To all of you who worry about your neighbor yakking away on their cell phone through a flight, chill out! Many planes today already have seat-back phones. Have you ever seen anyone use them? When you're in the air, you'll be connected to the plane's own cell, with a satellite uplink. Surely they'll charge roaming fees just as exorbitant as what the seat-back phones cost today.
Just hope that you don't accidentally roam onto their network while the plane is on the ground!
Bush didn't have such terrible difficulties with language when he was governor of Texas. His speaking skills have declined since then -- a pattern not indicative of dyslexia. It is speculated that it's pre-senile dementia.
Carbon nanotubes are one of many materials that can be made into artificial muscles. This has been known for a few years. For a comparison of technologies, see actuatorweb.org.
Those darn oil companies. In summer, they screw you by serving you hot gasoline. In winter, they screw you by reducing the energy content of the gasoline. Someone should do something about it!
Seriously, what would be accomplished by accounting for expansion? If they install the sensors, then they would adjust their prices to compensate for temperature. Does it really matter that the volume is inexact, as long as all gas stations consistently use the same inexact method of measuring the volume?
Odd thing about the Canadian gas market -- the prices posted at gas stations are almost always identical when driving around town. The government claims that it's simply the result of an efficient market, but I notice that prices don't converge like that in the US. I know, US prices are per gallon, and Canadian prices are per litre, but still... in the US, it's common to see two gas stations at an intersection with wildly different prices, and that never happens in Canada.
I believe that IKEA accepts CFL bulbs for recycling. There is usually a container for them and used batteries near the exit, in the returns department.
Hear, hear! Integration with PDF Kit would be awesome. Viewing PDFs in Safari is so quick and easy, since it's natively supported, with no need to launch any plugins or external applications. Not only do PDFs render in the browser window, File -> Save and File -> Print work too! Firefox should have the same native support for PDFs on Macs.
The argument against citing Wikipedia really has nothing to do with concerns over the truthfulness or objectivity of the articles on Wikipedia. Academic research is based on the idea that researchers can build upon the knowledge of other researchers. To ensure that the tree of human knowledge has a solid foundation, academic papers contain citations so that one can trace which researcher made what statements.
The problem is that Wikipedia contributions are anonymous for all practical purposes, so citing a Wikipedia article, even if you cite a snapshot of it, is useless for determining the source of the information. That defeats the purpose of citations.
However, if you happen to be doing sociology-type research on how Wikipedia users interact with each other, and you are using Wikipedia content as the data you are analyzing, the cite away!
Do they have any idea how snarled up the queues will be at the border? As it already is, it takes forever to process one foreign visitor trying to enter the US. The officer interviews the person for a minute, flips through the passport, takes the left index print, takes the right index print, and a picture. The capture process doesn't always work the first time, so they may have to try several times. If a family is trying to enter, each of them has to get their fingerprints and photo taken. Even if you are a US citizen, you're pretty screwed if you happen to arrive at the checkpoint when there happens to be a plane/busload with a high percentage of foreigners ahead of you in the queue.
I don't believe it is possible to make a scanner that could read 5 good fingerprints simultaneously -- the subject has to press down hard or roll each finger to get sufficient contact.
Taking all 10 fingerprints would be practically equivalent to shutting off the border altogether. They might as well reopen the Ellis Island and Angel Island holding facilities to deal with the queues.
US bills are the worst designed in the world. All the bills look so much alike, even normal people make mistakes. See this video, in which a police officer abuses a drive-thru clerk because the officer thought the clerk short-changed him.
The silly thing is, these days, they redesign the bills every few years to stay ahead of the counterfeiters, and the new bills are just as indistinguishable as their predecessors. Pathetic.
These sanctions are just the opposite of what we should do if we want North Korea to turn around. We should be flooding their market with foreign products, not witholding them. Juche, or self-reliance, is a fundamental tenet of North Korean ideology. The government shuts out all foreign communication and products, telling the people that they are better off doing everything without outside help. We can impose all the sanctions we want, the government doesn't want our products in the country anyway.
If we do an airlift, showering the North Koreans with McDonald's, iPods, etc., the people would immediately see what the government has deprived them of. Such an operation would not be easy, the results are not predictable, and Americanizing the world is not a worthy goal. However, I'm convinced that breaking their isolation by foisting foreign goods on the North Koreans is what the regime would fear the most.
In the U.S., it's much simpler. Just vote for the lesser of two evils. Not that they'll count your vote properly, anyway.
Re:Conditional comments are unmaintainable
on
CSS Cookbook
·
· Score: 1
If I have to resort to server-side programming to generate the CSS response, I might as well do user-agent detection instead. It still means that conditional comments are brain-dead.
Conditional comments are unmaintainable
on
CSS Cookbook
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Many designers would love to use conditional comments if they had CSS block granularity. Instead, the idiots at Microsoft only implemented them at the HTML level, making a maintenance mess.
Conditional comments would be so wonderful if you could put them in a.css file like this:
... where mystyle.css contains the standard declarations, mystyle_pre_ie7.css contains the first hack and mystyle_pre_ie6.css contains the second hack.
