Being easily frightened doesn't have anything to do with being a coward. Cowardice is not facing your fears, or being dominated by them. And I would argue that being easily frightened in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing:
A very easy example: An easily frightened solider is walking in the woods. He hears something and is frightened, and immediately flinches. A bullet flies over his head, and he turns and returns fire, killing the enemey. A few miles away, another solider is walking. He is not easily frightened or startled. He hears something, and calmly turns his head in the direction of the sound. The bullet goes straight through his face, killing him.
In an fundementally safe society like America in the 21st century, being easily frightened may seem like a defect, but you can't necessarily say that's true. Say there's a threat who's actual impact is unknowable to a given sample of people. People who are very frighetend of it may want to react more than peope who aren't easily frightened, but since we don't know the actual level of the threat, we can't tell if group A is over-reaction or group B is under-reacting. I'm sure there's some rad game theory solution to that problem.
Closer to home, I was definitely a nerd-tastic "flincher" in high school -- jocks could make a fist five feet away from me and I'd flinch and duck. Was I a pussy? Maybe, but I also got randomly punched a lot less than some of my less reactive friends.
Seriously, I do reuse passwords -- I use the same pw for low-security sites (message boards, excluding slashdot), but increasingly obscure unique ones for more highly secure sites and uses.
My favorite pw creation scheme is to take a sentence that's easy to remember a la "I grew up in Boston, Mass, 02120," from which I derive IgUiBm)2!2), which is a fairly secure pw -- it's easier to remember a sentence than it is single complex word (at least for me).
Why not like,use head phones. Say those white ones that come with an iPod. When the phone rings, pull the ear bud from your ear and let it drop a couple feet down. Then, pick up the phone handset and move it to your ear. Unless you're trying to deafen yourself, the audio coming from the ear bud 2 feet away from the phone handset will not reach the person on the other end of the line.
Give me a break. These people need to grow up. Like many other people, I moved to California from an arguably prettier, milder, easier-to-live-in state with a way better education system and a far lower cost of living. I work like a dog. Why? BECAUSE I LOVE WORKING FOR A TECHNOLOGY COMPANY. People bitching because they work long hours in tech should try working 45 years, 7 -3 at a fucking factory in the midwest and see how their quality of life compares. Or even worse, working at some hourly service job in the Southeast.
I don't care what you do, whether its work in the cafe or do QA or CS or clean the fucking toilets, there's probably about 10,000 people across the country who'd happily switch places with each of the malcontents at Apple, for a chance to work at such a stable, growing, employee-friendly company.
Say you murder someone. The cops come and ask to look around your house, with no warrent. You say "sure" and they come in and find evidence and they arrest you. Say you murder someone. The cops come and ask to look around and you say "get a warrent" and they go away. [Maybe the come back later, it's immaterial to the story.]
In neither case were your rights violated. Same here. If the FBI asked for RECORDs that might be an issue, but it appeared they asked for public terminals. The Director seems well within his rights to give them what they want, just as if the cops showed up and said "Hey, we think a murderer might have cleaned himself up in your mens' room, can we look and gather some of those bloody towels that are all over the floor?"
A warrent is only required when the authorities can't get permission from the person they need stuff from. No one has any requirement to give permission, but it's not like you can't give permission without a warrent.
IMHO, people are spun up about this because the word "library" was used. If they went to an Internet Cafe and asked the same thing no one would give a shit. FBI? Library? Warrent? OMG!
I disagree -- while I found the UI for Windows Mobile to be unusable inconsistant (for instance, you tap one place to dismiss an alert or VM message... but a text message cannot be dismissed the same way. Tapping in the same place for a SMS automatically replies) as a phone (it was very nice as a PDA), I find the BlackBerry to be incredible consistant and intuitive.
