and don't forget the screen that automatically adjusts for ambient lighting and reads like a sheet of paper in bright sun. That alone makes it a great field-computer.
Well consider this, they are still Beta as can be seen from the Gmail logo on every Gmail screen. If you don't like change to Beta software you should consider using something classified production ready software (you know, non Beta)
Yeah, right. Google designated Gmail as a beta about like the Mars rovers were designed to last only three months. Either could have been miserable failures and still be claimed as successes. A failure by Google would have been just as disasterous for Google as would rover failures have been for NASA. It's called CYA.
Read his question more closely. He cannot use satellite because the antenna direction from house to satellite points into side of hill. No, he didn't say that. He said his home is on a heavily forested northern slope of a hill. That's not even remotely the same as "points into the side of a hill".
Hopefully "after this gets publicised" more people will bother to read the manual which clearly states in Chapter 2 "The Basics" (page 14) how to turn the iPod completely off.
Excuse me, but I thought Apple products were so well designed that people didn't need manuals and 54 page instruction booklets. So which is it Apple fanboys...intuitive, or complex and obscure? You really can't have it both ways.
And let me just say that a phone that actively and invisibly racks up charges while it is turned OFF is fucking horrible design. It goes against accepted Human Interface Theory where Off is supposed to be off. No way are these excessive data charges the fault of the users.
As for Apple's AT&T partner, leave it up to the phone company to figure out a way to charge their customers for free WiFi.
He works in the NSA - he has given up his constitutional rights (he signed that paperwork).
Wrong. A citizen can neither sign away his constitutional rights nor can they be taken away. That;s because rights are not granted, they are inherent. The writers of the Constitution used that wording on purpose. The Constitution only draws attention to some specific rights - it "grants" nothing. Secrecy statements signed by citizens cannot trunmp the Constitution.
What if the military did this? The military is predominately Republican.
A fine but important point is that the military is NOT Republican. The military is apolitical, BY LAW. Now there are quite a few Republicans IN the military (see, the members didn't give up their Rights), but that is a very different thing. The military "being" of any political bent is a very scary idea.
Even if we just limit it to the NSA, what if they start "leaking" inconvinient facts about all the senators of only one party?
You mean like the Bush administration and Karl Rove tried to pressure U.S. Attorney's to bring charges against Democratic lawmakers and back off indictments of Republican lawmakers before the 2004 elections, and then fired them and replaced them with "loyal Republicans" when they refused? You're correct there - use of government departments to advance partisan political agendas is appalling and illegal and should be stopped.
There is a reason for the national security laws, and there is a reason why the constitutional rights cannot apply to armed forces personnel.
Again you are wrong. Military personnel DO have constitutional rights (Rights are inalienable, remember?), they just have additional rules they have to operate under, plus they fall outside the civilian judiciary system, but citizens definately DON'T give up their constitutional rights when they are drafted or enlist.
The US would probably never have joined WWII had it not been for the Pearl Harbor attack. The US populace were on the whole quite indifferent to the war in Europe and would have been quite happy for Hitler to have taken over.
As for "rushing to save the rest of the world", the Russians did far more to defeat Hitler, at huge cost to themselves.
Wow, a perfect example of how to cherry pick facts to support your positiion. Neither would the Russians have entered the war if Germany had not attacked them. Yes, many Americans were pro-German and even anti-Nazi before the war, but that was a result of the propaganda spouted by powerful right-wing figures like Henry Ford, and organizations such as the Carlisle Group, who supported National Socialism and railed against Jews, Jewish Bankers, Labor Unions (Hitler had abolished labor unions in Germany) and the Zionist Conspiracy. Prior to 1941 the Nazi Party was hiding its activities behind "Work will make you free" slogans, "relocation" camps, and other propaganda niceties that put a pretty face on their mass extermination programs and pure racism.
Prior to 1941 the American people were lied to to by right-wing forces for pure politcal advantage (this tactic may sound familiar to you). The right-wing pro-German factions were powerful and wealthy in America and it was not possible for the left, even though they held the Presidency, to simply do what they knew had to be done. I do not believe for a second that if Americans of the time knew what the Nazis were all about and had not been hoodwinked by right-wing propaganda they would have stood for it for a second. So it could be said that since the right supported the Nazis and the left opposed them, that on December 7 - the day that reality trumped propaganda - the entire country became liberal.
