Sorry to be totally offtopic, but I'm very bothered by the junk showing up on slashdot articles, specifically, short horizontal and vertical gray bars and grey, green, and red dots/pills which do nothing but obscure content. Here's an example: http://i646.photobucket.com/albums/uu187/weirdslashjunk/dots.png
Some follow up. It appears the verdict was reversed on appeal to the CA Court of Appeals, and from there went to the CA Supreme Court which recently heard the case. According to this article from June 4, 2009, a decision is due in 90 days.
How many stupid things did you do as a teenager? I mean little meaningless things -- imagine your life if you got busted for one of the frequent lapses in intelligence that plague teenagers, but instead of some slap on the wrist commensurate with the misdeed, you had to walk around the rest of your life with the equivalent of a scarlet letter, shunned, unable to get good work, and reviled by everyone who assume because of that scarlet letter, that you did something really really nasty. That's an utterly random result that makes people disrespect the law and start thinking revolutionary or counter-cultural ideas. It is in no way an actual deterrent and serves instead to undermine government. If we had a law that said the police can shoot dead every 10th speeder they catch, it might be a deterrent. Enough laws like that though, and you can expect violent resistance.
How many people would support The Church of Scientology paying people to edit and publish stories on Wikipedia?
It's that sort of reasoning that gets us ridiculous laws regarding child porn (like kids sexting eachother being charged as sex offenders). If you imagine the worst possible scum when making laws, you get stupidly over-broad laws.
If a person is skilled at writing, it seems reasonable for that person to make a living at writing. It seems that there is a huge bias against people making a living, although we do celebrate the super-rich.
Of course, if the guy who owns the site makes paid copy against the rules, that's his prerogative because its his site. But this isn't a moral issue -- it's an ownership issue.
The Cop pretending to sell drugs isn't breaking the law as the intent isn't to distribute the drugs but to attract those who are buying them. The cop does not own the drugs used any more than a Soldier owns the Tank he operates.
You are so wrong. It is illegal to POSSESS certain drugs. Ownership is not a requisite element of possession.
I looked at the three year plan one cell company wanted me to enter into years ago and decided to buy the phone for full price instead.
Of course, our short attention spans allow us to both sign a two year contract and expect a new phone the next year on that same plan...
I bought my phone 7 years ago this month. Paid $180, did have to replace the keypad at some point with one from a different phone of the same model I bought off Ebay for $3. The thing still works great, but sadly, Qwest is going out of the cell business completely on Oct. 31. I was proud to have the oldest phone of anyone I know, but I got there without really thinking. I've never been all that excited about cell phones and once I made I plunge, I stopped thinking about it altogether. Maybe that is another kind of short attention span.
Anyway, I've been testing out a drug dealer phone from boost mobile. Doesn't do anything fancy but the speakerphone sounds great, way better than my wife's iphone in both input and output. The phone is only $60, and for $50/month (no contract period) I get unlimited talk and text. If something really cool comes out, like an iPhone Nano or an iPhone shaped to fit one's palm(*), I can go for it without any contractual issues.
(*) Thin looks cool, but the iPhone's dimensions are not ergonomic as a phone. I have plenty of Apple hardware and love their notebooks for the sleek melding of form and function. With the iPhone however, function and design are poorly integrated by the fact that non-phone priorities overwhelmed the primary purpose of the device.
You said: OS X is more complicated than Linux. People who say they switched to a Mac are dumb because they get positive mod points but it is essentially a meaningless act not deserving of laurels. One shouldn't expect alpha software to work.
In my posts, I suggested it might be "smarter" to use a system that basically works as intended, for example when trying to share calendars. Obviously, whoever figures out how to actually get client apps that run on Linux based systems behave properly with a calendar server will be pretty intelligent. However, if spending that time cuts into actual money earning work, it's a "penny wise, pound foolish" type of thing.
Your response is that people who will spend their time earning their living rather responding to relentless error situations, are morons. It seems a silly response.
Linux systems are good at some things, and they suck at others. There are things in OS X I miss from the Linux world -- middle click paste for example -- but if I need a calendar client that works reliably, I don't have any options but to look outside Linux. That doesn't make me a moron, it means Linux doesn't suit all my needs.
