The common sense rule still applies: don't ever post anything that you wouldn't want to be fully public. I never understood what was so difficult about this that motivates people to keep trying to find ways around it.
The only thing that seems to be difficult is convincing people that this basic rule applies to everyone, no matter whether they be goodies or baddies. The fact is, people are reluctant to accept responsibility when their own stupidity comes back to bite them on the ass.
Trouble is, Facebook doesn't have much (apart from a dodgy honour system) in the way of identification of individuals. I have often wondered (hypothetically) how things would pan out if I were a defendant in court where evidence from Facebook posts were presented against me.
I do not have a Facebook account, and for a variety of reasons never will, but I often wonder how I would convince a court of that, given that I can find half a dozen individuals there who share the same name as myself.
Does the lighting law include the energy used to make and dispose of the product?
As a matter of curiosity, it would be interesting to know how many Slashdotters actually take the trouble to dispose of their defunct lightbulbs and other electrical or electronic goods "responsibly". In my case, I do make an attempt, but am not under any illusion that other agencies "downstream" necessarily do anything more than accept the goods and chuck them into landfill along with other rubbish.
Although this might be (correctly, I suppose) regarded as being deliberately flamebaity, it might be worth pointing out that from an evolutionary point of view, blocking construction of cell towers around places of worship would be otiose.;-)
This gives us something to think about, however. It's one thing for (hundreds of) thousands of people to fill the aether in each cell with their mindless yabbering at each other over their phones, but as mobile phone usage approaches 100% of the population, with the added load of data traffic from smartphones, iPads and other devices, it is easy to visualise a scenario where metropolitan phone users find it difficult to jam so much as a metaphorical toe into the flood of traffic.
I can imagine an iPhone user grinding his teeth waiting for a typical media-intensive webpage to load at 9600 baud. In a way it would be funny, if only we hadn't allowed ourselves to become so dependent on this technology.
I didn't, but the simplest aspect of this is that with a CD it's simple to make a backup that is 100% identical to the original. This was never possible with vinyl - lots of us went to considerable lengths to copy LPs as well as we could, but unless you had a first-rate reel-to-reel machine it just wasn't possible to make a really good copy.
so vinyl sounds like it has more punch because - guess what? - due to having a higher dynamic range, it does.
Actually, although I'm a big fan of vinyl, it can be argued that it actually has less dynamic range than digital; nearly all (with the rare exception of the Full Dynamic Range discs) vinyl recordings are pre-processed with an "RIAA" compression in order to compensate for the difficulty of keeping the needle in its groove in the noisy bits. Decompression on playback is (usually) handled by the pre-amp. That's why some amplifiers have a separate phono input from the line-level inputs.
Vinyl is often characterised as giving a "warmer" sound reproduction, which I guess probably reflects a comparatively low degree of responsiveness at higher frequencies.
Personally, I would never have been able to sit through Miles Davis' classic Kinda [sic] Blue if it had been compressed all to hell.
That is one of my "go-to" albums for testing out stereo systems. Although recorded over 50 years ago, it is so incredibly well recorded (quite apart from being fucking good music), it exposes the slightest defect in any sound system.
Even if the turntable were fitted with a decent cartridge, needle and tone arm, there's no way that USB can be made into a good connection. You don't have to (and shouldn't, unless you enjoy being gullible) pay hundreds of dollars for your cables, but even the crappy lamp cables you get from Radio Shack would be better.
It's perfectly possible to get quite a good setup at a pretty much budget price. My setup is a Pro-Ject Debut III with a Nad PP-2 pre-amp plugged into the back of an Audigy 2 ZS soundcard. If you shop around, you could probably get this for about $300 all up. I didn't pay much more, and I went to a bricks-and-mortar shop. Obviously, there are lots of ways to improve on this outfit, but the usual law of diminishing returns applies.
Also, a note for those unused to vinyl: because it's essentially a mechanical component, a new cartridge will give a somewhat thin sound, as it needs "running in" for some time to develop its full responsiveness.
If you're straining to read text, you should really consider getting your eyesight properly assessed. No point worrying about vanity: if you need glasses, then you need glasses. Just find yourself a really cool pair.
I agree with all of your points, but if a decent e-reader had been available when I was doing my degree in biotech, I would have snapped at a chance to avoid having to buy and carry around all those massive, thick large-format textbooks. However, even if the downloads were available, I'm not convinced there's a single e-reader on the market even now that is technically capable of rendering them satisfactorily.
