Hell, a couple of months ago I accidentally dropped a dime on the sidewalk. When I picked it up, my first instinct was to pop it in my mouth. I didn't, but the thing was so tiny and round it called out to me for some weird reason. If I'd had less willpower (by, say, being 7 years old) I might have done it.
This means a candidate that has little chance of being elected can actually have a significant influence on the election, if they can attract a few percentage points of votes -- that means one or the other major party candidates will have to adjust their platform to try to draw those voters, or lose the election.
And if you use enough bread, a shit sandwich can actually be quite edible.
You're still eating shit, though.
How about we do something about the shit, instead of coming up with reasons to use more bread?
Something to consider, though - not all radiation is the evil, hazardous, cancer-causing flesh-melting variety. Light is radiation, which is, well what they'd been using to study this thing.
The GP poster neither said nor implied anything along those lines, and indeed was clearly using the "light is radiation" definition (among other ones, of course - it's not like our telescopes are limited to the visible spectrum any more). Has Slashdot fallen so low that we actually need to randomly defend the usage of the word "radiation"? I thought most of the people here had a reasonable understanding of science.
It's much easier to type out an email on the Blackberry...
I agree with this 100%. The old silver Blackberry Curve 8320 had the single best phone keyboard I have ever used - the keys were distinct enough that you could feel the separation under your thumb, meaning that touch typing was a breeze and you almost never mashed two characters together. Seriously, I don't know why they changed the design, it was absolutely perfect in every way.
The newer Curve 8520s didn't have as good of a keyboard, but they're still miles and miles ahead of any other phone I've used. I really don't get it - does RIM have a patent on "awesome usable keyboards phones" or something?
(I worked in tech support for a while, and part of my job was setting up new Blackberries. I had to type out a looooot of e-mails addresses and passwords on those things)
If there's evidence that you not only knew about the exploding batteries but also demanded they be sold anyway, you may be held liable.
And how would they find that evidence, when all you did was demand the impossible from your employees and get a faulty product out of it?
Hell, if you just went around and said "look guys I know it has some problems but we need to ship now" you'd still be pretty much safe. Bernie Madoff's only failing was that he was so blatant about it.
Well yeah, but we've gone so far from that it's not even funny. Now the CEO can say "Make this product I know to be unsafe", and he's pretty much totally protected from any sort of sanction.
Indeed, by definition a corporation is set up to make people less liable for their actions. I mean, what did you think LLC stands for? Sure, if you order your corporate minions to outright murder someone you'll usually go to jail, but if it's along the lines of "whoops, the battery in that car explodes and kills people? Who would have guessed?" all that happens is that the corporation is fined some money. The government doesn't even get to go after anyone's personal bank account.
I personally think that this is a complete travesty. We should, basically, abolish the corporation. If you're going to do business, you will be responsible for making sure your products don't kill people - not some nebulous legal entity.
I used Xmarks for a little while, but their client was way way too intrusive; I ended up turning it off because I just didn't like its nagging (I think it had saved the wrong password or something).
Also, I never understood why my data had to go through their servers - wouldn't it be good enough to just have multiple syncing computers on at the same time? I can see using their servers for scheduling, but actually storing the data? And then there's the super creepy option of saving your passwords - I'm not even sure why they offered that one.
Umm you do realize that what the Verizon lady said doesn't contradict what the rep claims to have been told, right?
She literally said, "if the customer tells you to block it, you're allowed to suggest that they block it" - in other words, if you know that blocks exist, the rep is allowed to talk about it.
The rep said, "We are not allowed to suggest a block" - meaning, if the customer doesn't know that such blocks exist, you're not allowed to bring it up. Her statement does not at all contradict the rep's statement, it just seems to if you're not paying attention to the words.
When I moved to a 20,000-employee company, the good coffee didn't last long, because $(peanuts * 20,000) is enough savings to be noticed (and increase the bonus of some executive, so he's not going to leave it on the table for the next guy).
I kind of doubt that actually works, when you factor in employee productivity lost to bitching about the shitty coffee and Starbucks runs.
Keep in mind that small things like this cut both ways - they cost a lot of money only in the aggregate, but they also provide a lot of benefit in the aggregate.
I seem to remember reading that they used to be ships (and hence why they move diagonally - they're tacking against the wind, see?) but then the Church demanded a place in the game.
There's nothing keeping them from adding a "request a movie" function to RedBox; I seem to remember being able to do that before, but when I look at their site now it's not there. Still, it's only a matter of adding some Netflix-style infrastructure, except cheaper - instead of shipping a movie to a random house, they ship a movie to a local RedBox, and I'm sure that whoever takes care of the RedBoxen visits them at least four or five times a week and can load the requested movies in.
