Anybody who uses cruise control should be banned from driving. The whole point is that the driver should be in control of the vehicle at all times. All cruise control does is encourage morons to take an opportunity to paint their toenails or gasbag on the phone. A couple of weeks ago I even saw a guy steering with his knees while playing jazz riffs on a fucking trumpet (just when I thought I had seen it all).
But those of us who CAN drive usually have the sense to want more brakes than the "barely able to stop once, much less handle a downhill mountain road" rubber bands...
What I would like to see is more car manufacturers catering for people who can drive and putting in a proper stickshift, getting rid of those stupid cruise controls and other automatic doodads. About time car drivers had something to keep them awake.
Let's look at the nasty assassination of the Hamas chap in the middle east.
Well, why not? That affair seems entirely dodgy no matter which way you look at it.
For instance, why would Mossad, an organisation recognised internationally as being ruthlessly and surgically precise in its operations feel the need to involve upwards of 26 people to "off" one chap?
I'm no friend of any spook agency, but that cockup has all the hallmarks of "CIA" printed all over it.
Now that they have your DNA, they can make copies of it and frame your ass for a crime you didn't commit! It's technically possible now...
It's not just technically possible, it is literally and very easily possible. It isn't exactly the sort of thing one can conveniently do in a kitchen, but current PCR (polymerase chain reaction) equipment is no longer the sort of machinery one would find in the most rarefied and expensively equipped labs.
I suspect bookmarks have become a thing of the past. I have one hell of a lot of them, but my typical resource these days is a Google enquiry. 99% of the time it gets me just what I need, and that's fine.
Over the last 18 years or so I have taken some pains to maintain a logical and useful bookmarks file, but I've approached a limit. I can foresee a time in the not too distant future when I will stop bothering to manage or even keep bookmarks at all. The drawback to this is that Google has that much more control over what I get to see, but if I voluntarily cede that control through laziness, what more can I expect?
the reason to harvest cord blood rather than anything else is because it is free, easy to collect, and has more than average stem cells.
Correct for two out of three. It is indeed free, and has loads of stem cells, but when I was doing my biotech degree, one of my lecturers whose specialty was in UC stems told me that in practice it often isn't that easy to collect cord blood. At least, not in a fashion designed to guarantee an uncontaminated sample.
They stay on the screen, saying blandly, "Error 14"
Back in the '70s and '80s when machines had limited memory and storage, numeric error codes were a concise way of handling exceptions when everybody had a list of those codes (or more often knew them by heart). Trouble is, these have persisted into modern software, and it can be really fucking frustrating when a piece of software spits an error and the deepest, darkest depths of Google cache fail to find a reference list.
And yes, although Microsoft is guilty in this regard, so are a number of OSS developers. A recent occasion I came across this was when setting up a network printer with CUPS. It took me most of an afternoon to accomplish something that should have been trivial, and in fact had been in the previous version of the software.
...translates into "Does the screen display what you want it to display?"
Well, even that can be misleading. Back in the '80s, I worked at a site where we used a simple diagnostic tool to check network connections: the simple transmission of an ASCII-art rendition of "X". It was really funny to hear the user (after much muffled fumbling underneath his desk) respond to the question me: So now you should see a big "X"... user: No.
me: Are you sure? There should be a big "X" on the screen. user: Oh, on the screen...
But seriously, there is NO way to get a user to properly read or even record an error message. He just wants to get on with his day, and if that means ruining yours, then fine. The best thing you can do is set up your system to LOG error messages, preferably in a way that can be accessed from your desk.
Win 7 Mobile wastes a lot of space and spends a lot of time looking whizzy...
Fair enough, but maybe LG have finally learned a lesson from users' complaints: namely that the only difference between LG's own software and a bucket of shit is the bucket. If they can find anybody else's software to use, it's highly likely to be an improvement.
I have had many LG appliances, including phones, TV and a HDD PVR. The hardware is in some cases quite good (with a big exception that is off-topic in this discussion), but it is seriously badly let down by the shitty quality of their software.
But I do wonder if there's any particular reason why the Mossad prefers Australian or New Zealand identies?
I understood that 6 of the passports used in this operation were British. Mossad seems to prefer using identies of foreign nationals living within Israel.
The thing that puzzles me about this whole debacle is that Mossad has something of a reputation for ruthless, surgical precision in its operations. This operation to bump off a single Hamas leader (with Dubai police claiming some 25 people involved) just seems uncharacteristically ham-fisted and clumsy. In fact, now I come to think of it, much more like the CIA...;-)
how are we to believe any other information you gave us is truthful?