I would also quite like a reader for those texts from Project Gutenberg that I might only read once, but I think I'll wait until the technology gets better and more affordable. But generally, if a book is worth re-reading, it's worth buying on paper in the first place.
Calling the iPod a smaller version of the iPad is like calling a flip phone a small netbook...
Not really. The iPod Touch and the iPad have more similarities than differences, and there's little point in discussing usability, since that is entirely at the mercy of Apple.
The iPad looks very attractive, but it is essentially (like that manufacturer's other handheld products) just a media box. From my point of view, Apple has missed the boat. I would have welcomed an iPad that ran OS X with the bells that come with it, most particularly the *nix shell of my choice (zsh if anyone cares).
In other words, what I really is a tablet computer, not just a locked-in box that dishes up any trinkets and baubles that Apple cares to sell me.
Well said. I get very tired of all this whining about the flavour of this or that GPL licence, but they are all pretty much fair by comparison with the proprietary alternative.
I've written a basic VoIP app using Speex over UDP and, while not Skype, it was usable with 10% packet loss
That's not bad. Skype is good in lots of ways, but I'm all for a FOSS alternative. Although I have successfully managed to use Skype over a 56k dialup connection (obviously sans video), my worst experience to date was a time when my only connection was a (basic-rate) satellite link, where upstream latency made any kind of VOIP conversation entirely one-sided.
In a few months I'm going go be moving from Perth (Western Australia) to an isolated spot in Tasmania where I'm not going to be able to get any kind of "hard" copper or fibre connection, so I'll have to look at this issue again. I know there's always wireless (at a price, with tight traffic allowances), but if anyone can suggest a satellite link with good upstream speeds, I would be interested to read any input.
I wonder if phones will ever evolve to have email-length texts?
I doubt if the limitation is with the hardware, except in so far as it is designed to work with some political or ideological definition of SMS in GSM or related protocols that limits such messages to 160 characters. But this definition seems more or less arbitrary.
An email sent using a phone would be similarly brief.
Heh. If it can't be said with quill and parchment, then it isn't worth saying.
Sage I stood as I awaited thee, and
Awaiting the tardy Greyhound bus to Widgiemooltha
While frittering my time
Clipping my toenails.
For thus my parody of Milton
Doth merit kicking me in the nuts
... but most people don't carry their bookmarks in their pocket.
There was a time when I used to do exactly that. But although my bookmarks file is now several MB in size, having added to it since the early '90s, I could (and soon probably will) just get rid of it, since I usually just google everything other than a couple of dozen URLs anyway.
An even easier trick is to simply skip to their Advanced Search page. How you choose to do so is up to you - my solution is a simple local homepage with a table of commonly visited URLs with corresponding icons, but that's just how I like to work.
I'm not a NoScript user, but I do have an extensive/etc/hosts file and Adblock, and I don't seem to make this feature work at all. I guess I could try disabling one or the other, but I suspect I'm not missing much.
However, the autocompletion thingy under the search box can provide hours of mindless entertainment, like this one I found just now: "I'm b" -> "I'm being eaten by a boa constrictor". Until a few weeks ago "I like to" used to give something like "I like to tape my thumbs to my palms to see what it would be like to be a dinosaur", but that doesn't seem to work any more...
Agreed, internet speeds suck in Perth. But I'm not sure why Optus has been singled out for consideration - I can't think of any ISP that doesn't apply this rule.
I'm sorry, but as a Burroughs B3700 guy, it's really hard to watch a VMS guy get a chuckle at somebody else given their chosen OS's inferiority and not have a chuckle about it myself.
And yes, I actually was a B3700 guy. Now get off my lawn.;-)
In any case, I don't really see what Intel has to gain from this. Why not simply sell their CPUs capable of their maximum speed and charge $50 extra in the first place? This would save them the trouble and expense of setting up and maintaining a lot of server architecture, and maintain customer goodwill into the bargain. A customer who has been blackmailed once is going to think twice before coming back.
Pirated or jailbroken, that is one CPU I will not buy. Intentionally holding a gun to the customer's head by crippling the device until you pay a ransom is not a way to get my business.
Slashdot Mirror
The common sense rule still applies: don't ever post anything that you wouldn't want to be fully public. I never understood what was so difficult about this that motivates people to keep trying to find ways around it.
