I don't. I use Gmail for my main account and Yahoo for my throwaway. Their spam filtering is better than anything you or your ISP can come up with, if only because their training sample is so much larger. If you don't want to leave your email on their site, use their POP/IMAP access to store a local copy.
Seriously, why anyone doesn't use them for personal mail is just beyond me.
For you, increasing font size so you can stand several feet away may be the best solution. But it's not for almost everyone else, and designers are all about designing for the largest number.
Besides, both Firefox and IE zoom the page, increasing layout as well as font size, rather than just jacking the font size. Doesn't that work for you?
Alan Moore's cynicism about Hollywood long predates his experiences with Watchmen. He was absolutely certain Hollywood would screw it up after the third time he got fucked (c.f. Johnny Depp in From Hell). So it's not that Moore hates Snyder's take per se, it's that Moore wasn't getting sucked in again and simply avoided Watchmen from the start.
Most of the designers I know prefer, these days, to create fixed width designs because most sites look like crap when the browser is maximized on a monitor with 1900x1280 resolution. The line lengths are far too long.
By "no outside power source", I meant "isn't dependent on being connected to the power grid", or otherwise requiring a separately engineered power source that could suffer from its own engineering/societal failures.
If you really want to be pedantic, then yes, a human being resetting the weights every century is an outside power source. This is what I get for arguing with aspies.
Wow. It's astonishing, the density of stupid you've achieved in that post.
To highlight one item: it's not going to be sealed inside a limestone cliff, you moron. You can't even get your facts right, and you're criticizing them for not thinking it through?
It has weights that descend over the course of a century, and will need to be wound every century. The point was to have an independent, purely mechanical power source that could run for 10,000 years as long as someone just bothers to reset the weights. No chemicals to run out, no dependency on an outside power source to keep functioning.
Did you even read your own links? From the CSMonitor link:
Radon appears to have successfully presaged a quake in some instances, but not in others.
Well... lets not dignify your question with a response, shall we?
No, let's, because you keep demonstrating a failure to understand that a partial correlation doesn't equal a reliable leading indicator. Some earthquakes are preceded by a spike in radon; some aren't. Some spikes in radon levels are followed by earthquakes; some aren't. Not to mention also that the time period between a spike and earthquake, when it happens, is variable, anywhere from weeks to months.
You also ignored my point that if government had taken the warnings seriously, they'd have evacuated the wrong town, a month early. There's a reason seismologists don't run to the government every time they detect a spike in radon levels, and this is it.
This is./. We don't want your cogent analogies and your evenhanded, unhypeful treatment here. If one half of your X technology vs. Y technology comparison isn't "users of X will burn in hell", then this is no place for you, and you'd better be moseying along, lest something unfortunate were to occur, you filthy centrist.
Why would they hire a physicist who dabbles in earthquake detection when they've got seismologists who do this full-time around, who know that radon levels are not an accurate predictor of earthquakes? Do you think this guy is the first to notice the correlation? The earthquake science community looked at it and dismissed it decades ago as insufficiently reliable--some earthquakes aren't preceded by a spike in radon levels, and some spikes aren't followed by an earthquake.
I mean, seriously, do you think no one is trying to figure out how to predict earthquakes? This dude ran around saying a quake was going to happen within hours, right where he was standing. It didn't happen even within days or a couple weeks. Even if they'd taken him seriously, the wrong town would have been evacuated, and they would have all returned to their homes for when a quake happened hundreds of miles away.
Have YOU even thought about what you are blabbering?
That's the basic problem with radon levels: the correlation between increased radon and a quake following is non-trivial but far from strong enough to justify evacuating towns every time there's a spike. Sometimes it doesn't appear, and sometimes when it appears no quake happens. It's simply not reliable enough to be called an earthquake alarm bell.
He was off by more than a month, and a couple hundred miles. The location for which he was predicting the quake had no fatalities and only minor damage. He was also using a discredited earthquake prediction technique, which is monitoring radon levels.