That's really how it feels to walk in to a Blockbuster nowadays - I was in one yesterday (I wanted to look at their used DS games, but they didn't have any) and all I could think was "how are you guys still in business? There's absolutely no reason for me to be here".
As soon as I saw my first Redbox, I knew they were screwed; when someone comes up with a way to put your entire store in a little box that can fit in the corner of the local market, your time's up.
This is entirely unsurprising. The Elo system was, in a sense, designed to be easily calculable in a time before things like computers or databases or data mining were especially common (after all, it was adopted by US Chess Federation in 1960!), and it hasn't been revised much if at all since then. Of course statisticians using modern methods and number crunching capabilities and huge databases of both game results and game moves are going to be able to beat it by a lot - this isn't like the Netflix prize, where a bunch of teams were competing to improve something that had been in active development up until that very year.
You know that's not really a requirement, right? It's not like the game scans your PCI bus and goes "oh shit you don't have a discrete graphics card, I'm gonna report you to the gamer police!"
It'll probably run acceptably but sluggishly on your laptop, especially if you mainly use that not so fancy pants strategic tile view and/or turn most of the settings down. After all, it's a turn based strategy game - it's not like you need hyper twitch reflex response times to play the game.
Furthermore, there's a demo. You can download that and try it out - if the demo runs acceptably well on your laptop, then the full game almost certainly will as well.
On a world-wide scale, Obama is moderate Right. The United States has no viable Left-wing party, if you use a global calibration of "Left" and "Right".
Yes, relative to the GOP, the Democrats are to the "left" - much like how relative to the north pole, Greenland is to the south. That doesn't mean it's not one of the most northern landmasses.
Stewart never worried about being reasonable before the Tea Parties and the other wingnuts took control of one of our major political parties; during the Bush era, it was moderate Right vs extreme Right. Nowadays it's starting to look more like moderate Right vs batshit crazy.
Now what's important is not so much to bring the discussion over to the left, but to bring the discussion back to reality.
Heh, I think you don't quite understand what "local access" means.
It means that the user has an account on the machine, which may be used remotely. It doesn't mean that they have physical access to the computer.
Local user accounts are generally considered to only be a short step up from actual physical access in terms of how big your vulnerability surface is. College students have been proving for years that once you give someone a local user account, you've almost certainly given them root access at some point in the future.
Did you skip the end of the video where the demonstrator opens up a command prompt on the remote machine running as the NT Network Authority? That's as close to "remote root" as makes no difference.
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And they say patents stifle innovation! Just look at all the new and interesting forms of corporate warfare we have to fear!
Man, using rotten.com as a teaching aid. What won't the Internet think of next?
Hell, a couple of months ago I accidentally dropped a dime on the sidewalk. When I picked it up, my first instinct was to pop it in my mouth. I didn't, but the thing was so tiny and round it called out to me for some weird reason. If I'd had less willpower (by, say, being 7 years old) I might have done it.
And if you use enough bread, a shit sandwich can actually be quite edible.
You're still eating shit, though.
How about we do something about the shit, instead of coming up with reasons to use more bread?
The GP poster neither said nor implied anything along those lines, and indeed was clearly using the "light is radiation" definition (among other ones, of course - it's not like our telescopes are limited to the visible spectrum any more). Has Slashdot fallen so low that we actually need to randomly defend the usage of the word "radiation"? I thought most of the people here had a reasonable understanding of science.
I agree with this 100%. The old silver Blackberry Curve 8320 had the single best phone keyboard I have ever used - the keys were distinct enough that you could feel the separation under your thumb, meaning that touch typing was a breeze and you almost never mashed two characters together. Seriously, I don't know why they changed the design, it was absolutely perfect in every way.
The newer Curve 8520s didn't have as good of a keyboard, but they're still miles and miles ahead of any other phone I've used. I really don't get it - does RIM have a patent on "awesome usable keyboards phones" or something?
(I worked in tech support for a while, and part of my job was setting up new Blackberries. I had to type out a looooot of e-mails addresses and passwords on those things)
And how would they find that evidence, when all you did was demand the impossible from your employees and get a faulty product out of it?
Hell, if you just went around and said "look guys I know it has some problems but we need to ship now" you'd still be pretty much safe. Bernie Madoff's only failing was that he was so blatant about it.
I've got the same combination on my luggage!
Well yeah, but we've gone so far from that it's not even funny. Now the CEO can say "Make this product I know to be unsafe", and he's pretty much totally protected from any sort of sanction.
Indeed, by definition a corporation is set up to make people less liable for their actions. I mean, what did you think LLC stands for? Sure, if you order your corporate minions to outright murder someone you'll usually go to jail, but if it's along the lines of "whoops, the battery in that car explodes and kills people? Who would have guessed?" all that happens is that the corporation is fined some money. The government doesn't even get to go after anyone's personal bank account.
