Picking 1,2,3,4,5,6 is stupid. Thousands of people choose those numbers, so if they come up the winnings are going to be a tiny fraction of what you'd normally get.
Lets be realistic(ish): If the numbers 1,2,3,4,5 and 6 were drawn as winning lottery numbers, the press would be in uproar about the seeming lack of randomness. They'd be screaming that the machine was flawed, and maybe even the draw would be ruled as invalid (by clueless management at the lottery company).
If you had a winning lottery ticket with that same sequence, assuming you were the only person who had picked those numbers, accusations would fly that you had hacked the lottery machine! I can guarentee that this would be the case in the UK, with our excellent mainstream journalism!
I know a guy who lifts the droop out of the hose when he's done pumping to make sure none of his gas remains in the hose.
I do that. The "free" petrol I get from the hose is a nice side effect, I mainly empty the hose to minimise the chance of spilling petrol on the car's paintwork. Over time that does the paintwork no good, and at the least it can end up with a dirty smear under the filler cover.
Night and day would only matter if gas were stored above ground. I'm pretty sure that the temperature of underground tanks won't change that rapidly.
The point about fuel being held underground is being trotted out by lots of people in this discussion, but I don't think it is safe to assume that the fuel's volume doesn't change with the weather/time of day. And I have an anecdote to counter this;)
I live in the UK, and several years ago I filled my car up only to have the fuel tank overflow later in the day because of the thermal expansion of the petrol. Early (before sunrise) on a very frosty morning I filled my car up at a BP petrol station that certainly has underground tanks (Google maps). I filled the car to the top (as I always used to do), drove the remaining few miles to work, and did my day's graft (i.e. bunking off and reading slashdot). Even though it was a winter's day, the sun had been out and when I went out to my car there was a bad smell of petrol, and it was clear that the fuel had expanded and overflowed out the filler cap!
As I said, I always used to fill my car to the very top[1], but had never before nor since had this occur, even when the car had been sitting in the summer sun all day with a full tank. I think that because I had filled my car up after a cold night and then left the car in the gutless winter sun, the temperature increase was enough to make it over flow. In the summer the car would get much hotter, and so surely an overflow would be worse? But I never had it overflow in the summer, so to me it looks like the petrol station's petrol does change temperature with the ambient temperature, and sometimes you can get more petrol than you're supposed to.
There's a few other things I'd like to mention... British filling stations often have quite a bit of metal sticking out the ground where the tanks get refilled, and this would no doubt have an effect on the fuel's temperature in the tanks. I also think that people here are assuming the tanks are buried quite deep... from the Google map I linked to above, you can see that part of the station's forecourt is concrete, the rest is tarmac. I should think that the concrete area is just large concrete slabs over the tanks, so how thick would that concrete be? 10 inches? A foot? That's not deep underground. Also, first thing in the morning the station isn't busy, so if the pumps are sitting out on a forecourt at 1 degree Celcius the pumps and pipes will be cold. Depending on the pump's design, the fuel might get a good chilling before it goes through the volume measuring guage. And I bet petrol's specific heat capacity is less than water: changing the temperature of petrol might be quite easy compared to the liquid we're all most familiar with..../me googles... it is 4.19 kJ/kgK for water versus 2.13 kJ/kgK for petty.
The way fuel prices are in the UK, I am interested in anyway to save a bit at the pump. I should think that there are some petrol stations that, for whatever reason, are susceptable to the petrol getting colder at night than their competition. Also if you filled up from a pump that is less used on the forecourt (i.e. the one furthest from the shop door), it might be colder than the other pumps -> chills your petrol, more goes in the tank.
TFA talked about Canada having temperature aware fuel guages, the USA not. I don't know what we have in the UK, but there might be some pumps around that aren't temperature aware. Food for thought...
[1] I don't fill up all the way anymore, I tend to put in 20UKP's worth when the tank gets low. That's about 200 miles worth, and by putting in the same monetary amount of petrol each time I can keep an eye on the efficency of my driving easily if I reset the trip-o-meter at the petty station. Also, why fill the car to the very top - you're only wasting fuel to carry all that fuel. I tend to only fill up all the way these days if I'm doing a long journey (and so also won't be familiar with the local filling stations).