Well, who cares? TFA is just a content-free puff-piece for the author. It doesn't really say anything that we didn't already know, i.e. that businesses, libraries or whatever offering any kind of uncontrolled hotspot are leaving themselves open to investigation or legal action - and that such a typical situation (by virtue of its low bandwidth) is usually incapable of hosting any kind of viable file-sharing operation. Big deal.
There's also the issue that although TFA is submitted with "file sharing" as keywords, there is no evidence or claim that the defendant made any attempt to do so. Tarring a kid with the brush of having downloaded a paltry 16 tracks is hardly a virtuous or useful pastime for a record company.
But it could certainly be profitable. If said companies can succeed in extorting 750K per track (assuming the defendant has any capacity to pay), that might constitute a valid business model from a shareholder's point of view. Fuck, I suppose I'm in the wrong business.
But then, I'm a musician too, and I'd rather my music was heard than exploited in this way.
I bought a serial-to-usb converter for a couple of bucks from a mob in China via fleabay in the hope that it would work. I didn't really expect it to, however, and as it turns out, that was just as well.:-{
There was a law in Alexandria that all travelers had to turn over their books to the library so they could be copied. These weren't backup copies, these were copies that belonged to the library.
Actually, the library kept the original and left the traveller with a copy.
Around here, you get modded troll for even trying to find out what the problem is.
A confusion of cause and effect here...
I'm the one who replied somewhat tersely to your post (sorry about that), but I had nothing to do with your being moderated as troll. Remember, I can't mod and post in the same discussion. Believe it or not, I actually had a reason why I said to look it up rather than give you my own potted version, and that is this: by doing so, you are likely to end up better informed than you would be by an interminable flamewar, which is a typical response on Slashdot to the issues or reality of climate change.
Why do we care about this? What is the consequence if somebody thinks the earth is getting warmer or cooler?
Why should we do your homework for you? Go and look it up for yourself, or hand in your nerd card. You'll find it's more complicated than "the earth is getting warmer or cooler".
They bought us a whole round of Razors at work and at least half of them fell apart on us.
Were those the Razr2 V9 I mentioned in the GP post? A lot of the other devices were/are fairly flimsy plastic/aluminium machines, but the (slimmer but heavier) V9 seems to be built on a steel chassis that is very rugged. My V9 has been dropped on to concrete floors more times than I care to remember with no ill effects (other than a few minor cosmetic dings), and it takes serious strength to stand up to the weight of a tractor, even in mud.
by the time the crack or circumvention comes out, Ubisoft will have made the vast majority of the money they planned to make on the title.
This business model might work (as far as it goes) on the balance sheet, but it's still not much of a model. It assumes that development costs will be cut to a minimum (which usually means their programmers will end up being shafted) and no responsibility will be taken for any aspects of quality control.
If the gamer has any sense of social responsibilty at all, I hope s/he will avoid any Ubisoft products. But I'm probably pissing into the wind by even mentioning social responsibility in the context of gamers... [sigh]
I don't pirate either, and that's one of the reasons. But I also don't buy things that come with DRM.
Same here. I'm not so much into the game market, but I do buy a lot of music, and the same principles apply. But when it comes to the point where a game manufacturer is spending more resources on preventing someone digitally ripping off his product than he appears to be on the product itself, then everybody would be better off if the game was simply produced as a physical board game.
Some phones seem to survive being run over and abused quite well. My wife and I both have Motorola Razr2 V9 phones, and last winter, my wife managed to drop hers in a muddy puddle, where it remained overnight, and where I happened to drive over it *twice* on my old Chamberlain tractor. It survived that with just a cracked front screen and a stiff hinge. A couple of weeks later, she dropped it in the loo.
I might have been tempted to abandon the phone there, but she didn't, and it's still working now. I guess if I really wanted to destroy it, I've got a 60lb sledge-hammer that might just work...
Not every single bit of information is really worth the effort to save
That's what you might think now, but a historian of the future would probably disagree. By way of an example, it's possible to gain an insight into practices of the past by looking into details of regulations: few official records exist, for instance, detailing fraudulent practice in the food industry in 16th or 17th century England, but the fact that there are statutes specifically forbidding stuffing meat with rags to make it look "plumper" tell us a lot about common practice of the time.
History isn't just made up of dates and battles. It is made up of countless little bits, each not in itself very important, but contributing to the whole.
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody who uses cruise control should be banned from driving. The whole point is that the driver should be in control of the vehicle at all times. All cruise control does is encourage morons to take an opportunity to paint their toenails or gasbag on the phone. A couple of weeks ago I even saw a guy steering with his knees while playing jazz riffs on a fucking trumpet (just when I thought I had seen it all).