I see. Smart people use broken stuff. Stupid people use stuff that works. While this may be true in certain contexts, I think it fails when using broken stuff costs time that could better be spent earning money.
Why are Mac fans morons? It's nice to sit down in a clean room and relax and in the same way, to sit down to a clean system and relax. I've been using linux for 9 years now and I've been through some ordeals over that time frame -- undoubtedly things have improved a great deal. By the same token, Apple's equivalent of compiz/fusion doesn't randomly stop working. Sound doesn't randomly stop working. Neither of things happen often, but they do happen. I'm 40 -- I don't want to wait till I'm 50 for things to be perfect.
Worse still, there are holes in the application set for business users on the linux side, in particular, shared calendaring. For example, I run Apple's Darwin Calendar Server on a Debian box. Sunbird works fine until you get a few thousand items in the calendar and then it just doesn't open the calendar at all (Apple's ical has no such problem). Evolution will only work if the server is configured in such a way that Apple's iCal won't be able to connect. I've spent so many hours futzing around with Evolution and Sunbird, I'd have saved money just buying a refurb Mac Mini for my assistant rather than trying to cut corners and keep her on an Ubuntu system. I sorta feel like a moron for not doing that from the get go!
Why won't the EULA be found binding? I've used my Leopard Family Pack disc to make a hackintosh out of a Dell Mini9, and I read the EULA to some extent beforehand. I realize that I agreed to certain limitations when I bought the disc, and I know I'm violating my agreement installing Leopard on my Mini9. The part I'm not clear on, is what would be Apple's damages if they decided to sue me? I've bought enough Macs that I hope they'd go easy me on least. Anyway, you say the EULA is not binding -- can you explain why?
As an aside, I think the cheapest way for Apple to kill the clone market would be to release a version of OS X that could legally be installed on commodity hardware, but charge $3-500 for it. Every retail OS X disc is an upgrade after all and PC makers don't sell new Windows computers with Windows Upgrade licenses, so why should clone makers be doing the same thing?
Maybe. But Apple users surely ride BMWs and wear Aerostitch. Harley riders are to a man, Windows users. You can tell this because while Harley riders get the easy skanks, they also get viruses and road rash.
The difference betwen $250 and $400 is much larger than the difference between $1200 and $1350... so to speak. In the first instance, that $150 difference IS non-trivial. In the second, it's less than 10% of the lower price and so it might be well worth it to spend a little extra.
The tower is in its last days as a mass market product. Too much space. Too much power. Too much weight.
I agree. The hole is the netbook. I have a Dell Mini9 running Leopard and it is surprisingly responsive (single core Atom 270, Intel GMA 950) even when screen spanning with 1280x1024 monitor on the side. A netbook with a dual core Atom 330 and nVidia graphics would probably rock, and I have a lot more confidence in Apple getting the keyboard/mouse layout right than Dell has with their Mini9. And as much as I like the size of my Mini9, the plastics feel chintzy, something Apple would certainly avoid.
The problem with such a netbook is that it would drain off sales from Apple's low end or refurb market because for non-gamers, it would be about all they'd need to surf, look at pics, listen to music, or watch videos. I have no excitement for a large iTouch though -- it's nice to be able to type on a level surface and have the screen angled toward your face. As for holding and using, the iTouch is already about as large as reasonable and I won't think of an iPhone because it feels way to odd holding such a wide slab up to my head -- the size just isn't good for holding in the palm of one hand.
I don't think there's some moral right to business models. Newspaper classifieds were exceedingly shitty, to the point where even in early days I'd often find it easier to sell or buy stuff on local mailing lists and Usenet groups than through classifieds.
Too true. And even before widespread network usage, traditional classifieds were already under serious attack from traditional "alternative" paper ads. In my area, there's been a weekly paper that published classified ads for free from individuals, and makes money by charging for larger graphical ads and for line ads from businesses. It's been around since the early 90s at least. Even before Craigslist, if you were looking for a motorcycle, boat, car or any such thing, you'd pick up that weekly because almost nobody advertised in the local newspaper. And it isn't hard to figure out why -- the prices for a newspaper ad are nuts. For example, 4 years ago or so, whenever we'd put in a 3 line want ad for an employee, it was cost $125 to run for three days.