There are basically three buttons: YES, MENU, and BACK. It's much more modal than a touch-screen enabled device, but also much more usable for the simple tasks of phone, email, contacts, and scheduling. The whole device is very email orientated, and if that's what you do a lot of (and it is what I do), it's simply the best device on the market. The browser capabilities are roughly in line with IE for mobile, and the Google Maps application is a joy to use. Battery life is near infinite, even with a lot of constant email checking. There are also numerous shortcuts for power-users.
In comparison with the iPhone (I've used both), the iPhone is a lot slicker and has better font handling -- assuming you like your fonts smoothed. It's much better for showing pictures and video, and with GPS, the google maps function might actualy be more useful now. The iPhone has a better browser. But, battery life is far, far worse, and if you actually use your smartphone for work, that needs to be a real consideration. The soft keyboard, while "you can get used to it," and have it be "not too bad," is objectively inferior to a real keyboard for the portion of the population that has thumbs (eg most of humanity).
Bottom line, the iPhone is slicker and prettier, but the UI of the Blackberry enables users -- especially business users -- to do just as much, usually much faster, and for much longer, than the iPhone.
(And just for the record, I'm typing this on a MacBook -- I'm not a hater, the phone just isn't that great for me.)
Tethering is absolutely not against AT&T regulations. I was able to pay I think... $9.95 a month to add tethering to my data plan for my 3G Cingular Windows Mobile 8525 (aka the Tilt). ATT is all about tethering. Not sure why they hate it on the iPhone.
But... I do know that it totally sucked in terms of speed and battery life. If they are banning tethering on the iPhone, I suspect it's battery-life related, since the battery life seems to be the 800lb gorrila in the room with that phone. [smugly pats BlackBerry Curve]
Oh my... my Mac, with all smoothing turned off, rendered that "cl" in "click" exactly like a "d." At first I thought there was some awesome new simile I was learning...
The only issue w/ those starch peanuts is rats and other pests eat them, and so now many are covered in posion. It's better to just trash them; they dissolve to nothing in landfills.
By the the way, my comment window (in Safari) is also about only 20 characters across.
Clearly, you haven't been to SEMA... Anyway, as someone who's attended all 14 E3s ('95 - '08 inclusive), I can say that the "Booth Babes" as a concept were way over-rated, over-discussed, and over-focused upon by people who'd never attended the show. There were always a few booths that had some skantily clad women in them, but generally only for stage shows, which also featured scantily clad dudes, and people in costumes. Not much different from any stage show. A few people tried to raise some publicity by dressing their models pretty slutty, but mostly the models (which everyone hired) dressed reasonably demurly. Just about any trade show hires models to work the booth; marketing staffs just aren't big enough (especially as they need to be talking to the press, etc). So, for instance, all those fresh-faced, modestly-dressed young women helping you play Nintendo games in the old days were, in fact, "booth babes." Not too scandalous!
Anyway, from a fan perspective, this E3 was pretty depressing (although better than last year). No pagentry, no mega-booths, just a tiny show floor and a convention center that was depressingly empty. For work, however, it couldn't have been better! Tons of meetings, tons of running into people, and no lines at any of the kiosks or games. The new WBIE shooter PROJECT ORIGIN looks freaking amazing, as does the new Animal Crossing, and Major Minor, the new game from the Parappa Team. Other standouts were Ninja Town or Ninja Land (desktop tower defense with Ninjas), and some of the indie stuff.
more sparsely. Norway is MORE SPARSELY POPULATED, or has a SPARSER POPULATION. Sparse(er, est) is an adjective. It can modify a noun, like population, but it can't modify populated, which is a verb. You're looking for an adverb. Here's an easy hint for English: If you're looking to describe HOW you do something (such as populate a country), add an -LY on the end of one of the words someplace and you should be good.
Here's a simple example:
John is QUICK. Quick is an adjective that describes John.
John runs QUICKLY. Quickly is an adverb that describes how John runs.
"John runs QUICK" is incorrect, but it's an increasingly common usage, especially by NASCAR drivers and immigrants from places without strong word-ending rules, such as many Asian countries.
