You're not the first person I've heard proporting the rumor that it will require a new $3000 computer
Ignore the rumours and concentrate on one thing...you don't know what it requires until it's released. Don't let that hold you back of course; I just bought a new desktop myself.
As an example, consider HD televisions. Everyone that got onto that bandwagon early has been screwed. Their TV lacks a critical connection that is required for future HD content. Bummer. It's now a door-stop that's bigger than the door.
Besides that, with electronics things are much the same as software except you can burn your fingers when "patching". Early releases are buggy and have the dodgy components with the low MTBF numbers. I could list a whole slew of consumer electronics where rev1 was a piece of crap. And if I wanted to break some confidentiality contracts I could list a whole lot more where I have personal knowledge of just how many rev 1s got returned dead. It's bad, trust me.
And why were you sending mail direct from your cable modem static IP? You should have been using your ISP's smarthost.
Because when I hook my laptop up to the net away from home using wifi or gprs, it can't get to my ISP's smarthost. So instead I have a publicly accessible server with authetication and SSL set up that I can use from anywhere. This is way better than the last 8 years where I've had to manually change the outgoing server.
I've had to stop this approach because of some RBL lists blocking my mail. The whole of @aol.com ignores me. Instead I now use GMails SMTP server. It also has SSL and authentication, and can be reached for anywhere.
FUD. I use sleep and hibernate on my XP laptop all the time without any issues. I reboot maybe once a month.
Likewise, I've used both for years on many different laptops without issue. If you have problems it's because a driver doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Nowt to do with M$ I'm afraid, can't blame 'em for this one.
Video Performance Optimizer $18 seems like stuff that you can set your self in the video drivers control panel.
Hmm, personally if I were buying a gaming optimised PC I'd expect this sort of tweak as standard. No one installs windows by hand in these outfits; they use disk images. The fact that they know there are opimizations possible and they aren't a part of their disk image is appauling. What exactly are you paying for with an outfit like Alienware? I thought that sort of thing was the point.
The difference between those systems and this one is that this seems to actively rate down bad users. Where as regular use in the schemes you noted above gives you perks, there's no punishment inherent in there if you don't use it properly like we are seeing here.
Agreed, this does seem to be deliberate punishment. However, ed2k maintains queues exceeding 3000 users on you upload queue. Believe me, that's punishment! Actually, the numbers may actually go in the opposite direction on really bad clients. I think it tracks it as a ratio, so going negative is possible. You might get the first X amount of data as an average user, but then you drop to below average.
Your joke raises a good question though...what are they going to do with all of these batteries? There's some pretty nasty chemicals in there and they need proper disposal. This is going to cost Sony a lot more than just the replacements. Unless they ship them to China I guess!!
While you can look at it one way and say this is just a logical extension of rewarding 'good' users, the fact that the system can be used to punish 'bad' users and explains nothing about how this definition of 'good' and 'bad' will be determined makes me more concerned for the people using such a service.
I bloody well wouldn't.
Never used p2p then? All modern p2p applications do this. For example, the ed2k protocol maintains a list of clients on each box. Whenever you download from someone, it remembers that. When it comes to uploading, the application checks the user against the file and jumps the queue if you have received from them in the past.
Rewarding those who give back is nothing new. The slashdot moderation system is an example of this. Jeez, even customer loyalty schemes are an equivalent in meatspace. There's a lot of prior art on this sort of thing.
Sounds like a valid judgement then; she specifically cleaned up the PC and removed the p2p apps. She'd have been better reinstalling windows entirely, at least there are valid reasons for that e.g. Windows Half Life (no, not the game).
Re:Talk about a Battle of the Bands
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iPods at War
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· Score: 1
Just hook up those iPods to some speakers, and if you pick the right music, you can add psychological warfare to the physical weapons.
They already are. Loud music is/was being used in the torture arsenal in Guantanamo Bay and Iraqi prisons. Mostly to enforce sleep deprivation but I'm sure there's some bad taste. I've heard tales of Britney and death metal.