About two years ago, we decided to try a Craigslist ad because it didn't cost anything and if it didn't work out, we didn't lose anything. We ended up getting three times the applicants and of higher quality to boot. Gone were the days of wondering what would possess someone would to bring a purse to an interview that had boobs printed on it. In compensation, we do sometimes get some unusual email addresses now, but we just don't call back. Word to the wise, don't respond to an employer's job posting with an address like "GoatseMe69@msn.com".
Even if CL charged $10 per ad, we'd still use it without hesitation. Compared to what things used to cost, $60 would be a bargain, particularly because you have enough room to adequately describe the job which helps immensely in getting appropriate applicants. If CL wanted to, its revenue could spike very high whenever it wished.
You are completely right about the second season. Most of it was a soap opera of whining JC doing something stupid, whining SC doing something stupid, or both of them whining and doing something stupid. It was an endless slog getting through that filler to see the 5 or 10 minutes per show that were interesting, i.e., the parts about John Henry or the Catherine Weaver. If I really wanted to watch a show about a petulant teenager and his crappy mom, I'd pick ________ (I can't even think of a name of such a show because I never watch such crap). Anyway, the producers totally blew it and I'm not shedding a tear -- based on season 2, there's a high probability that season 3 would continue with the 10% interesting, 90% "where's my remote so I can FF" junk.
To be fair, you can't judge all lawyers by a metric as simple as win/lose. Some lawyers take on cases that they are almost certainly going to lose, maybe many such cases for many years, in an attempt to change the law itself or for reasons such as fairness. Such lawyers may be quite excellent, yet have a quite pitiful win/lose ratio. For example, the civil rights movement certainly involved many worthy cases destined to lose against unjust laws. The lawyers who fought those battles weren't bad lawyers simply because they lost -- they didn't have a snowball's chance of winning. It's a rare person who'll put their heart into a fight knowing they'll be savaged in the end merely because it is the right thing to do.
Even in very well settled and not terribly controversial areas of the law, there are certain types of cases which are simply more likely to be lost. For example, criminal defense. Many excellent lawyers lose many cases in such a practice. By the same token, if a prosecutor loses many cases, you have to wonder about his/her skill.
if we could join the efficiency of modern engines with the weight of vehicles from the early to mid 1980's, we would could meet this goal using existing technology.
Excellent comment. When I was in college (late 80s, early 90s), I a 1983 4wd Subaru wagon -- it got better than 30 mpg (in 2wd). I've been recently thinking about getting a new car to replace my aging Jetta -- it's appalling what is out there. Almost nobody makes anything that exceeds 30 mpg anymore. I think I'm just going to wait a few years to see if anything interesting comes out, or gets imported, like the 60-70 mpg VW Diesel Polo you can buy right now in just about any country except America or Canada.
There should be a Godwin corollary for comments like yours.
As for the substance of your comment, just because some states did bad stuff means we should scrap the principles on which America was founded? Where are we going to be when the Feds control everything and do bad stuff? With 50 different styles, at least some are going to be better, but with a homogeneous government, the chance that it is bad everywhere is much greater. Oh wait... seems we already have such a monstrosity.
Some of it depends on how you drive. You can easily get 10% improvement just by pumping up your tires. A bit more if you refrain from going 70 mph. A bit more if you avoid jackrabitting (remember, first one to the red light loses). Turn off your car in the drive through -- idling for 5 minutes is 5 minutes at 0 mpg.
Last year when gas was really expensive, I got my Jetta up to about 34 mpg with a mix of city/highway driving. Most of that was due simply to pumping my tires to the maximum sidewall pressure and not racing up to red lights. Prior to that I usually got about 29 mpg. On one tank, I was able to get to near 38, but that required some sketchy things like coasting with the engine off, so I went back to the more passive techniques mentioned in the first paragraph.
Anyway, with a 12 gallon tank, 5 mpg was an extra 60 miles, or roughly 2 gallons. Regular unleaded hit as much $4.75/gal in my area, so some simple things saved me more than $9/fillup.
