I did hear of a theory where C/R was being cracked by taking the C/R image, posting to a porn session, and letting a seeing person do the work.
I had a chat with a Veep that was hired on to a company I used to work at. Very down to earth guy, very friendly. We got to talking about spams and semi-legitimate emailings to customers, etc.
He had one very interesting tidbit; stick with me for a sec here. Most companies outsource their semi-legit stuff because they get reported as spammers and whatnot, or it bogs down their email server/network, etc. No surprise there- however, the interesting tidbit is that the outsourcing companies turn around and outsource to Indian firms for handling the bounces. There's literally a room full of people in India, sitting there answering those challenge/responses and updating the client's customer email list(unlike spammers, it really is in their best interests to minimize failed deliveries). It sounds "expensive", but it's not, considering how few people use challenge/response systems. Further- a reasonably smart human can get familiar with all the various systems quickly(an hour or two, I'd guess, tops) and probably process close to a message every few seconds with a client program set up to do that limited functionality smoothly. Best part- if your client does several mailings, unless the recipient goes in and removes you, you're clear for future emailings.
Besides, you don't practice your French, you pardon it! Or replace it with "Freedom" if you're a conservative Republican asswipe. Well, not always. "Pardon my Freedom, but.." sounds pretty dumb.
You don't accept substandard results if nobody can produce. This is something you intend to throw massive money on eventually, you'd want the would-be contractors to put up or shut up real quick.
You mean like the 'Star Wars" Missile Defense System which has failed numerous tests of increasing ease, but is being used anyway because "it beats nothing", except that "nothing" doesn't violate treaties we signed, creates a false sense of security, doesn't motivate anyone to 'get it right' and wastes trillions of dollars.
Or the Patriot Defense System, which routinely targeted friendly aircraft during development, failed miserably the first time it was put into use(for a use it was never intended- it's never been used for what it was originally designed for, shooting down planes) and then 10+ years later was used again and resulted in the deaths of dozens of UK soldiers because it couldn't tell the difference between a helicopter traveling at less than 100 kt and an enemy missile traveling over the speed of sound?
Or the Osprey tiltrotor, which suffered an astronomical failure rate and again, caused dozens of deaths of US marines?
Then there's the Comanche helicopter, which they've been kicking around for years and finally decided, after spending billions, to just say "oh well, so much for that"?
The defense department is famous for bidding scandals(if contracts are put out to bid at all), and being happy to look the other way and fudge the requirements(or ignore them completely) if the system fails to meet original requirements.
Curiously, the russians never quite had such problems. Their fighter jets, for example, don't require pristine runways and constant maintenance; they're built like tanks, because the people who designed them knew they'd be held responsible if it failed unreasonably...and responsible doesn't mean "loose their job", it means "end up in Siberia" or "in a river with a bullet through your brain".
This country needs three things. First, a true capitalist system for defense contractors. You want to sell the Army a tank? Fine. You can do so all on your own, without a single fucking dime, and then try and sell it. If it can't compete, too bad, your company goes under- that's the way capitalism works. Second, defense contractors need to be held responsible for when their products fail. Refunds for starters, contracts that can be invalidated on failure, civil/criminal punishments for gross design/construction failures. Third, absolutely, positively, no secret budgets of any kind. I am entirely pissed off with the pentagon filling up with all the kids who had secret treehouse clubs when they were kids and want to do the same shit now that they're 40.
Odd. I'm still stuck on my 2.4.xx version. I tried to upgrade a few distros to 2.6 and things didn't go very well (kernel panic)
Did you read any of the many guides you can find with a quick Google search? You need only have proper versions of various kernel utils, sometimes swap needs to be reformatted if it's a really old system..and of course you have to make sure you enable all the right stuff, just as with any other kernel build...
Have ya ever seen that commercial where the park ranger is pouring all the Metamucil down the Old Faithful?
Yeah, but come to think of it, not recently...no wonder they're having problems! Quick, someone pop down to CVS and buy a can! Or maybe spring a little extra for some of that grit-free stuff...
Keep them away from bullies and small minded people who won't understand or accept them.
Quite frankly, the teacher should be more concerned about the bullies; the smart kid isn't the problem, the bullies are. Why?
They usually turn out to be complete rejects as far as society goes; violent neanderthals, basically. Everyone looks the other way until BAM, they hit the real world and suddenly end up in jail for bashing their girlfriend's head against the wall(unless they happen to make it big in sports). Meanwhile, the geek suffers and may be secluded, but ultimately contributes to society in ways the ape never could have.
The solution here is to be strict with punishing the kids that pick on him. Johnny makes fun of him for not combing his hair? Johnny gets a time-out and a talk about how we're all different people, and we need to accept those who are different from us. Children start out as pretty accepting- but in the early years they can either learn it's really NOT ok to pick on other people, or they can get away with it, feel slightly good about themselves, and keep doing it. Learning to accept others makes them far more likely to succeed in school and particularly in the workplace(ie, "team players").
The US and UK troops will be able to understand each other! Two nations no longer divided by a common language
Joke as you will, but we shot down more British soldiers due to stupid screw ups than were shot by Iraqis. Maybe instead of translators, we should be writing control systems for our automated missile defense systems that don't suck, and putting someone a little more responsible and trained than 18 year old dropouts at the controls. In at least one incident, it was because Patriot missile batteries kept identifying helicopters and planes as inbound missiles. If the operator doesn't stop it after about 10 seconds, the battery fires a missile by itself. Two harriers and at least one helicopter(I believe it had close to 30 British troops on board) were shot down that way. Nobody survived.
