I recall reading about some controversy about Steve Wozniac's company's tracking product as it might potentially be applied to children, but it claims to be low cost.
I'm reminded of the (perhaps apocryphal) story of the guy who quit the patent office in the 1890's because "everything had already been invented" Yes, I know your point was that we're not presently under evolutionary pressure, not that we're "perfect" as it is; your phrasing just struck me as humorous.
I can think of numerous potential beneficial evolutionary changes, some incremental and some more radical:
Better detoxification in heavy metal poisoning: self chelation therapy
Reduced need for sleep
Continued adaptation to upright posture: stronger vein walls to prevent varicose veins/hemorrhoids.
Further widening of the female pelvis to ease childbirth
Additional articulation of fingers
Auxillary sensory organs on hands (taste/smell/vision/vibration (hearing))
Seperation of eating and breathing functions - no more choking to death on food
Controlled background processing of thought (unlike the rather chaotic 'subconscious reasoning' we practice today)
Ability to regrow missing/damaged limbs and organs (eg, axlotyl)
That wouldn't really help in this case. Rather than labelling the bill as an Iraq Spending Bill or whatever, it would simply be given a generic Protecting Against Terrorism title. Once you do that, it's easy to justify including both the war spending and the national ID cards on the same bill.
<sarcasm> Yes, because Saddam was going to give those massive quantities of WMD - all that anthrax and sarin and botulinum toxin that Colin told us all about -- to his close friend and associate Osama to use against us! </sarcasm>
Point taken, though; if it came to that we'd have "A Bill to Do Stuff" instead of "A Bill to Do This Thing, and for Other Purposes"
Mods: it's a joke. Phil Schiller is Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. Sad that I had to explain that to (hopefully) avoid being modded "Flamebait"
You have a valid point, but there's only so much room in a headline. Headlines are intended to be a bit over the top, to entice you into reading the summary... and then hopefully the article.
The real issue here, I think, is that the (presumed guilty) copyright offenders are looking at 4 years in a Chinese prison. Is that an appropriate punishment for the offense? Is that proportionate to what other offenders get under the Chinese justice system? If not, what political and financial influence was exerted to provide disproportionate protection to copyright holders... and why?
These are the rich topics for debate here, not BitTorrent per se.
Oh, and the dual 2.7 uses "an innovative closed-loop liquid cooling system that draws away heat quietly and efficiently."
They've been using liquid cooling for several months on the 2.5 (and 2.3?) GHz model; this isn't new to them. There was some hope that they'd dispense with it (PPC 970GX with much less heat dissipation) due to concerns over the longevity of the cooling system, but they apparently weren't able to do that.
I don't know if it was the first mass-produced desktop with liquid cooling or not. Depends on how you define "mass produced" I guess; liquid cooling per se isn't terribly new, certainly.
M is commonly used for "one thousand" in the US as well. Try ordering 5,000 business cards printed, and the invoice will likely specify a unit of "M" and a quantity of "5", for example.
Yes, having "M" mean both a thousand and a million depending on the application is stupid, but that's how it is.
I agree completely. Corporations should not be involved in LEGISLATING social issues. Corporations CAN be involved so far as their HR, and employee relation practices allow them to be.
You have to preselect the widgets that you need and that is idiotic.
So that's what adware is all about. Helping me by relieving me of the burden of preselecting widgets.
Silly me, I thought it was intrusive advertising. Thanks for clearing that up!
More seriously...
This means that I have to clutter my desktop with useless shit
Um, no. First of all, they're not on your desktop; they're on a secondary, hide-able layer. Secondly, you don't "have to" have anything there... unless we listen to your first complaint and allow the vendor or some random person is some far-off country to decide you need to run the "Spam-the-Universe" widget. Perhaps most importantly, it can be turned off. Don't like it? Don't use it. Is that a difficult concept to grasp or something?
I noticed that myself, and have been unable to find a number for the (vaporware?) Senate Bill referred to.