If they were as inherently dangerous as everyone is told to believe, they would have all blown up by now.
No they wouldn't. Inherently unsafe" doesn't mean they will necessarily blow up within a certain timeframe. It means that, by design, it is possible for it to blow up under the right circumstances, as the Chernobyl technicians found out. As a result of Chernobyl, many design and procedural changes have resulted to avoid those circumstances. Would you feel alright flying in a plane if the wings could fall off during a right turn, so the pilot only makes left turns?
Compare it with a pebble bed reactor, which by design can never go critical.
Actually, in the UK, truth is a strict defense against libel. Holocaust Denier David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt over the UK edition of her book, Denying the Holocaust, in which she called Irving
a Holocaust denier, falsifier, and bigot, and said that he manipulated and distorted real documents.
Irving lost after a trial in which his scholarship on the Holocaust was shown to be fraudulent and he was demonstrated to be a bigot.
For example, the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in February 2009 in the case of Noonan v. Staples, that even a true statement, if made with malicious intent, could stand as the basis of a defamation suit, based on a clause in Massachusetts libel law, allowing libel suits for true claims made in "actual malice."
Your belief above that honestly believing something is sufficient, is not strictly true: It depends upon the jurisdiction you're in.
I think the idea was that tossing the higher technology gave them a chance at a different, more pastoral lifestyle. It doesn't necessarily free them the cycle, but it offers an opportunity that retaining their technology wouldn't.
I'm not saying it's good philosophy or sociology, but that was the idea, and it's not totally crazy. There are lots of communities that live more steady-state, non-technology-driven lives: Quakers, Amish, Hutterites, Mennonites, various hippie communes still holding out from the sixties, even some environmentalists urging scaling back our drive to industrialize everything in unsustainable ways.
They didn't opt to become cavemen, they opted to become pastoralists, akin to Quakers. With their knowledge they could easily recreate a relatively stable and safe pre-industrial civilization--they kept maps and a few raptors, and things like binoculars. They weren't planning on abandoning language, they were planning on teaching the locals to speak.
Keep in mind that their technological civilization was at its ragged end. The ships were falling apart--they planned to cannibalize Galactica to keep other ships running. And after five years living a cramped, always-near-death-from-technology life, I imagine a quiet, pastoral life seemed a lot more appealing to them than it would to you or I.
And at bottom was the awareness that their technologically empowered lifestyle kept leading to the same cycle of destructive war that catapulted them back there anyway. The idea was to give themselves another chance at the cycle, to hopefully mature spiritually this time.
That was head-Six and head-Baltar, not Six and Baltar themselves. They're angels or demons or whatever, agents of the higher power that's been guiding them.
What is Kara?
It's vague, but basically an angel along the lines of head-Six and head-Baltar.
Why did they smash their fleet?
After five years of running from the technology they'd created, that was trying to kill them, and understanding that the cycle of technology->destruction of humanity kept going, they decided to try pastoralism--living a low-tech country lifestyle that would possibly give them a chance to break the cycle by maturing spiritually as well as technologically.
Also, remember that their fleet was on its last legs. The ships were falling apart, and other ships were talking about cannibalizing Galactica for parts. They had guns with no method for making ammunition, and medicine with no method for replacing stocks of antibiotics. Their technological lifestyle was at its ragged end, so swapping it for a pastoral lifestyle where they keep some knives and binoculars didn't seem like such a bad trade.
Finally, when the colonists settled the twelve planets, they destroyed their ships. There's a long tradition of doing so as a way of committing yourself to a decision.
Why didn't the cylon base get damage from galactica practically jumping partially from inside of it?
Presumably it did, but it had just been hit by a volley of nukes, and was kind of fucked all over.