I think that part of the reason why this issue particularly irks some people on Slashdot is because many of us have studied logic (or we're just geeks) and the negative impact of the incorrect usage rears its ugly head when either we have difficulty correctly identifying the logical fallacy or witness others having that problem. It's difficult to "unlearn" things sometimes. We'd* prefer not having the incorrect usage disseminated, especially by those that should know better.
The reason it irks me is that whenever I read "begs the question" my brain correctly interprets the phrase as meaning "does not answer the question", and then of course the sentence no longer makes any sense. I have to stop, start over and re-read the sentence while pretending I am a semi-literate ignoramous.
From Wikipedia: due process (more fully due process of law) is the principle that the government must respect all of a person's legal rights instead of just some or most of those legal rights when the government deprives a person of life, liberty, or property.
U of Kansas is a STATE school, and is therefore part of the government. I'm also pretty sure that access to thenetwork paid for through tuition would be considered leased "property". As a result, the banned student DOES have acces to the full due process of law to appeal the decision. If U of K were a private school due process would not be applicable, although it would be moot since the student could not be prohibited from suing if he felt he was being unfairly deprived of a paid service.
Your view that there can be no restriction on "speech" is absurdely simplistic. Try going to an airport and announcing that you have a bomb strapped to your chest. Try calling your neighbor a child molester just because you feel like it. And yes, try shouting "FIRE" in a theater where people can be killed in the resulting stampede - just because you wierdly think the writers of the Constitution said you could. Try shouting "KILL" to your trained dog and then watch as he does kill someone. Your idea that there can be no restrictions on speech, period, is frankly at about the intellectual level of a three year old.
Most if not all of the components of the Patriot Act had been previously written and people had been trying to tack it onto other legislation for years. For as much as the Patriot Act gets the blame for all our "rights lost" in the past 6 years, it really was just a short piece of literature that merely 'connected the dots' on all this other crap that we had already established.
There is a glaring logical error in this argument. That people had been "trying to tack [multiple components] on to other legislation for years" means that these measures had NOT been passed. You cannot then turn around and say that the UASPA "merely connected the dots" on security laws that had already been established. [emphasis mine]
I suspect you meant to say that the USAPA was not written from scratch overnight, but that doesn't make a whit of difference, does it? The UASPA, which DID get passed is the law that began the rise of the police state mentality we now labor under.
WTF would you make bomb threats using your own PC, at home, anyway? For crying out loud, if you're going to commit a felony, go find an open wireless relay, using a borrowed, rented, or stolen notebook. And you're smart? Rented...you'll get caught. Borrowed...you'll get caught. Go to your nearest open WiFi hotspot more than twice to send the threats...you'll get caught - or if they have security cameras you'll get caught the first time. Stolen is your best bet but even then the where, how and when you stole it will give clues to your identity. Oh, and you threw the stolen PC away after you used it, right?
I congratulate your families on your success, however I see your success as being based on more than just hard work. There are clues in your reply... your parents' "educations were not recognized". I suspect that means they were professionals (engineers? physicians? educators?) with good educations in Europe. That they could not bring their degrees or European status with them is a shame, but it nevertheless put them in a very different poistion from those whose parents may have never had any success. Starting over is a lot easier than breaking new ground. Your wife's parents owned a farm, well that tells me they too had resources. Sharecroppers work long hard hours too, but it almost never gets them anywhere. No one works as hard as poor people, not even farmers.
Like you, I used to think that anyone could get ahead with hard work, but I now know that is not always possible. My advantage was so subtle that it was invisible to me - I simply knew it was possible to get ahead. For many people who do not have any family member who gained success through education, college is as alien a concept as supporting a family as a nomadic herder in Mongolia would be for me. I know people do it, I know it CAN be done, but I could never just start doing it no matter how hard I worked at it. I would not have the support mechanism.