The thing is, I'd put money on the fact that out of all of these sites, someones hooked up an iPod to at least one of them already...
Re:Problem?
on
iPods at War
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm glad that our troops can be entertained in this fashion and that some can get stationed in places with all kinds of creature comforts
What we need to be careful about however is the perception of this confort by for example the Iraqi people. That's been one of the big criticisms of the way Iraq has been handled. While the Iraqi's don't have clean water, working sewage and electricity, our troops were chilling in big palaces with all the latest toys. Many Iraqis compared them to Saddam.
Of course, I'm not saying that they shouldn't have toys. But there is a balance to be had and I'm sure spoiling soldiers probably isn't all that operationally wise. There's good reason for the discipline in the armed forces.
However, I honestly think everyone has missed the real problem that could arise from all of this. Should a soldier get captured, a gameboy might entertain his guards. But imagine they got a hold of a flash drive with personal information, letters home. Or even some GPS enabled phone that has been logging the platoons movements for the past three months! The army probably wants to do a risk accessment on a lot of devices, as well as issuing advice etc to the troops.
I've used smoothwall and ipcop in the past and presently I'm using my own debian configuration as a router. However, I will be buying one of these, or at least a similar one that works with DD-WRT, which is a Linux upgrade to the router. Here's why:
Less power consumption
More reliable (no moving parts)
More secure (in theory)
Can be mounted to a wall instead of taking up a whole shelf
Harder to hack (smoothwall can be easilly root'ed whereas a hack here would be noticed)
Oh, and the definition of a router is quite simple. It's a device that shifts packets from one subnet to another. So all of these devices are routers. I'd say "internet gateway" was more of a better description for the more featured solutions.
Funnilly enough, I came across this router last night when looking at DD-WRT, which is a linux router upgrade distro. So, you can take that as a big yes. The upgrade turns this router into a bit of a beast.
This one happens to be rather good for the project as it has more than the usual ammount of RAM and flash memory. Most routers have 16/4 meg of ram/flash, but IIRC this one has 64/16. It also has USB, which is a major plus once you get *nix on it.
I know this is a bit off-topic, but does it provide sufficent cooling?
They should do; I've seen reports of people overclocking them without issue.
he picked it up in frustration and slammed it against the desk. Well, it spun up. He didn't ask any questions, but IMMEDIATLY "Ghosted" the drive to another one.
Similar story for me, six months ago. I don't recommend slaming it against the desk, if you feel violence is neccessary build it up gradually. Start of with a gentle tap from the base of your screw driver.
In my case I believe the read head was stuck. It worked intermittently and on the last time it worked I was ghosting it and the head stuck. The drive was too hot to touch after a few hours of it sitting in this state. Any longer and it may have become a fire hazzard.
Speaking of which, I almost had a fire two weeks ago. Water had been getting into the in-line power adapter for my WiFi access point. I've never seen an ethernet cable melt before, kinda scary.
The large majority of "computer voodoo" is because of Microsoft's buggy crapware...
It's more likely a result of your attitude.
Moving the mouse around while waiting to prevent lock-ups is another very popular one.
No, moving the mouse is to see if it's locked up _yet_. Another one is to move the windows about to see the state of the system e.g. if the GPU is doing redraws correctly.
Not to mention all the drivers that will just corrupt themselves after working fine for 3 months, if you just LOOK at the system funny.
I have three XP systems at home and seven at work. Each has been going for at least two years. That's 80 three-month periods and I've never seen this once.
Another Windows one is IE's download dialog... It takes so long before it appears, that when it starts there is already a few KBs downloaded, so it claims a 500KB/sec download rate on a dial-up modem
That's not whats happening. When you click on the link, it starts downloading instantly. It then presends you with the save-as dialog. This is really useful IMHO as the file is partially downloaded by the time you decide where to dump it. If it's taking three minutes to download on dialup, I'll gladly accept a 30-second reduction in that via this system. Yes, it confuses users, but how many of those users refer to the beige box as "the hard drive"?:-) Confusing them is like shooting fish in a barrel.