Microsoft can redeem themselves towards the Icelandic economy if and only if they immediately reduce the price of all of their products to zero, permanently. Anything less will be an act of non-compliance towards the needs of the Icelandic economy, and can be considered an attack on the nation's sovereignty. Such an attack will inevitably be responded to by the market by way of an across-the-board adoption of free software.
Welcome to the world of the delusional hippie-geek.
Seriously, I know./ sets a low bar for the reliability of content, but this is half masturbatory fantasy, half geek gossip column OSS fanboi wanking.
The minute an FPP is made of furry slash between Linus and Darl, I'm outta here!
You're right that Apple took the tightly-controlled, high quality route against PCs--and lost out massively on the money that Microsoft and Intel made instead. Bill Gates wanted Steve Jobs to license the Mac OS because he was sure it would become the ubiquitous computing platform; Windows is the result of Steve's adherence to Apple's course. Computers would be easier to use if they were all Apples, but they'd be far less widespread.
Even then, I'm not sure that Apple proves your point: it lost out on being the ubiquitous platform, but it no doubt benefits from the ubiquity of PCs insofar as computing devices in general are far more commonplace. Apple has been lifted by the rising tide of widespread computing. Even granting your point that PCs have been bad for usability overall and a marketplace full of Apple-like vendors would be better, Apple still exists, offering a superior computing experience. I'd say we have the best of both worlds now: the benefits of standardization while still having premium choices available.
HD-DVD didn't lose to Blu-Ray because the "industry" decided. Blu-Ray won because they were able to swing Warner behind them with a paid-off commitment to issue movies only in Blu-Ray. You can't consider Blu-Ray to be the considered choice of the marketplace in any pure sense where consumers swung one way or the other en masse. It was corporate dealmaking that won that format war.
Standardization is a trade-off where you give up some unique features you offer in order to grow the market as a whole and sell more of the basic unit than you could sell of the unique unit (which you can still sell anyway). It has nothing to do with open source software. It's a spreadsheet-driven decision by executives. You can also compete on your implementation of the standard, or the price (Mushkin vs. OCZ). I really don't understand what you're complaining about here. Standardization in the computer industry did lots to make computers more ubiquitous and allow everyone to sell more.
rue poetic justice would be for these corrupt, callous judges to serve their sentences in the same kind of environment to which they were happy to dispatch juvenile defendants.
That's not poetic justice. Putting them in a juvie facility would be letting them off easy. Judicial corruption should get the supermax treatment.
Slashdot Mirror
Fixed that for you.
I don't. I use Gmail for my main account and Yahoo for my throwaway. Their spam filtering is better than anything you or your ISP can come up with, if only because their training sample is so much larger. If you don't want to leave your email on their site, use their POP/IMAP access to store a local copy.
Seriously, why anyone doesn't use them for personal mail is just beyond me.
For you, increasing font size so you can stand several feet away may be the best solution. But it's not for almost everyone else, and designers are all about designing for the largest number.
Besides, both Firefox and IE zoom the page, increasing layout as well as font size, rather than just jacking the font size. Doesn't that work for you?
Alan Moore's cynicism about Hollywood long predates his experiences with Watchmen. He was absolutely certain Hollywood would screw it up after the third time he got fucked (c.f. Johnny Depp in From Hell). So it's not that Moore hates Snyder's take per se, it's that Moore wasn't getting sucked in again and simply avoided Watchmen from the start.
Most of the designers I know prefer, these days, to create fixed width designs because most sites look like crap when the browser is maximized on a monitor with 1900x1280 resolution. The line lengths are far too long.
The stupid is strong in this thread.
By "no outside power source", I meant "isn't dependent on being connected to the power grid", or otherwise requiring a separately engineered power source that could suffer from its own engineering/societal failures.
If you really want to be pedantic, then yes, a human being resetting the weights every century is an outside power source. This is what I get for arguing with aspies.
Wow. It's astonishing, the density of stupid you've achieved in that post.
To highlight one item: it's not going to be sealed inside a limestone cliff, you moron. You can't even get your facts right, and you're criticizing them for not thinking it through?