Not so long ago my Mum jumped on the internet bandwagon, and I got her sorted out with a 512k/sec ADSL connection from Zen. There were higher speeds available from other ISPs at the time, but mostly they had artificial download caps, and Zen were one of remaining ISPs without any caps or throttling. A few months later, Zen announced their faster products, that have a download cap with greedy "top-up" fees. No thanks, she's still got the slow[1] 512k, but with no worry of having some surprise bill from Zen. About 150 gigabytes a month can be downloaded with a 512 kilobit/sec account, so if you're after a good chunk of data, just be patient or plan ahead!
Zen will also forward C&D's they get to their customers, whereas for years when I was on Claranet and Telewest I never heard a peep from them about my piratings. I was naughty in January and downloaded a movie through bittorrent, tracked by thepiratebay on my Mum's Zen connection. In March Zen forwarded an email from BayTSP (the MPAA special agents) with a threat to close my Mum's account if the offence happened again within 72hours! The mail they forwarded was PGP signed, but it didn't appear that the sender ( paramount-no-reply@copyright-compliance.com ) had a public PGP signature. So it looks like Zen will threaten their customers, very slowly, on possibly forged take-down notices!
Funnily enough I don't recommend Zen to people anymore.
[1] No matter how fast your 'net connection is though, videos from youtube et al. still need pausing for a while before watching to avoid it stuttering!
Ahh, they've upgraded the system that seemed to be launched a few years ago, OK, 10, where if there was someone driving the BMW, the front fog lights were automatically switched on (and off if actually foggy).
BMW spend a fortune developing their M line of cars, but they still don't offer working indicators...
I'm sure a modern digital camera can capture a page of text as well as a photocopier, and a camera probably won't need the flash either. Old paper isn't generally allowed to be photocopied because of the bright light (causes fading) and the heat (presumably ages the paper and helps fade the ink too), but a digital camera won't do this, and it might even be quicker than photocopying!
I hate to offer a workaround as a solution, but this kind of BS isn't going to end soon:(
You sound like a knowledgable guy, so maybe you'll be able to confirm if this could help: We all know that sound travels slower than light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation, so the/. askee could do some clever positioning of wireless network receivers around his house from his AP to adjust the delay of the music over a wireless LAN!
Moving along I've got a few VMware support services, which is dumb considering they're only useful when VMware is actually running.
Here's a workaround: Set the VMWare services to manual, and use this little script to start and stop everything (though turn off VM's before stopping VMWare).
C:\Tools>type VMW.cmd @echo off
if {%1}=={up} goto up if {%1}=={down} (goto down) else goto usage
:up
start/min net start "VMware Authorization Service" start/min net start "VMware DHCP Service" start/min net start "VMware NAT Service" start/min net start "VMware Virtual Mount Manager Extended" net start "VMware Registration Service" pushd "C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Server\" start vmware.exe popd
goto eof
:down
net stop "VMware Registration Service" start/min net stop "VMware NAT Service" start/min net stop "VMware DHCP Service" start/min net stop "VMware Virtual Mount Manager Extended" :: sleep 3 start/min net stop "VMware Authorization Service" goto eof
:usage
echo This batch file will start or stop VMWare server echo Usage: VMW Up echo VMW Down
F29 Retaliator on the Amiga.... A flight sim of sorts, where if you ejected from the plane then you could still control the plane. So fly north, eject, and you could then see the plane being flown in the background as the camera watched your dude parachute to the ground. Of course, the fun thing to do was to turn the plane around and try to fly it into yourself!
I rememeber that bug on the Amiga version of Frontier! I don't know if it was mentioned in the manual, but I do remember the manual mentioning that if you didn't service your engines then you could miss-jump and wreck the engine. I rememeber trying this bug (probably after reading about it in Amiga Power), miss-jumping, and being stuck thousands of lightyears from Sol!
The bug wouldn't have been in the original Elite game though, as the games were quite different. And Elite had 7 "small" galaxies IIRC, but Frontier and FFE only had the one.
Fontier was a seriously buggy game though, as was its successor Frontier First Encounters. In FFE if you got enough money then it would reach the maximum value (something like 16.7 million credits, IIRC), and change to a negative of the same value. Did they used to charge a launch fee in that game? Or only landing/docking fee? Eitherway, if you got "too rich" then it caused problems as ironically you couldn't pay for stuff. The trick was to give huge sums to charity before reaching the bug's value.
