Whenever we have one of these stories about a congressman proposing some legislation, there should be a direct mailto: link in the paragraph. It doesn't matter whether the law is good or bad. It would encourage people to email the appropriate representatives and have their voice heard.
I think Mozilla needs some PR people. I was watching C-SPAN the other day and the issue was spam. Lots of callers were complaining about pop-up windows as well. I really wanted to tell them about Mozilla, but it was a taped show:(
Anyway, there is a lot of frustration out there and the Mozilla people really need to get the word out that they have a competitive product. Place some ads in the weekly magazines, some big newspapers, and get a buzz going. Open up a Paypal account that we can donate to so Mozilla can get an ad in the New York Times.
In theory, prostitution should be legal in a purely capitalistic system.
In practice, unregulated prostitution is a blight on society that is dangerous to the participants and the community as a whole. (I used to live in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which had the highest rate of AIDS per prostitute in the state. It wasn't pretty.)
I'm becoming a convert to the "do less harm" philosophy, so I am starting to think partial legalization of prostitution might be a good thing. Basically, the "do less harm" theory says, "People are going to do drugs/shoot up/hire hookers no matter what, so let's try to minimize the damage instead of forcing it under the rug." One example is a needle-exchange program. Another would be to legalize prostitution in certain "safe houses", where the women are safe, there is good security, and the men/women are tested for diseases.
Maybe it would be useful to review some BAD books. First, it would steer people away from them. Second, it would provide good examples of where a lot of tech writing goes wrong. Finally, it's just fun to read someone bash the sh!t of out something.
AI had some good things going for it. If it wasn't for the embarassingly literal interpretation of the Pinnochio story (like all that blue fairy BS), it would have been a pretty decent movie.
Uh...the whole of Dracula is a metaphor for sex, dude. You must have sexiness in a proper Dracula or you haven't done it right.
I'm not a scholar on Dracula, but in that story's case, the plot is dependant on sex (i.e., the horror of being seduced by some monster). That doesn't bother me. What I don't like is when some hot babe is put into a potentially thoughtful sci-fi or horror movie just to reel in the 13-year-old boys. It's not that I'm a prude, it's just that sometimes I'm more interested in seeing actual ideas explored rather than some scantily-clad blonde who looks like every other billboard-queen out there.
Before I saw this movie, I really did NOT like the idea of a female Terminator. It always pisses me off when filmmakers try to mix sexiness with sci-fi or horror (probably because I'm so conditioned to having the sex appeal subtract from the main story).
But the Terminatrix was actually cool. She often has this weird half-smile on her face, and her head is tilted down with determination. She reminded me of Haley Joel Osment from AI in some ways.
There are, of course, some frustrating sequences in the movie. The Terminatrix has about 1,000,000 opportunities to flat out kill John Connor and Kate Brewster, but never seems to take them. Like the Robert Patrick character, she can impersonate other people. She impersonates Kate's fiancee in one sequence, and has a 100% clear chance of killing her before changing to her "regular" form at the last minute and blowing her cover.
Overall, the movie was pretty good. The ending was much more bold than I was expecting, and it sets up T4 nicely (there are some big unanswered questions that the good Terminator poses that just beg to be answered in a sequel). Here's hoping that if there is a T4, it consists completely of the post-apocalyptic sequences.
I realize "key" has more than 2 meanings. I was just using it as an example. And the fact that it would be a challenge for translation software is exactly my point. Users all over the world would submit triplets of the form:
[word in language A]
[word in language B]
[associated words from language a]
So, a user would submit:
[key]
[X]// I don't what what "key" is in French
[house, door, lock]
A big database is compiled with all that data. Then, if the translator is trying to convert this sentence to French:
"The key was C sharp and he was playing it on the piano"
the translator would convert it to:
"blah blah blah Y blah blah blah".
....because the words "piano" and "sharp" cause the sentence to be weighted toward the musical intepretation of "key".
The main point is that users from all over the world build this big database. I am envisioning a system like "Hot Or Not" (oddly enough), where people just log in for fun and spend a couple minutes adding some words and viewing statistics on the conversions and languages.
Create a website that lists every English word, and users can submit the corresponding French word. Whichever French word is submitted the most for a particular English word becomes the accepted value.
In addition, there would be "associate words." For example, what does "key" mean in English? Is it a house key? A key on a keyboard? In such a case, you could have "key" associated with 2 different groups of words:
If the translator found the word "key" near words such as "keyboard", it would know to take that translation. If the word "key" was near the word "house", it would know to take that translation.