It's pretty fucking embarrassing that our troops and their computer systems can't tell the difference between a helicopter and a missile traveling at nearly the speed of sound, and that a system which was routinely proven to have unacceptable friendly-fire targeting problems was deployed so heavily(and when problems surfaced as expected, to meet a threat that didn't exist, the systems were not shut off). As always, technology is being hauled in to solve a problem other technology and sheer incompetence created.
When I was in college, our physics books were a "collaborative" book developed by Thomas Moore and "published" by McGraw-Hill. I dug one of the volumes out- it's bound with that cheesy plastic springy binder, because my college had to print it. So it's practically falling apart- whereas the textbooks from my father's classes are still looking good on his shelf in his office.
Doing your homework was fun- absolutely every problem set we did had at LEAST one mistake, to the point that our physics teacher was probably the most annoyed and frustrated of all of us as we went over our homework the next day. Every problem had to be worked out by the class together and double-checked, because the teacher's edition was wrong too! Great except when you're behind, everyone understood the problem, and you need to catch up on the curriculum schedule.
Graphs has wrong units, labels, variable names, or simply didn't exist but had problems referencing them. Equations were flat-out wrong or had typos. Page numbers and section numbers didn't match(Ie "see section 3-2 for more information on..."). Diagrams looked like they were drawn by a kid(you know, things like sailboats with triangle sails and trapezoid hulls? Flowers with smiley faces? Etc.)
The kicker? We were the second year to use the book, and the first year's class had turned in a HUGE list of corrections to Moore. The second edition sprouted even more errors, and some of the errors from the first year were never corrected. We weren't the only ones using it, either; plenty of other schools turned in corrections as well. I feel sorry for the kids at Pomona, must have been embarrassing to know other schools were using it.
Of course, this is all torture for me since I live next-door in Vancouver, just out of reach of the network.
If you're desperate and the terrain will cooperate, perhaps build a cantenna(or buy one of those wire-dish highly directional antennas). You might have to open up the modem to get an external antenna installed...although the modem might be leased, making that a no-go option.
There are "good samaritan" laws around here that say since he's a doctor, he's obliged to help. But, if he went out and performed CPR on someone who later died or got brain damage, they'd sue his ass into the ground for providing medical services without consent..
Very often said Good Samaritan laws have protections in them which make such a scenario impossible. If your cardiologist friend lives in MA, for example- he needs to speak with a lawyer, because he was fully protected.
I imagine even if he wasn't, its the sort of thing that wouldn't raise his insurance premiums one iota(at least not directly). Sorry, but I'm -really- tired of hearing doctors, driving $100,000 cars, living in multi-million-dollar homes, with trophy wives and 6 weeks vacation on some private island...whine about how rough it is that their insurance just costs so gosh darn much.
Ever looked at medical stats? We have shit for medical care in this country- some of the highest malpractice, fatality and complication(ie, go in for one thing, come out with something else) rates in the world; our doctors and nurses are, for the most part, completely incompetent by modern standards. Some(staph infection, for example) are simply because doctors are --too fucking lazy-- to wash their hands properly. At a DC doctor's conference on infection control, barely 1/4 of the mens room users even so much as washed their hands under running water!
Dad is nuclear physicist and he also says that of all dangerous things he can only think about one, which is riding on fifth or sixth gear on my bike
Yep. Especially when you're wearing jeans, which will be ripped through in a half-second if you were to fall off the bike. I don't ride a motorcycle, but I do know only the truly stupid ride without motorcycle pants+jacket/suit, especially if the roads aren't in great shape and you'd be lucky if days went by before someone happened to pass you by. Same goes for riding without a helmet- dumb, dumb, dumb.
I am a student working at a helpdesk at a university, one day we came in to a voicemail from a user where they apparently thought they hung up the phone but they hit the 3 way button and well ill let you guys listen for yourselves.
That's nothing. We had a vendor do the same thing- he was apparently on a conference call to his boss, and his boss made him call us for an update. The voicemail went as normal, and then there was a click-click.
"Yeah, I got his voicemail, the guy wasn't around." They then proceeded to discuss how they'd handle selling us on something, so on so forth.
It was so priceless I yelled for my boss to come over, hit the "start over" button and within minutes everyone in the department was giggling with glee that a vendor was not only stupid enough to not know how to work a phone, but to also talk about a customer behind their back. We never did tell him, or give him our business, for that matter:-)
The three-way calling reminds me of a story from a book- I forget which- where the author was at a college which got three-way calling for free. The author's friend would, for fun, flip open the phonebook to a random page, plant his finger down, call the number wherever his finger landed. When the person answered, he'd say "Hang on a sec!", put them on hold, and then dial the other number and say the same thing, then connect them. The conversations were reportedly priceless once you got through the universal part, which was: "Hey, why did you call me?" "I didn't call you, you called me!" "No I didn't!"...
Actually, I went to go see Spirited Away. I didn't see a single type of the person he mentions. In fact, there were a number of older couples, and a lot of normal teenybopper middle school kids. Plenty of people went to see it here in Boston because it got a great review in the Globe.
The guy has more pent up anger than I've seen in ages. You want a perfect example? How about this. He's mentally ill, complaining about people who go "Hmmmm" while thinking about things, for example- and speaks of murdering women by bashing their heads against walls. A very disturbed and dangerous individual who needs psychological help, much more so than any of the individuals he described.
t will start this new initiative by making it's suite of tools run easily under WINE, then depending on the response it gets, it will port it's tools natively to Linux!