There are many intelligent, hard-working people who are trapped in poverty. It isn't because they don't work hard (remember, working hard for your daughter was studying hard, while working hard for a poor person may be having two jobs to support a family), or because they get rent subsidies, or are lazy - it is because they don't have that subtle background that lets them know what is possible, or even how to advance themselves. Its like riding a bicycle. It seems obvious how to do it once you know how, but you tend to forget how hard it was when you didn't know.
You are a fountain of ignorance, at least concerning your diatribe against Duke. Instead of being wealthy and pay tuition, you can also simply be smart and hard working. My daughter just graduated from Duke, from which she had gotten a full scholarship. Without that, there would have been no way she could have afforded to study there. Many Colleges and Universities give scholarships to exceptional young people who do NOT come from wealthy homes. Most likely, someone like you wouldn't get such a scholarship, especially in view of your ignorant rant.
Stop whining that your daughter is one of the poor downtrodden who simply pulled herself up by her bootstraps. Your use of language, your vocabulary ("diatribe"), and your lack of spelling errors indicates that you are likely white, well-educated, and not scrabbling just to pay the rent. Your use of commas and capitalization does need work, however. In your world your daughter's "hard work" meant studying hard - not contributing to the family cash in the sugar bowl. Even then, there is a lot more to "advantaged" than money. You are one of those people who are clearly blind to their own advantages in life, and who don't understand that it simply isn't as easy for others to advance. Your daughter is white, from a middle or upper-middle class family with a history of higher education, has never had to worry where her clothes or shelter came from, and YOU whine that she did it all through her hard work. I'm not criticizing your daughter who may very well be a wonderful person, I'm criticizing you, who have blinded yourself to your own advantages and whine that "anyone can do it". Well, not everyone CAN do it, no matter how hard they work.
wow, well caught. Adding better "antennae" to the equipment would mean adding more than one antenna to each piece of equipment. Adding better "antennas" means adding a single new antenna to each, which presumably is the situation. Since that's now settled I'm never going to think about this again.
Something that was corrected well before AT&T broke up - with the rise of Sprint and other such long distance calling plan providers.
Excuse me, but you have that totally backwards. The creation of Sprint and other low-cost carriers was only made possible by the breakup of AT$T and the resulting requirement that they share the government subsidized telephone infrastructure that had been totally monopolized by Bell.
they leased the phone to customers because they supported/serviced the phones at no additional cost.
There is a logical inconsistency in that argument: the lease payment IS the additional cost. Given that those phones almost never had a problem it was a cash cow for the phone company. What I also remember is tht you were not allowed to ad an extension yourself, period. And they checked by measuring ringer equivalents on your number. You also were not allowed to install a speaker phone, or an answering machine unless you leased it from them. If you lived in the country you had a party line because the phone company wouldn't go to the expense of private lines. Long distance was outrageously expensive.
"Well, I'm sorry you're afraid, but he has a right to talk about whatever he wants."
But not without consequences. It has been well established that the employer had the right to fire him at will so what are you complaining about - everyone exercised their rights.
What you and everyone else here are missing is that all we know about this incident is what we have been told about it by the person who was fired. He comes across as very reasonable and a great guy in his own comics about himself, but we don't really know what other issues there had been, what other comments were made by him that day, or what the tone of his "face-shooting" comments were. Even in his own comic he says he said "Well, now I DO have a reason to go postal." That statement to his employer justified a police interview. Frankly, even if he was making jokes and having a high old time on the day 32 people were murdered I wouldn't want him in my office either.
OK lets expand this theory a bit. Suppose said kettle....what the hell, lets call it a boiler, is under a turbine and I want to boil water and have the steam turn the turbine. A novel idea. Unforunately it is going to take extra energy to boil the water now, as the increased pressure in the kettle from the pushback of the turbine is going to raise the boiling point of the water. The car is the kettle, the burner is its engine, and now the engine has to work harder. But the increased pressure means less heat is lost because of the steam carrying it away from the water...so it takes LESS energy to boil the water because more heat is retained in the water and less heat is lost to steam. Since the steam is much hotter than the boiling water, keeping the steam in the proximity of the water surface makes it MORE efficient than an unrestricted system.