The UK show, Brainiac, did a data storage test a few years ago. The show has now made it to the USA, but perhaps not this re-run.
From memory, they tested CDs, harddrives, flash drives and a few others. They fired them out of a blunderbust, dropped them, drove over them and I think they even cooked them in a pie.
After all this, the flash drive was the only one that still worked. IIRC the contacts were a bit flakey though.
In terms of data recovery, a mangled flash card is probably way ahead of other kinds of storage. Recovery of a harddrive requires a clean room and specialist equiptment. You could rejuvinate a physically broken flashcard by removing the actual eeprom and putting it on a new (compatible) card and it would be as good as new.
Nostalgia - blowing on the Nintendo game cartridge.
My old Genesis did this, and who can remember the old wobbly ram pack?
I've always wondered if the blowing actually helped and if it wasn't just the remove/reinsert that did it. When I used to work for a computer laptop manufacturer, we found that a large portion of broken units could be fixed via "reseating the cpu". With the number of contacts in these high-density connectors, an odd broken contact is inevitable. The way I see it, any dust that could be removed by blowing would not cause an open circuit. It would be just as easilly pushed out of the way by the contact.
Corrosion on the other hand is a pain. Clean it up with ethanol (ask your drunkard uncle for some) and it's as good as new.
Oh, and a 100 lb woman in stiletto heels can exert over 1000 psi if she balances on her heel.
Tell me about it. My flat has mainly wooden flooring and the both the hall and the kitchen have been utterly destroyed by girls in heels. The floor looks like one of those sealed puzzles with the ball bearings.
Can't complain though...who'd complain about chicks in heals?:-)
You're still saying the same thing: if only pacifism had been widely accepted, we wouldn't have violence.
No, I'm not saying that. The millions of dissenters wouldn't win on morality, it would be their sheer numbers and the ultimate thread of riotous violence and civil war that would have won. It's an extra bonus if that happens with no violence.
Aside from ridiculous notions that Hitler would have accepted a couple hundred thousand American peace protesters in his borders in 1939 without violence
Oh christ, the whole USA world pivot theory. Who was talking about Americans? MLKs quote specifically mentions the German people.
we can go to a simple micro-level example.
Lets not, shall we? Your example is irrelevant, of course you'd shoot him in the head. Twice. But it doesn't change a thing that WW2 could have been easilly avoided. The main thing that allowed it to happen was the concent of the German population, using techniques used again in the USA in the past five years WRT invading Iraq. They too had a large "terrorist" incident. Anyone who didn't agree to Hitlers sweeping new powers was tainted as unpatriotic (their words btw). They invaded Poland to protect their own freedom. Sound familiar?
What I don't understand is why the 180 after the war ended. We would happily fight in Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Iraq, and other places without a single American at risk
Another post essentially answered that question by mentioning Eisenhowers "Military Industrial Complex". Simply put; the companies that sprung up to make the vast ammounts of weaponry for WW2 didn't want to let go. Now they are in the Whitehouse in the guise of the Vice President. Cheeny is personally benefiting from these wars. His company, Harrliburton, has multiple massive no-bid contracts in the region. All of the logistics are being provided by them. We're talking food, lodging, shipping & supply, management, the whole lot has been outsourced. Almost everything except the actual fighting has been outsourced. Even base security is handled by mercinaries now e.g. companies like Black Water.
This isn't the case for every war of course. Korea, Vietnam were just coldwar-by-proxy. Kinda similar to the Israeli/Lebanese conflict at the moment; the US and UK are calling for a ceasefire because they want that war! It's an idealogical battle, with the intention of accelerating the second coming of Christ and the rapture. Yes, they actually believe that stuff!
Do you think "creative, non-violent responses" would have been sufficient to end the Holocaust faster than the Holocaust ended all Jews?
Yes. They could have ended it before it begun, if only we had the empathy to care about oppression of a group you personally don't belong to. Pretty much like the Islamic people are getting at the moment, but who here has done anything to stop that?