The only thing that seems to be difficult is convincing people that this basic rule applies to everyone, no matter whether they be goodies or baddies. The fact is, people are reluctant to accept responsibility when their own stupidity comes back to bite them on the ass.
Trouble is, Facebook doesn't have much (apart from a dodgy honour system) in the way of identification of individuals. I have often wondered (hypothetically) how things would pan out if I were a defendant in court where evidence from Facebook posts were presented against me.
I do not have a Facebook account, and for a variety of reasons never will, but I often wonder how I would convince a court of that, given that I can find half a dozen individuals there who share the same name as myself.
Does the lighting law include the energy used to make and dispose of the product?
As a matter of curiosity, it would be interesting to know how many Slashdotters actually take the trouble to dispose of their defunct lightbulbs and other electrical or electronic goods "responsibly". In my case, I do make an attempt, but am not under any illusion that other agencies "downstream" necessarily do anything more than accept the goods and chuck them into landfill along with other rubbish.
Although this might be (correctly, I suppose) regarded as being deliberately flamebaity, it might be worth pointing out that from an evolutionary point of view, blocking construction of cell towers around places of worship would be otiose. ;-)
This gives us something to think about, however. It's one thing for (hundreds of) thousands of people to fill the aether in each cell with their mindless yabbering at each other over their phones, but as mobile phone usage approaches 100% of the population, with the added load of data traffic from smartphones, iPads and other devices, it is easy to visualise a scenario where metropolitan phone users find it difficult to jam so much as a metaphorical toe into the flood of traffic.
I can imagine an iPhone user grinding his teeth waiting for a typical media-intensive webpage to load at 9600 baud. In a way it would be funny, if only we hadn't allowed ourselves to become so dependent on this technology.
I stopped reading at 'CDs dont last as long.'
I didn't, but the simplest aspect of this is that with a CD it's simple to make a backup that is 100% identical to the original. This was never possible with vinyl - lots of us went to considerable lengths to copy LPs as well as we could, but unless you had a first-rate reel-to-reel machine it just wasn't possible to make a really good copy.
so vinyl sounds like it has more punch because - guess what? - due to having a higher dynamic range, it does.
Actually, although I'm a big fan of vinyl, it can be argued that it actually has less dynamic range than digital; nearly all (with the rare exception of the Full Dynamic Range discs) vinyl recordings are pre-processed with an "RIAA" compression in order to compensate for the difficulty of keeping the needle in its groove in the noisy bits. Decompression on playback is (usually) handled by the pre-amp. That's why some amplifiers have a separate phono input from the line-level inputs.
Vinyl is often characterised as giving a "warmer" sound reproduction, which I guess probably reflects a comparatively low degree of responsiveness at higher frequencies.
Personally, I would never have been able to sit through Miles Davis' classic Kinda [sic] Blue if it had been compressed all to hell.
That is one of my "go-to" albums for testing out stereo systems. Although recorded over 50 years ago, it is so incredibly well recorded (quite apart from being fucking good music), it exposes the slightest defect in any sound system.
Even if the turntable were fitted with a decent cartridge, needle and tone arm, there's no way that USB can be made into a good connection. You don't have to (and shouldn't, unless you enjoy being gullible) pay hundreds of dollars for your cables, but even the crappy lamp cables you get from Radio Shack would be better.
It's perfectly possible to get quite a good setup at a pretty much budget price. My setup is a Pro-Ject Debut III with a Nad PP-2 pre-amp plugged into the back of an Audigy 2 ZS soundcard. If you shop around, you could probably get this for about $300 all up. I didn't pay much more, and I went to a bricks-and-mortar shop. Obviously, there are lots of ways to improve on this outfit, but the usual law of diminishing returns applies.
Also, a note for those unused to vinyl: because it's essentially a mechanical component, a new cartridge will give a somewhat thin sound, as it needs "running in" for some time to develop its full responsiveness.
If you're straining to read text, you should really consider getting your eyesight properly assessed. No point worrying about vanity: if you need glasses, then you need glasses. Just find yourself a really cool pair.
I agree with all of your points, but if a decent e-reader had been available when I was doing my degree in biotech, I would have snapped at a chance to avoid having to buy and carry around all those massive, thick large-format textbooks. However, even if the downloads were available, I'm not convinced there's a single e-reader on the market even now that is technically capable of rendering them satisfactorily.