Can we keep the tools, but not get the plugin? Please? PLEASE?
Isn't it sad when you prefer the platform where a quarter of the "web" content DOESN'T work, and that's perfectly OK? No full motion ads, no ads that start talking to you when you mouse-over them...
I forget where i read it, but UT2004 was supposed to focus less on eye-candy for better gameplay...but after setting nearly every option to the minimum, turning off decals, dynamic lighting, shadows, yadda yadda- the framerate still sucks, especially at the worst time- when you're getting you ass whooped, because the game engine's choking on all the particles.
I played the link-the-powernodes game and found it endlessly stupid. The game's pretty much decided in the first 30-40 seconds by who gets the most nodes. There are so many weapons, all just slight variations. The rocket launcher can't hold more than 3 rockets, which REALLY sucks, you used to be able to load up something like 8- that was half the reason it rocked, you just had limited ammo to even things out a little. The pistol is gone; it was highly accurate- i could practically snipe people with them, and with two in hand, you could knock down a player in seconds, rapid fire for when you were close; sometimes I'd just play entire games with two pistols, they were perfect. The assault rifle is mostly worthless, doing little damage and spraying fire all over the place. The new grenade "charge up" scheme sucks. Don't get me started about the vehicles being a near 100% ripoff from Halo, only implemented far worse. Even the gun turrets suck.
I've been sorely disappointed in everything after the original Unreal Tournament..
Everyone keeps saying this. I looked at the diagram, and at least one part of the lens moves. That's a moving part, folks. Stop saying it "has no moving parts".
Now, here are some predictions:
They'll still break. Electrodes will corrode. Membranes will rupture. Say they discover after extended operation that the first units put a little too much voltage through the lens or something. You get the idea.
Materials used, such as the membranes, will age. Either becoming stiff, brittle, or simply change properties enough that the lens doesn't focus the way it was supposed to
the curve won't be as perfect as everyone is hyping and initial cameras will have excessively blurry images, or images that are blurry in parts but not others due to inconsistencies in high-volume manufacturing of the membranes(think LCD screen "acceptable bad pixel count")
light loss will be significant. Whereas in the glass optics field we have multicoated lenses that are incredibly efficient, none of those coatings could be applied to the materials on this lens, and furthermore, you've got(for each element) 4 surfaces, not two, for light to pass through.
Color balance will be odd despite calibration efforts, and will change as the fluid/membranes age(probably from UV exposure).
It will be useless on anything other than consumer point&shoots. The sensor on a Canon 10D DSLR for example is almost twice the width of that prototype they showed, and uses lenses 2-3x larger still.
Is any attempt made at determining whether these kids get help from their parents? Is it done by the honor system?
Many of the events require on-the-spot stuff. Those that don't, yes, its possible. Years ago I built a egg launcher with a few friends for a Sci Olympiad competition, and my father came up with the idea of a composite-core catapult arm(aluminum shower curtain rod, which is what we had been using, only with a wood core glued in. Tt worked, we stopped bending the arm...and yes, we were using that much force- we could launch an egg clear across a football field with no problem. We set up next to some folks with a rubber band and a teaspoon...they were slightly disappointed). Still, we did 95% of the construction and design entirely on our own as a team, and fully 50% of the equation was catching it(we luckily had a lacrosse player on our team!) Not to mention, we learned something about composite materials.
Furthermore, it's a team effort- most of the people I knew on the team would have been rather put off if someone's parents contributed too much, probably to the point of mentioning it to the advisor.
Oh, the other project I was involved in was a rube goldberg machine. I was told, by my two other teammates, that my one part of the machine was virtually the only thing that worked, and it worked VERY well. It was a wad of steel wool hooked up to a switch and battery, to ignite or cut something. The fire apparently spread a tad(numerous components involved wood, plastic, paper, etc).
Check out the Max Pac [maxvision.com] for some more insight into this, they put a desktop PC into a briefcase with a 21" LCD on the side.
Portables aren't anything all that new- I used a portable PC with an LCD(the size of a postage stamp, and a nice orange monocolor- not even greyscale) for a science project back in the days of DOS. It was about the size of a very small sewing machine, and the keyboard(which was infrared-based) popped out of one side to reveal the screen. Can't remember the name of it for the life of me, but it had a hard drive, floppy, etc. Datapack? Data-something...hmm.
There's also the infamous Macintosh Portable, aka the Lugable. It was the size of a typewriter, and weighed about 3 times more. The first Powerbook wasn't a leap in portability- it was like a cross-country trip. I think my 17" powerbook probably weighs about the same as the original powerbook, but it's taken about 15 years for that to happen.
They may have exploded, but they're still valid currency. The treasury has an entire department which is solely for processing damaged money. I remember seeing an interview with one of the inspectors. I believe the essential part of it was that you had to have more than the majority of the bill material in OK condition to prove that you didn't just cut it up and try to claim all the pieces.
Since the bills are intact all the way around and it looks like in many cases the serials are OK, I'd say he's OK, and can get them exchanged for non-exploded ones. Of course, he better not go saying he microwaved them, as destruction of currency is a federal crime(the penny-mangling machines are 'licensed' to do it, to nip one question in the bud...)