Perhaps it was best said by MLK:
"Perhaps if there had
been a broader understanding of the uses of nonviolent direct action
in Germany when Hitler was rising and consolidating his power, the
brutal extermination of six million Jews and millions of other war
dead might have been averted and Germany might never have become
totalitarian. If Protestants and Catholics had engaged in nonviolent
direct action and had made the oppression of the Jews their very own
oppression and had come into the streets beside the Jew to scrub the
sidewalks, and had Gentiles worn the stigmatizing yellow arm bands by
the millions, a unique form of mass resistance to the Nazi regime
might have developed..."
you lose your pda or someone steals it, the person possessing the device gets a usb cable connects it to a computer with activesync installed, bam ! They have then have full access to all the data on the pda, by default there's no facility to password protect the device.
Completely wrong. Firstly, password protection is built in always, in all versions of Windows Mobile going back to WM2003. This results in a password screen on the device, and a prompt on the PC for ActiveSync. You just need to turn it on. Ask any customer support representative in any company why these things are disabled by default; they'll tell you that many users just can't deal with it or lose the password. They lose data, and that is bad.
Next, the password reset proceedure completely resets the device. All personal data is gone. To be honest, my WM5 device is one of the most secure devices I have. It doesn't even have any listening ports, I've portscaned the whole range. I'm confortable in the fact that if I lose it, all my data stays private. Not many other phones or PDAs can claim that.
What a lot of security zealots forget at the end of the day that we have a little thing called the law, which in most parts of the world prohibits things such as breaking security on applications to illegally obtain data.
What reality do you inhabit?;-) The law does nothing to prohibit anything, ever. Morality does; the law just logs the collective morality at the time. As in gay sex being illegal fifty years ago. People still did it though.
Hear hear. This is yet another large terrorism "bust" in the UK. Each one was originally sold to us as a massive success in the Fight For Freedom(TM). The first was a Brazilian guy who was running away from the police with an explosive vest on. About a week after he was shot in the face NINE times we hear that, no, he wasn't running. No, he didn't have a jacket no. And no, he had zero terrorist links. This happened a week or two after the london bombings and for some reason none of the surveilence systems were functional in the subway station. Righhttt...
The next case was two brothers arrested in possibly the biggest police operation in UK history. Over 200 officers present at the arrest. During the arrest, one of the brothers attempted to shoot the police as they entered. Or so we were told. Appently they went with a similar line to the Chewbacka defence; you see the officer had gloves on that made his weapon discharge when he shot the guy in cold blood. No charges were filed and the police are now paying to rebuild their house after it was torn appart. Again, righhttt...
Another set of guys, who we were told were on the same level as the 9/11 hijackers. Big court case, all that. Well, you see it turns out was ALL they had done was chat about what things could be blown up. They, being young men, were talking about nightclubs etc. They had no terrorist links, no access to explosives and frankly they were a bunch of muppets that would never have done anything. How many of you have joked with friends about robbing a bank and the perfect crime? How would you feel if you were now in jail for those hypothetical musings?
So, here we are once again. The whole nation is terrified of flying. Planes have some downright serious restrictions on what you can and cannot take in luggage. Yet as the parent poster points out, if things were really as they said, they wouldn't be mixing hazzardous binary explosives in large bins, would they? The risk to flying is zero. This plot was nowhere near being carried out. Now, they could just be playing safe and taking every precaution. But if liquid explosives were really an issue today (coke/mentos?), they were an issue yesterday and the day before. They will be tomorrow. Are we going to keep up this ban indefinately?
We are being buttered up for the next concquest in the PNACs publicly stated plan to essentially take over the Middle East. My money is on Iran or Syria. Possibly the latter, the pattern fits with the Syran/Hizbolla links we've been constantly informed about over the past few weeks. It's similar to how the Iraq conquest was sold via a snowballing fear/hate campaign. Many of us observed this propaganda build up at the time. Here we are once again.
i play it for the friends i've made along the way.
Which is one of the best things about the net; it puts like minded people together. However, these people are not your friends and one of the biggest worries about these kinds of additions is that people lose real friendships for virtual ones.