That is so impractical that it's not even funny. It's hard enough to work with CSS without having to flip back and forth between all those files to find out which rules apply. God help you if you also have alternate stylesheets.
It's Microsoft's own fault for producing a browser that needs so many kludges. Their recommended way of managing those kludges is such a joke, they really don't have any right to complain when CSS designers resort to CSS hacks instead.
I believe that the only company to ever benefit from working with Microsoft is Apple. I'm pretty sure that Microsoft bailed out Apple in its most troubled days only to keep a token competitor in the marketplace and avoid further anti-trust scrutiny. Apple, of course, was smart enough to hedge its bets by developing Safari and Pages so that it wasn't completely dependent on Microsoft.
All other Microsoft partners that I can think of, though, have gotten screwed.
Regardless of your opinion of IP laws, there's no hypocrisy on the part of the government here. Yes, copyrights and patents do create monopolies. Being a monopoly is legal.
Microsoft is being punished for abusing their monopoly status, which is illegal. The EU has ruled that bundling Windows Media Player with Windows is an anti-competitive practice. Both the US and the EU governments have focused on the bundling issue because it's the easiest way to show that Microsoft is taking advantage of its market share to shut out competitors from the market.
Even within the current framework of IP laws, there are plenty of ways that Microsoft can operate legally. As long as PC manufacturers have to ship with Windows pre-installed, Microsoft is supposed to make Internet Explorer and Media Player separate products, that's all.
Note to anyone with access to a voting machine with security tape but no paper trail: you could sabotage the election simply by tampering with the tape. While it wouldn't change the records on the machine, you might succeed in getting the votes on that machine invalidated.
Luckily, California requires paper trails on its machines. I assume that tampering with the tape in that case just forces them to re-count the ballots manually.
The reason for leaving no paper trail is obvious: a system without paper trails can never be proven wrong. Suppose there were a close race, and a recount happens. What if there is a discrepancy between the paper and electronic records? The officials will most likely trust the paper count. Then the electorate and the media might start asking why we spent so much money switching to electronic machines that are less trustworthy than paper ballots.
Wouldn't it be better to avoid all that fuss by eliminating the evidence altogether? No recounts, no worries! (That goes for the machine manufacturers as well as the lazy/incompetent/corrupt officials who buy the machines.)
Slashdot Mirror
To all of you who worry about your neighbor yakking away on their cell phone through a flight, chill out! Many planes today already have seat-back phones. Have you ever seen anyone use them? When you're in the air, you'll be connected to the plane's own cell, with a satellite uplink. Surely they'll charge roaming fees just as exorbitant as what the seat-back phones cost today.
Just hope that you don't accidentally roam onto their network while the plane is on the ground!
Bush didn't have such terrible difficulties with language when he was governor of Texas. His speaking skills have declined since then -- a pattern not indicative of dyslexia. It is speculated that it's pre-senile dementia.
I would have expected hard-core liberals to remove the W key from the keyboard altogether.
Carbon nanotubes are one of many materials that can be made into artificial muscles. This has been known for a few years. For a comparison of technologies, see actuatorweb.org.
Those darn oil companies. In summer, they screw you by serving you hot gasoline. In winter, they screw you by reducing the energy content of the gasoline. Someone should do something about it!
Seriously, what would be accomplished by accounting for expansion? If they install the sensors, then they would adjust their prices to compensate for temperature. Does it really matter that the volume is inexact, as long as all gas stations consistently use the same inexact method of measuring the volume?
Odd thing about the Canadian gas market -- the prices posted at gas stations are almost always identical when driving around town. The government claims that it's simply the result of an efficient market, but I notice that prices don't converge like that in the US. I know, US prices are per gallon, and Canadian prices are per litre, but still... in the US, it's common to see two gas stations at an intersection with wildly different prices, and that never happens in Canada.
How much of that million pounds would you actually keep after paying income tax? One in three have good financial sense!
$5629 for a 64GB thumb drive???
I believe that IKEA accepts CFL bulbs for recycling. There is usually a container for them and used batteries near the exit, in the returns department.
Hear, hear! Integration with PDF Kit would be awesome. Viewing PDFs in Safari is so quick and easy, since it's natively supported, with no need to launch any plugins or external applications. Not only do PDFs render in the browser window, File -> Save and File -> Print work too! Firefox should have the same native support for PDFs on Macs.
There's an exemption for trademarks already in use before today -- see 3.(4)(b).
There you go, spreading FUD like a Windows guy. Macs don't get infected. =)
The argument against citing Wikipedia really has nothing to do with concerns over the truthfulness or objectivity of the articles on Wikipedia. Academic research is based on the idea that researchers can build upon the knowledge of other researchers. To ensure that the tree of human knowledge has a solid foundation, academic papers contain citations so that one can trace which researcher made what statements.
The problem is that Wikipedia contributions are anonymous for all practical purposes, so citing a Wikipedia article, even if you cite a snapshot of it, is useless for determining the source of the information. That defeats the purpose of citations.