From the article: Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.
I call baloney on this bee vs. cell phone theory. Cell phones were commmon in Europe for many years before they became ubiquitous in the US, so the fact that the bee problem started in the US and spread to Europe argues against a causal relationship. If a bee-decline were related to handi use the problem would have started in Europe and spread to the US.
Did you figure in the reduction of the useful life of the computer and/or its components as a result of the amount of power cycling you're doing to it?
Oh, pulease. Not that old wive's tale again. YOu want to use anecdotal information to support this - well I can use it to debunk it. I've been using computers since probably before you were born, I've turned them on and off all the time, and I have NEVER had a hard drive fail, or a power supply for that matter. It is only when components are stressed beyond their capabilities (overclocking, high ambient temps, etc) that these issues have more than a remote chance of happening. Back when computers had tubes, drive platters weighed 2 pounds, connections were soldered and everything cost a fortune to diagnose and fix was the decrease in MTBF due to thermal cycling remotely an issue - and even then it had a big myth factor. You could turn 100 modern computers on and off ten times a day and you couldn't measure the difference in MTBF from 100 computers left on 24/7 (with the possible exception of the on/off switch).
My problem with internet cafes is: can they be trusted when you're using a password or passphrase? You might not be too bothered if somebody gains access to your email (I would be), but what about your bank accounts? If you travel for long enough, you need some way to pay off credit cards, check charges, or check your balance.
That's easy to fix. Use a bank that allows you to use a digital fob like SecureID that generates random login numbers every sixty seconds. So even if someone logs your password at an internet cafe it isn't any good a few seconds later. Even PayPal has the fobs available. If your favorite bank doesn't use them for online transactions get a free ETrade bank account (they have SecureID available) and fund it with enough money to cover you during your trip. Bank of America uses a different security feature that requires you to identify a random picture to log in, at least on their brokerage accounts - I'm not sure about checking accounts. With that system you don't have to worry about losing a fob, but you do have to make sure no one is looking over your shoulder when you log in.
Another point. IF the magnetic stripe on your ATM cards fails or you lose your security fob, it is IMPOSSIBLE to get another one sent to you anywhere other than your home address (You cn get a new AMEX card though if you are in a large city). Make sure you have another person at home who you trust to have joint account privileges at your bank so you can call them to do some banking on your behalf in an emergency. And don't rely totally on ATMs - carry some cash in travelers checks at all times.
Let's not speculate about what could be done: Read the actual rules. We sign a contract every year that we will follow IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines. If you're curious, the short section on information and communication systems.
I think the rules are very reasonable. Does anything in there strike you as unreasonable?
The fact that you posted this as anonymous coward makes me think even you don't believe the "reasonable and benevolent" IBM management line. And before you tell me I don't know what I'm talking about - I worked for them for 12 years so I know exactly how they do things.
And like I said in my earlier post, decades of studies have shown that mice are a very accurate representation of humans, when it comes to testing chemicals. The organs are proportioned almost exactly the same, and comparable responses to humans have been observed again and again and again. Doubt it if you wish. The fact remains that if something is harmful to mice, we can be sure that a relative proportion of that chemical is harmful to humans.
This is just not true. You are overstating the case. Mice aren't used because they are nearly identical to humans, they are used because they are cheap and plentiful. Your statement that if something is harmful to mice we "can be sure" it is harmful to humans is absolutely wrong. We can suspect that it might be harmful to humans, but we cannot be sure. That is why there are different levels of carcinogenicity classifications, with "known to cause cancer in animals" ranked below "known to cause cancer in humans". In fact, mice used in tox studies have been bred to be susceptible to tumors, making them far more sensitive to challenges (chemicals and otherwise) than humans. As an example, merely picking up mice by their tails every day increases their cancer rate by statistically significant amounts, probably due to increased stress. Of coursse humans do not have tails, but it is unlikely that picking children up by the arms increases their cancer rate. Additionally, mouse organs are NOT identical to human organs as you claim. For example, mice airways are not bifurcated like human airways, which makes mice poor human anologs for inhalation studies - but they are used nevertheless because they are cheap to buy, feed, cage and kill.