A virtual friend will not buy you a beer when you are broke. They won't cheer you up if your wife leaves you. They certainally won't say that "perhaps you play too much WoW...";-) Life is all about balance; some of the most interesting people I know are those I have met online. However, in terms of a meaningful relationship/friendship, meatspace wins hands down, no contest.
From this statistical analysis of similar screening systems:
The US Census shows that there are about 300 million people living in the USA. Suppose that there are 1,000 terrorists there as well, which is probably a high estimate. The base-rate would be 1 terrorist per 300,000 people. In percentages, that is.00033%, which is way less than 1%. Suppose that NSA surveillance has an accuracy rate of.40, which means that 40% of real terrorists in the USA will be identified by NSA's monitoring of everyone's email and phone calls. This is probably a high estimate, considering that terrorists are doing their best to avoid detection. There is no evidence thus far that NSA has been so successful at finding terrorists. And suppose NSA's misidentification rate is.0001, which means that.01% of innocent people will be misidentified as terrorists, at least until they are investigated, detained and interrogated. Note that.01% of the US population is 30,000 people. With these suppositions, then the probability that people are terrorists given that NSA's system of surveillance identifies them as terrorists is only p=0.0132, which is near zero, very far from one. Ergo, NSA's surveillance system is useless for finding terrorists.
On the other hand, how many models of Dell/Sony laptops have had some sort of problem where you could scrape off some paint, or the casing became discolored at some point? Pretty much all of them.
I disagree. I have the following laptops with no such damage: Two eight year Compaqs in beige plastic. One five year old IBM (black plastic coated magnesium IIRC). I've also owned other laptops that I've sold on or given back to the office. I paid nothing for the Compaqs and they have been treated roughly over the years.
Out of ALL of these I've only seen damage to one. It was a Toshiba Portege that developed wear marks from your wrists after several months of use. I also have a five year old mobile phone (a backup) that the paint is damaged on. Now, Toshiba laptops suck IMHO, the one I had suffered from numerous hardware/driver issues (regular BSOD) and the phone I speak of was a first generation smartphone. It was practically a prototype. Basically both were crap, but for different reasons.
Well designed products do not suffer from these kinds of problems. Now, Apple have proved time and time again that they can design good things. Perhaps the damage to their products (e.g. ipod nano) is intentional so that the image-concious Apple owner wants to spend some more money.
Slashdot Mirror
Ignore the rumours and concentrate on one thing...you don't know what it requires until it's released. Don't let that hold you back of course; I just bought a new desktop myself.
As an example, consider HD televisions. Everyone that got onto that bandwagon early has been screwed. Their TV lacks a critical connection that is required for future HD content. Bummer. It's now a door-stop that's bigger than the door.
Besides that, with electronics things are much the same as software except you can burn your fingers when "patching". Early releases are buggy and have the dodgy components with the low MTBF numbers. I could list a whole slew of consumer electronics where rev1 was a piece of crap. And if I wanted to break some confidentiality contracts I could list a whole lot more where I have personal knowledge of just how many rev 1s got returned dead. It's bad, trust me.
Because when I hook my laptop up to the net away from home using wifi or gprs, it can't get to my ISP's smarthost. So instead I have a publicly accessible server with authetication and SSL set up that I can use from anywhere. This is way better than the last 8 years where I've had to manually change the outgoing server.
I've had to stop this approach because of some RBL lists blocking my mail. The whole of @aol.com ignores me. Instead I now use GMails SMTP server. It also has SSL and authentication, and can be reached for anywhere.
Likewise, I've used both for years on many different laptops without issue. If you have problems it's because a driver doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Nowt to do with M$ I'm afraid, can't blame 'em for this one.
Hmm, personally if I were buying a gaming optimised PC I'd expect this sort of tweak as standard. No one installs windows by hand in these outfits; they use disk images. The fact that they know there are opimizations possible and they aren't a part of their disk image is appauling. What exactly are you paying for with an outfit like Alienware? I thought that sort of thing was the point.