There was many other bugs that could be taken advantage of in those games. One defense method was when attacked, you pause the game, find the attacker in space and target them, fire off a missile, stick the stardreamer to top speed, and the missile would hit the attacker. If you used missiles "properly" then the target would often out run it. This method also worked nicely for launching a missile at an incoming missile, because at the start of the game you don't have the room on your ship or money for an ECM. The bug was basically that when you paused the game, it'd pause the action, but not the interaction. i.e. you could still set a missile to target something, you could move about in the inventory and star chart/systems screens, you could jetison cargo, you could use the different views of your ship and move the views (though not move the ship or actually fire the lasers).
I live next door to an elementary school. Let's imagine that one day, I decide to kill a few dozen kids with a banana. Will the government ban bananas?
Only after the Daily Mail runs as campaign to get them banned!
I do think though that complex motorways junctions will actiually be relatively easy to monitor: There's only a few possible places for vehicles to enter or exit the junction system, and vehicles cannot easily join/leave the closed motorway system lead up to and leaving SJ. The government would simply watch all entrances and exits, and as long as their system reports close to 100% successfully read the state'll be happy. A small town or village may have many more possible entrances or exits than Spaghetti, from an A-road or two, all the way down to public bridleways (though clearly major motorway hubs handle significantly more traffic and would be the first places the state would want to get tracking hardware installed).
After I closed my paypal account, I had some spam from a market research company about paypal. I did not do their research, but emailed back with a rant (if it keeps an employee busy for even a few minutes, then I've managed to successfully waste some company money). Of course, I formatted the email like a n00b (i.e. the reply above the quoted text), but I made up a disclaimer below the text (hoping they would miss it):
Disclaimer. Acceptance by the recipient's mail server to this message is acceptance of these terms by the recipient, as is any reply (including any "auto-response" or similar). Each and every further communication to/cc/bcc any [My Domain] address will be charged an administrative fee of £1000 (one thousand pounds sterling) by the email administration. Any terms on the ends of your emails are invalidated and over ruled by these terms. Attachment or inclusion of any type of "disclaimer" is acceptance of this policy, and this disclaimer is final (i.e. cannot be overridden or invalidated by any past or future disclaimers). [My Domain] decision is final over any matter, and you may not sue or take any legal action over future or past communications/contact.
I never got any reply, but if I did I might have posted them some kind of invoice. It'd be a win/win situation - either I get a grand or a court rules that email disclaimers or EULAs aren't legally binding (OK, maybe I'm being a little optimistic).
(due to the time I'd spend exercising which I HATE)
I'm sure there is at least one form of exercise that you don't hate. I hate running, always have, probably always will, and most ball sports I like much either (probably because they include running about). But riding a bike or swimming I find much more interesting.
Also, if you are rather portly and only walk a little every day your fitness will be really low. Any exercise you do will start hurting very quickly, and that's never going to encourage you to exercise. Try standing at your desk for periods during the day, say if you're on the phone and don't need to use the desk, just to take the edge off any un-fitness.
And get laid more. That is one type of exercise that no-one hates!
.....It's a free country, but you should remit your slashdot license at the earliest possible opportunity. They actually ran out of user ID's at 999,999 and it's important that unused / neglected / undeserved ones be returned to the source without delay. TBH, I think slashdot really started to go downhill at about UID six hundred thousand or so;)
Our local council (Worcestershire) has taken the steps of getting the users of car-parks to enter their number plate (or part of) into the ticket machines when buying a pay and display ticket. Of course, these artifically expensive machines have been purchased to stop the "problem" of people parking, paying for the minimum period when they only need to stay for a few minutes, then giving the ticket to someone else. The machine prints your car reg on the ticket, so presumably if the code isn't right, you'll get a parking fine, because you must have "stolen" your parking!
There are also privacy implications with recording when and where people are parking, but these machines are clearly to help raise revenue (though the usefullness of the data will dawn on some pea brained councillor soon). So I tend to park in the (free) street now rather than council car parks! If I do ever use a car park, I enter my car reg wrong, and if I get a fine I plan to kick up one hell of a fuss. I'll enter my reg as all A's or Z's, or 999 if the machine wants the number (not had a parking fine yet), and will claim that the machine was not working when fighting a fine, or that I couldn't figure the machine out etc..
No, the guy's right to bitch about their cookie use. That site gives visitors the following raw deal: Have a permanent cookie and you won't get interstitial ads after the first one (I'm assuming they set a perm cookie: I only allow session, so didn't see how long they tried to set cookies for), or turn cookies off and the site becomes a pain to navigate, because you'll get a full page ad for 15 seconds at every click.