Why should we send money to him? To encourage him to cave in again in the future? If he was taking this to court, I'd send him some dough. I feel bad for the guy, but I'm not going to give him money for letting himself get bullied.
This is never going to stop until people start standing up for themselves.
I was pleased to start Firebird (on WinXP) and see that the profile selection now has a "Do Not Ask On Startup" option. However, it doesn't seem to work for me. (I still get asked to choose a profile even if I selected "Do Not Ask..." last time I opened it). Anyone else having this issue?
PS: I like the new "Back" and "Forward" buttons. I'll probably still download a new skin for them, but they are much better than the defaults for Phoenix (which always had my clicking on the mini-arrows that drop down a history list).
Sometimes it is good for a programmer to be interrupted.
Some author - maybe it was Hemingway - said that when he was done writing for the day, he'd always stop while he was still "into" it. This gave him something to look forward to the next day. It gave him a place to start.
I think a similar technique is useful for programmers. For example, say you are writing a really fun function but only have 10 minutes of work left. I say, stop writing! Spend the rest of your time on the net reading some tech articles, or improve your code's documentation (if you think documentation is boring, maybe you aren't doing it right. When you document, pretend your talking to another programmer about your program).
When you come in the next morning, you'll have an easy way to start the flow again. You won't be hacking around trying to figure out what to do next.
The genereral consensus in movie-land is that the "Return Of the King" film will be the one that really wins all the awards. Awarding Part 3 will be seen as rewarding the whole series. So, I think Gollum has a good chance of getting nominated next year.
I wouldn't mind paying a penny or two to send email if a couple bucks were shaved off of my ISP's bill each month. As far as I'm concerned, I already pay for the email: it's in my monthly internet bill.
But if they release a plan that says, "You're internet bill will go down by $5, but you'll have to pay $0.02 per email", I wouldn't mind that.
Obviously the RIAA has their hand in the jar
on
Instant Concert CDs?
·
· Score: 1
How will the RIAA react to this, seeing as this is legitimizing one of the oldest forms of music pirating?
First of all, you are paying for the recording. Obviously the RIAA is going to insist on taking a cut.
Second, this is no more legitimizing piracy than buying a "Live" album (which usually suck anyway).
OK, I have to ask: what the heck are you guys doing with your email addresses that make you get 81 spam messages before noon? Publishing it on a billboard in Times Square? I've had my current email for 3 months. I don't get ANY spam. And I'm a guy whose used that address at Amazon, Drugstore.com, Yahoo, eBay, and a million other places. The only place I haven't used it is on Usenet.
The only email account I have that gets spam is my Hotmail account. I call this my "slutty" email because it's the one I use when I KNOW providing an email address will give me spam.
The job sites have been contaminated by a bunch of temp agencies looking to hire people part time. I did the whole Monster/Dice/HotJobs dance a year ago, and it just lead to a lot of dead ends. I had much more luck visiting the websites of companies I was interested in and looking at their "Employment" section. Of course, in the end, I actually got a job due to a human contact, which is usually the way it goes...
In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find
In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do, and say
Is in the pill you took today
In the year 4545
Ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes
You won't find a thing chew
Nobody's gonna look at you
In the year 5555
Your arms are hanging limp at your sides
Your legs got not nothing to do
Some machine is doing that for you
In the year 6565
Ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube
In the year 7510
If God's a-comin' he ought to make it by then
Maybe he'll look around himself and say
Guess it's time for the Judgement day
In the year 8510
God is gonna shake his mighty head
He'll either say I'm pleased where man has been
Or tear it down and start again
In the year 9595
I'm kinda wondering if man is gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain't put back nothing
Now it's been 10,000 years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what he never knew
Now man's reign is through
But through the eternal night
The twinkling of starlight
So very far away
Maybe it's only yesterday
In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find
In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do or say
Is in the pill you took today....(fading...)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it's a coincidence that the program is called Eclipse. When you first load the thing, all you see is the Sun being blocked out.
Well, for no other reason than that that is, in fact, the one and only Fabio, in silly costume, portraying the main character.
Thanks for telling me which one was Fabio. At first I thought he was the sword.
Whenever we have one of these stories about a congressman proposing some legislation, there should be a direct mailto: link in the paragraph. It doesn't matter whether the law is good or bad. It would encourage people to email the appropriate representatives and have their voice heard.