I would also quite like a reader for those texts from Project Gutenberg that I might only read once, but I think I'll wait until the technology gets better and more affordable. But generally, if a book is worth re-reading, it's worth buying on paper in the first place.
One final question, do you understand what my sig means?
Does anybody read sigs? They are rarely relevant to the discussion, so I set my preferences to filter them out.
Calling the iPod a smaller version of the iPad is like calling a flip phone a small netbook...
Not really. The iPod Touch and the iPad have more similarities than differences, and there's little point in discussing usability, since that is entirely at the mercy of Apple.
The iPad looks very attractive, but it is essentially (like that manufacturer's other handheld products) just a media box. From my point of view, Apple has missed the boat. I would have welcomed an iPad that ran OS X with the bells that come with it, most particularly the *nix shell of my choice (zsh if anyone cares).
In other words, what I really is a tablet computer, not just a locked-in box that dishes up any trinkets and baubles that Apple cares to sell me.
Well said. I get very tired of all this whining about the flavour of this or that GPL licence, but they are all pretty much fair by comparison with the proprietary alternative.
I've written a basic VoIP app using Speex over UDP and, while not Skype, it was usable with 10% packet loss
That's not bad. Skype is good in lots of ways, but I'm all for a FOSS alternative. Although I have successfully managed to use Skype over a 56k dialup connection (obviously sans video), my worst experience to date was a time when my only connection was a (basic-rate) satellite link, where upstream latency made any kind of VOIP conversation entirely one-sided.
In a few months I'm going go be moving from Perth (Western Australia) to an isolated spot in Tasmania where I'm not going to be able to get any kind of "hard" copper or fibre connection, so I'll have to look at this issue again. I know there's always wireless (at a price, with tight traffic allowances), but if anyone can suggest a satellite link with good upstream speeds, I would be interested to read any input.
I wonder if phones will ever evolve to have email-length texts?
I doubt if the limitation is with the hardware, except in so far as it is designed to work with some political or ideological definition of SMS in GSM or related protocols that limits such messages to 160 characters. But this definition seems more or less arbitrary.
An email sent using a phone would be similarly brief.
Heh. If it can't be said with quill and parchment, then it isn't worth saying.
Sage I stood as I awaited thee, and
Awaiting the tardy Greyhound bus to Widgiemooltha
While frittering my time
Clipping my toenails.
For thus my parody of Milton
Doth merit kicking me in the nuts
Oh wait. That wasn't worth saying either...
... but most people don't carry their bookmarks in their pocket.
There was a time when I used to do exactly that. But although my bookmarks file is now several MB in size, having added to it since the early '90s, I could (and soon probably will) just get rid of it, since I usually just google everything other than a couple of dozen URLs anyway.
Assuming the feature comes my way (which it hasn't yet), I wonder if it will cope with text-mode browsers such as Lynx or Links...
An even easier trick is to simply skip to their Advanced Search page. How you choose to do so is up to you - my solution is a simple local homepage with a table of commonly visited URLs with corresponding icons, but that's just how I like to work.
I'm not a NoScript user, but I do have an extensive /etc/hosts file and Adblock, and I don't seem to make this feature work at all. I guess I could try disabling one or the other, but I suspect I'm not missing much.
However, the autocompletion thingy under the search box can provide hours of mindless entertainment, like this one I found just now: "I'm b" -> "I'm being eaten by a boa constrictor". Until a few weeks ago "I like to" used to give something like "I like to tape my thumbs to my palms to see what it would be like to be a dinosaur", but that doesn't seem to work any more...
Agreed, internet speeds suck in Perth. But I'm not sure why Optus has been singled out for consideration - I can't think of any ISP that doesn't apply this rule.
I'm sorry, but as a Burroughs B3700 guy, it's really hard to watch a VMS guy get a chuckle at somebody else given their chosen OS's inferiority and not have a chuckle about it myself.
;-)
And yes, I actually was a B3700 guy. Now get off my lawn.
In any case, I don't really see what Intel has to gain from this. Why not simply sell their CPUs capable of their maximum speed and charge $50 extra in the first place? This would save them the trouble and expense of setting up and maintaining a lot of server architecture, and maintain customer goodwill into the bargain. A customer who has been blackmailed once is going to think twice before coming back.
Pirated or jailbroken, that is one CPU I will not buy. Intentionally holding a gun to the customer's head by crippling the device until you pay a ransom is not a way to get my business.