It has weights that descend over the course of a century, and will need to be wound every century. The point was to have an independent, purely mechanical power source that could run for 10,000 years as long as someone just bothers to reset the weights. No chemicals to run out, no dependency on an outside power source to keep functioning.
Did you even read your own links? From the CSMonitor link:
No, let's, because you keep demonstrating a failure to understand that a partial correlation doesn't equal a reliable leading indicator. Some earthquakes are preceded by a spike in radon; some aren't. Some spikes in radon levels are followed by earthquakes; some aren't. Not to mention also that the time period between a spike and earthquake, when it happens, is variable, anywhere from weeks to months.
You also ignored my point that if government had taken the warnings seriously, they'd have evacuated the wrong town, a month early. There's a reason seismologists don't run to the government every time they detect a spike in radon levels, and this is it.
This is ./. We don't want your cogent analogies and your evenhanded, unhypeful treatment here. If one half of your X technology vs. Y technology comparison isn't "users of X will burn in hell", then this is no place for you, and you'd better be moseying along, lest something unfortunate were to occur, you filthy centrist.
Why would they hire a physicist who dabbles in earthquake detection when they've got seismologists who do this full-time around, who know that radon levels are not an accurate predictor of earthquakes? Do you think this guy is the first to notice the correlation? The earthquake science community looked at it and dismissed it decades ago as insufficiently reliable--some earthquakes aren't preceded by a spike in radon levels, and some spikes aren't followed by an earthquake.
I mean, seriously, do you think no one is trying to figure out how to predict earthquakes? This dude ran around saying a quake was going to happen within hours, right where he was standing. It didn't happen even within days or a couple weeks. Even if they'd taken him seriously, the wrong town would have been evacuated, and they would have all returned to their homes for when a quake happened hundreds of miles away.
Have YOU even thought about what you are blabbering?
That's the basic problem with radon levels: the correlation between increased radon and a quake following is non-trivial but far from strong enough to justify evacuating towns every time there's a spike. Sometimes it doesn't appear, and sometimes when it appears no quake happens. It's simply not reliable enough to be called an earthquake alarm bell.
He was off by more than a month, and a couple hundred miles. The location for which he was predicting the quake had no fatalities and only minor damage. He was also using a discredited earthquake prediction technique, which is monitoring radon levels.
No they wouldn't. Inherently unsafe" doesn't mean they will necessarily blow up within a certain timeframe. It means that, by design, it is possible for it to blow up under the right circumstances, as the Chernobyl technicians found out. As a result of Chernobyl, many design and procedural changes have resulted to avoid those circumstances. Would you feel alright flying in a plane if the wings could fall off during a right turn, so the pilot only makes left turns?
Compare it with a pebble bed reactor, which by design can never go critical.
Actually, in the UK, truth is a strict defense against libel. Holocaust Denier David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt over the UK edition of her book, Denying the Holocaust, in which she called Irving
Irving lost after a trial in which his scholarship on the Holocaust was shown to be fraudulent and he was demonstrated to be a bigot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Irving#Libel_suit
In the U.S., truth is not a strict defense against libel:
Your belief above that honestly believing something is sufficient, is not strictly true: It depends upon the jurisdiction you're in.
I think the idea was that tossing the higher technology gave them a chance at a different, more pastoral lifestyle. It doesn't necessarily free them the cycle, but it offers an opportunity that retaining their technology wouldn't.
I'm not saying it's good philosophy or sociology, but that was the idea, and it's not totally crazy. There are lots of communities that live more steady-state, non-technology-driven lives: Quakers, Amish, Hutterites, Mennonites, various hippie communes still holding out from the sixties, even some environmentalists urging scaling back our drive to industrialize everything in unsustainable ways.
They didn't opt to become cavemen, they opted to become pastoralists, akin to Quakers. With their knowledge they could easily recreate a relatively stable and safe pre-industrial civilization--they kept maps and a few raptors, and things like binoculars. They weren't planning on abandoning language, they were planning on teaching the locals to speak.