I personally think that this is a complete travesty. We should, basically, abolish the corporation. If you're going to do business, you will be responsible for making sure your products don't kill people - not some nebulous legal entity.
I used Xmarks for a little while, but their client was way way too intrusive; I ended up turning it off because I just didn't like its nagging (I think it had saved the wrong password or something).
Also, I never understood why my data had to go through their servers - wouldn't it be good enough to just have multiple syncing computers on at the same time? I can see using their servers for scheduling, but actually storing the data? And then there's the super creepy option of saving your passwords - I'm not even sure why they offered that one.
*sniff* I love the smell of enterprise in the morning. Smells like... napalm.
Umm you do realize that what the Verizon lady said doesn't contradict what the rep claims to have been told, right?
She literally said, "if the customer tells you to block it, you're allowed to suggest that they block it" - in other words, if you know that blocks exist, the rep is allowed to talk about it.
The rep said, "We are not allowed to suggest a block" - meaning, if the customer doesn't know that such blocks exist, you're not allowed to bring it up. Her statement does not at all contradict the rep's statement, it just seems to if you're not paying attention to the words.
I kind of doubt that actually works, when you factor in employee productivity lost to bitching about the shitty coffee and Starbucks runs.
Keep in mind that small things like this cut both ways - they cost a lot of money only in the aggregate, but they also provide a lot of benefit in the aggregate.
I seem to remember reading that they used to be ships (and hence why they move diagonally - they're tacking against the wind, see?) but then the Church demanded a place in the game.
There's nothing keeping them from adding a "request a movie" function to RedBox; I seem to remember being able to do that before, but when I look at their site now it's not there. Still, it's only a matter of adding some Netflix-style infrastructure, except cheaper - instead of shipping a movie to a random house, they ship a movie to a local RedBox, and I'm sure that whoever takes care of the RedBoxen visits them at least four or five times a week and can load the requested movies in.
That's really how it feels to walk in to a Blockbuster nowadays - I was in one yesterday (I wanted to look at their used DS games, but they didn't have any) and all I could think was "how are you guys still in business? There's absolutely no reason for me to be here".
As soon as I saw my first Redbox, I knew they were screwed; when someone comes up with a way to put your entire store in a little box that can fit in the corner of the local market, your time's up.
This is entirely unsurprising. The Elo system was, in a sense, designed to be easily calculable in a time before things like computers or databases or data mining were especially common (after all, it was adopted by US Chess Federation in 1960!), and it hasn't been revised much if at all since then. Of course statisticians using modern methods and number crunching capabilities and huge databases of both game results and game moves are going to be able to beat it by a lot - this isn't like the Netflix prize, where a bunch of teams were competing to improve something that had been in active development up until that very year.
You know that's not really a requirement, right? It's not like the game scans your PCI bus and goes "oh shit you don't have a discrete graphics card, I'm gonna report you to the gamer police!"
It'll probably run acceptably but sluggishly on your laptop, especially if you mainly use that not so fancy pants strategic tile view and/or turn most of the settings down. After all, it's a turn based strategy game - it's not like you need hyper twitch reflex response times to play the game.
Furthermore, there's a demo. You can download that and try it out - if the demo runs acceptably well on your laptop, then the full game almost certainly will as well.
On a world-wide scale, Obama is moderate Right. The United States has no viable Left-wing party, if you use a global calibration of "Left" and "Right".
Yes, relative to the GOP, the Democrats are to the "left" - much like how relative to the north pole, Greenland is to the south. That doesn't mean it's not one of the most northern landmasses.
She's also a creationist. That's really all that needs to be said on that matter.
Stewart never worried about being reasonable before the Tea Parties and the other wingnuts took control of one of our major political parties; during the Bush era, it was moderate Right vs extreme Right. Nowadays it's starting to look more like moderate Right vs batshit crazy.
Now what's important is not so much to bring the discussion over to the left, but to bring the discussion back to reality.
Heh, I think you don't quite understand what "local access" means.
It means that the user has an account on the machine, which may be used remotely. It doesn't mean that they have physical access to the computer.
Local user accounts are generally considered to only be a short step up from actual physical access in terms of how big your vulnerability surface is. College students have been proving for years that once you give someone a local user account, you've almost certainly given them root access at some point in the future.
Did you skip the end of the video where the demonstrator opens up a command prompt on the remote machine running as the NT Network Authority? That's as close to "remote root" as makes no difference.
Argh hyperlink fail. The proper link should be this: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/09/19/1941258 (or you could just go to http://www.slashdot.org/ and scroll down a little bit)