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and don't forget the screen that automatically adjusts for ambient lighting and reads like a sheet of paper in bright sun. That alone makes it a great field-computer.
Well consider this, they are still Beta as can be seen from the Gmail logo on every Gmail screen. If you don't like change to Beta software you should consider using something classified production ready software (you know, non Beta)
Yeah, right. Google designated Gmail as a beta about like the Mars rovers were designed to last only three months. Either could have been miserable failures and still be claimed as successes. A failure by Google would have been just as disasterous for Google as would rover failures have been for NASA. It's called CYA.
Read his question more closely. He cannot use satellite because the antenna direction from house to satellite points into side of hill.
No, he didn't say that. He said his home is on a heavily forested northern slope of a hill. That's not even remotely the same as "points into the side of a hill".
Hopefully "after this gets publicised" more people will bother to read the manual which clearly states in Chapter 2 "The Basics" (page 14) how to turn the iPod completely off.
Excuse me, but I thought Apple products were so well designed that people didn't need manuals and 54 page instruction booklets. So which is it Apple fanboys...intuitive, or complex and obscure? You really can't have it both ways.
And let me just say that a phone that actively and invisibly racks up charges while it is turned OFF is fucking horrible design. It goes against accepted Human Interface Theory where Off is supposed to be off. No way are these excessive data charges the fault of the users.
As for Apple's AT&T partner, leave it up to the phone company to figure out a way to charge their customers for free WiFi.
He works in the NSA - he has given up his constitutional rights (he signed that paperwork).
Wrong. A citizen can neither sign away his constitutional rights nor can they be taken away. That;s because rights are not granted, they are inherent. The writers of the Constitution used that wording on purpose. The Constitution only draws attention to some specific rights - it "grants" nothing. Secrecy statements signed by citizens cannot trunmp the Constitution.
What if the military did this? The military is predominately Republican.
A fine but important point is that the military is NOT Republican. The military is apolitical, BY LAW. Now there are quite a few Republicans IN the military (see, the members didn't give up their Rights), but that is a very different thing. The military "being" of any political bent is a very scary idea.
Even if we just limit it to the NSA, what if they start "leaking" inconvinient facts about all the senators of only one party?
You mean like the Bush administration and Karl Rove tried to pressure U.S. Attorney's to bring charges against Democratic lawmakers and back off indictments of Republican lawmakers before the 2004 elections, and then fired them and replaced them with "loyal Republicans" when they refused? You're correct there - use of government departments to advance partisan political agendas is appalling and illegal and should be stopped.
There is a reason for the national security laws, and there is a reason why the constitutional rights cannot apply to armed forces personnel.
Again you are wrong. Military personnel DO have constitutional rights (Rights are inalienable, remember?), they just have additional rules they have to operate under, plus they fall outside the civilian judiciary system, but citizens definately DON'T give up their constitutional rights when they are drafted or enlist.
OOPS, I meant "even pro-Nazi".
The US would probably never have joined WWII had it not been for the Pearl Harbor attack. The US populace were on the whole quite indifferent to the war in Europe and would have been quite happy for Hitler to have taken over.
As for "rushing to save the rest of the world", the Russians did far more to defeat Hitler, at huge cost to themselves.
Wow, a perfect example of how to cherry pick facts to support your positiion. Neither would the Russians have entered the war if Germany had not attacked them. Yes, many Americans were pro-German and even anti-Nazi before the war, but that was a result of the propaganda spouted by powerful right-wing figures like Henry Ford, and organizations such as the Carlisle Group, who supported National Socialism and railed against Jews, Jewish Bankers, Labor Unions (Hitler had abolished labor unions in Germany) and the Zionist Conspiracy. Prior to 1941 the Nazi Party was hiding its activities behind "Work will make you free" slogans, "relocation" camps, and other propaganda niceties that put a pretty face on their mass extermination programs and pure racism.