What is interesting is that they burned so readily- US currency is supposed to be decently non-flammable(it's one of thousands of tests done on the paper and ink- that's why your bills make it through the laundry OK, for example). It's probably the toughest paper in the world, able to survive virtually anything. Except microwaving, apparently:-)
When a provider starts blocking large stretches of IP blocks owned by a particular ISP like UUNet, average users scream bloody murder.
Yes- but the funny thing is that these days, ISPs are so competitive that there is little to no way to differentiate between them; even the slightest advantage/disadvantage can have wide-ranging consequences.
In fact, one of the largest factors is reliability, both locally and long-range; you don't want your T1 to go down, and you pretty much expect to be able to get to anything on the internet. UUnet is widely regarded as one of the most reliable. Wouldn't it be a shock if, gee whiz, UUnet customers suddenly found their mail bouncing back to them, they couldn't get to websites(and their customers couldn't get to -their- website), and so on?
The very fascinating part is that it doesn't take much to make this sort of thing effective; the mere chance that your site might not be accessible to people is enough to make you want to switch, or not go with UUnet at all.
The problem is that you have to hurt them more than spam is helping them. Yes, helping. For every byte of a spam that gets delivered, who makes money? Not the spammers, directly. If SMTP traffic were unbillable, UUnet would be all over spam like a dog on fleas. But, it makes them money and makes up more and more of their business, quite frankly. I'm sure they -love- spam. Too bad that such a vision is remarkably shortsighted- if spam gets bad enough, people will be driven away from email just like they were driven away from usenet(I used to read usenet daily- I haven't fired up a news reader in probably 10 years, because all of usenet is just spam, spam, and more spam).
I think it's time we reinstituted the usenet death penalty, only for routers, webservers, and email servers. Participation from businesses is unlikely, but there are plenty of sites still run by individuals willing to make a point. Heck, you don't even have to block them, you can just trigger a blurb on every webpage("Hi there, you're a UUnet customer. UUnet supports spammers. If they keep doing it, you won't be able to view this webpage") based on their IP, for example.
run revdep rebuild because recompiling one of the libraries broke something else
run etc-update to update various etc files, and tell emerge for the 50,000th time that NO, you DON'T want to overwrite smb.conf because you changed 2-3 lines(multiply this by 20+ config files that are normally configured as part of a system)...and struggle to figure out if there was actually anything important in the new config file emerge wanted to merge in, since the hand-merge tool is as clunky as could possibly be
merge in one updated config file only to discover you just merged an "old" new config file, because you forgot to run etc-update last time and it was left-over
listen to some pimply puke tell you "luz0r, y0 sholdn't be runninz unstable" when your system breaks, and have to explain to him for the thousandth time that the reason you're running unstable is because the packages in "stable" are so old you'd be hacked overnight(and we're not talking unusual stuff here, either- we're talking packages like apache). Notice with frustration that there have been 6 unstable releases of a particular package since the last stable release, none apparently good enough to earn promotion to stable.
Gentoo has come a ways from when I first tried it, and I use it on 3 systems- but the Gentoo team needs to make a serious effort to recruit people for maintaining the portage tree and especially fast, thorough certification of updated packages.
Catalyst sounds nice, but what about a tool for making our own initrds so I can, for example, load the module-only driver for my raid card? I think a lot of people have a need for loading third-party drivers in order to boot.
RAID card vendors have a funny definition for "linux support". My Promise SX4 card's SATA interfaces, and not the raid interface, are the only thing 2.6 supports, so you get to stare at 4 separate drives instead of your RAID-5 array; one helpful page suggests that "that's ok because software raid is better anyway"- um, okay. Promise's half-closed-source driver(which is available from 'some guy in germany') won't compile under 2.6, but does under 2.4; however, only as a module, so bringing up the system off the card is impossible without an initrd, even though LILO will work since it uses the BIOS to get the kernel and initrd.
I tried using genkernel, which does build initrds, but I haven't been able to make an initrd that'll boot a -normal- system without tons of module errors, and adding the FasTrak driver module into an already built initrd is a huge pain as well, something else I haven't gotten working. Anyone have a good link to a guide to making initrds and specifically dealing with module headache and describing how the initrd then boots the system off the real_root partition?
'course, i'd also settle for a howto on tricking the kernel into linking the module directly into the kernel, that'd do the same thing...
All this is great and wonderful, but hides a serious problem. There are several problems facing the internet these days, IMHO. You can see the signs in the quality of link-quantified based search engines like google.
Problem #1: when people contribute, they do so on corporate sites. Epinions. Livejournal. Even Photo.net is a perfect example of the clustering that happens, as is mp3.com...and mp3.com is an even better example of the problems with this. a)someone else suddenly gets rights to your stuff, and b)when they disappear, so does a huge chunk(relatively) of the net. c)While all this web-application crap is lovely and cute, we've discovered that it costs money and you can't do it just off banner ads- so a large number of these companies fail pretty fast if they don't find some way to charge for it, and people don't like paying anyone but their ISP, really(and that won't change with micropayments, IMHO). Nobody realized that the only people who could afford to host pictures etc- were the ISPs themselves, because they're actually getting paid for your access. Shock, gasp- the old model was better than the new one.
Problem #2: overreliance on search engines. The web really isn't anymore- its more like a branched tree in many ways, because people don't rely on links from, say, their ISP's homepage. They fire up google instead. The internet is supposed to recover from major chunks disappearing, but what happens if google goes off the air tomorrow? I bet you'd see an immediate drop in traffic(well, aside from a hundred million people IM'ing/emailing each other saying "hey, did you know google is down?"). People would be lost. I remember in '96 I used my ISP's homepage as a jumping point; now that's virtually unheard of. People use portals, not their ISP's homepage- the predecessor to portals. Again, gasp, shock- the old system was better.