However, if you happen to be doing sociology-type research on how Wikipedia users interact with each other, and you are using Wikipedia content as the data you are analyzing, the cite away!
Apple really, really wanted to use Sosumi as the ringtone on this phone.
Do they have any idea how snarled up the queues will be at the border? As it already is, it takes forever to process one foreign visitor trying to enter the US. The officer interviews the person for a minute, flips through the passport, takes the left index print, takes the right index print, and a picture. The capture process doesn't always work the first time, so they may have to try several times. If a family is trying to enter, each of them has to get their fingerprints and photo taken. Even if you are a US citizen, you're pretty screwed if you happen to arrive at the checkpoint when there happens to be a plane/busload with a high percentage of foreigners ahead of you in the queue.
I don't believe it is possible to make a scanner that could read 5 good fingerprints simultaneously -- the subject has to press down hard or roll each finger to get sufficient contact. Taking all 10 fingerprints would be practically equivalent to shutting off the border altogether. They might as well reopen the Ellis Island and Angel Island holding facilities to deal with the queues.
Just wait until after Christmas. I'll bet the Zune will have negative market share as soon as the kids unwrap their presents.
Are you telling me that you can rent a car on a Visa without showing your ID?
US bills are the worst designed in the world. All the bills look so much alike, even normal people make mistakes. See this video, in which a police officer abuses a drive-thru clerk because the officer thought the clerk short-changed him.
The silly thing is, these days, they redesign the bills every few years to stay ahead of the counterfeiters, and the new bills are just as indistinguishable as their predecessors. Pathetic.
These sanctions are just the opposite of what we should do if we want North Korea to turn around. We should be flooding their market with foreign products, not witholding them. Juche, or self-reliance, is a fundamental tenet of North Korean ideology. The government shuts out all foreign communication and products, telling the people that they are better off doing everything without outside help. We can impose all the sanctions we want, the government doesn't want our products in the country anyway.
If we do an airlift, showering the North Koreans with McDonald's, iPods, etc., the people would immediately see what the government has deprived them of. Such an operation would not be easy, the results are not predictable, and Americanizing the world is not a worthy goal. However, I'm convinced that breaking their isolation by foisting foreign goods on the North Koreans is what the regime would fear the most.
In the U.S., it's much simpler. Just vote for the lesser of two evils. Not that they'll count your vote properly, anyway.
If I have to resort to server-side programming to generate the CSS response, I might as well do user-agent detection instead. It still means that conditional comments are brain-dead.
Many designers would love to use conditional comments if they had CSS block granularity. Instead, the idiots at Microsoft only implemented them at the HTML level, making a maintenance mess.
Conditional comments would be so wonderful if you could put them in a .css file like this:
That way, the purpose of each MSIE-specific kludge is clear.
With conditional comments, you would need an additional CSS file for each version of IE you plan to support:
It's Microsoft's own fault for producing a browser that needs so many kludges. Their recommended way of managing those kludges is such a joke, they really don't have any right to complain when CSS designers resort to CSS hacks instead.
I believe that the only company to ever benefit from working with Microsoft is Apple. I'm pretty sure that Microsoft bailed out Apple in its most troubled days only to keep a token competitor in the marketplace and avoid further anti-trust scrutiny. Apple, of course, was smart enough to hedge its bets by developing Safari and Pages so that it wasn't completely dependent on Microsoft.
All other Microsoft partners that I can think of, though, have gotten screwed.
Regardless of your opinion of IP laws, there's no hypocrisy on the part of the government here. Yes, copyrights and patents do create monopolies. Being a monopoly is legal. Microsoft is being punished for abusing their monopoly status, which is illegal. The EU has ruled that bundling Windows Media Player with Windows is an anti-competitive practice. Both the US and the EU governments have focused on the bundling issue because it's the easiest way to show that Microsoft is taking advantage of its market share to shut out competitors from the market.
Even within the current framework of IP laws, there are plenty of ways that Microsoft can operate legally. As long as PC manufacturers have to ship with Windows pre-installed, Microsoft is supposed to make Internet Explorer and Media Player separate products, that's all.
Note to anyone with access to a voting machine with security tape but no paper trail: you could sabotage the election simply by tampering with the tape. While it wouldn't change the records on the machine, you might succeed in getting the votes on that machine invalidated.
Luckily, California requires paper trails on its machines. I assume that tampering with the tape in that case just forces them to re-count the ballots manually.
The reason for leaving no paper trail is obvious: a system without paper trails can never be proven wrong. Suppose there were a close race, and a recount happens. What if there is a discrepancy between the paper and electronic records? The officials will most likely trust the paper count. Then the electorate and the media might start asking why we spent so much money switching to electronic machines that are less trustworthy than paper ballots.
Wouldn't it be better to avoid all that fuss by eliminating the evidence altogether? No recounts, no worries! (That goes for the machine manufacturers as well as the lazy/incompetent/corrupt officials who buy the machines.)