But those of us who CAN drive usually have the sense to want more brakes than the "barely able to stop once, much less handle a downhill mountain road" rubber bands...
What I would like to see is more car manufacturers catering for people who can drive and putting in a proper stickshift, getting rid of those stupid cruise controls and other automatic doodads. About time car drivers had something to keep them awake.
Seriously, how is this interesting enough to make it here?
It might gave been interesting to watch his car being run over by a truck while he was so busy checking his ssh connection at stoplights.
Let's look at the nasty assassination of the Hamas chap in the middle east.
Well, why not? That affair seems entirely dodgy no matter which way you look at it.
For instance, why would Mossad, an organisation recognised internationally as being ruthlessly and surgically precise in its operations feel the need to involve upwards of 26 people to "off" one chap?
I'm no friend of any spook agency, but that cockup has all the hallmarks of "CIA" printed all over it.
Now that they have your DNA, they can make copies of it and frame your ass for a crime you didn't commit! It's technically possible now...
It's not just technically possible, it is literally and very easily possible. It isn't exactly the sort of thing one can conveniently do in a kitchen, but current PCR (polymerase chain reaction) equipment is no longer the sort of machinery one would find in the most rarefied and expensively equipped labs.
I suspect bookmarks have become a thing of the past. I have one hell of a lot of them, but my typical resource these days is a Google enquiry. 99% of the time it gets me just what I need, and that's fine.
Over the last 18 years or so I have taken some pains to maintain a logical and useful bookmarks file, but I've approached a limit. I can foresee a time in the not too distant future when I will stop bothering to manage or even keep bookmarks at all. The drawback to this is that Google has that much more control over what I get to see, but if I voluntarily cede that control through laziness, what more can I expect?
So the baby's mtDNA, if maternally related to the criminal, can be used to find the right family at least.
True, but people often forget that YcDNA (i.e. from the Y chromosome) can also be used for the same purpose to track male lineage.
the reason to harvest cord blood rather than anything else is because it is free, easy to collect, and has more than average stem cells.
Correct for two out of three. It is indeed free, and has loads of stem cells, but when I was doing my biotech degree, one of my lecturers whose specialty was in UC stems told me that in practice it often isn't that easy to collect cord blood. At least, not in a fashion designed to guarantee an uncontaminated sample.
They stay on the screen, saying blandly, "Error 14"
Back in the '70s and '80s when machines had limited memory and storage, numeric error codes were a concise way of handling exceptions when everybody had a list of those codes (or more often knew them by heart). Trouble is, these have persisted into modern software, and it can be really fucking frustrating when a piece of software spits an error and the deepest, darkest depths of Google cache fail to find a reference list.
And yes, although Microsoft is guilty in this regard, so are a number of OSS developers. A recent occasion I came across this was when setting up a network printer with CUPS. It took me most of an afternoon to accomplish something that should have been trivial, and in fact had been in the previous version of the software.
...translates into "Does the screen display what you want it to display?"
Well, even that can be misleading. Back in the '80s, I worked at a site where we used a simple diagnostic tool to check network connections: the simple transmission of an ASCII-art rendition of "X". It was really funny to hear the user (after much muffled fumbling underneath his desk) respond to the question
me: So now you should see a big "X"...
user: No.
me: Are you sure? There should be a big "X" on the screen.
user: Oh, on the screen...
But seriously, there is NO way to get a user to properly read or even record an error message. He just wants to get on with his day, and if that means ruining yours, then fine. The best thing you can do is set up your system to LOG error messages, preferably in a way that can be accessed from your desk.
I would say if it is half as popular as the Zune, Microsoft has nothing to worry about.
:-)
If it's TWICE as popular as the Zune, Microsoft still has nothing to worry about.
Win 7 Mobile wastes a lot of space and spends a lot of time looking whizzy...
Fair enough, but maybe LG have finally learned a lesson from users' complaints: namely that the only difference between LG's own software and a bucket of shit is the bucket. If they can find anybody else's software to use, it's highly likely to be an improvement.
I have had many LG appliances, including phones, TV and a HDD PVR. The hardware is in some cases quite good (with a big exception that is off-topic in this discussion), but it is seriously badly let down by the shitty quality of their software.
But I do wonder if there's any particular reason why the Mossad prefers Australian or New Zealand identies?
;-)
I understood that 6 of the passports used in this operation were British. Mossad seems to prefer using identies of foreign nationals living within Israel.
The thing that puzzles me about this whole debacle is that Mossad has something of a reputation for ruthless, surgical precision in its operations. This operation to bump off a single Hamas leader (with Dubai police claiming some 25 people involved) just seems uncharacteristically ham-fisted and clumsy. In fact, now I come to think of it, much more like the CIA...
how are we to believe any other information you gave us is truthful?
