IMO, I think Ringtones are the least annoying part about a phone, its just their volume that gets annoying. Much like someone talking too loud I don't want their ringtone to disrupt me either. However, if someone has a rap/punk/rock/pop/techno/classical/retro song for their ringtone, I have no issue with it whatsoever.
So, if someone's cell starts beltin' out Achy Breaky Heart, you do have an issue? Then J. Random OldDude probably has an issue with rap/punk/rock/pop/techno/classical/retro. Or one of those.
Besides, even if the ringtone is based on something I like, why is it a favor to me to hear a truncated, low-fidelity, looping fragment of it?
Sorry, a ringtone is a signal to the user of the cellphone that they have a call or message. Anything else is an abuse of the concept.
It is not a personal statement to every unfortunate within earshot, because in truth they don't give a rat's metric ass about you as a person, or about any statement you wish to make about yourself. You're a part of the scenery, and if your ringtone is loud, you're an annoying part of the scenery.
I'm 6'7" (2m to the US Customary challenged) tall, but I don't run around yelling I'm really tall. I like Metallica and Alan Parsons Project, but I don't blast either out of my cellphone. I really enjoy the occasional dram, but I don't slosh Laphroaig at folks with me at the bar because I think it's vitally important for me to make a personal statement about my superior tastes in whisky.
Sometimes I think the entire "Buy this ringtone and customize your phone to represent YOU" scam is one of the telecom industry's biggest worthless marketing success.
So you've had run-ins with people offended by how you use your cellphone?
The last thing we need is yet another stupid rule to obey that does little but reward over-sensitivity.
The rules are already there. They always have been. They're unspoken, like most rules of polite behavior. People who break them are really never punished, just labeled "rude" and properly ostracized. Perhaps confronted, but you never know where the line between "rude" and "sociopathic" lies in any given person, and it's not always worth risking unprovoked assault.
Nope, I am forced to conclude that inappropriate and rude use of a cellphone is far worse.
I'm sure it was. It was looking for a flower named "Lorenz", not "Lorentz".
TBH, I have no idea where Moz got the name. The only Wikipedia hit I got was for the Lorentz Transform, which is the equivalence and mutual convertability of different relativistic frames of reference. Is this Moz's way of saying "we'll all be going at different relativistic speeds, accelerations, and frames of reference"?
But, extending the car analogy earlier, a great proportion of the Internet "community" consists of poorly-maintained, poorly-driven SUVs with huge "Why, yes, I DO own the road" bumper stickers.
The Internet community disappeared on the first day of Eternal September, in 1993.
Seriously. The car analogy is strikingly apropos of the societal problem. If people are selfish, distracted, road-raging boors in self-propelled road-hazards on real roads, where you can (and SHOULD!) look out through the windshield at your probable victims... where your real identity is just one license-plate lookup away... and where there is real law enforcement with real laws to enforce just patrolling around looking out for you to misbehave... how much worse will it be, when it's just you, the Intarwebs, and a grillion MyFace "friends" that you will really never meet.. where you work under the assumption of fair anonymity and no law enforcement (perhaps a mistaken assumption, but not really obviously so for most)...
It's a miracle the Internet works at all any more.
I assume you're proposing your idea of slander and damages, not trying to recite your current understanding of the law in this area.
IANAL, but a quick google turned up this interesting page about defamation and harm. Quoting (emphasis mine):
The Libel or Slander must Harm or Damage the Plaintiff
Where libel is concerned, damages are presumed and the plaintiff need not prove special harm. Special harm is harm to one's reputation that results in monetary losses. If the libelous matter requires proof of additional, or extrinsic, facts for one to understand its defamatory meaning or its reference to the plaintiff, it is called libel per quod, which does require proof of special harm.
Slander generally requires proof of special harm. If the defamatory statement amounts to slander per se, however, the plaintiff is not required to prove special harm; damage is presumed. Slander per se includes statements that the plaintiff engaged in criminal behavior or sexual misconduct or that the plaintiff has a communicable disease. Statements that adversely affect the plaintiff's trade or profession are also slander per se.
So, in your precise scenario, spreading lies (verbally or published) that damage my business reputation are automatically presumed to cause damage. According to this Wikipedia page, all states of the United States except Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, and Tennessee consider "allegations or imputations injurious to another in their trade, business, or profession" to be defamatory per se.