Prior to 1941 the American people were lied to to by right-wing forces for pure politcal advantage (this tactic may sound familiar to you). The right-wing pro-German factions were powerful and wealthy in America and it was not possible for the left, even though they held the Presidency, to simply do what they knew had to be done. I do not believe for a second that if Americans of the time knew what the Nazis were all about and had not been hoodwinked by right-wing propaganda they would have stood for it for a second. So it could be said that since the right supported the Nazis and the left opposed them, that on December 7 - the day that reality trumped propaganda - the entire country became liberal.
I think that part of the reason why this issue particularly irks some people on Slashdot is because many of us have studied logic (or we're just geeks) and the negative impact of the incorrect usage rears its ugly head when either we have difficulty correctly identifying the logical fallacy or witness others having that problem. It's difficult to "unlearn" things sometimes. We'd* prefer not having the incorrect usage disseminated, especially by those that should know better.
The reason it irks me is that whenever I read "begs the question" my brain correctly interprets the phrase as meaning "does not answer the question", and then of course the sentence no longer makes any sense. I have to stop, start over and re-read the sentence while pretending I am a semi-literate ignoramous.
From Wikipedia: due process (more fully due process of law) is the principle that the government must respect all of a person's legal rights instead of just some or most of those legal rights when the government deprives a person of life, liberty, or property.
U of Kansas is a STATE school, and is therefore part of the government. I'm also pretty sure that access to thenetwork paid for through tuition would be considered leased "property". As a result, the banned student DOES have acces to the full due process of law to appeal the decision. If U of K were a private school due process would not be applicable, although it would be moot since the student could not be prohibited from suing if he felt he was being unfairly deprived of a paid service.
Your view that there can be no restriction on "speech" is absurdely simplistic. Try going to an airport and announcing that you have a bomb strapped to your chest. Try calling your neighbor a child molester just because you feel like it. And yes, try shouting "FIRE" in a theater where people can be killed in the resulting stampede - just because you wierdly think the writers of the Constitution said you could. Try shouting "KILL" to your trained dog and then watch as he does kill someone. Your idea that there can be no restrictions on speech, period, is frankly at about the intellectual level of a three year old.
Most if not all of the components of the Patriot Act had been previously written and people had been trying to tack it onto other legislation for years. For as much as the Patriot Act gets the blame for all our "rights lost" in the past 6 years, it really was just a short piece of literature that merely 'connected the dots' on all this other crap that we had already established.
There is a glaring logical error in this argument. That people had been "trying to tack [multiple components] on to other legislation for years" means that these measures had NOT been passed. You cannot then turn around and say that the UASPA "merely connected the dots" on security laws that had already been established. [emphasis mine]
I suspect you meant to say that the USAPA was not written from scratch overnight, but that doesn't make a whit of difference, does it? The UASPA, which DID get passed is the law that began the rise of the police state mentality we now labor under.
WTF would you make bomb threats using your own PC, at home, anyway? For crying out loud, if you're going to commit a felony, go find an open wireless relay, using a borrowed, rented, or stolen notebook.
And you're smart? Rented...you'll get caught. Borrowed...you'll get caught. Go to your nearest open WiFi hotspot more than twice to send the threats...you'll get caught - or if they have security cameras you'll get caught the first time. Stolen is your best bet but even then the where, how and when you stole it will give clues to your identity. Oh, and you threw the stolen PC away after you used it, right?
I congratulate your families on your success, however I see your success as being based on more than just hard work. There are clues in your reply... your parents' "educations were not recognized". I suspect that means they were professionals (engineers? physicians? educators?) with good educations in Europe. That they could not bring their degrees or European status with them is a shame, but it nevertheless put them in a very different poistion from those whose parents may have never had any success. Starting over is a lot easier than breaking new ground. Your wife's parents owned a farm, well that tells me they too had resources. Sharecroppers work long hard hours too, but it almost never gets them anywhere. No one works as hard as poor people, not even farmers.
Like you, I used to think that anyone could get ahead with hard work, but I now know that is not always possible. My advantage was so subtle that it was invisible to me - I simply knew it was possible to get ahead. For many people who do not have any family member who gained success through education, college is as alien a concept as supporting a family as a nomadic herder in Mongolia would be for me. I know people do it, I know it CAN be done, but I could never just start doing it no matter how hard I worked at it. I would not have the support mechanism.