All the books by British author John Christopher are really great. The Tripod series, and the Burning Lands series are both post-post-apolyptic and blew my mind when I read then around age 12 or 13. Nerds of a certain age may remember that the Tripod series was serialized in comic form in Boys Life for years in the 1980s.
The burning lands series has some great elements of questions about science and technology whether or not its use is ultimately good or evil -- good food for thought for youngersters raised in the Internet age, and also is sex-scene free.
Additionally, if you read some books you now think are too old for your kids, maybe you should consider that those books were too old for YOU, and you turned out fine! I cringe when my son reads MAD, but it was probably just as nihlistic and subversive in the 1970s as it is today.
When I was two, my parents sat me down and were like "here's the rules for English and a list of verbs, go!"
No seriously, learning languages is much easier as a child, because kids have the innate ability to learn languages better, so I don't think the way I learned English is necessarily going to work later in life. I agree, when I am in France for a week or so, my accent improves and my comprehension improves dramatically over that week, but that's when everyone but the fat people are speaking French. I'm not saying immersion doesn't work, it obviously does and is great. But being "immersed" for 90 minutes three times a week is a sham IMHO, at least for me.
Lastly, before Krashen et all, lots of people learned foreign languages just fine the "old fashioned" way, so it's difficult to accept that Immersion is the only way. It's probably like the Whole Language vs Phonics debate -- some people learn well one way, and some people learn well the other.
How does my paragraph confirm it? My class was taught in ENGLISH, about French. I learned everything the class planned to teach, and while French people cringe, I have no problems when I am in France being understood, I just have a bad accent. When I tried to take a faux-immersion class, I never knew WTF was going on. And, before you blame the teacher... it was the same women who taught faux immersion French, which I drop/failed, as who taught French for Scientists, which I aced. I accept that I may be in the minority, but I'd rather bet told some language rules and be given a long list of verbs to memorize, than to have a million stupid, infantile "conversations" in the target language that never enable me to understand how to or when to or why to conjugate a verb.
I still remember dear mom and dad telling me... "Spanish! Why the heck would you ever need to know Spanish! You should learn French, it's the international language of business and diplomacy." Bien sur, Mama et Papa were a little east coast traditional...
Anyway, in college I took French for Scientists -- two years of learning to read French, not speak it or write it (although, by learning to read, you basically learn to write). We could take our dictionaries to tests, because it was all just about translating French to English. I can still read French. But I live in California where everyone speaks Spanish, and I work with lots of Japanese speakers...
Anyway, one cool thing about the "X for Scientists" or equivilant classes is that they are taught IN ENGLISH. I could never get the hang of the faux immersion classes where they try to teach the language in the language. It's just stupid when you have a procedural or grammar question that is IMPOSSIBLE to ask in the new language, but would take two seconds to ask in English. Perhaps languages classes have gotten over this in the 15 years since I left school, but since it's a stupid idea that sounds smart, I'm sure the Academy is still holding firm.
I love the idea of sub-pixel rendering for fonts, but in practice, to me, they make the screen blurry... and cause eye-strain. My solution was to turn OFF spr (on my mac and pc), and suddenly my LCD-induced eye-strain went away.
So, the answer is clearly... do whatever works for you!
You're right, but wouldn't this move the 'infringer' to the guy who had the URL to put all the little random chunks together into a Maroon Five file on his PC, not the girl who had one 128K chunk that *could be* used to represent the Maroon Five file -- or a shopping list -- on her PC?
the wiki explains it a little better. It's sort of cool. It breaks all the data in 128K randomized chunks, and those chunks can also be used as well to represent OTHER data, because it's all about the relationship of the radomized chunks, not just the chunks themselves.
Barring bug fixes, why would you ever update your OS. OS are like girlfriends. You can usually do different, but it's hard to do better.