There are other choices, but lets be honest: The other choices are available only to a minority, the majority of IE surfing users won't even want to hear an explanation of cookies because "it sounds a bit too technical".
The new disscussion system doesn't have the discussions split across multiple pages, and appears to thread fully. You toggle the view of comments on and off purely by the power of your browser, and/. scores!
You're right about forums with threading. The best threading I've seen is usenet, when combined with a good client (I did strangly like Netscape 4's usenet client!). Email can thread too, with client support, though usenet is built for threaded discussions. I wonder if there is a web based forum software package that runs on a usenet backend (apart from Google groups)? I wonder if the web interface auto bottom-posts?
Whoops, I worded my post badly, and so I've come across like I went to the Dubya school of maths!
What I meant was that the AC was right to make a sarcastic remark at the stupidity of TFA's statement saying 0.04 seconds is less than half a second. Whilst saying 0.04s < 0.5s is correct, it sounded like officer Barbrady in TFA has a loose grasp on maths as he doesn't recognise the differences between 0.4 and 0.04, and so implied that 0.04s is nearly half a second.
On the brightside, I could imagine that if you were stopped by this officer for speeding, then you could get out of a ticket by saying that what you were doing was OK because you were doing less than the speed of sound!
The distances separating the vehicles I posted were based on the cars being 0.04s apart, and the distances sound "right" for tailgating; about 3 feet (not 3 yards). The legal 2 second gap is 50 times the distance that those 'gaters were caught doing!
I've seen people at 0.04 seconds. That is less than half a second," he said.
True. But it's a lot less than he thinks.
I thought the same. I think my brain cell is functioning, and I've done some numbers [1]. TFA doesn't mention speed, but at 40mph the vehicles would be separated by 28.2" (72cm), at 55mph (88.5kph) it would be 38.7" (98cm). That is pretty fucking close, though I've had dicks driving behind me closer. Why is it usually a BMW (with their front fog lights on) or a Merc that does this shit?
[1] How fucking pathetic? Bragging on/. cos I've done some GCSE level maths....
The fountain of knowledge that is Wikipedia has this article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the _Bazaar, which is interesting. Its an essay/book about open source development, and there is a link to the full text in the WP article. There's a chapter about why open development is good (from a quick look at te text), and I know I've read similar-minded texts on sites like gnu.org and fsf.org, but was unable to find them. I think Cory Doctorow has written some good articles about secrets and the management of them, but I think his are more DRM musings, though the same principles apply to proprietry software vs. open software.
Articles about why SSH etc. are secure, even though their inner workings are wide open to the world, may be helpful too.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets be realistic(ish): If the numbers 1,2,3,4,5 and 6 were drawn as winning lottery numbers, the press would be in uproar about the seeming lack of randomness. They'd be screaming that the machine was flawed, and maybe even the draw would be ruled as invalid (by clueless management at the lottery company).
If you had a winning lottery ticket with that same sequence, assuming you were the only person who had picked those numbers, accusations would fly that you had hacked the lottery machine! I can guarentee that this would be the case in the UK, with our excellent mainstream journalism!
I do that. The "free" petrol I get from the hose is a nice side effect, I mainly empty the hose to minimise the chance of spilling petrol on the car's paintwork. Over time that does the paintwork no good, and at the least it can end up with a dirty smear under the filler cover.
The point about fuel being held underground is being trotted out by lots of people in this discussion, but I don't think it is safe to assume that the fuel's volume doesn't change with the weather/time of day. And I have an anecdote to counter this ;)
I live in the UK, and several years ago I filled my car up only to have the fuel tank overflow later in the day because of the thermal expansion of the petrol. Early (before sunrise) on a very frosty morning I filled my car up at a BP petrol station that certainly has underground tanks (Google maps). I filled the car to the top (as I always used to do), drove the remaining few miles to work, and did my day's graft (i.e. bunking off and reading slashdot). Even though it was a winter's day, the sun had been out and when I went out to my car there was a bad smell of petrol, and it was clear that the fuel had expanded and overflowed out the filler cap!