No, actually, that's just my inner cynic talking. IANAL, so I don't know whether the pigopolists even have an appeal path. If they have one, I can't imagine them not using it, since allowing "the principle that the statutory damages must bear a reasonable relationship to the actual damages" to stand in precedent would seem to be quite undesirable to them. Proportionality and reason are definitely not among the weapons of the RIAAish Inquisition. Reasonable limits on damages kinda softens the deterrent effect of "We're gonna ruin you, and your children, and your children's children, to the seventh generation!"
Well, let's think about what activities are being blamed for the problem described. The one seized upon and trumpeted loudly is gaming. So let's take the gaming rig outside. Where sunlight washes out the contrast of the LCD or CRT display and gets us killed in-game because we didn't see the faint trace of that sniper camper waaaaay over there. And then the console or PC overheats because of the lack of air conditioning. And then we get sunburn.
Ditto with watching TV and video outdoors, especially the contrast washout and sunburn part.
it might be nice to go sit under a tree with my laptop somewhere (if it weren't winter).
Under a tree? In the shade? Where you aren't getting any UV exposure from the sunlight you're avoiding? Won't help your vitamin deficiency, sorry. Now, sitting under the (bare) tree in winter might give you more exposure, but at high temperate latitudes winter sunlight apparently isn't enough either. Never mind frostbite and hypothermia.
Really though, the bigger issue is that the majority of these cases are probably caused by poor diet more than (or at least as much as) lack of sun exposure.
Yup, I agree. We've had this "lack of sun exposure" problem since the beginning of the Industrial Age. We fixed it with vitamin enrichment of the foods people normally ate. Now, we don't eat those as much. So we accidentally avoid both sources of vitamin D: sunlight or healthy food. Winner!
Unless the Wikipedia article is wrong, I think you're misinterpreting the flowchart.
Ingestion of natural vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) from oily fish, egg yolks, and other vertebrate tissue sources, ingestion of natural vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol) from invertebrate (usually fungal) tissue sources like mushrooms, ingestion of enriched foods with versions of either vitamin, or skin exposure to ultraviolet (which creates D3) all put vitamin D into the bloodstream. Then, the liver performs the first step of processing the vitamin, hydroxylation of either into calcidiol. Then, the kidney performs a second and final hydroxylation, conversion into calcitriol. This is the vitamin used by the tissues.
In other words, sunlight is not involved with either hydroxylation reaction, only in one of the two sources (ingestion or skin synthesis) of the initial forms of vitamin D.
If sunlight were involved in either hydroxylation reaction, we'd need to expose our livers and kidneys to sunlight, and that sounds quite painful and messy to me.
Vitamin D enriched foods and drinks (as well as those naturally high in D) would probably help, if we could get the pasty-skinned console trolls to consume them. Maybe if they added vitamin D to pizza rolls, Hot Pockets, Doritos, and Mountain Dew?
Why should we piss on the DIY'ers because they dont have a Master's degree in CS? Frankly, a lot of computer stuff is pretty easy and paying someone is ridiculous.
Thousands of cars on cinderblocks and dozens of houses with flooded basements are testimony that sometimes, paying someone is the only thing that isn't ridiculous. There's DIY, and there's "OMG you are SO in over your head." Anyone whose software development abilities are so stunted that the "advancement" outlined in TFA would help them is absolutely in the latter category.
The Haber ammonia synthesis process requires a source of hydrogen to run. It is just that currently the cheapest way to generate hydrogen is steam reforming of natural gas.
Which is to say, using the Haber process create fertilizer precursors will, in an economically realistic world, inevitably be based on reforming natural gas. So, fossil fuels will be extracted and processed in order to create biofuel. So much for carbon neutral.
I do like the idea of poopooing the algae, as long as there's enough water-treatment runoff to do the trick. It seems like there would be... if Slashdot is any evidence, the world is pretty much awash in natural algal fertilizer.
Steam? At any distance that the exhaust is hot and dense enough to be a breathing hazard, you're already in trouble from blast and acoustic effects. Or are you claiming the exhaust contains high and persistent quantities of hydrogen peroxide?
Besides, every major launch platform also uses solids.
