Looks innocent enough to me. If I were an American (or even a human being), I would be inclined to give the guy the benefit of the doubt, whatever else I might think of him. He's obviously not spending time trawling through hardcore sites - his friend just needs a NSFW tag.
The suggestion that the Rudd government has dumped the proposed legislation was only in an opinion article on The Australian. No other media that I found at the time (except Slashdot, of course) indicated anything to the contrary.
Voters are welcome to live in the fantasy world of their choice, but the truth is that Kevin Rudd and his cronies are a big disappointment, as there is little to distinguish them from their predecessors.
in the US if you win can you claim your legal expenses and other costs back from the other party either by default or as part of the same ruling? This inorder to discourage frivoulous lawsuits?
This applies in lots of countries, but judges can be selective (I'm being polite) when it comes to awarding costs.
Jobs loses this, we all lose.
Don't buy Apple if you wish, but stick a fork in Flash.
I won't deny that Flash is not everything we would want it to be, but Jobs obviously envisions a platform that is patented and locked down to the exclusion of all competitors. At least Flash has the merit of being multi-platform. On that basis alone, Jobs can go get fucked.
Disclaimer: typed on a second-hand MacBook. Some of Apple's ideas and hardware are great, but Steve Jobs is a nasty piece of work, and whoever donated his liver should have been retrospectively aborted.
You might suggest that your employeer supply smart phones like the Blackberry that can be used for secure email access and can be remotely monitored and wiped if comprimised
If your employer is even slightly worried about security, mobile devices are a poor option. By the time anyone realises your data has been compromised, it may already be in public circulation.
Their network, their rules. Stop taking your personal machine, and require them to supply you with one to do your job.
Agreed. If you want to take your personal machine into work, that's fine, but you don't have to connect it to their network. It's cheap enough to buy/use a USB modem dongle, so you can keep your non-work activity entirely and demonstrably separate. Also good if you don't like the idea of your employer spying on you.
Of course, some might question the propriety of doing non-work-related stuff on your employer's time. One can make perfectly cogent and valid arguments both ways; for practical purposes, I'm inclined to say it's OK unless it consumes so much time that it impacts on what the employee is being paid to do. But what you do on your lunch-break is nobody else's business.
The type of weenie who would seriously not buy an iPad (or anything else) because "there might be something better out in a few months" deserves to rot...
I disagree. If you want to call me a weenie anyway, go ahead, I've been called worse things.
There is nothing wrong with holding back from a purchase if the product doesn't quite meet your requirements for functionality, coolness or whatever. For instance, I would have bought an e-book reader years ago while I was in the early stages of my undergrad degree, if any of the offerings available had met my requirements for displaying contents of my biochemistry and molecular biology texts at a useful resolution and in colour.
However, since none of the manufacturers came up with a suitable gadget in time, I found myself stuck with lugging heavy books around. Sure, that is an opportunity lost, but I'm not rotting in any kind of hell as a result; I just put up with a certain amount of inconvenience. Big deal.
I am pretty much the same in terms of "WANT IT NOW" when it comes to new releases...
Ubuntu isn't my preferred choice of distro, for a variety of reasons which it would be otiose to rehearse here. But there is much to be said for a "rolling-release" process such as is embodied in Gentoo or in my preferred platform, Arch Linux. My workhorse desktop machine hasn't suffered a reinstall for some 3 years, but the simple-but-effective package manager has kept me up to date with no pain at all.
Unfortunately, I can't say Arch will supplant Windows in terms of ease-of-use for the *nix newbie, since it assumes a certain familiarity with manual editing of config files, but it was a logical choice for me when I finally became disenchanted with Slackware.
If his 22,000 machines were only worth 15 cents each, that's a total of only $3,300 dollars. Makes you wonder why he bothered; you can probably make better money digging ditches.
Print them out and scatter the pages throughout the cockpit?
One thing that struck me while waiting (and waiting...) to board a long-delayed flight last week was how confined is the space that many pilots have to work in (though presumably with more legroom than us mugs have in cattle-class). That alone would (I assume) make the cockpit a stuffy place that would probably send me to sleep.
but if nobody is actually dying from distracted pilots, wtf? Really.