Agreed, this does seem to be deliberate punishment. However, ed2k maintains queues exceeding 3000 users on you upload queue. Believe me, that's punishment! Actually, the numbers may actually go in the opposite direction on really bad clients. I think it tracks it as a ratio, so going negative is possible. You might get the first X amount of data as an average user, but then you drop to below average.
Your joke raises a good question though...what are they going to do with all of these batteries? There's some pretty nasty chemicals in there and they need proper disposal. This is going to cost Sony a lot more than just the replacements. Unless they ship them to China I guess!!
Never used p2p then? All modern p2p applications do this. For example, the ed2k protocol maintains a list of clients on each box. Whenever you download from someone, it remembers that. When it comes to uploading, the application checks the user against the file and jumps the queue if you have received from them in the past.
Rewarding those who give back is nothing new. The slashdot moderation system is an example of this. Jeez, even customer loyalty schemes are an equivalent in meatspace. There's a lot of prior art on this sort of thing.
Sounds like a valid judgement then; she specifically cleaned up the PC and removed the p2p apps. She'd have been better reinstalling windows entirely, at least there are valid reasons for that e.g. Windows Half Life (no, not the game).
They already are. Loud music is/was being used in the torture arsenal in Guantanamo Bay and Iraqi prisons. Mostly to enforce sleep deprivation but I'm sure there's some bad taste. I've heard tales of Britney and death metal.
The thing is, I'd put money on the fact that out of all of these sites, someones hooked up an iPod to at least one of them already...
What we need to be careful about however is the perception of this confort by for example the Iraqi people. That's been one of the big criticisms of the way Iraq has been handled. While the Iraqi's don't have clean water, working sewage and electricity, our troops were chilling in big palaces with all the latest toys. Many Iraqis compared them to Saddam.
Of course, I'm not saying that they shouldn't have toys. But there is a balance to be had and I'm sure spoiling soldiers probably isn't all that operationally wise. There's good reason for the discipline in the armed forces.
However, I honestly think everyone has missed the real problem that could arise from all of this. Should a soldier get captured, a gameboy might entertain his guards. But imagine they got a hold of a flash drive with personal information, letters home. Or even some GPS enabled phone that has been logging the platoons movements for the past three months! The army probably wants to do a risk accessment on a lot of devices, as well as issuing advice etc to the troops.
I've used smoothwall and ipcop in the past and presently I'm using my own debian configuration as a router. However, I will be buying one of these, or at least a similar one that works with DD-WRT, which is a Linux upgrade to the router. Here's why:
Oh, and the definition of a router is quite simple. It's a device that shifts packets from one subnet to another. So all of these devices are routers. I'd say "internet gateway" was more of a better description for the more featured solutions.
Funnilly enough, I came across this router last night when looking at DD-WRT, which is a linux router upgrade distro. So, you can take that as a big yes. The upgrade turns this router into a bit of a beast.
This one happens to be rather good for the project as it has more than the usual ammount of RAM and flash memory. Most routers have 16/4 meg of ram/flash, but IIRC this one has 64/16. It also has USB, which is a major plus once you get *nix on it.
They should do; I've seen reports of people overclocking them without issue.
Similar story for me, six months ago. I don't recommend slaming it against the desk, if you feel violence is neccessary build it up gradually. Start of with a gentle tap from the base of your screw driver.
In my case I believe the read head was stuck. It worked intermittently and on the last time it worked I was ghosting it and the head stuck. The drive was too hot to touch after a few hours of it sitting in this state. Any longer and it may have become a fire hazzard.
Speaking of which, I almost had a fire two weeks ago. Water had been getting into the in-line power adapter for my WiFi access point. I've never seen an ethernet cable melt before, kinda scary.
It's more likely a result of your attitude.
No, moving the mouse is to see if it's locked up _yet_. Another one is to move the windows about to see the state of the system e.g. if the GPU is doing redraws correctly.
I have three XP systems at home and seven at work. Each has been going for at least two years. That's 80 three-month periods and I've never seen this once.