Close. Most of the current (e.g., ATLAS V) and future (e.g., Rus-M, Angara) heavylift liquid-only EELVs are RP-1/LOX (i.e., kerosene) lower stage designs, so from a carbon footprint perspective no winner. However, the Delta IV Heavy (3 CBC variant) uses only LH2/LOX engines, so that one has neither SRBs nor nasty chemical liquid fuels. Of course, that design has only had 3 launches thus far, only two successful. But, in theory, it's still a "major launch platform".
Relative to a 17-year latency period, yeah, 7 months is new-found. And full disclosure was new as of yesterday. To everyone but the discoverer and the OS vendor, that makes it new.
To crib some TV network's advertisement, "It's a rerun, but it's new to you!"
Vulnerability applies to 32-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems with Windows NT 3.5 heritage.
Vulnerability arises from ancient coding or design flaws in the MS-DOS execution subsystem. This subsystem is not present in 64-bit Windows OSs.
The workaround is to disable the MS-DOS subsystem.
Great article at the SANS Institute Internet Storm Center: http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=8023. This includes links to Youtube videos on how to use Windows Group Policy tools to disable this subsystem.
However, once you do this, you won't be able to run 16-bit DOS-based software, so if you really need that you may have to wait for a patch. Or build a dedicated DOS machine, where at least you'll have no illusions of security. (Cynics would say this is true of any MS operating system, but I leave that debate to others.)
Of course, there exists a perfectly good counter-example, one used by over 1/5 of the Earth's population, a large part of which speak mutually unintelligible languages, and yet can probably all read and understand non-complicated writings in this single writing system.
But regarding Cyrillic, yeah, recognizing the glyphs isn't necessarily understanding the writing.
Well that makes sense. Starter phasers only have stun and kill, but you have to be moderately experienced to be able to properly wield additional level 20 phaser settings: intimidate, humiliate and irradiate.
At what level can I set my phaser to "pew pew pwn"?
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, I think Ringtones are the least annoying part about a phone, its just their volume that gets annoying. Much like someone talking too loud I don't want their ringtone to disrupt me either. However, if someone has a rap/punk/rock/pop/techno/classical/retro song for their ringtone, I have no issue with it whatsoever.
So, if someone's cell starts beltin' out Achy Breaky Heart, you do have an issue? Then J. Random OldDude probably has an issue with rap/punk/rock/pop/techno/classical/retro. Or one of those.
Besides, even if the ringtone is based on something I like, why is it a favor to me to hear a truncated, low-fidelity, looping fragment of it?
Sorry, a ringtone is a signal to the user of the cellphone that they have a call or message. Anything else is an abuse of the concept.
It is not a personal statement to every unfortunate within earshot, because in truth they don't give a rat's metric ass about you as a person, or about any statement you wish to make about yourself. You're a part of the scenery, and if your ringtone is loud, you're an annoying part of the scenery.
I'm 6'7" (2m to the US Customary challenged) tall, but I don't run around yelling I'm really tall. I like Metallica and Alan Parsons Project, but I don't blast either out of my cellphone. I really enjoy the occasional dram, but I don't slosh Laphroaig at folks with me at the bar because I think it's vitally important for me to make a personal statement about my superior tastes in whisky.
Sometimes I think the entire "Buy this ringtone and customize your phone to represent YOU" scam is one of the telecom industry's biggest worthless marketing success.
So you've had run-ins with people offended by how you use your cellphone?
The last thing we need is yet another stupid rule to obey that does little but reward over-sensitivity.
The rules are already there. They always have been. They're unspoken, like most rules of polite behavior. People who break them are really never punished, just labeled "rude" and properly ostracized. Perhaps confronted, but you never know where the line between "rude" and "sociopathic" lies in any given person, and it's not always worth risking unprovoked assault.
Nope, I am forced to conclude that inappropriate and rude use of a cellphone is far worse.
Yes. How about Christmas Island?
The upside is that no export controls government employee savvy enough to recognize a sofware forge will willing click on a ".cx" link.
Panem et circences.The Romans had that figured out millenia ago. Great way to keep the plebs quiet and pliant.
I'm sure it was. It was looking for a flower named "Lorenz", not "Lorentz".
TBH, I have no idea where Moz got the name. The only Wikipedia hit I got was for the Lorentz Transform, which is the equivalence and mutual convertability of different relativistic frames of reference. Is this Moz's way of saying "we'll all be going at different relativistic speeds, accelerations, and frames of reference"?