Especially with a laptop, if the OS that shipped with it works, why ever change? Chances are, any new OS will add "features," aka "be slower," and since it's "new" it will also be buggy and worse. Modern OSes already do too much, you don't need every shareware utility ever made to autoload thanks to MS or Apple.
Frankly, if I could get ProDOS to boot on this MacBook, I'm sure I'd be better off...
The odds that it *won't* be more fucked up than Vista? Probably pretty low, since MS seems determined to thwart Moore's Law with software and ensure that our OS and GUIs run slower with each successive generation. My 1987 Mac SE boots faster than my 2007 ThinkPad (with XP!). That's kind of retarded. A newer machine running slower than an older machine is automatically fucked up in my opinion.
IF [anything seems fucked up] THEN SHUT DOWN REACTOR
Much rather have a business PC take the reactor offline than have anything *not* take the reactor offline when it needs it. I 3 nuclear power, but they need a better PR person. The spin here should be: "Look how safe nuclear power is! We'll go offline at the drop of a hat if we need to, etc."
I live in a very hardcore, poor, urban neighborhood in Oakland, CA, and there are never lines -- becuase NO ONE FUCKING VOTES.
I'd cheer for a four hour line, but I suspect that if everyone who voted in my precinct lined up at once, it would take about 20 minutes.
We used to use the Disenfranchizer2000 from Diebold, but now we used the awesome "draw a line between these two black dots on a piece of paper" which totally precludes ambiguity and is checked for errors when you put it in the machine. There is an electronic machine present, I assume for those with disabilities, but I've never seen it used.
Of course, even if everyone voted it wouldn't matter, because most for most local positions the usual Machine scumbags run unopposed.
Great points. In practice, we usually fax contracts so we can start working, then send (via FedEx) paper copies for 'real' execution. I can't think of an example in 15+ years in the working world where a fax signature wasn't used in a positive manner -- to seal the deal on something everyone already agreed on, like an NDA or a writing assignment or a negotiated development contract.
On the other hand, we also switched to the e-signing service DocuSign for our internal contracts and approvals, because using a fax machine is such a massive pain in the ass and no one in our company likes dealing with paper. A few of our clients use it too, it's pretty wonderful. As secure as you want it to be, and also quick and easy.
Slashdot Mirror
A very easy example: An easily frightened solider is walking in the woods. He hears something and is frightened, and immediately flinches. A bullet flies over his head, and he turns and returns fire, killing the enemey. A few miles away, another solider is walking. He is not easily frightened or startled. He hears something, and calmly turns his head in the direction of the sound. The bullet goes straight through his face, killing him.
In an fundementally safe society like America in the 21st century, being easily frightened may seem like a defect, but you can't necessarily say that's true. Say there's a threat who's actual impact is unknowable to a given sample of people. People who are very frighetend of it may want to react more than peope who aren't easily frightened, but since we don't know the actual level of the threat, we can't tell if group A is over-reaction or group B is under-reacting. I'm sure there's some rad game theory solution to that problem.
Closer to home, I was definitely a nerd-tastic "flincher" in high school -- jocks could make a fist five feet away from me and I'd flinch and duck. Was I a pussy? Maybe, but I also got randomly punched a lot less than some of my less reactive friends.
FWIW, My company just banned using Chrome based on the EULA.
Seriously, I do reuse passwords -- I use the same pw for low-security sites (message boards, excluding slashdot), but increasingly obscure unique ones for more highly secure sites and uses.
My favorite pw creation scheme is to take a sentence that's easy to remember a la "I grew up in Boston, Mass, 02120," from which I derive IgUiBm)2!2), which is a fairly secure pw -- it's easier to remember a sentence than it is single complex word (at least for me).
Or read a book, or turn on closed captioning.
I don't care what you do, whether its work in the cafe or do QA or CS or clean the fucking toilets, there's probably about 10,000 people across the country who'd happily switch places with each of the malcontents at Apple, for a chance to work at such a stable, growing, employee-friendly company.