I think Mozilla needs some PR people. I was watching C-SPAN the other day and the issue was spam. Lots of callers were complaining about pop-up windows as well. I really wanted to tell them about Mozilla, but it was a taped show :(
Anyway, there is a lot of frustration out there and the Mozilla people really need to get the word out that they have a competitive product. Place some ads in the weekly magazines, some big newspapers, and get a buzz going. Open up a Paypal account that we can donate to so Mozilla can get an ad in the New York Times.
They also have really good sprinkler systems.
Here is a hell of a lot of images of these things:
Pictures
In theory, prostitution should be legal in a purely capitalistic system.
In practice, unregulated prostitution is a blight on society that is dangerous to the participants and the community as a whole. (I used to live in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which had the highest rate of AIDS per prostitute in the state. It wasn't pretty.)
I'm becoming a convert to the "do less harm" philosophy, so I am starting to think partial legalization of prostitution might be a good thing. Basically, the "do less harm" theory says, "People are going to do drugs/shoot up/hire hookers no matter what, so let's try to minimize the damage instead of forcing it under the rug." One example is a needle-exchange program. Another would be to legalize prostitution in certain "safe houses", where the women are safe, there is good security, and the men/women are tested for diseases.
Maybe it would be useful to review some BAD books. First, it would steer people away from them. Second, it would provide good examples of where a lot of tech writing goes wrong. Finally, it's just fun to read someone bash the sh!t of out something.
AI had some good things going for it. If it wasn't for the embarassingly literal interpretation of the Pinnochio story (like all that blue fairy BS), it would have been a pretty decent movie.
Uh...the whole of Dracula is a metaphor for sex, dude. You must have sexiness in a proper Dracula or you haven't done it right.
I'm not a scholar on Dracula, but in that story's case, the plot is dependant on sex (i.e., the horror of being seduced by some monster). That doesn't bother me. What I don't like is when some hot babe is put into a potentially thoughtful sci-fi or horror movie just to reel in the 13-year-old boys. It's not that I'm a prude, it's just that sometimes I'm more interested in seeing actual ideas explored rather than some scantily-clad blonde who looks like every other billboard-queen out there.
Before I saw this movie, I really did NOT like the idea of a female Terminator. It always pisses me off when filmmakers try to mix sexiness with sci-fi or horror (probably because I'm so conditioned to having the sex appeal subtract from the main story).
But the Terminatrix was actually cool. She often has this weird half-smile on her face, and her head is tilted down with determination. She reminded me of Haley Joel Osment from AI in some ways.
There are, of course, some frustrating sequences in the movie. The Terminatrix has about 1,000,000 opportunities to flat out kill John Connor and Kate Brewster, but never seems to take them. Like the Robert Patrick character, she can impersonate other people. She impersonates Kate's fiancee in one sequence, and has a 100% clear chance of killing her before changing to her "regular" form at the last minute and blowing her cover.
Overall, the movie was pretty good. The ending was much more bold than I was expecting, and it sets up T4 nicely (there are some big unanswered questions that the good Terminator poses that just beg to be answered in a sequel). Here's hoping that if there is a T4, it consists completely of the post-apocalyptic sequences.
I realize "key" has more than 2 meanings. I was just using it as an example. And the fact that it would be a challenge for translation software is exactly my point. Users all over the world would submit triplets of the form:
// I don't what what "key" is in French
....because the words "piano" and "sharp" cause the sentence to be weighted toward the musical intepretation of "key".
[word in language A]
[word in language B]
[associated words from language a]
So, a user would submit:
[key]
[X]
[house, door, lock]
Another user might submit:
[key]
[Y]
[music, notes, sound, sharp, flat, piano...]
A big database is compiled with all that data. Then, if the translator is trying to convert this sentence to French:
"The key was C sharp and he was playing it on the piano"
the translator would convert it to:
"blah blah blah Y blah blah blah".
The main point is that users from all over the world build this big database. I am envisioning a system like "Hot Or Not" (oddly enough), where people just log in for fun and spend a couple minutes adding some words and viewing statistics on the conversions and languages.
For example:
Create a website that lists every English word, and users can submit the corresponding French word. Whichever French word is submitted the most for a particular English word becomes the accepted value.