O_o
How long have the editors waited to use the phrase "EFFing lawyers"? All their lives, I'd guess.
Grats.
But, extending the car analogy earlier, a great proportion of the Internet "community" consists of poorly-maintained, poorly-driven SUVs with huge "Why, yes, I DO own the road" bumper stickers.
The Internet community disappeared on the first day of Eternal September, in 1993.
Seriously. The car analogy is strikingly apropos of the societal problem. If people are selfish, distracted, road-raging boors in self-propelled road-hazards on real roads, where you can (and SHOULD!) look out through the windshield at your probable victims... where your real identity is just one license-plate lookup away... and where there is real law enforcement with real laws to enforce just patrolling around looking out for you to misbehave... how much worse will it be, when it's just you, the Intarwebs, and a grillion MyFace "friends" that you will really never meet.. where you work under the assumption of fair anonymity and no law enforcement (perhaps a mistaken assumption, but not really obviously so for most)...
It's a miracle the Internet works at all any more.
I assume you're proposing your idea of slander and damages, not trying to recite your current understanding of the law in this area.
IANAL, but a quick google turned up this interesting page about defamation and harm. Quoting (emphasis mine):
So, in your precise scenario, spreading lies (verbally or published) that damage my business reputation are automatically presumed to cause damage. According to this Wikipedia page, all states of the United States except Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, and Tennessee consider "allegations or imputations injurious to another in their trade, business, or profession" to be defamatory per se.
Until overturned on appeal.
No, actually, that's just my inner cynic talking. IANAL, so I don't know whether the pigopolists even have an appeal path. If they have one, I can't imagine them not using it, since allowing "the principle that the statutory damages must bear a reasonable relationship to the actual damages" to stand in precedent would seem to be quite undesirable to them. Proportionality and reason are definitely not among the weapons of the RIAAish Inquisition. Reasonable limits on damages kinda softens the deterrent effect of "We're gonna ruin you, and your children, and your children's children, to the seventh generation!"
Well, let's think about what activities are being blamed for the problem described. The one seized upon and trumpeted loudly is gaming. So let's take the gaming rig outside. Where sunlight washes out the contrast of the LCD or CRT display and gets us killed in-game because we didn't see the faint trace of that sniper camper waaaaay over there. And then the console or PC overheats because of the lack of air conditioning. And then we get sunburn.
Ditto with watching TV and video outdoors, especially the contrast washout and sunburn part.
it might be nice to go sit under a tree with my laptop somewhere (if it weren't winter).
Under a tree? In the shade? Where you aren't getting any UV exposure from the sunlight you're avoiding? Won't help your vitamin deficiency, sorry. Now, sitting under the (bare) tree in winter might give you more exposure, but at high temperate latitudes winter sunlight apparently isn't enough either. Never mind frostbite and hypothermia.
Really though, the bigger issue is that the majority of these cases are probably caused by poor diet more than (or at least as much as) lack of sun exposure.
Yup, I agree. We've had this "lack of sun exposure" problem since the beginning of the Industrial Age. We fixed it with vitamin enrichment of the foods people normally ate. Now, we don't eat those as much. So we accidentally avoid both sources of vitamin D: sunlight or healthy food. Winner!
Unless the Wikipedia article is wrong, I think you're misinterpreting the flowchart.
Ingestion of natural vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) from oily fish, egg yolks, and other vertebrate tissue sources, ingestion of natural vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol) from invertebrate (usually fungal) tissue sources like mushrooms, ingestion of enriched foods with versions of either vitamin, or skin exposure to ultraviolet (which creates D3) all put vitamin D into the bloodstream. Then, the liver performs the first step of processing the vitamin, hydroxylation of either into calcidiol. Then, the kidney performs a second and final hydroxylation, conversion into calcitriol. This is the vitamin used by the tissues.
In other words, sunlight is not involved with either hydroxylation reaction, only in one of the two sources (ingestion or skin synthesis) of the initial forms of vitamin D.
If sunlight were involved in either hydroxylation reaction, we'd need to expose our livers and kidneys to sunlight, and that sounds quite painful and messy to me.