That's not whats happening. When you click on the link, it starts downloading instantly. It then presends you with the save-as dialog. This is really useful IMHO as the file is partially downloaded by the time you decide where to dump it. If it's taking three minutes to download on dialup, I'll gladly accept a 30-second reduction in that via this system. Yes, it confuses users, but how many of those users refer to the beige box as "the hard drive"? :-) Confusing them is like shooting fish in a barrel.
The UK show, Brainiac, did a data storage test a few years ago. The show has now made it to the USA, but perhaps not this re-run.
From memory, they tested CDs, harddrives, flash drives and a few others. They fired them out of a blunderbust, dropped them, drove over them and I think they even cooked them in a pie.
After all this, the flash drive was the only one that still worked. IIRC the contacts were a bit flakey though.
In terms of data recovery, a mangled flash card is probably way ahead of other kinds of storage. Recovery of a harddrive requires a clean room and specialist equiptment. You could rejuvinate a physically broken flashcard by removing the actual eeprom and putting it on a new (compatible) card and it would be as good as new.
My old Genesis did this, and who can remember the old wobbly ram pack?
I've always wondered if the blowing actually helped and if it wasn't just the remove/reinsert that did it. When I used to work for a computer laptop manufacturer, we found that a large portion of broken units could be fixed via "reseating the cpu". With the number of contacts in these high-density connectors, an odd broken contact is inevitable. The way I see it, any dust that could be removed by blowing would not cause an open circuit. It would be just as easilly pushed out of the way by the contact.
Corrosion on the other hand is a pain. Clean it up with ethanol (ask your drunkard uncle for some) and it's as good as new.
Tell me about it. My flat has mainly wooden flooring and the both the hall and the kitchen have been utterly destroyed by girls in heels. The floor looks like one of those sealed puzzles with the ball bearings.
Can't complain though...who'd complain about chicks in heals? :-)
No, I'm not saying that. The millions of dissenters wouldn't win on morality, it would be their sheer numbers and the ultimate thread of riotous violence and civil war that would have won. It's an extra bonus if that happens with no violence.
Oh christ, the whole USA world pivot theory. Who was talking about Americans? MLKs quote specifically mentions the German people.
Lets not, shall we? Your example is irrelevant, of course you'd shoot him in the head. Twice. But it doesn't change a thing that WW2 could have been easilly avoided. The main thing that allowed it to happen was the concent of the German population, using techniques used again in the USA in the past five years WRT invading Iraq. They too had a large "terrorist" incident. Anyone who didn't agree to Hitlers sweeping new powers was tainted as unpatriotic (their words btw). They invaded Poland to protect their own freedom. Sound familiar?
Another post essentially answered that question by mentioning Eisenhowers "Military Industrial Complex". Simply put; the companies that sprung up to make the vast ammounts of weaponry for WW2 didn't want to let go. Now they are in the Whitehouse in the guise of the Vice President. Cheeny is personally benefiting from these wars. His company, Harrliburton, has multiple massive no-bid contracts in the region. All of the logistics are being provided by them. We're talking food, lodging, shipping & supply, management, the whole lot has been outsourced. Almost everything except the actual fighting has been outsourced. Even base security is handled by mercinaries now e.g. companies like Black Water.
This isn't the case for every war of course. Korea, Vietnam were just coldwar-by-proxy. Kinda similar to the Israeli/Lebanese conflict at the moment; the US and UK are calling for a ceasefire because they want that war! It's an idealogical battle, with the intention of accelerating the second coming of Christ and the rapture. Yes, they actually believe that stuff!
Yes. They could have ended it before it begun, if only we had the empathy to care about oppression of a group you personally don't belong to. Pretty much like the Islamic people are getting at the moment, but who here has done anything to stop that?
Perhaps it was best said by MLK:
Completely wrong. Firstly, password protection is built in always, in all versions of Windows Mobile going back to WM2003. This results in a password screen on the device, and a prompt on the PC for ActiveSync. You just need to turn it on. Ask any customer support representative in any company why these things are disabled by default; they'll tell you that many users just can't deal with it or lose the password. They lose data, and that is bad.