As I said, I always used to fill my car to the very top[1], but had never before nor since had this occur, even when the car had been sitting in the summer sun all day with a full tank. I think that because I had filled my car up after a cold night and then left the car in the gutless winter sun, the temperature increase was enough to make it over flow. In the summer the car would get much hotter, and so surely an overflow would be worse? But I never had it overflow in the summer, so to me it looks like the petrol station's petrol does change temperature with the ambient temperature, and sometimes you can get more petrol than you're supposed to.
There's a few other things I'd like to mention... British filling stations often have quite a bit of metal sticking out the ground where the tanks get refilled, and this would no doubt have an effect on the fuel's temperature in the tanks. I also think that people here are assuming the tanks are buried quite deep... from the Google map I linked to above, you can see that part of the station's forecourt is concrete, the rest is tarmac. I should think that the concrete area is just large concrete slabs over the tanks, so how thick would that concrete be? 10 inches? A foot? That's not deep underground. Also, first thing in the morning the station isn't busy, so if the pumps are sitting out on a forecourt at 1 degree Celcius the pumps and pipes will be cold. Depending on the pump's design, the fuel might get a good chilling before it goes through the volume measuring guage. And I bet petrol's specific heat capacity is less than water: changing the temperature of petrol might be quite easy compared to the liquid we're all most familiar with.... /me googles... it is 4.19 kJ/kgK for water versus 2.13 kJ/kgK for petty.
The way fuel prices are in the UK, I am interested in anyway to save a bit at the pump. I should think that there are some petrol stations that, for whatever reason, are susceptable to the petrol getting colder at night than their competition. Also if you filled up from a pump that is less used on the forecourt (i.e. the one furthest from the shop door), it might be colder than the other pumps -> chills your petrol, more goes in the tank.
TFA talked about Canada having temperature aware fuel guages, the USA not. I don't know what we have in the UK, but there might be some pumps around that aren't temperature aware. Food for thought...
[1] I don't fill up all the way anymore, I tend to put in 20UKP's worth when the tank gets low. That's about 200 miles worth, and by putting in the same monetary amount of petrol each time I can keep an eye on the efficency of my driving easily if I reset the trip-o-meter at the petty station. Also, why fill the car to the very top - you're only wasting fuel to carry all that fuel. I tend to only fill up all the way these days if I'm doing a long journey (and so also won't be familiar with the local filling stations).
Not so long ago my Mum jumped on the internet bandwagon, and I got her sorted out with a 512k/sec ADSL connection from Zen. There were higher speeds available from other ISPs at the time, but mostly they had artificial download caps, and Zen were one of remaining ISPs without any caps or throttling. A few months later, Zen announced their faster products, that have a download cap with greedy "top-up" fees. No thanks, she's still got the slow[1] 512k, but with no worry of having some surprise bill from Zen. About 150 gigabytes a month can be downloaded with a 512 kilobit/sec account, so if you're after a good chunk of data, just be patient or plan ahead!
Zen will also forward C&D's they get to their customers, whereas for years when I was on Claranet and Telewest I never heard a peep from them about my piratings. I was naughty in January and downloaded a movie through bittorrent, tracked by thepiratebay on my Mum's Zen connection. In March Zen forwarded an email from BayTSP (the MPAA special agents) with a threat to close my Mum's account if the offence happened again within 72hours! The mail they forwarded was PGP signed, but it didn't appear that the sender ( paramount-no-reply@copyright-compliance.com ) had a public PGP signature. So it looks like Zen will threaten their customers, very slowly, on possibly forged take-down notices!
Funnily enough I don't recommend Zen to people anymore.
[1] No matter how fast your 'net connection is though, videos from youtube et al. still need pausing for a while before watching to avoid it stuttering!
Ahh, they've upgraded the system that seemed to be launched a few years ago, OK, 10, where if there was someone driving the BMW, the front fog lights were automatically switched on (and off if actually foggy).
BMW spend a fortune developing their M line of cars, but they still don't offer working indicators...
I'm sure a modern digital camera can capture a page of text as well as a photocopier, and a camera probably won't need the flash either. Old paper isn't generally allowed to be photocopied because of the bright light (causes fading) and the heat (presumably ages the paper and helps fade the ink too), but a digital camera won't do this, and it might even be quicker than photocopying!
I hate to offer a workaround as a solution, but this kind of BS isn't going to end soon :(
You sound like a knowledgable guy, so maybe you'll be able to confirm if this could help: We all know that sound travels slower than light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation, so the /. askee could do some clever positioning of wireless network receivers around his house from his AP to adjust the delay of the music over a wireless LAN!