Another respondent has already mentioned a commercial flight that overshot its destination not so long ago; maybe the idea is to prevent cases where pilots keep snoozing until their plane runs out of petrol. That might spoil your day if you were on such a flight.
This is true, but such fuel isn't exactly usable in the form in which it comes out of the ground. There's a hell of a lot of "stuff" that has to be moved around before you get anything that can be used in a reactor.
It's a bit disingenuous, or more than quite a bit naive to suggest that 100+ year old hardwoods are sent to paper mills.
You obviously haven't visited Australia. It is routine here to clear-fell huge tracts of old-growth forest to supply the chip and pulp industry. In Western Australia, some attempt is made to hide it by leaving a band of intact trees between the cut and the road, but in Tasmania it is impossible to hide whole mountainsides of jagged stumps.
Sure, there are those of us who value and use high-grade timber such as you mentioned, but our interests are insignificant by comparison with those of the asswipes who, with the willing complicity of our governments are happily wiping out thousands of acres of old-growth forest.
I'd be willing to bet the carbon footprint for the transportation is higher than the trees themselves that are used in the process.
Off-topic, but interesting nonetheless: this argument could easily be used by way of rebuttal to those who insist that nuclear energy is an appropriately "green" solution. Unfortunately, it's one that is hard to fully quantify, because no mining company will tell us how much fuel they use in the course of their operations, but bulk transportation of nuclear (or any) fuel by sea alone commonly involves the burning of thousands of tonnes of hydrocarbons for each trip.
It is an environmental problem because natural forests are ruined to grow different kinds of trees which are easier to transform into paper.
Time for an old fart like me to point out that we don't need to make paper from trees. In fact, trees make crap paper unless you're prepared to make special efforts to deal with the acids that break it down over time. Time was (and in some circles still is), when paper was made from old cotton or linen rags (hence "rag" paper).
Of course, we can make paper from cotton, hemp or probably just about any vegetable fibre, which need not be as slow-growing as the trees currently being obliterated by the paper pulp industry.
Q: Want to know what a real secure OS is? I don't see many OS/2 virii around.
A: A secure OS is one that is entirely disconnected from any other network. It is also, by the way, not very functional, but maybe no-one will notice that.
OS/2 is 1/2 of an operating system.
The plural of "virus" is "viruses" and NEVER "virii".
We could pursue the DRM issue forever, but there's a completely unrelated lesson Apple could learn from this debacle if they cared to. If the offending phone was indeed left on a barstool, a question arises (in my mind at least): If Apple are so damned clever, why can't they make their phones small enough to fit in a pocket of your jeans?
Then nobody would have to leave the device out in plain view for anyone to pinch.
Seeing how the universe is ~14 billion years old, the chances are that any alien races are significantly older than us and have had more time to develop.
By the time any aliens get around to saying hello to us, it's unlikely that there will be any resources left here to make it worth their while. We'll probably have a bit of coal for some time, but unless their ships are powered by Newcomen steam engines, they'll probably just give us a miss.
I fail to understand why the US has been so sluggish in taking any useful measures to prevent counterfeiting of currency. For instance, it is typical for other nations to use plastic instead of paper, which severely limits the range of techniques available to the forger while offering a wide range of security features. The US treasury's practice of clinging to that same murky-green ink on paper for all dnominations is absurd if not downright stupid.
The point is, this is all so unnecessary. A bluetooth headset is quite cheap enough to be accessible to anyone with a phone. Even if you don't wear it all the time while driving, it only takes a moment to pick it up and stick it on your ear if the phone rings. I'm not saying this is a complete cure for distraction, but it at least frees up the hands and is no worse than having a conversation with a passenger, which as far as I know is not illegal anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks innocent enough to me. If I were an American (or even a human being), I would be inclined to give the guy the benefit of the doubt, whatever else I might think of him. He's obviously not spending time trawling through hardcore sites - his friend just needs a NSFW tag.
Mark my words; There will never be a mandatory filter.
Don't worry, I will.