Slashdot Mirror
Never mind -- mod me off topic. I finally notice the "default design" link at the top of my user account page. Junk is gone.
Sorry to be totally offtopic, but I'm very bothered by the junk showing up on slashdot articles, specifically, short horizontal and vertical gray bars and grey, green, and red dots/pills which do nothing but obscure content. Here's an example: http://i646.photobucket.com/albums/uu187/weirdslashjunk/dots.png
Is there a way to fix this?
Some follow up. It appears the verdict was reversed on appeal to the CA Court of Appeals, and from there went to the CA Supreme Court which recently heard the case. According to this article from June 4, 2009, a decision is due in 90 days.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/la-fi-coffee4-2009jun04,0,7389392.story
How many stupid things did you do as a teenager? I mean little meaningless things -- imagine your life if you got busted for one of the frequent lapses in intelligence that plague teenagers, but instead of some slap on the wrist commensurate with the misdeed, you had to walk around the rest of your life with the equivalent of a scarlet letter, shunned, unable to get good work, and reviled by everyone who assume because of that scarlet letter, that you did something really really nasty. That's an utterly random result that makes people disrespect the law and start thinking revolutionary or counter-cultural ideas. It is in no way an actual deterrent and serves instead to undermine government. If we had a law that said the police can shoot dead every 10th speeder they catch, it might be a deterrent. Enough laws like that though, and you can expect violent resistance.
It's that sort of reasoning that gets us ridiculous laws regarding child porn (like kids sexting eachother being charged as sex offenders). If you imagine the worst possible scum when making laws, you get stupidly over-broad laws.
If a person is skilled at writing, it seems reasonable for that person to make a living at writing. It seems that there is a huge bias against people making a living, although we do celebrate the super-rich.
Of course, if the guy who owns the site makes paid copy against the rules, that's his prerogative because its his site. But this isn't a moral issue -- it's an ownership issue.
You are so wrong. It is illegal to POSSESS certain drugs. Ownership is not a requisite element of possession.
I bought my phone 7 years ago this month. Paid $180, did have to replace the keypad at some point with one from a different phone of the same model I bought off Ebay for $3. The thing still works great, but sadly, Qwest is going out of the cell business completely on Oct. 31. I was proud to have the oldest phone of anyone I know, but I got there without really thinking. I've never been all that excited about cell phones and once I made I plunge, I stopped thinking about it altogether. Maybe that is another kind of short attention span.
Anyway, I've been testing out a drug dealer phone from boost mobile. Doesn't do anything fancy but the speakerphone sounds great, way better than my wife's iphone in both input and output. The phone is only $60, and for $50/month (no contract period) I get unlimited talk and text. If something really cool comes out, like an iPhone Nano or an iPhone shaped to fit one's palm(*), I can go for it without any contractual issues.
(*) Thin looks cool, but the iPhone's dimensions are not ergonomic as a phone. I have plenty of Apple hardware and love their notebooks for the sleek melding of form and function. With the iPhone however, function and design are poorly integrated by the fact that non-phone priorities overwhelmed the primary purpose of the device.
Before Apple, shared calendaring in the linux world sucked or was very expensive. Get the source for Darwin Calendar Server here:
http://trac.calendarserver.org/
Or the Deb:
http://packages.debian.org/stable/python/calendarserver
If it's on Debian, it's pretty darn open.
Aside from scheduling, the bus has to overcome the whole "ghetto on wheels" issue.
You said: OS X is more complicated than Linux. People who say they switched to a Mac are dumb because they get positive mod points but it is essentially a meaningless act not deserving of laurels. One shouldn't expect alpha software to work.
In my posts, I suggested it might be "smarter" to use a system that basically works as intended, for example when trying to share calendars. Obviously, whoever figures out how to actually get client apps that run on Linux based systems behave properly with a calendar server will be pretty intelligent. However, if spending that time cuts into actual money earning work, it's a "penny wise, pound foolish" type of thing.
Your response is that people who will spend their time earning their living rather responding to relentless error situations, are morons. It seems a silly response.