In neither case were your rights violated. Same here. If the FBI asked for RECORDs that might be an issue, but it appeared they asked for public terminals. The Director seems well within his rights to give them what they want, just as if the cops showed up and said "Hey, we think a murderer might have cleaned himself up in your mens' room, can we look and gather some of those bloody towels that are all over the floor?"
A warrent is only required when the authorities can't get permission from the person they need stuff from. No one has any requirement to give permission, but it's not like you can't give permission without a warrent.
IMHO, people are spun up about this because the word "library" was used. If they went to an Internet Cafe and asked the same thing no one would give a shit. FBI? Library? Warrent? OMG!
There are basically three buttons: YES, MENU, and BACK. It's much more modal than a touch-screen enabled device, but also much more usable for the simple tasks of phone, email, contacts, and scheduling. The whole device is very email orientated, and if that's what you do a lot of (and it is what I do), it's simply the best device on the market. The browser capabilities are roughly in line with IE for mobile, and the Google Maps application is a joy to use. Battery life is near infinite, even with a lot of constant email checking. There are also numerous shortcuts for power-users.
In comparison with the iPhone (I've used both), the iPhone is a lot slicker and has better font handling -- assuming you like your fonts smoothed. It's much better for showing pictures and video, and with GPS, the google maps function might actualy be more useful now. The iPhone has a better browser. But, battery life is far, far worse, and if you actually use your smartphone for work, that needs to be a real consideration. The soft keyboard, while "you can get used to it," and have it be "not too bad," is objectively inferior to a real keyboard for the portion of the population that has thumbs (eg most of humanity).
Bottom line, the iPhone is slicker and prettier, but the UI of the Blackberry enables users -- especially business users -- to do just as much, usually much faster, and for much longer, than the iPhone.
(And just for the record, I'm typing this on a MacBook -- I'm not a hater, the phone just isn't that great for me.)
But... I do know that it totally sucked in terms of speed and battery life. If they are banning tethering on the iPhone, I suspect it's battery-life related, since the battery life seems to be the 800lb gorrila in the room with that phone. [smugly pats BlackBerry Curve]
Oh my... my Mac, with all smoothing turned off, rendered that "cl" in "click" exactly like a "d." At first I thought there was some awesome new simile I was learning...
By the the way, my comment window (in Safari) is also about only 20 characters across.
Anyway, from a fan perspective, this E3 was pretty depressing (although better than last year). No pagentry, no mega-booths, just a tiny show floor and a convention center that was depressingly empty. For work, however, it couldn't have been better! Tons of meetings, tons of running into people, and no lines at any of the kiosks or games. The new WBIE shooter PROJECT ORIGIN looks freaking amazing, as does the new Animal Crossing, and Major Minor, the new game from the Parappa Team. Other standouts were Ninja Town or Ninja Land (desktop tower defense with Ninjas), and some of the indie stuff.
Here's a simple example:
John is QUICK. Quick is an adjective that describes John.
John runs QUICKLY. Quickly is an adverb that describes how John runs.
"John runs QUICK" is incorrect, but it's an increasingly common usage, especially by NASCAR drivers and immigrants from places without strong word-ending rules, such as many Asian countries.
The burning lands series has some great elements of questions about science and technology whether or not its use is ultimately good or evil -- good food for thought for youngersters raised in the Internet age, and also is sex-scene free.
Additionally, if you read some books you now think are too old for your kids, maybe you should consider that those books were too old for YOU, and you turned out fine! I cringe when my son reads MAD, but it was probably just as nihlistic and subversive in the 1970s as it is today.
No seriously, learning languages is much easier as a child, because kids have the innate ability to learn languages better, so I don't think the way I learned English is necessarily going to work later in life. I agree, when I am in France for a week or so, my accent improves and my comprehension improves dramatically over that week, but that's when everyone but the fat people are speaking French. I'm not saying immersion doesn't work, it obviously does and is great. But being "immersed" for 90 minutes three times a week is a sham IMHO, at least for me.