Suggestion for editors: when an article concerns allegedly pending legislation, don't approve it unless you have a damned reference for it. If we could read the fucking proposed language, we could comment more intelligently on it.
Point very well taken; I see that as a valid concern. Especially if John's parents happen to hear the professor "they paid good money for" gore a sacred cow of theirs.
handwritten notes capture the professor's lesson anyway
That depends in part on how good a lecturer the professor is, in particular how many false starts and tangents s/he takes.
A student can waste a lot of time and effort on a 2 minute digression that sounds relevant but turns out to meaningless in context.
An accurate record (tape, MP3, hired court reporter, genetically engineered super-parrot, whatever) lets you make several passes through the lecture, separating the wheat from the chaff.
I suspect that those who object to their lectures being recorded fall into three groups:
The shy, who may simply dislike being recorded and/or photographed, although they've overcome their dislike of public speaking;
Those who perceive ((rightly - possible profits) or wrongly (simple ego)) some diminution of value for having been recorded;
The pretenders: those who realize that if people can review what they say in detail, they'll find it lacking in content and/or uninspired.
I don't know why your friends are even there in the first place; a reasonable guess is that you've been gaming together. You need them to understand that although you're using the machine for recreational purposes, it's also used for more serious things. Nosing around uninvited is the equivalent of pawing through your tax records in the filing cabinet, or browsing the medicine chest. Damned rude behavior that won't be tolerated from anyone, friend or not.
Not merely inexperienced users; in many cases when saving a new document there may be several appropriate folders for it (receipt for online pruchase of grass seed - "home", "online commerce", "agricultural", "payables", "creditcard/visa", etc...). One can work around this with aliases or symlinks, sure, but that's a pain.
maybe Apple will release some sort of Spotlight -> Automator transition that allows people to use spotlight queries to actually reorganize their data permanently
Basically, organization is up to the user, whether it be by creating organized directories, or by creating logical names.
This is somewhat true, but far from the complete story.
Consider the following scenario... and sure you can do this with "find" in a *nix...
You want to find that image you remember looking at 3 weeks ago (atime)... you know, the one that was somewhat large in pixel dimensions (netpbm), of the Grand Canyon. You're not sure if you took it yourself on your vacation there last year, or downloaded it somewhere. You're pretty sure it was either GIF or JPG ('file' or extension), because you always import from your camera in JPG and PNG or other formats are still somewhat rare on the web. You'd like the images you yourself took to be higher in the search results, so you add the model of the camera you used on that trip (which is in the metadata)(grep?) as a search parameter.
In a second or two you have the picture you remember, without having a clue where on your local disks it lived. Or the filename.
I'd rather have an index maintained realtime and a pretty GUI, rather than a lot of disk thrashing and persnickety syntax on the command line... and then end up with a listing rather than a set of thumbnails which allow me to do the final refinement without even moving a hand.
Ah, OK... I was off by a major release number. I remember not being able to update to 10.2.7 and it doesn't seem that long ago, so I mistook it for 10.3.x.
Thanks for the correction. (And where in the Hell did that missing year go?)
Actually I think your list is one too high. One of those (10.3.6?) was G5-only, while 10.3.7 was G3 and G4 only. So on any given box, there would be 8 applicable updates, not 9.
Slashdot Mirror
I recall reading about some controversy about Steve Wozniac's company's tracking product as it might potentially be applied to children, but it claims to be low cost.
I can think of numerous potential beneficial evolutionary changes, some incremental and some more radical:
Yes, because Saddam was going to give those massive quantities of WMD - all that anthrax and sarin and botulinum toxin that Colin told us all about -- to his close friend and associate Osama to use against us!
</sarcasm>
Point taken, though; if it came to that we'd have "A Bill to Do Stuff" instead of "A Bill to Do This Thing, and for Other Purposes"
Well, it's not as if anyone could have foreseen this, is it?