I am not even on the electoral roll but am considering signing up to give Labor my last preference.
Please reconsider. Family First is even worse.
The suggestion that the Rudd government has dumped the proposed legislation was only in an opinion article on The Australian. No other media that I found at the time (except Slashdot, of course) indicated anything to the contrary.
Voters are welcome to live in the fantasy world of their choice, but the truth is that Kevin Rudd and his cronies are a big disappointment, as there is little to distinguish them from their predecessors.
in the US if you win can you claim your legal expenses and other costs back from the other party either by default or as part of the same ruling? This inorder to discourage frivoulous lawsuits?
This applies in lots of countries, but judges can be selective (I'm being polite) when it comes to awarding costs.
Jobs loses this, we all lose.
Don't buy Apple if you wish, but stick a fork in Flash.
I won't deny that Flash is not everything we would want it to be, but Jobs obviously envisions a platform that is patented and locked down to the exclusion of all competitors. At least Flash has the merit of being multi-platform. On that basis alone, Jobs can go get fucked.
Disclaimer: typed on a second-hand MacBook. Some of Apple's ideas and hardware are great, but Steve Jobs is a nasty piece of work, and whoever donated his liver should have been retrospectively aborted.
You might suggest that your employeer supply smart phones like the Blackberry that can be used for secure email access and can be remotely monitored and wiped if comprimised
If your employer is even slightly worried about security, mobile devices are a poor option. By the time anyone realises your data has been compromised, it may already be in public circulation.
Their network, their rules. Stop taking your personal machine, and require them to supply you with one to do your job.
Agreed. If you want to take your personal machine into work, that's fine, but you don't have to connect it to their network. It's cheap enough to buy/use a USB modem dongle, so you can keep your non-work activity entirely and demonstrably separate. Also good if you don't like the idea of your employer spying on you.
Of course, some might question the propriety of doing non-work-related stuff on your employer's time. One can make perfectly cogent and valid arguments both ways; for practical purposes, I'm inclined to say it's OK unless it consumes so much time that it impacts on what the employee is being paid to do. But what you do on your lunch-break is nobody else's business.
The type of weenie who would seriously not buy an iPad (or anything else) because "there might be something better out in a few months" deserves to rot...
I disagree. If you want to call me a weenie anyway, go ahead, I've been called worse things.
There is nothing wrong with holding back from a purchase if the product doesn't quite meet your requirements for functionality, coolness or whatever. For instance, I would have bought an e-book reader years ago while I was in the early stages of my undergrad degree, if any of the offerings available had met my requirements for displaying contents of my biochemistry and molecular biology texts at a useful resolution and in colour.
However, since none of the manufacturers came up with a suitable gadget in time, I found myself stuck with lugging heavy books around. Sure, that is an opportunity lost, but I'm not rotting in any kind of hell as a result; I just put up with a certain amount of inconvenience. Big deal.
Like they say, politicians are like nappies (diapers): they should be changed frequently, for the same reason.
Yeah, that's not very many cents cents in those dollars dollars.
:-|
OK, give me a break, I spotted the typo after I had hit the "submit" button...
I am pretty much the same in terms of "WANT IT NOW" when it comes to new releases...
Ubuntu isn't my preferred choice of distro, for a variety of reasons which it would be otiose to rehearse here. But there is much to be said for a "rolling-release" process such as is embodied in Gentoo or in my preferred platform, Arch Linux. My workhorse desktop machine hasn't suffered a reinstall for some 3 years, but the simple-but-effective package manager has kept me up to date with no pain at all.
Unfortunately, I can't say Arch will supplant Windows in terms of ease-of-use for the *nix newbie, since it assumes a certain familiarity with manual editing of config files, but it was a logical choice for me when I finally became disenchanted with Slackware.
If his 22,000 machines were only worth 15 cents each, that's a total of only $3,300 dollars. Makes you wonder why he bothered; you can probably make better money digging ditches.
Print them out and scatter the pages throughout the cockpit?