Keep in mind that their technological civilization was at its ragged end. The ships were falling apart--they planned to cannibalize Galactica to keep other ships running. And after five years living a cramped, always-near-death-from-technology life, I imagine a quiet, pastoral life seemed a lot more appealing to them than it would to you or I.
And at bottom was the awareness that their technologically empowered lifestyle kept leading to the same cycle of destructive war that catapulted them back there anyway. The idea was to give themselves another chance at the cycle, to hopefully mature spiritually this time.
That was head-Six and head-Baltar, not Six and Baltar themselves. They're angels or demons or whatever, agents of the higher power that's been guiding them.
It's vague, but basically an angel along the lines of head-Six and head-Baltar.
After five years of running from the technology they'd created, that was trying to kill them, and understanding that the cycle of technology->destruction of humanity kept going, they decided to try pastoralism--living a low-tech country lifestyle that would possibly give them a chance to break the cycle by maturing spiritually as well as technologically.
Also, remember that their fleet was on its last legs. The ships were falling apart, and other ships were talking about cannibalizing Galactica for parts. They had guns with no method for making ammunition, and medicine with no method for replacing stocks of antibiotics. Their technological lifestyle was at its ragged end, so swapping it for a pastoral lifestyle where they keep some knives and binoculars didn't seem like such a bad trade.
Finally, when the colonists settled the twelve planets, they destroyed their ships. There's a long tradition of doing so as a way of committing yourself to a decision.
Presumably it did, but it had just been hit by a volley of nukes, and was kind of fucked all over.
Welcome to the world of the delusional hippie-geek.
Seriously, I know ./ sets a low bar for the reliability of content, but this is half masturbatory fantasy, half geek gossip column OSS fanboi wanking.
The minute an FPP is made of furry slash between Linus and Darl, I'm outta here!
How is "quant" racist in any sense?
You must be creating a lot of new folders to want a keyboard shortcut. That's one shortcut I've never even thought of wanting.
You're right that Apple took the tightly-controlled, high quality route against PCs--and lost out massively on the money that Microsoft and Intel made instead. Bill Gates wanted Steve Jobs to license the Mac OS because he was sure it would become the ubiquitous computing platform; Windows is the result of Steve's adherence to Apple's course. Computers would be easier to use if they were all Apples, but they'd be far less widespread.
Even then, I'm not sure that Apple proves your point: it lost out on being the ubiquitous platform, but it no doubt benefits from the ubiquity of PCs insofar as computing devices in general are far more commonplace. Apple has been lifted by the rising tide of widespread computing. Even granting your point that PCs have been bad for usability overall and a marketplace full of Apple-like vendors would be better, Apple still exists, offering a superior computing experience. I'd say we have the best of both worlds now: the benefits of standardization while still having premium choices available.
HD-DVD didn't lose to Blu-Ray because the "industry" decided. Blu-Ray won because they were able to swing Warner behind them with a paid-off commitment to issue movies only in Blu-Ray. You can't consider Blu-Ray to be the considered choice of the marketplace in any pure sense where consumers swung one way or the other en masse. It was corporate dealmaking that won that format war.
Standardization is a trade-off where you give up some unique features you offer in order to grow the market as a whole and sell more of the basic unit than you could sell of the unique unit (which you can still sell anyway). It has nothing to do with open source software. It's a spreadsheet-driven decision by executives. You can also compete on your implementation of the standard, or the price (Mushkin vs. OCZ). I really don't understand what you're complaining about here. Standardization in the computer industry did lots to make computers more ubiquitous and allow everyone to sell more.
According to the linked article, Gates was shown this email and went on to mock the media's supposed shock that he sent it, and others like it.
That's not poetic justice. Putting them in a juvie facility would be letting them off easy. Judicial corruption should get the supermax treatment.