Problem #3: Companies that host these sites really don't like spiders; they suck up bandwidth and often cause dynamic apps to crumble under the load- I've seen it happen, and I've killed/blocked spiders myself because they would have run up enormous bandwidth bills(I help run a mailing list with about 11 years of archives). Either that, or the spider might not be able to index the dynamic content. Add this to point #1+2, and oops- a large chunk of content contributed by that 44% just dropped off the radar of the rest of the world...because remember how dependent we are on search engines like google?
Problem #4: people just don't link to stuff they like anymore, really. It used to be techno-gear-heads like us, and we usually posted our favorite links or even our bookmark files directly. Joe Shmoe doesn't. The mere fact that a very small bunch of people with blogs(not to mention the companies that manage to get 60 links to the same page into google results) can sway google is a perfect example of how few people link anymore off their homepages. Don't like it? Put up links to your favorite stuff on your homepage, and don't forget to use proper descriptive text(see the w3's homepage- "here" is a perfect example of what NOT to use between the A tags!)
And now, my head is about to explode from all this deep thinking:-) [discuss!]
Maybe the poster doesn't know that iLink is what sony call firewire? For some obscure reason Sony use a different name and a different connector, so it's not at all obvious that it's the same thing.
It's not an "obscure reason", it was a legal one. Apple trademarked the word "Firewire", and Sony didn't want to pay to use it, or Apple wouldn't let them use it, so they call it iLink. Others call/label it "1394", or less-commonly, the full "IEEE-1394".
If the camera is not equipped with Firewire, he's tough out of luck unless it's USB2, because USB 1 is not fast enough for DV.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a chat with a Veep that was hired on to a company I used to work at. Very down to earth guy, very friendly. We got to talking about spams and semi-legitimate emailings to customers, etc.
He had one very interesting tidbit; stick with me for a sec here. Most companies outsource their semi-legit stuff because they get reported as spammers and whatnot, or it bogs down their email server/network, etc. No surprise there- however, the interesting tidbit is that the outsourcing companies turn around and outsource to Indian firms for handling the bounces. There's literally a room full of people in India, sitting there answering those challenge/responses and updating the client's customer email list(unlike spammers, it really is in their best interests to minimize failed deliveries). It sounds "expensive", but it's not, considering how few people use challenge/response systems. Further- a reasonably smart human can get familiar with all the various systems quickly(an hour or two, I'd guess, tops) and probably process close to a message every few seconds with a client program set up to do that limited functionality smoothly. Best part- if your client does several mailings, unless the recipient goes in and removes you, you're clear for future emailings.
Nope, I'd suggest you practice your English :-)
Besides, you don't practice your French, you pardon it! Or replace it with "Freedom" if you're a conservative Republican asswipe. Well, not always. "Pardon my Freedom, but.." sounds pretty dumb.
You mean like the 'Star Wars" Missile Defense System which has failed numerous tests of increasing ease, but is being used anyway because "it beats nothing", except that "nothing" doesn't violate treaties we signed, creates a false sense of security, doesn't motivate anyone to 'get it right' and wastes trillions of dollars.
Or the Patriot Defense System, which routinely targeted friendly aircraft during development, failed miserably the first time it was put into use(for a use it was never intended- it's never been used for what it was originally designed for, shooting down planes) and then 10+ years later was used again and resulted in the deaths of dozens of UK soldiers because it couldn't tell the difference between a helicopter traveling at less than 100 kt and an enemy missile traveling over the speed of sound?
Or the Osprey tiltrotor, which suffered an astronomical failure rate and again, caused dozens of deaths of US marines?
Then there's the Comanche helicopter, which they've been kicking around for years and finally decided, after spending billions, to just say "oh well, so much for that"?
The defense department is famous for bidding scandals(if contracts are put out to bid at all), and being happy to look the other way and fudge the requirements(or ignore them completely) if the system fails to meet original requirements.
Curiously, the russians never quite had such problems. Their fighter jets, for example, don't require pristine runways and constant maintenance; they're built like tanks, because the people who designed them knew they'd be held responsible if it failed unreasonably...and responsible doesn't mean "loose their job", it means "end up in Siberia" or "in a river with a bullet through your brain".
This country needs three things. First, a true capitalist system for defense contractors. You want to sell the Army a tank? Fine. You can do so all on your own, without a single fucking dime, and then try and sell it. If it can't compete, too bad, your company goes under- that's the way capitalism works. Second, defense contractors need to be held responsible for when their products fail. Refunds for starters, contracts that can be invalidated on failure, civil/criminal punishments for gross design/construction failures. Third, absolutely, positively, no secret budgets of any kind. I am entirely pissed off with the pentagon filling up with all the kids who had secret treehouse clubs when they were kids and want to do the same shit now that they're 40.
Did you read any of the many guides you can find with a quick Google search? You need only have proper versions of various kernel utils, sometimes swap needs to be reformatted if it's a really old system..and of course you have to make sure you enable all the right stuff, just as with any other kernel build...
Yeah, but come to think of it, not recently...no wonder they're having problems! Quick, someone pop down to CVS and buy a can! Or maybe spring a little extra for some of that grit-free stuff...
Quite frankly, the teacher should be more concerned about the bullies; the smart kid isn't the problem, the bullies are. Why?
