in Columbia that it's still fairly easy to get ahold of pirated copies of . Maybe I'm conflating street marketing practices with coding and expecting higher standards of the latter. I get a general sense that the software community Over There is, shall we say, prosaic when it suits their interests.
I'm a Yank and my clueless government irritates me no end -- around here, only the relatively wealthy and vacuous can withstand the death march of running for election. It's why I've given up on our two-party system and voted Libertarian the last decade or so.
More to the point, what happens if somebody abroad creates really bitchin' encryption and posts the source code on a non-US site? Does this provide a workaround to the idiotic munitions-export rule? If so, maybe somebody needs to tutor somebody via pseudocode.
Yep, Win95's UI is pretty excremental. But there's the "Eat $h1t -- 5 billion flies can't be wrong" aspect to consider. What are 100 million users already familiar with, even though it's not the most efficient and well-thought-out design?
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Goodbye, Don. Thanks for all the laffs.
The Swiss ball idea is interesting, but it seems to me that one could achieve the same effect by taking a secretary's chair (swivel chair on casters, no arms) and removing the back; older chairs have adjustable-height backs that can be pulled entirely out of the chair seat. Not only might this be cheaper, it would look a little less odd to coworkers than sitting on an inflated spheroid might.
Now, if I could just find a Linux driver for it...(sigh) There's as much chance of my being able to *write* a driver as there is of flying to the moon in my pickup truck.
What a stupid choice of person to name suitcases after. Amelia may have a certain cachet as America's premier '30's aviatrix, but hey...will your luggage ever arrive at its destination?
...for lack of a better term: Bush's campaign management team are really shooting themselves in the foot over this one by not thinking through the perceptions they generate in going after Exley (the guy who did the parody site). Whenever you counterattack, never create a martyr or an underdog whose cause the press can trumpet. Not only are Bush and co. going to be perceived as trying to beat up on a little guy; they're allowing the Washington Post to call undue attention to a parody site that would've remained relatively obscure instead.
Bush's "some freedoms...limited" remark is symptomatic of his hot-headedness. Plenty of us /.ers are liberal/libertarian enough that the freedom-limiting stance is anathema anyway, but I for one don't want a President who reacts to perceived slurs in this fashion -- he ought to save his temper tantrums for a punching bag in the office.
it would probably start out as a part of the Air Force
Yep...right up US Hwy 378 from me in Sumter, SC, at Shaw AFB, is the home of "the Fighting 609th," the 609th Information Warfare Squadron. I think they've been featured on the Discovery Channel.
The Marines are technically part of the Navy, although ... they tend to do just as much stuff seperately as they do together.
OK, here's the deal, basically: (1) Both are overseen at the Cabinet level by the Dep't of the Navy (the SecNav), and the two branches have complementary missions. The Corps are naval light infantry with supporting air wings of their own. There's also some overlap in tactical air: Marine squadrons rotating into carrier air wings, Navy providing some CAS for Marine ground missions. (2) *Part* of the Navy, the 'phibs, are effectively the Corps' "chauffeurs" and the Corps does a lot of the security at Navy bases and aboard the larger ships (generally anything big enough to be a flag for a battle group, like a carrier). (3) A lot of strategic and support functions, like medical, legal, administrative, and chaplains, are Navy for Marine Corps and USN alike.
I've never screwed my hat on for a living (Marines are called "jarheads" by sailors looking to start fistfights ;D ) but my mostly-Navy family has a retarded^H^H^Hretired Marine officer in it, although we don't talk about him much.
So...whaddya suppose the USCF enlisted insignia will look like? Chevrons with a string of ones and zeroes instead of stars, "crows," crossed rifles etc?
The Yorktown...every time I think of her, I imagine a tense voice over the 1MC: "Conn, CIC! Windows NT close aboard, designate Raid One, threat axis is...oh, forget it!"
Why don't tech writers write plainly about what is going on?
Whoa!! Don't paint all us TWs with that broad brush, quonzar. Most of us have never been within hollering distance of Redmond. Quite honestly, the TWs at M$ may never have even thought to question the difference between "previewing" and "opening" email--until now. Given the newly obsolete conventional wisdom that opening an email can't hurt you, I'd have to say this one falls under the "Hey, who knew?" category of goof.
OTOH, with M$, who knows? An M$ tech editor I knew told me that the writers are sort of isolated from the rest of the editorial team -- I'm not sure what she meant, because that's not a sensible way to produce documentation. Any M$ TWs or TEs out there, please correct my ignorance.
At least they aren't Marines.
The Blackbirds are at Davis-Monthan, I think. Not the graveyard part where they chop up the airframes for scrap; they're carefully mothballed for the next time they're needed. They've already been out of service and back in again for Desert Storm.
And what the other guy wrote abt the synth-ap radar, that makes sense. Lake Murray is mostly less than 100 feet (~32 m) deep, and I do know that multiple images of the same target can be composited using software to get a synthetically sharpened image with the "noise" reduced. Still, when I heard abt using radio-wavelength ANYTHING to image thru water, I about flipped.