Linux systems are good at some things, and they suck at others. There are things in OS X I miss from the Linux world -- middle click paste for example -- but if I need a calendar client that works reliably, I don't have any options but to look outside Linux. That doesn't make me a moron, it means Linux doesn't suit all my needs.
I see. Smart people use broken stuff. Stupid people use stuff that works. While this may be true in certain contexts, I think it fails when using broken stuff costs time that could better be spent earning money.
Why are Mac fans morons? It's nice to sit down in a clean room and relax and in the same way, to sit down to a clean system and relax. I've been using linux for 9 years now and I've been through some ordeals over that time frame -- undoubtedly things have improved a great deal. By the same token, Apple's equivalent of compiz/fusion doesn't randomly stop working. Sound doesn't randomly stop working. Neither of things happen often, but they do happen. I'm 40 -- I don't want to wait till I'm 50 for things to be perfect.
Worse still, there are holes in the application set for business users on the linux side, in particular, shared calendaring. For example, I run Apple's Darwin Calendar Server on a Debian box. Sunbird works fine until you get a few thousand items in the calendar and then it just doesn't open the calendar at all (Apple's ical has no such problem). Evolution will only work if the server is configured in such a way that Apple's iCal won't be able to connect. I've spent so many hours futzing around with Evolution and Sunbird, I'd have saved money just buying a refurb Mac Mini for my assistant rather than trying to cut corners and keep her on an Ubuntu system. I sorta feel like a moron for not doing that from the get go!
Why won't the EULA be found binding? I've used my Leopard Family Pack disc to make a hackintosh out of a Dell Mini9, and I read the EULA to some extent beforehand. I realize that I agreed to certain limitations when I bought the disc, and I know I'm violating my agreement installing Leopard on my Mini9. The part I'm not clear on, is what would be Apple's damages if they decided to sue me? I've bought enough Macs that I hope they'd go easy me on least. Anyway, you say the EULA is not binding -- can you explain why?
As an aside, I think the cheapest way for Apple to kill the clone market would be to release a version of OS X that could legally be installed on commodity hardware, but charge $3-500 for it. Every retail OS X disc is an upgrade after all and PC makers don't sell new Windows computers with Windows Upgrade licenses, so why should clone makers be doing the same thing?
Maybe. But Apple users surely ride BMWs and wear Aerostitch. Harley riders are to a man, Windows users. You can tell this because while Harley riders get the easy skanks, they also get viruses and road rash.
No. http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/mac-os-x/
Yikes my math. That would be just over 10%!
The difference betwen $250 and $400 is much larger than the difference between $1200 and $1350 ... so to speak. In the first instance, that $150 difference IS non-trivial. In the second, it's less than 10% of the lower price and so it might be well worth it to spend a little extra.
I agree. The hole is the netbook. I have a Dell Mini9 running Leopard and it is surprisingly responsive (single core Atom 270, Intel GMA 950) even when screen spanning with 1280x1024 monitor on the side. A netbook with a dual core Atom 330 and nVidia graphics would probably rock, and I have a lot more confidence in Apple getting the keyboard/mouse layout right than Dell has with their Mini9. And as much as I like the size of my Mini9, the plastics feel chintzy, something Apple would certainly avoid.
The problem with such a netbook is that it would drain off sales from Apple's low end or refurb market because for non-gamers, it would be about all they'd need to surf, look at pics, listen to music, or watch videos. I have no excitement for a large iTouch though -- it's nice to be able to type on a level surface and have the screen angled toward your face. As for holding and using, the iTouch is already about as large as reasonable and I won't think of an iPhone because it feels way to odd holding such a wide slab up to my head -- the size just isn't good for holding in the palm of one hand.
Too true. And even before widespread network usage, traditional classifieds were already under serious attack from traditional "alternative" paper ads. In my area, there's been a weekly paper that published classified ads for free from individuals, and makes money by charging for larger graphical ads and for line ads from businesses. It's been around since the early 90s at least. Even before Craigslist, if you were looking for a motorcycle, boat, car or any such thing, you'd pick up that weekly because almost nobody advertised in the local newspaper. And it isn't hard to figure out why -- the prices for a newspaper ad are nuts. For example, 4 years ago or so, whenever we'd put in a 3 line want ad for an employee, it was cost $125 to run for three days.