They usually turn out to be complete rejects as far as society goes; violent neanderthals, basically. Everyone looks the other way until BAM, they hit the real world and suddenly end up in jail for bashing their girlfriend's head against the wall(unless they happen to make it big in sports). Meanwhile, the geek suffers and may be secluded, but ultimately contributes to society in ways the ape never could have.
The solution here is to be strict with punishing the kids that pick on him. Johnny makes fun of him for not combing his hair? Johnny gets a time-out and a talk about how we're all different people, and we need to accept those who are different from us. Children start out as pretty accepting- but in the early years they can either learn it's really NOT ok to pick on other people, or they can get away with it, feel slightly good about themselves, and keep doing it. Learning to accept others makes them far more likely to succeed in school and particularly in the workplace(ie, "team players").
Joke as you will, but we shot down more British soldiers due to stupid screw ups than were shot by Iraqis. Maybe instead of translators, we should be writing control systems for our automated missile defense systems that don't suck, and putting someone a little more responsible and trained than 18 year old dropouts at the controls. In at least one incident, it was because Patriot missile batteries kept identifying helicopters and planes as inbound missiles. If the operator doesn't stop it after about 10 seconds, the battery fires a missile by itself. Two harriers and at least one helicopter(I believe it had close to 30 British troops on board) were shot down that way. Nobody survived.
It's pretty fucking embarrassing that our troops and their computer systems can't tell the difference between a helicopter and a missile traveling at nearly the speed of sound, and that a system which was routinely proven to have unacceptable friendly-fire targeting problems was deployed so heavily(and when problems surfaced as expected, to meet a threat that didn't exist, the systems were not shut off). As always, technology is being hauled in to solve a problem other technology and sheer incompetence created.
When I was in college, our physics books were a "collaborative" book developed by Thomas Moore and "published" by McGraw-Hill. I dug one of the volumes out- it's bound with that cheesy plastic springy binder, because my college had to print it. So it's practically falling apart- whereas the textbooks from my father's classes are still looking good on his shelf in his office.
Doing your homework was fun- absolutely every problem set we did had at LEAST one mistake, to the point that our physics teacher was probably the most annoyed and frustrated of all of us as we went over our homework the next day. Every problem had to be worked out by the class together and double-checked, because the teacher's edition was wrong too! Great except when you're behind, everyone understood the problem, and you need to catch up on the curriculum schedule.
Graphs has wrong units, labels, variable names, or simply didn't exist but had problems referencing them. Equations were flat-out wrong or had typos. Page numbers and section numbers didn't match(Ie "see section 3-2 for more information on..."). Diagrams looked like they were drawn by a kid(you know, things like sailboats with triangle sails and trapezoid hulls? Flowers with smiley faces? Etc.)
The kicker? We were the second year to use the book, and the first year's class had turned in a HUGE list of corrections to Moore. The second edition sprouted even more errors, and some of the errors from the first year were never corrected. We weren't the only ones using it, either; plenty of other schools turned in corrections as well. I feel sorry for the kids at Pomona, must have been embarrassing to know other schools were using it.
If you're desperate and the terrain will cooperate, perhaps build a cantenna(or buy one of those wire-dish highly directional antennas). You might have to open up the modem to get an external antenna installed...although the modem might be leased, making that a no-go option.
Very often said Good Samaritan laws have protections in them which make such a scenario impossible. If your cardiologist friend lives in MA, for example- he needs to speak with a lawyer, because he was fully protected.
I imagine even if he wasn't, its the sort of thing that wouldn't raise his insurance premiums one iota(at least not directly). Sorry, but I'm -really- tired of hearing doctors, driving $100,000 cars, living in multi-million-dollar homes, with trophy wives and 6 weeks vacation on some private island...whine about how rough it is that their insurance just costs so gosh darn much.
Ever looked at medical stats? We have shit for medical care in this country- some of the highest malpractice, fatality and complication(ie, go in for one thing, come out with something else) rates in the world; our doctors and nurses are, for the most part, completely incompetent by modern standards. Some(staph infection, for example) are simply because doctors are --too fucking lazy-- to wash their hands properly. At a DC doctor's conference on infection control, barely 1/4 of the mens room users even so much as washed their hands under running water!
Yep. Especially when you're wearing jeans, which will be ripped through in a half-second if you were to fall off the bike. I don't ride a motorcycle, but I do know only the truly stupid ride without motorcycle pants+jacket/suit, especially if the roads aren't in great shape and you'd be lucky if days went by before someone happened to pass you by. Same goes for riding without a helmet- dumb, dumb, dumb.
That's nothing. We had a vendor do the same thing- he was apparently on a conference call to his boss, and his boss made him call us for an update. The voicemail went as normal, and then there was a click-click.
"Yeah, I got his voicemail, the guy wasn't around." They then proceeded to discuss how they'd handle selling us on something, so on so forth.
It was so priceless I yelled for my boss to come over, hit the "start over" button and within minutes everyone in the department was giggling with glee that a vendor was not only stupid enough to not know how to work a phone, but to also talk about a customer behind their back. We never did tell him, or give him our business, for that matter :-)
The three-way calling reminds me of a story from a book- I forget which- where the author was at a college which got three-way calling for free. The author's friend would, for fun, flip open the phonebook to a random page, plant his finger down, call the number wherever his finger landed. When the person answered, he'd say "Hang on a sec!", put them on hold, and then dial the other number and say the same thing, then connect them. The conversations were reportedly priceless once you got through the universal part, which was: "Hey, why did you call me?" "I didn't call you, you called me!" "No I didn't!"...