There are many intelligent, hard-working people who are trapped in poverty. It isn't because they don't work hard (remember, working hard for your daughter was studying hard, while working hard for a poor person may be having two jobs to support a family), or because they get rent subsidies, or are lazy - it is because they don't have that subtle background that lets them know what is possible, or even how to advance themselves. Its like riding a bicycle. It seems obvious how to do it once you know how, but you tend to forget how hard it was when you didn't know.
You are a fountain of ignorance, at least concerning your diatribe against Duke. Instead of being wealthy and pay tuition, you can also simply be smart and hard working. My daughter just graduated from Duke, from which she had gotten a full scholarship. Without that, there would have been no way she could have afforded to study there. Many Colleges and Universities give scholarships to exceptional young people who do NOT come from wealthy homes. Most likely, someone like you wouldn't get such a scholarship, especially in view of your ignorant rant.
Stop whining that your daughter is one of the poor downtrodden who simply pulled herself up by her bootstraps. Your use of language, your vocabulary ("diatribe"), and your lack of spelling errors indicates that you are likely white, well-educated, and not scrabbling just to pay the rent. Your use of commas and capitalization does need work, however. In your world your daughter's "hard work" meant studying hard - not contributing to the family cash in the sugar bowl. Even then, there is a lot more to "advantaged" than money. You are one of those people who are clearly blind to their own advantages in life, and who don't understand that it simply isn't as easy for others to advance. Your daughter is white, from a middle or upper-middle class family with a history of higher education, has never had to worry where her clothes or shelter came from, and YOU whine that she did it all through her hard work. I'm not criticizing your daughter who may very well be a wonderful person, I'm criticizing you, who have blinded yourself to your own advantages and whine that "anyone can do it". Well, not everyone CAN do it, no matter how hard they work.
wow, well caught. Adding better "antennae" to the equipment would mean adding more than one antenna to each piece of equipment. Adding better "antennas" means adding a single new antenna to each, which presumably is the situation. Since that's now settled I'm never going to think about this again.
Something that was corrected well before AT&T broke up - with the rise of Sprint and other such long distance calling plan providers.
Excuse me, but you have that totally backwards. The creation of Sprint and other low-cost carriers was only made possible by the breakup of AT$T and the resulting requirement that they share the government subsidized telephone infrastructure that had been totally monopolized by Bell.
they leased the phone to customers because they supported/serviced the phones at no additional cost.
There is a logical inconsistency in that argument: the lease payment IS the additional cost. Given that those phones almost never had a problem it was a cash cow for the phone company. What I also remember is tht you were not allowed to ad an extension yourself, period. And they checked by measuring ringer equivalents on your number. You also were not allowed to install a speaker phone, or an answering machine unless you leased it from them. If you lived in the country you had a party line because the phone company wouldn't go to the expense of private lines. Long distance was outrageously expensive.
Pre-breakup Bell was no benevolent giant.
"Well, I'm sorry you're afraid, but he has a right to talk about whatever he wants."
But not without consequences. It has been well established that the employer had the right to fire him at will so what are you complaining about - everyone exercised their rights.
What you and everyone else here are missing is that all we know about this incident is what we have been told about it by the person who was fired. He comes across as very reasonable and a great guy in his own comics about himself, but we don't really know what other issues there had been, what other comments were made by him that day, or what the tone of his "face-shooting" comments were. Even in his own comic he says he said "Well, now I DO have a reason to go postal." That statement to his employer justified a police interview. Frankly, even if he was making jokes and having a high old time on the day 32 people were murdered I wouldn't want him in my office either.
OK lets expand this theory a bit. Suppose said kettle....what the hell, lets call it a boiler, is under a turbine and I want to boil water and have the steam turn the turbine. A novel idea. Unforunately it is going to take extra energy to boil the water now, as the increased pressure in the kettle from the pushback of the turbine is going to raise the boiling point of the water. The car is the kettle, the burner is its engine, and now the engine has to work harder.
But the increased pressure means less heat is lost because of the steam carrying it away from the water...so it takes LESS energy to boil the water because more heat is retained in the water and less heat is lost to steam. Since the steam is much hotter than the boiling water, keeping the steam in the proximity of the water surface makes it MORE efficient than an unrestricted system.