About two years ago, we decided to try a Craigslist ad because it didn't cost anything and if it didn't work out, we didn't lose anything. We ended up getting three times the applicants and of higher quality to boot. Gone were the days of wondering what would possess someone would to bring a purse to an interview that had boobs printed on it. In compensation, we do sometimes get some unusual email addresses now, but we just don't call back. Word to the wise, don't respond to an employer's job posting with an address like "GoatseMe69@msn.com".
Even if CL charged $10 per ad, we'd still use it without hesitation. Compared to what things used to cost, $60 would be a bargain, particularly because you have enough room to adequately describe the job which helps immensely in getting appropriate applicants. If CL wanted to, its revenue could spike very high whenever it wished.
You are completely right about the second season. Most of it was a soap opera of whining JC doing something stupid, whining SC doing something stupid, or both of them whining and doing something stupid. It was an endless slog getting through that filler to see the 5 or 10 minutes per show that were interesting, i.e., the parts about John Henry or the Catherine Weaver. If I really wanted to watch a show about a petulant teenager and his crappy mom, I'd pick ________ (I can't even think of a name of such a show because I never watch such crap). Anyway, the producers totally blew it and I'm not shedding a tear -- based on season 2, there's a high probability that season 3 would continue with the 10% interesting, 90% "where's my remote so I can FF" junk.
In some fields, you want to avoid greenhorns and burnt out oldsters. Someone about 10-20 years into it is perfect.
To be fair, you can't judge all lawyers by a metric as simple as win/lose. Some lawyers take on cases that they are almost certainly going to lose, maybe many such cases for many years, in an attempt to change the law itself or for reasons such as fairness. Such lawyers may be quite excellent, yet have a quite pitiful win/lose ratio. For example, the civil rights movement certainly involved many worthy cases destined to lose against unjust laws. The lawyers who fought those battles weren't bad lawyers simply because they lost -- they didn't have a snowball's chance of winning. It's a rare person who'll put their heart into a fight knowing they'll be savaged in the end merely because it is the right thing to do.
Even in very well settled and not terribly controversial areas of the law, there are certain types of cases which are simply more likely to be lost. For example, criminal defense. Many excellent lawyers lose many cases in such a practice. By the same token, if a prosecutor loses many cases, you have to wonder about his/her skill.
Excellent comment. When I was in college (late 80s, early 90s), I a 1983 4wd Subaru wagon -- it got better than 30 mpg (in 2wd). I've been recently thinking about getting a new car to replace my aging Jetta -- it's appalling what is out there. Almost nobody makes anything that exceeds 30 mpg anymore. I think I'm just going to wait a few years to see if anything interesting comes out, or gets imported, like the 60-70 mpg VW Diesel Polo you can buy right now in just about any country except America or Canada.
There should be a Godwin corollary for comments like yours.
... seems we already have such a monstrosity.
As for the substance of your comment, just because some states did bad stuff means we should scrap the principles on which America was founded? Where are we going to be when the Feds control everything and do bad stuff? With 50 different styles, at least some are going to be better, but with a homogeneous government, the chance that it is bad everywhere is much greater. Oh wait
Some of it depends on how you drive. You can easily get 10% improvement just by pumping up your tires. A bit more if you refrain from going 70 mph. A bit more if you avoid jackrabitting (remember, first one to the red light loses). Turn off your car in the drive through -- idling for 5 minutes is 5 minutes at 0 mpg.
Last year when gas was really expensive, I got my Jetta up to about 34 mpg with a mix of city/highway driving. Most of that was due simply to pumping my tires to the maximum sidewall pressure and not racing up to red lights. Prior to that I usually got about 29 mpg. On one tank, I was able to get to near 38, but that required some sketchy things like coasting with the engine off, so I went back to the more passive techniques mentioned in the first paragraph.
Anyway, with a 12 gallon tank, 5 mpg was an extra 60 miles, or roughly 2 gallons. Regular unleaded hit as much $4.75/gal in my area, so some simple things saved me more than $9/fillup.