Forgive my flaming cyncism, but the way the legislative process really works in this country anymore is, it ain't really law until somebody sues and it's upheld. When I see a lawsuit over whether an e-sig is binding, I'll believe the technology's mature in all respects.
Fellow /.'ers, please feel invited to correct any ignorance on my part.
As wonderful as this book is in so many ways, the idea of the USS Enterprise becoming private property is, to put it mildly, a bit of a stretch. The USN Dept of Naval Reactors doesn't like to let anybody but the "made guys" see any of the workings of their steamkettles; likewise, other parts of the powertrain and elsewhere in the ship (arresting gear, comm stuff) is not for public consumption and can't be removed from the ship without a *major* overhaul that essentially turns it inside out. I don't think the DoD and the Navy would agree to risking a security breach like that when it's a more time-honored custom to turn a marginally-performing hull into razor blades.
Best to ya, Neal.
Yabbut whom do you suppose underwrote the development of the technology to do this in the first place (if not the very images presented as examples)?
Yep, the National Reconnaisance Office -- yer tax dollars at work. :)
Movies necessarily jazz up the presentation and create some false impressions thereby, but the NRO's "national technical means" are, well, pretty darn good. Although anybody who actually uses the stuff has signed an agreement saying they won't discuss or divulge performance capabilities of their toys, it's not unheard of to be able to ID specific persons (the right-shaped blur in the right place at the right time), and there have been some rumors about extremely-long-focal-length sats able to read license plates. (Hell, I heard somebody brag once about being able to read the Titleist logo and count the dimples on a golf ball, but that's millimeter resolution -- that doesn't seem likely.)
At wavelengths other than the visible EM spectrum, the capabilities get even more interesting -- like being able to tell what's at the *bottom* of a shallow body of water using radar. (Sounds like rubbish to me, but somebody swore that on a radar-sat image, he could see a crashed WW II B-25 Mitchell bomber at the bottom of Lake Murray in South Carolina. Personally, I think he looks at clouds a lot and says, "I see a doggie, a duckie, a Backfire bomber, and a fnord.")
To actually get candid answers from BG would best be left as an exercise for students of improvised field interrogation. (I recommend handcuffs and a set of jumper cables.)
Something that may be closer to many slashdot readers, myopia. Who wouldn't want to free theur children from the need to wear glasses? However, correlations have been found between myopia and intelligence. Is it because four-eyes like to read, or is there a genetic link between brain size and the size of the eyeball? If it comes down to an either or, do you pick between a brainy kid who may need glasses, or a less smart kid who doesn't?
George, don't forget that there's also a very tight correlation between the length of a person's thumb and his/her measured intelligence on the Stanford-Binet! As a baby's thumb gets longer, the rest of him/her grows up, and as he reaches maturity his/her IQ peaks as well.
Not to pick at ya; just pointing out how careful you have to be with statistically based arguments.
When -- not if -- human eugenic engineering becomes a reality, we'll undoubtedly be able to choose the babies' sex. I think that in the West, but even more so in Asian countries, there's a predilection for parents to favor sons over daughters. If this were to happen, the long-term social consequences of adolescent males with lessened chances of finding a mate make me think of Frank Herbert's The White Plague and Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age.
While a lot of /. rips AOL,....
I've noticed from time to time that this extends to AOLers on /. as well. Back when we had the flap over "ni**er.com" and the NAACP, I got into a side discussion with a software engineer of African ancestry who pointed out that I could now understand how other's perceptions of oneself could be predjudiced by some relatively shallow cues.
Pls excuse the off-topic "waaaah."
Damn, there go my skeet targets. Back to spending $$ for clay pigeons.
It ain't stored in the clear on ANY of my three machines; I type it.
Your point's well taken, however. A sufficiently adept and motivated cracker could probably find a way to retrieve this off a client machine. Worse, I've heard (dunno if true) that AOHell can intercept a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff at the server end; if somebody's logging off one screen name and onto another, I wonder if they'd be vulnerable.
Further, I'd like to suggest that whether they recognize it in theory, they've tended not to enforce it in practice unless browbeaten into doing so (threats of revoking MFN status, and so forth). I understand from a Chinese student here in Columbia that it's still fairly easy to get ahold of pirated copies of . Maybe I'm conflating street marketing practices with coding and expecting higher standards of the latter. I get a general sense that the software community Over There is, shall we say, prosaic when it suits their interests.
What the hell...if the state legislature in Tennessee can decide to make pi = 22/7 by just saying so, what's to stop Congresscritters?
I'm a Yank and my clueless government irritates me no end -- around here, only the relatively wealthy and vacuous can withstand the death march of running for election. It's why I've given up on our two-party system and voted Libertarian the last decade or so.
More to the point, what happens if somebody abroad creates really bitchin' encryption and posts the source code on a non-US site? Does this provide a workaround to the idiotic munitions-export rule? If so, maybe somebody needs to tutor somebody via pseudocode.
Yep, Win95's UI is pretty excremental. But there's the "Eat $h1t -- 5 billion flies can't be wrong" aspect to consider. What are 100 million users already familiar with, even though it's not the most efficient and well-thought-out design?