From the article: Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.
I call baloney on this bee vs. cell phone theory. Cell phones were commmon in Europe for many years before they became ubiquitous in the US, so the fact that the bee problem started in the US and spread to Europe argues against a causal relationship. If a bee-decline were related to handi use the problem would have started in Europe and spread to the US.
Did you figure in the reduction of the useful life of the computer and/or its components as a result of the amount of power cycling you're doing to it?
Oh, pulease. Not that old wive's tale again. YOu want to use anecdotal information to support this - well I can use it to debunk it. I've been using computers since probably before you were born, I've turned them on and off all the time, and I have NEVER had a hard drive fail, or a power supply for that matter. It is only when components are stressed beyond their capabilities (overclocking, high ambient temps, etc) that these issues have more than a remote chance of happening. Back when computers had tubes, drive platters weighed 2 pounds, connections were soldered and everything cost a fortune to diagnose and fix was the decrease in MTBF due to thermal cycling remotely an issue - and even then it had a big myth factor. You could turn 100 modern computers on and off ten times a day and you couldn't measure the difference in MTBF from 100 computers left on 24/7 (with the possible exception of the on/off switch).
My problem with internet cafes is: can they be trusted when you're using a password or passphrase? You might not be too bothered if somebody gains access to your email (I would be), but what about your bank accounts? If you travel for long enough, you need some way to pay off credit cards, check charges, or check your balance.
That's easy to fix. Use a bank that allows you to use a digital fob like SecureID that generates random login numbers every sixty seconds. So even if someone logs your password at an internet cafe it isn't any good a few seconds later. Even PayPal has the fobs available. If your favorite bank doesn't use them for online transactions get a free ETrade bank account (they have SecureID available) and fund it with enough money to cover you during your trip. Bank of America uses a different security feature that requires you to identify a random picture to log in, at least on their brokerage accounts - I'm not sure about checking accounts. With that system you don't have to worry about losing a fob, but you do have to make sure no one is looking over your shoulder when you log in.
Another point. IF the magnetic stripe on your ATM cards fails or you lose your security fob, it is IMPOSSIBLE to get another one sent to you anywhere other than your home address (You cn get a new AMEX card though if you are in a large city). Make sure you have another person at home who you trust to have joint account privileges at your bank so you can call them to do some banking on your behalf in an emergency. And don't rely totally on ATMs - carry some cash in travelers checks at all times.
Let's not speculate about what could be done: Read the actual rules. We sign a contract every year that we will follow IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines. If you're curious, the short section on information and communication systems.
I think the rules are very reasonable. Does anything in there strike you as unreasonable?
The fact that you posted this as anonymous coward makes me think even you don't believe the "reasonable and benevolent" IBM management line. And before you tell me I don't know what I'm talking about - I worked for them for 12 years so I know exactly how they do things.
This is just not true. You are overstating the case. Mice aren't used because they are nearly identical to humans, they are used because they are cheap and plentiful. Your statement that if something is harmful to mice we "can be sure" it is harmful to humans is absolutely wrong. We can suspect that it might be harmful to humans, but we cannot be sure. That is why there are different levels of carcinogenicity classifications, with "known to cause cancer in animals" ranked below "known to cause cancer in humans". In fact, mice used in tox studies have been bred to be susceptible to tumors, making them far more sensitive to challenges (chemicals and otherwise) than humans. As an example, merely picking up mice by their tails every day increases their cancer rate by statistically significant amounts, probably due to increased stress. Of coursse humans do not have tails, but it is unlikely that picking children up by the arms increases their cancer rate. Additionally, mouse organs are NOT identical to human organs as you claim. For example, mice airways are not bifurcated like human airways, which makes mice poor human anologs for inhalation studies - but they are used nevertheless because they are cheap to buy, feed, cage and kill.
No, I'm smart enough to own a wallet. It's like a windscreen for money that you don't want to lose. You should try it.
I realize it must be very difficult to defend the absurd position that paper money never gets dropped, but can't you do better than that?