Actually, I went to go see Spirited Away. I didn't see a single type of the person he mentions. In fact, there were a number of older couples, and a lot of normal teenybopper middle school kids. Plenty of people went to see it here in Boston because it got a great review in the Globe.
The guy has more pent up anger than I've seen in ages. You want a perfect example? How about this. He's mentally ill, complaining about people who go "Hmmmm" while thinking about things, for example- and speaks of murdering women by bashing their heads against walls. A very disturbed and dangerous individual who needs psychological help, much more so than any of the individuals he described.
Can we keep the tools, but not get the plugin? Please? PLEASE?
Isn't it sad when you prefer the platform where a quarter of the "web" content DOESN'T work, and that's perfectly OK? No full motion ads, no ads that start talking to you when you mouse-over them...
I forget where i read it, but UT2004 was supposed to focus less on eye-candy for better gameplay...but after setting nearly every option to the minimum, turning off decals, dynamic lighting, shadows, yadda yadda- the framerate still sucks, especially at the worst time- when you're getting you ass whooped, because the game engine's choking on all the particles.
I played the link-the-powernodes game and found it endlessly stupid. The game's pretty much decided in the first 30-40 seconds by who gets the most nodes. There are so many weapons, all just slight variations. The rocket launcher can't hold more than 3 rockets, which REALLY sucks, you used to be able to load up something like 8- that was half the reason it rocked, you just had limited ammo to even things out a little. The pistol is gone; it was highly accurate- i could practically snipe people with them, and with two in hand, you could knock down a player in seconds, rapid fire for when you were close; sometimes I'd just play entire games with two pistols, they were perfect. The assault rifle is mostly worthless, doing little damage and spraying fire all over the place. The new grenade "charge up" scheme sucks. Don't get me started about the vehicles being a near 100% ripoff from Halo, only implemented far worse. Even the gun turrets suck.
I've been sorely disappointed in everything after the original Unreal Tournament..
Everyone keeps saying this. I looked at the diagram, and at least one part of the lens moves. That's a moving part, folks. Stop saying it "has no moving parts".
Now, here are some predictions:
Many of the events require on-the-spot stuff. Those that don't, yes, its possible. Years ago I built a egg launcher with a few friends for a Sci Olympiad competition, and my father came up with the idea of a composite-core catapult arm(aluminum shower curtain rod, which is what we had been using, only with a wood core glued in. Tt worked, we stopped bending the arm...and yes, we were using that much force- we could launch an egg clear across a football field with no problem. We set up next to some folks with a rubber band and a teaspoon...they were slightly disappointed). Still, we did 95% of the construction and design entirely on our own as a team, and fully 50% of the equation was catching it(we luckily had a lacrosse player on our team!) Not to mention, we learned something about composite materials.
Furthermore, it's a team effort- most of the people I knew on the team would have been rather put off if someone's parents contributed too much, probably to the point of mentioning it to the advisor.
Oh, the other project I was involved in was a rube goldberg machine. I was told, by my two other teammates, that my one part of the machine was virtually the only thing that worked, and it worked VERY well. It was a wad of steel wool hooked up to a switch and battery, to ignite or cut something. The fire apparently spread a tad(numerous components involved wood, plastic, paper, etc).
Portables aren't anything all that new- I used a portable PC with an LCD(the size of a postage stamp, and a nice orange monocolor- not even greyscale) for a science project back in the days of DOS. It was about the size of a very small sewing machine, and the keyboard(which was infrared-based) popped out of one side to reveal the screen. Can't remember the name of it for the life of me, but it had a hard drive, floppy, etc. Datapack? Data-something...hmm.
There's also the infamous Macintosh Portable, aka the Lugable. It was the size of a typewriter, and weighed about 3 times more. The first Powerbook wasn't a leap in portability- it was like a cross-country trip. I think my 17" powerbook probably weighs about the same as the original powerbook, but it's taken about 15 years for that to happen.
Ah, so for all our college-student friends, that would be "the parents' house"?
They may have exploded, but they're still valid currency. The treasury has an entire department which is solely for processing damaged money. I remember seeing an interview with one of the inspectors. I believe the essential part of it was that you had to have more than the majority of the bill material in OK condition to prove that you didn't just cut it up and try to claim all the pieces.
Since the bills are intact all the way around and it looks like in many cases the serials are OK, I'd say he's OK, and can get them exchanged for non-exploded ones. Of course, he better not go saying he microwaved them, as destruction of currency is a federal crime(the penny-mangling machines are 'licensed' to do it, to nip one question in the bud...)
What is interesting is that they burned so readily- US currency is supposed to be decently non-flammable(it's one of thousands of tests done on the paper and ink- that's why your bills make it through the laundry OK, for example). It's probably the toughest paper in the world, able to survive virtually anything. Except microwaving, apparently :-)
Yes- but the funny thing is that these days, ISPs are so competitive that there is little to no way to differentiate between them; even the slightest advantage/disadvantage can have wide-ranging consequences.
In fact, one of the largest factors is reliability, both locally and long-range; you don't want your T1 to go down, and you pretty much expect to be able to get to anything on the internet. UUnet is widely regarded as one of the most reliable. Wouldn't it be a shock if, gee whiz, UUnet customers suddenly found their mail bouncing back to them, they couldn't get to websites(and their customers couldn't get to -their- website), and so on?