One thing that struck me while waiting (and waiting...) to board a long-delayed flight last week was how confined is the space that many pilots have to work in (though presumably with more legroom than us mugs have in cattle-class). That alone would (I assume) make the cockpit a stuffy place that would probably send me to sleep.
but if nobody is actually dying from distracted pilots, wtf? Really.
Another respondent has already mentioned a commercial flight that overshot its destination not so long ago; maybe the idea is to prevent cases where pilots keep snoozing until their plane runs out of petrol. That might spoil your day if you were on such a flight.
Nuclear plants don't need much fuel.
This is true, but such fuel isn't exactly usable in the form in which it comes out of the ground. There's a hell of a lot of "stuff" that has to be moved around before you get anything that can be used in a reactor.
It's a bit disingenuous, or more than quite a bit naive to suggest that 100+ year old hardwoods are sent to paper mills.
You obviously haven't visited Australia. It is routine here to clear-fell huge tracts of old-growth forest to supply the chip and pulp industry. In Western Australia, some attempt is made to hide it by leaving a band of intact trees between the cut and the road, but in Tasmania it is impossible to hide whole mountainsides of jagged stumps.
Sure, there are those of us who value and use high-grade timber such as you mentioned, but our interests are insignificant by comparison with those of the asswipes who, with the willing complicity of our governments are happily wiping out thousands of acres of old-growth forest.
I'd be willing to bet the carbon footprint for the transportation is higher than the trees themselves that are used in the process.
Off-topic, but interesting nonetheless: this argument could easily be used by way of rebuttal to those who insist that nuclear energy is an appropriately "green" solution. Unfortunately, it's one that is hard to fully quantify, because no mining company will tell us how much fuel they use in the course of their operations, but bulk transportation of nuclear (or any) fuel by sea alone commonly involves the burning of thousands of tonnes of hydrocarbons for each trip.
It is an environmental problem because natural forests are ruined to grow different kinds of trees which are easier to transform into paper.
Time for an old fart like me to point out that we don't need to make paper from trees. In fact, trees make crap paper unless you're prepared to make special efforts to deal with the acids that break it down over time. Time was (and in some circles still is), when paper was made from old cotton or linen rags (hence "rag" paper).
Of course, we can make paper from cotton, hemp or probably just about any vegetable fibre, which need not be as slow-growing as the trees currently being obliterated by the paper pulp industry.
Q: Want to know what a real secure OS is? I don't see many OS/2 virii around.
A: A secure OS is one that is entirely disconnected from any other network. It is also, by the way, not very functional, but maybe no-one will notice that.
OS/2 is 1/2 of an operating system.
The plural of "virus" is "viruses" and NEVER "virii".
We could pursue the DRM issue forever, but there's a completely unrelated lesson Apple could learn from this debacle if they cared to. If the offending phone was indeed left on a barstool, a question arises (in my mind at least): If Apple are so damned clever, why can't they make their phones small enough to fit in a pocket of your jeans?
Then nobody would have to leave the device out in plain view for anyone to pinch.
Seeing how the universe is ~14 billion years old, the chances are that any alien races are significantly older than us and have had more time to develop.
By the time any aliens get around to saying hello to us, it's unlikely that there will be any resources left here to make it worth their while. We'll probably have a bit of coal for some time, but unless their ships are powered by Newcomen steam engines, they'll probably just give us a miss.
I fail to understand why the US has been so sluggish in taking any useful measures to prevent counterfeiting of currency. For instance, it is typical for other nations to use plastic instead of paper, which severely limits the range of techniques available to the forger while offering a wide range of security features. The US treasury's practice of clinging to that same murky-green ink on paper for all dnominations is absurd if not downright stupid.
And if you are so important that you absolutely need to be able to talk at a moments notice, you'd have a driver - such as the President.
I hadn't realised the President was a chauffeur.
The point is, this is all so unnecessary. A bluetooth headset is quite cheap enough to be accessible to anyone with a phone. Even if you don't wear it all the time while driving, it only takes a moment to pick it up and stick it on your ear if the phone rings. I'm not saying this is a complete cure for distraction, but it at least frees up the hands and is no worse than having a conversation with a passenger, which as far as I know is not illegal anywhere.