In addition, there would be "associate words." For example, what does "key" mean in English? Is it a house key? A key on a keyboard? In such a case, you could have "key" associated with 2 different groups of words:
key (keyboard, computer, technology, mouse, input)
key (house, car, door, lock)
If the translator found the word "key" near words such as "keyboard", it would know to take that translation. If the word "key" was near the word "house", it would know to take that translation.
If a smart person wants $2.00, they'll charge $2.99, not $1.99.
Why should we send money to him? To encourage him to cave in again in the future? If he was taking this to court, I'd send him some dough. I feel bad for the guy, but I'm not going to give him money for letting himself get bullied.
This is never going to stop until people start standing up for themselves.
I was pleased to start Firebird (on WinXP) and see that the profile selection now has a "Do Not Ask On Startup" option. However, it doesn't seem to work for me. (I still get asked to choose a profile even if I selected "Do Not Ask..." last time I opened it). Anyone else having this issue?
PS: I like the new "Back" and "Forward" buttons. I'll probably still download a new skin for them, but they are much better than the defaults for Phoenix (which always had my clicking on the mini-arrows that drop down a history list).
I'm sure that in 50 years, robots will be much more organic and lightweight.
Cool. A mouse with a trackball on top of it.
I think someone should make a mouse with a keyboard on top of it. That way you can type without every taking your hand off the mouse.
Sometimes it is good for a programmer to be interrupted.
Some author - maybe it was Hemingway - said that when he was done writing for the day, he'd always stop while he was still "into" it. This gave him something to look forward to the next day. It gave him a place to start.
I think a similar technique is useful for programmers. For example, say you are writing a really fun function but only have 10 minutes of work left. I say, stop writing! Spend the rest of your time on the net reading some tech articles, or improve your code's documentation (if you think documentation is boring, maybe you aren't doing it right. When you document, pretend your talking to another programmer about your program).
When you come in the next morning, you'll have an easy way to start the flow again. You won't be hacking around trying to figure out what to do next.
The genereral consensus in movie-land is that the "Return Of the King" film will be the one that really wins all the awards. Awarding Part 3 will be seen as rewarding the whole series. So, I think Gollum has a good chance of getting nominated next year.
I wouldn't mind paying a penny or two to send email if a couple bucks were shaved off of my ISP's bill each month. As far as I'm concerned, I already pay for the email: it's in my monthly internet bill.
But if they release a plan that says, "You're internet bill will go down by $5, but you'll have to pay $0.02 per email", I wouldn't mind that.
How will the RIAA react to this, seeing as this is legitimizing one of the oldest forms of music pirating?
First of all, you are paying for the recording. Obviously the RIAA is going to insist on taking a cut.
Second, this is no more legitimizing piracy than buying a "Live" album (which usually suck anyway).
OK, I have to ask: what the heck are you guys doing with your email addresses that make you get 81 spam messages before noon? Publishing it on a billboard in Times Square? I've had my current email for 3 months. I don't get ANY spam. And I'm a guy whose used that address at Amazon, Drugstore.com, Yahoo, eBay, and a million other places. The only place I haven't used it is on Usenet.
The only email account I have that gets spam is my Hotmail account. I call this my "slutty" email because it's the one I use when I KNOW providing an email address will give me spam.
The job sites have been contaminated by a bunch of temp agencies looking to hire people part time. I did the whole Monster/Dice/HotJobs dance a year ago, and it just lead to a lot of dead ends. I had much more luck visiting the websites of companies I was interested in and looking at their "Employment" section. Of course, in the end, I actually got a job due to a human contact, which is usually the way it goes...
Zager Evans
....(fading...)
In The Year 2525
In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find
In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do, and say
Is in the pill you took today
In the year 4545
Ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes
You won't find a thing chew
Nobody's gonna look at you
In the year 5555
Your arms are hanging limp at your sides
Your legs got not nothing to do
Some machine is doing that for you
In the year 6565
Ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube
In the year 7510
If God's a-comin' he ought to make it by then
Maybe he'll look around himself and say
Guess it's time for the Judgement day
In the year 8510
God is gonna shake his mighty head
He'll either say I'm pleased where man has been
Or tear it down and start again
In the year 9595
I'm kinda wondering if man is gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain't put back nothing
Now it's been 10,000 years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what he never knew
Now man's reign is through
But through the eternal night
The twinkling of starlight
So very far away
Maybe it's only yesterday
In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find
In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do or say
Is in the pill you took today