Here's a workaround: Set the VMWare services to manual, and use this little script to start and stop everything (though turn off VM's before stopping VMWare).
F29 Retaliator on the Amiga.... A flight sim of sorts, where if you ejected from the plane then you could still control the plane. So fly north, eject, and you could then see the plane being flown in the background as the camera watched your dude parachute to the ground. Of course, the fun thing to do was to turn the plane around and try to fly it into yourself!
EMM386, surely?
I rememeber that bug on the Amiga version of Frontier! I don't know if it was mentioned in the manual, but I do remember the manual mentioning that if you didn't service your engines then you could miss-jump and wreck the engine. I rememeber trying this bug (probably after reading about it in Amiga Power), miss-jumping, and being stuck thousands of lightyears from Sol!
The bug wouldn't have been in the original Elite game though, as the games were quite different. And Elite had 7 "small" galaxies IIRC, but Frontier and FFE only had the one.
Fontier was a seriously buggy game though, as was its successor Frontier First Encounters. In FFE if you got enough money then it would reach the maximum value (something like 16.7 million credits, IIRC), and change to a negative of the same value. Did they used to charge a launch fee in that game? Or only landing/docking fee? Eitherway, if you got "too rich" then it caused problems as ironically you couldn't pay for stuff. The trick was to give huge sums to charity before reaching the bug's value.
There was many other bugs that could be taken advantage of in those games. One defense method was when attacked, you pause the game, find the attacker in space and target them, fire off a missile, stick the stardreamer to top speed, and the missile would hit the attacker. If you used missiles "properly" then the target would often out run it. This method also worked nicely for launching a missile at an incoming missile, because at the start of the game you don't have the room on your ship or money for an ECM. The bug was basically that when you paused the game, it'd pause the action, but not the interaction. i.e. you could still set a missile to target something, you could move about in the inventory and star chart/systems screens, you could jetison cargo, you could use the different views of your ship and move the views (though not move the ship or actually fire the lasers).
Here's the printable, all on one page version of the article:m mand=printArticleBasic&articleId=9014118
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?co
I live next door to an elementary school. Let's imagine that one day, I decide to kill a few dozen kids with a banana. Will the government ban bananas?
Only after the Daily Mail runs as campaign to get them banned!The link you posted to the picture of Spaghetti Junction wasn't the UK's SJ, it appears there's lots of complex junctions around the world that are known as Spaghetti Junction. I know Birmingham's Spaghetti (last went through it, twice, on Friday), and your link just didn't look right. This is the Birmingham one:o =1&l=0&m=a&spnx=0.008592&spny=0.005932
http://www.wikimapia.org/#y=52511115&x=-1866367&z
And the Wikipedia article for completeness.
I do think though that complex motorways junctions will actiually be relatively easy to monitor: There's only a few possible places for vehicles to enter or exit the junction system, and vehicles cannot easily join/leave the closed motorway system lead up to and leaving SJ. The government would simply watch all entrances and exits, and as long as their system reports close to 100% successfully read the state'll be happy. A small town or village may have many more possible entrances or exits than Spaghetti, from an A-road or two, all the way down to public bridleways (though clearly major motorway hubs handle significantly more traffic and would be the first places the state would want to get tracking hardware installed).
After I closed my paypal account, I had some spam from a market research company about paypal. I did not do their research, but emailed back with a rant (if it keeps an employee busy for even a few minutes, then I've managed to successfully waste some company money). Of course, I formatted the email like a n00b (i.e. the reply above the quoted text), but I made up a disclaimer below the text (hoping they would miss it):
I never got any reply, but if I did I might have posted them some kind of invoice. It'd be a win/win situation - either I get a grand or a court rules that email disclaimers or EULAs aren't legally binding (OK, maybe I'm being a little optimistic).
I'm sure there is at least one form of exercise that you don't hate. I hate running, always have, probably always will, and most ball sports I like much either (probably because they include running about). But riding a bike or swimming I find much more interesting.
Also, if you are rather portly and only walk a little every day your fitness will be really low. Any exercise you do will start hurting very quickly, and that's never going to encourage you to exercise. Try standing at your desk for periods during the day, say if you're on the phone and don't need to use the desk, just to take the edge off any un-fitness.
And get laid more. That is one type of exercise that no-one hates!