Next, the password reset proceedure completely resets the device. All personal data is gone. To be honest, my WM5 device is one of the most secure devices I have. It doesn't even have any listening ports, I've portscaned the whole range. I'm confortable in the fact that if I lose it, all my data stays private. Not many other phones or PDAs can claim that.
What reality do you inhabit? ;-) The law does nothing to prohibit anything, ever. Morality does; the law just logs the collective morality at the time. As in gay sex being illegal fifty years ago. People still did it though.
Hear hear. This is yet another large terrorism "bust" in the UK. Each one was originally sold to us as a massive success in the Fight For Freedom(TM). The first was a Brazilian guy who was running away from the police with an explosive vest on. About a week after he was shot in the face NINE times we hear that, no, he wasn't running. No, he didn't have a jacket no. And no, he had zero terrorist links. This happened a week or two after the london bombings and for some reason none of the surveilence systems were functional in the subway station. Righhttt...
The next case was two brothers arrested in possibly the biggest police operation in UK history. Over 200 officers present at the arrest. During the arrest, one of the brothers attempted to shoot the police as they entered. Or so we were told. Appently they went with a similar line to the Chewbacka defence; you see the officer had gloves on that made his weapon discharge when he shot the guy in cold blood. No charges were filed and the police are now paying to rebuild their house after it was torn appart. Again, righhttt...
Another set of guys, who we were told were on the same level as the 9/11 hijackers. Big court case, all that. Well, you see it turns out was ALL they had done was chat about what things could be blown up. They, being young men, were talking about nightclubs etc. They had no terrorist links, no access to explosives and frankly they were a bunch of muppets that would never have done anything. How many of you have joked with friends about robbing a bank and the perfect crime? How would you feel if you were now in jail for those hypothetical musings?
So, here we are once again. The whole nation is terrified of flying. Planes have some downright serious restrictions on what you can and cannot take in luggage. Yet as the parent poster points out, if things were really as they said, they wouldn't be mixing hazzardous binary explosives in large bins, would they? The risk to flying is zero. This plot was nowhere near being carried out. Now, they could just be playing safe and taking every precaution. But if liquid explosives were really an issue today (coke/mentos?), they were an issue yesterday and the day before. They will be tomorrow. Are we going to keep up this ban indefinately?
We are being buttered up for the next concquest in the PNACs publicly stated plan to essentially take over the Middle East. My money is on Iran or Syria. Possibly the latter, the pattern fits with the Syran/Hizbolla links we've been constantly informed about over the past few weeks. It's similar to how the Iraq conquest was sold via a snowballing fear/hate campaign. Many of us observed this propaganda build up at the time. Here we are once again.
Remember people, WE'RE AT WAR(TM)!!
Which is one of the best things about the net; it puts like minded people together. However, these people are not your friends and one of the biggest worries about these kinds of additions is that people lose real friendships for virtual ones.
A virtual friend will not buy you a beer when you are broke. They won't cheer you up if your wife leaves you. They certainally won't say that "perhaps you play too much WoW..." ;-) Life is all about balance; some of the most interesting people I know are those I have met online. However, in terms of a meaningful relationship/friendship, meatspace wins hands down, no contest.
From this statistical analysis of similar screening systems:
I disagree. I have the following laptops with no such damage: Two eight year Compaqs in beige plastic. One five year old IBM (black plastic coated magnesium IIRC). I've also owned other laptops that I've sold on or given back to the office. I paid nothing for the Compaqs and they have been treated roughly over the years.
Out of ALL of these I've only seen damage to one. It was a Toshiba Portege that developed wear marks from your wrists after several months of use. I also have a five year old mobile phone (a backup) that the paint is damaged on. Now, Toshiba laptops suck IMHO, the one I had suffered from numerous hardware/driver issues (regular BSOD) and the phone I speak of was a first generation smartphone. It was practically a prototype. Basically both were crap, but for different reasons.
Well designed products do not suffer from these kinds of problems. Now, Apple have proved time and time again that they can design good things. Perhaps the damage to their products (e.g. ipod nano) is intentional so that the image-concious Apple owner wants to spend some more money.