Lastly, before Krashen et all, lots of people learned foreign languages just fine the "old fashioned" way, so it's difficult to accept that Immersion is the only way. It's probably like the Whole Language vs Phonics debate -- some people learn well one way, and some people learn well the other.
How does my paragraph confirm it? My class was taught in ENGLISH, about French. I learned everything the class planned to teach, and while French people cringe, I have no problems when I am in France being understood, I just have a bad accent. When I tried to take a faux-immersion class, I never knew WTF was going on. And, before you blame the teacher... it was the same women who taught faux immersion French, which I drop/failed, as who taught French for Scientists, which I aced. I accept that I may be in the minority, but I'd rather bet told some language rules and be given a long list of verbs to memorize, than to have a million stupid, infantile "conversations" in the target language that never enable me to understand how to or when to or why to conjugate a verb.
Anyway, in college I took French for Scientists -- two years of learning to read French, not speak it or write it (although, by learning to read, you basically learn to write). We could take our dictionaries to tests, because it was all just about translating French to English. I can still read French. But I live in California where everyone speaks Spanish, and I work with lots of Japanese speakers...
Anyway, one cool thing about the "X for Scientists" or equivilant classes is that they are taught IN ENGLISH. I could never get the hang of the faux immersion classes where they try to teach the language in the language. It's just stupid when you have a procedural or grammar question that is IMPOSSIBLE to ask in the new language, but would take two seconds to ask in English. Perhaps languages classes have gotten over this in the 15 years since I left school, but since it's a stupid idea that sounds smart, I'm sure the Academy is still holding firm.
So, the answer is clearly... do whatever works for you!
You're right, but wouldn't this move the 'infringer' to the guy who had the URL to put all the little random chunks together into a Maroon Five file on his PC, not the girl who had one 128K chunk that *could be* used to represent the Maroon Five file -- or a shopping list -- on her PC?
the wiki explains it a little better. It's sort of cool. It breaks all the data in 128K randomized chunks, and those chunks can also be used as well to represent OTHER data, because it's all about the relationship of the radomized chunks, not just the chunks themselves.
Especially with a laptop, if the OS that shipped with it works, why ever change? Chances are, any new OS will add "features," aka "be slower," and since it's "new" it will also be buggy and worse. Modern OSes already do too much, you don't need every shareware utility ever made to autoload thanks to MS or Apple.
Frankly, if I could get ProDOS to boot on this MacBook, I'm sure I'd be better off...
The odds that it *won't* be more fucked up than Vista? Probably pretty low, since MS seems determined to thwart Moore's Law with software and ensure that our OS and GUIs run slower with each successive generation. My 1987 Mac SE boots faster than my 2007 ThinkPad (with XP!). That's kind of retarded. A newer machine running slower than an older machine is automatically fucked up in my opinion.
And yes, my pedantic tendencies bother even me...
IF [anything seems fucked up] THEN SHUT DOWN REACTOR
Much rather have a business PC take the reactor offline than have anything *not* take the reactor offline when it needs it. I 3 nuclear power, but they need a better PR person. The spin here should be: "Look how safe nuclear power is! We'll go offline at the drop of a hat if we need to, etc."
I'd cheer for a four hour line, but I suspect that if everyone who voted in my precinct lined up at once, it would take about 20 minutes. We used to use the Disenfranchizer2000 from Diebold, but now we used the awesome "draw a line between these two black dots on a piece of paper" which totally precludes ambiguity and is checked for errors when you put it in the machine. There is an electronic machine present, I assume for those with disabilities, but I've never seen it used.
Of course, even if everyone voted it wouldn't matter, because most for most local positions the usual Machine scumbags run unopposed.
On the other hand, we also switched to the e-signing service DocuSign for our internal contracts and approvals, because using a fax machine is such a massive pain in the ass and no one in our company likes dealing with paper. A few of our clients use it too, it's pretty wonderful. As secure as you want it to be, and also quick and easy.