Well, who cares? TFA is just a content-free puff-piece for the author. It doesn't really say anything that we didn't already know, i.e. that businesses, libraries or whatever offering any kind of uncontrolled hotspot are leaving themselves open to investigation or legal action - and that such a typical situation (by virtue of its low bandwidth) is usually incapable of hosting any kind of viable file-sharing operation. Big deal.
There's also the issue that although TFA is submitted with "file sharing" as keywords, there is no evidence or claim that the defendant made any attempt to do so. Tarring a kid with the brush of having downloaded a paltry 16 tracks is hardly a virtuous or useful pastime for a record company.
But it could certainly be profitable. If said companies can succeed in extorting 750K per track (assuming the defendant has any capacity to pay), that might constitute a valid business model from a shareholder's point of view. Fuck, I suppose I'm in the wrong business.
But then, I'm a musician too, and I'd rather my music was heard than exploited in this way.
I bought a serial-to-usb converter for a couple of bucks from a mob in China via fleabay in the hope that it would work. I didn't really expect it to, however, and as it turns out, that was just as well. :-{
There was a law in Alexandria that all travelers had to turn over their books to the library so they could be copied. These weren't backup copies, these were copies that belonged to the library.
Actually, the library kept the original and left the traveller with a copy.
Around here, you get modded troll for even trying to find out what the problem is.
A confusion of cause and effect here...
I'm the one who replied somewhat tersely to your post (sorry about that), but I had nothing to do with your being moderated as troll. Remember, I can't mod and post in the same discussion. Believe it or not, I actually had a reason why I said to look it up rather than give you my own potted version, and that is this: by doing so, you are likely to end up better informed than you would be by an interminable flamewar, which is a typical response on Slashdot to the issues or reality of climate change.
Why do we care about this? What is the consequence if somebody thinks the earth is getting warmer or cooler?
Why should we do your homework for you? Go and look it up for yourself, or hand in your nerd card. You'll find it's more complicated than "the earth is getting warmer or cooler".
That's just what Big Plankton wants you to think.
Only Big Phytoplankton. Zooplankton have enough trouble keeping a skeleton together as a result of the acidification of the oceans...
They bought us a whole round of Razors at work and at least half of them fell apart on us.
Were those the Razr2 V9 I mentioned in the GP post? A lot of the other devices were/are fairly flimsy plastic/aluminium machines, but the (slimmer but heavier) V9 seems to be built on a steel chassis that is very rugged. My V9 has been dropped on to concrete floors more times than I care to remember with no ill effects (other than a few minor cosmetic dings), and it takes serious strength to stand up to the weight of a tractor, even in mud.
by the time the crack or circumvention comes out, Ubisoft will have made the vast majority of the money they planned to make on the title.
This business model might work (as far as it goes) on the balance sheet, but it's still not much of a model. It assumes that development costs will be cut to a minimum (which usually means their programmers will end up being shafted) and no responsibility will be taken for any aspects of quality control.
If the gamer has any sense of social responsibilty at all, I hope s/he will avoid any Ubisoft products. But I'm probably pissing into the wind by even mentioning social responsibility in the context of gamers... [sigh]
I don't pirate either, and that's one of the reasons. But I also don't buy things that come with DRM.
Same here. I'm not so much into the game market, but I do buy a lot of music, and the same principles apply. But when it comes to the point where a game manufacturer is spending more resources on preventing someone digitally ripping off his product than he appears to be on the product itself, then everybody would be better off if the game was simply produced as a physical board game.
Some phones seem to survive being run over and abused quite well. My wife and I both have Motorola Razr2 V9 phones, and last winter, my wife managed to drop hers in a muddy puddle, where it remained overnight, and where I happened to drive over it *twice* on my old Chamberlain tractor. It survived that with just a cracked front screen and a stiff hinge. A couple of weeks later, she dropped it in the loo.
I might have been tempted to abandon the phone there, but she didn't, and it's still working now. I guess if I really wanted to destroy it, I've got a 60lb sledge-hammer that might just work...
Not every single bit of information is really worth the effort to save
That's what you might think now, but a historian of the future would probably disagree. By way of an example, it's possible to gain an insight into practices of the past by looking into details of regulations: few official records exist, for instance, detailing fraudulent practice in the food industry in 16th or 17th century England, but the fact that there are statutes specifically forbidding stuffing meat with rags to make it look "plumper" tell us a lot about common practice of the time.
History isn't just made up of dates and battles. It is made up of countless little bits, each not in itself very important, but contributing to the whole.