This joke'd marked as a troll at any other time (and why I've not cracked it on slashdot), but I might be able to get away with it now:
Linux's killer app is Reiser
badum, tschhh
.....It's a free country, but you should remit your slashdot license at the earliest possible opportunity. They actually ran out of user ID's at 999,999 and it's important that unused / neglected / undeserved ones be returned to the source without delay. TBH, I think slashdot really started to go downhill at about UID six hundred thousand or soOur local council (Worcestershire) has taken the steps of getting the users of car-parks to enter their number plate (or part of) into the ticket machines when buying a pay and display ticket. Of course, these artifically expensive machines have been purchased to stop the "problem" of people parking, paying for the minimum period when they only need to stay for a few minutes, then giving the ticket to someone else. The machine prints your car reg on the ticket, so presumably if the code isn't right, you'll get a parking fine, because you must have "stolen" your parking!
There are also privacy implications with recording when and where people are parking, but these machines are clearly to help raise revenue (though the usefullness of the data will dawn on some pea brained councillor soon). So I tend to park in the (free) street now rather than council car parks! If I do ever use a car park, I enter my car reg wrong, and if I get a fine I plan to kick up one hell of a fuss. I'll enter my reg as all A's or Z's, or 999 if the machine wants the number (not had a parking fine yet), and will claim that the machine was not working when fighting a fine, or that I couldn't figure the machine out etc..
No, the guy's right to bitch about their cookie use. That site gives visitors the following raw deal: Have a permanent cookie and you won't get interstitial ads after the first one (I'm assuming they set a perm cookie: I only allow session, so didn't see how long they tried to set cookies for), or turn cookies off and the site becomes a pain to navigate, because you'll get a full page ad for 15 seconds at every click.
There are other choices, but lets be honest: The other choices are available only to a minority, the majority of IE surfing users won't even want to hear an explanation of cookies because "it sounds a bit too technical".
I had a rant on their forum too with a bugmenot.com account.e ssage?board.id=feedback&message.id=1877
http://forums.firingsquad.com/firingsquad/board/m
The new disscussion system doesn't have the discussions split across multiple pages, and appears to thread fully. You toggle the view of comments on and off purely by the power of your browser, and /. scores!
You're right about forums with threading. The best threading I've seen is usenet, when combined with a good client (I did strangly like Netscape 4's usenet client!). Email can thread too, with client support, though usenet is built for threaded discussions. I wonder if there is a web based forum software package that runs on a usenet backend (apart from Google groups)? I wonder if the web interface auto bottom-posts?
Whoops, I worded my post badly, and so I've come across like I went to the Dubya school of maths!
What I meant was that the AC was right to make a sarcastic remark at the stupidity of TFA's statement saying 0.04 seconds is less than half a second. Whilst saying 0.04s < 0.5s is correct, it sounded like officer Barbrady in TFA has a loose grasp on maths as he doesn't recognise the differences between 0.4 and 0.04, and so implied that 0.04s is nearly half a second.
On the brightside, I could imagine that if you were stopped by this officer for speeding, then you could get out of a ticket by saying that what you were doing was OK because you were doing less than the speed of sound!
The distances separating the vehicles I posted were based on the cars being 0.04s apart, and the distances sound "right" for tailgating; about 3 feet (not 3 yards). The legal 2 second gap is 50 times the distance that those 'gaters were caught doing!
True. But it's a lot less than he thinks.
I thought the same. I think my brain cell is functioning, and I've done some numbers [1]. TFA doesn't mention speed, but at 40mph the vehicles would be separated by 28.2" (72cm), at 55mph (88.5kph) it would be 38.7" (98cm). That is pretty fucking close, though I've had dicks driving behind me closer. Why is it usually a BMW (with their front fog lights on) or a Merc that does this shit?
[1] How fucking pathetic? Bragging on /. cos I've done some GCSE level maths....
The fountain of knowledge that is Wikipedia has this article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the _Bazaar, which is interesting. Its an essay/book about open source development, and there is a link to the full text in the WP article. There's a chapter about why open development is good (from a quick look at te text), and I know I've read similar-minded texts on sites like gnu.org and fsf.org, but was unable to find them. I think Cory Doctorow has written some good articles about secrets and the management of them, but I think his are more DRM musings, though the same principles apply to proprietry software vs. open software.
Articles about why SSH etc. are secure, even though their inner workings are wide open to the world, may be helpful too.