Mods: it's a joke. Phil Schiller is Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. Sad that I had to explain that to (hopefully) avoid being modded "Flamebait"
I suspect it's a bug in Safari and not a conspiracy, though. Possibly Pith Helmet; I'll remove that and see what happens before filing a bug report...
The real issue here, I think, is that the (presumed guilty) copyright offenders are looking at 4 years in a Chinese prison. Is that an appropriate punishment for the offense? Is that proportionate to what other offenders get under the Chinese justice system? If not, what political and financial influence was exerted to provide disproportionate protection to copyright holders... and why?
These are the rich topics for debate here, not BitTorrent per se.
They should just cane them; that'd get a lot of politicians really hard.
I don't know if it was the first mass-produced desktop with liquid cooling or not. Depends on how you define "mass produced" I guess; liquid cooling per se isn't terribly new, certainly.
Yes, having "M" mean both a thousand and a million depending on the application is stupid, but that's how it is.
Therefore, I am entirely disinterested in anything they have to say and have mapped *.backuptrauma.com to 127.0.0.1
Silly me, I thought it was intrusive advertising. Thanks for clearing that up!
More seriously...
Um, no. First of all, they're not on your desktop; they're on a secondary, hide-able layer. Secondly, you don't "have to" have anything there... unless we listen to your first complaint and allow the vendor or some random person is some far-off country to decide you need to run the "Spam-the-Universe" widget. Perhaps most importantly, it can be turned off. Don't like it? Don't use it. Is that a difficult concept to grasp or something?Suggestion for editors: when an article concerns allegedly pending legislation, don't approve it unless you have a damned reference for it. If we could read the fucking proposed language, we could comment more intelligently on it.
Point very well taken; I see that as a valid concern. Especially if John's parents happen to hear the professor "they paid good money for" gore a sacred cow of theirs.
Thanks for the correction re: radiative heat dissipation vs. conduction.
A student can waste a lot of time and effort on a 2 minute digression that sounds relevant but turns out to meaningless in context.
An accurate record (tape, MP3, hired court reporter, genetically engineered super-parrot, whatever) lets you make several passes through the lecture, separating the wheat from the chaff.
I suspect that those who object to their lectures being recorded fall into three groups:
I don't know why your friends are even there in the first place; a reasonable guess is that you've been gaming together. You need them to understand that although you're using the machine for recreational purposes, it's also used for more serious things. Nosing around uninvited is the equivalent of pawing through your tax records in the filing cabinet, or browsing the medicine chest. Damned rude behavior that won't be tolerated from anyone, friend or not.
Not merely inexperienced users; in many cases when saving a new document there may be several appropriate folders for it (receipt for online pruchase of grass seed - "home", "online commerce", "agricultural", "payables", "creditcard/visa", etc...). One can work around this with aliases or symlinks, sure, but that's a pain.
-5 Scary
*ponders*
Consider the following scenario... and sure you can do this with "find" in a *nix...
You want to find that image you remember looking at 3 weeks ago (atime)... you know, the one that was somewhat large in pixel dimensions (netpbm), of the Grand Canyon. You're not sure if you took it yourself on your vacation there last year, or downloaded it somewhere. You're pretty sure it was either GIF or JPG ('file' or extension), because you always import from your camera in JPG and PNG or other formats are still somewhat rare on the web. You'd like the images you yourself took to be higher in the search results, so you add the model of the camera you used on that trip (which is in the metadata)(grep?) as a search parameter.
In a second or two you have the picture you remember, without having a clue where on your local disks it lived. Or the filename.
I'd rather have an index maintained realtime and a pretty GUI, rather than a lot of disk thrashing and persnickety syntax on the command line... and then end up with a listing rather than a set of thumbnails which allow me to do the final refinement without even moving a hand.
Thanks for the correction. (And where in the Hell did that missing year go?)
This concludes this pointless quibble. Carry on.