The very fascinating part is that it doesn't take much to make this sort of thing effective; the mere chance that your site might not be accessible to people is enough to make you want to switch, or not go with UUnet at all.
The problem is that you have to hurt them more than spam is helping them. Yes, helping. For every byte of a spam that gets delivered, who makes money? Not the spammers, directly. If SMTP traffic were unbillable, UUnet would be all over spam like a dog on fleas. But, it makes them money and makes up more and more of their business, quite frankly. I'm sure they -love- spam. Too bad that such a vision is remarkably shortsighted- if spam gets bad enough, people will be driven away from email just like they were driven away from usenet(I used to read usenet daily- I haven't fired up a news reader in probably 10 years, because all of usenet is just spam, spam, and more spam).
I think it's time we reinstituted the usenet death penalty, only for routers, webservers, and email servers. Participation from businesses is unlikely, but there are plenty of sites still run by individuals willing to make a point. Heck, you don't even have to block them, you can just trigger a blurb on every webpage("Hi there, you're a UUnet customer. UUnet supports spammers. If they keep doing it, you won't be able to view this webpage") based on their IP, for example.
You forgot:
Gentoo has come a ways from when I first tried it, and I use it on 3 systems- but the Gentoo team needs to make a serious effort to recruit people for maintaining the portage tree and especially fast, thorough certification of updated packages.
Catalyst sounds nice, but what about a tool for making our own initrds so I can, for example, load the module-only driver for my raid card? I think a lot of people have a need for loading third-party drivers in order to boot.
RAID card vendors have a funny definition for "linux support". My Promise SX4 card's SATA interfaces, and not the raid interface, are the only thing 2.6 supports, so you get to stare at 4 separate drives instead of your RAID-5 array; one helpful page suggests that "that's ok because software raid is better anyway"- um, okay. Promise's half-closed-source driver(which is available from 'some guy in germany') won't compile under 2.6, but does under 2.4; however, only as a module, so bringing up the system off the card is impossible without an initrd, even though LILO will work since it uses the BIOS to get the kernel and initrd.
I tried using genkernel, which does build initrds, but I haven't been able to make an initrd that'll boot a -normal- system without tons of module errors, and adding the FasTrak driver module into an already built initrd is a huge pain as well, something else I haven't gotten working. Anyone have a good link to a guide to making initrds and specifically dealing with module headache and describing how the initrd then boots the system off the real_root partition?
'course, i'd also settle for a howto on tricking the kernel into linking the module directly into the kernel, that'd do the same thing...
All this is great and wonderful, but hides a serious problem. There are several problems facing the internet these days, IMHO. You can see the signs in the quality of link-quantified based search engines like google.
Problem #1: when people contribute, they do so on corporate sites. Epinions. Livejournal. Even Photo.net is a perfect example of the clustering that happens, as is mp3.com...and mp3.com is an even better example of the problems with this. a)someone else suddenly gets rights to your stuff, and b)when they disappear, so does a huge chunk(relatively) of the net. c)While all this web-application crap is lovely and cute, we've discovered that it costs money and you can't do it just off banner ads- so a large number of these companies fail pretty fast if they don't find some way to charge for it, and people don't like paying anyone but their ISP, really(and that won't change with micropayments, IMHO). Nobody realized that the only people who could afford to host pictures etc- were the ISPs themselves, because they're actually getting paid for your access. Shock, gasp- the old model was better than the new one.
Problem #2: overreliance on search engines. The web really isn't anymore- its more like a branched tree in many ways, because people don't rely on links from, say, their ISP's homepage. They fire up google instead. The internet is supposed to recover from major chunks disappearing, but what happens if google goes off the air tomorrow? I bet you'd see an immediate drop in traffic(well, aside from a hundred million people IM'ing/emailing each other saying "hey, did you know google is down?"). People would be lost. I remember in '96 I used my ISP's homepage as a jumping point; now that's virtually unheard of. People use portals, not their ISP's homepage- the predecessor to portals. Again, gasp, shock- the old system was better.
Problem #3: Companies that host these sites really don't like spiders; they suck up bandwidth and often cause dynamic apps to crumble under the load- I've seen it happen, and I've killed/blocked spiders myself because they would have run up enormous bandwidth bills(I help run a mailing list with about 11 years of archives). Either that, or the spider might not be able to index the dynamic content. Add this to point #1+2, and oops- a large chunk of content contributed by that 44% just dropped off the radar of the rest of the world...because remember how dependent we are on search engines like google?
Problem #4: people just don't link to stuff they like anymore, really. It used to be techno-gear-heads like us, and we usually posted our favorite links or even our bookmark files directly. Joe Shmoe doesn't. The mere fact that a very small bunch of people with blogs(not to mention the companies that manage to get 60 links to the same page into google results) can sway google is a perfect example of how few people link anymore off their homepages. Don't like it? Put up links to your favorite stuff on your homepage, and don't forget to use proper descriptive text(see the w3's homepage- "here" is a perfect example of what NOT to use between the A tags!)
And now, my head is about to explode from all this deep thinking :-) [discuss!]
It's not an "obscure reason", it was a legal one. Apple trademarked the word "Firewire", and Sony didn't want to pay to use it, or Apple wouldn't let them use it, so they call it iLink. Others call/label it "1394", or less-commonly, the full "IEEE-1394".
If the camera is not equipped with Firewire, he's tough out of luck unless it's USB2, because USB 1 is not fast enough for DV.