Vitamin D enriched foods and drinks (as well as those naturally high in D) would probably help, if we could get the pasty-skinned console trolls to consume them. Maybe if they added vitamin D to pizza rolls, Hot Pockets, Doritos, and Mountain Dew?
I'm glad you acknowledged it. I was gonna snark out on that, but that would have detracted from the fact that basically, I agree with you.
Still, misspelling "precise" is pretty much an irony singularity. You can't get much higher irony density than that.
tl;dr
Why should we piss on the DIY'ers because they dont have a Master's degree in CS? Frankly, a lot of computer stuff is pretty easy and paying someone is ridiculous.
Thousands of cars on cinderblocks and dozens of houses with flooded basements are testimony that sometimes, paying someone is the only thing that isn't ridiculous. There's DIY, and there's "OMG you are SO in over your head." Anyone whose software development abilities are so stunted that the "advancement" outlined in TFA would help them is absolutely in the latter category.
The Haber ammonia synthesis process requires a source of hydrogen to run. It is just that currently the cheapest way to generate hydrogen is steam reforming of natural gas.
Which is to say, using the Haber process create fertilizer precursors will, in an economically realistic world, inevitably be based on reforming natural gas. So, fossil fuels will be extracted and processed in order to create biofuel. So much for carbon neutral.
I do like the idea of poopooing the algae, as long as there's enough water-treatment runoff to do the trick. It seems like there would be... if Slashdot is any evidence, the world is pretty much awash in natural algal fertilizer.
The exhaust will rot out your lungs.
Steam? At any distance that the exhaust is hot and dense enough to be a breathing hazard, you're already in trouble from blast and acoustic effects. Or are you claiming the exhaust contains high and persistent quantities of hydrogen peroxide?
Besides, every major launch platform also uses solids.
Close. Most of the current (e.g., ATLAS V) and future (e.g., Rus-M, Angara) heavylift liquid-only EELVs are RP-1/LOX (i.e., kerosene) lower stage designs, so from a carbon footprint perspective no winner. However, the Delta IV Heavy (3 CBC variant) uses only LH2/LOX engines, so that one has neither SRBs nor nasty chemical liquid fuels. Of course, that design has only had 3 launches thus far, only two successful. But, in theory, it's still a "major launch platform".
I bet a joke going over your audience's heads makes an odd-sounding whoosh at 9km msl. Thin air and all.
Relative to a 17-year latency period, yeah, 7 months is new-found. And full disclosure was new as of yesterday. To everyone but the discoverer and the OS vendor, that makes it new.
To crib some TV network's advertisement, "It's a rerun, but it's new to you!"
Correction: All 32-bit MS Windows OSs with Windows NT 3.1 heritage... i.e., from NT 3.1 to 32-bit Win 7.
I always wondered by PEEK and POKE still worked in QBASIC.
Dear $DIETY, that's a horrible thought. A Qbasic poke-script (with scores of DATA statements) that roots your Vista kernel. That's... sick, just sick.
Vulnerability applies to 32-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems with Windows NT 3.5 heritage.
Vulnerability arises from ancient coding or design flaws in the MS-DOS execution subsystem. This subsystem is not present in 64-bit Windows OSs.
The workaround is to disable the MS-DOS subsystem.
Great article at the SANS Institute Internet Storm Center: http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=8023. This includes links to Youtube videos on how to use Windows Group Policy tools to disable this subsystem.
However, once you do this, you won't be able to run 16-bit DOS-based software, so if you really need that you may have to wait for a patch. Or build a dedicated DOS machine, where at least you'll have no illusions of security. (Cynics would say this is true of any MS operating system, but I leave that debate to others.)
Geez, I'll break out the World's Smallest Bass Cello and play "My Heart Bleeds for You".
Interesting random synapse firing: would the World's Smallest Bass Cello still be suitable for bass?
Of course, there exists a perfectly good counter-example, one used by over 1/5 of the Earth's population, a large part of which speak mutually unintelligible languages, and yet can probably all read and understand non-complicated writings in this single writing system.
But regarding Cyrillic, yeah, recognizing the glyphs isn't necessarily understanding the writing.
Well that makes sense. Starter phasers only have stun and kill, but you have to be moderately experienced to be able to properly wield additional level 20 phaser settings: intimidate, humiliate and irradiate.
At what level can I set my phaser to "pew pew pwn"?