You know, I don't like to be treated as a criminal by default when visiting a foreign country
According to whois, you live in Japan. Which has probably been the most xenophobic country in the last 500-1000 years. It's still culturally acceptable, if not expected, to refer to foreigners as gaijin- and god help you if you're Asian but not Japanese. Please tell me how many non-Japanese people you se on your way to work today? Uh huh- your country is one of the least racially-integrated on the planet.
Wikipedia says Japan in the 80's tortured prisoners (held for 72 hours, then another 10 days without any charges, all in line with your constitution) to extract confessions- and in the 70's, suspects were tortured until they signed blank confessions. We've had trial-by-jury for 200 years; you had it for 20 years around 1920, and now you're just finally getting it back.
At the time, Apple had BILLIONS of dollars in CASH (well, not real cash, but in bank accounts of course.) It was losing money, but it wasn't in need of a bailout or rescue- and the money "bought" MS a couple of things, one of which was IE being the default shipping browser. More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple#The_Microsoft_deal
Let me make that perfectly clear: the amount of money involved in the deal was insignificant to BOTH parties, and Microsoft got what it paid for.
Furthermore, Office for the Macintosh has always been one of Microsoft's most profitable products.
PS:It wasn't Jobs that was responsible for OS X. It was Amelio- he bought NEXT after BeOS stuck its thumb up at Apple and demanded a fortune. Jobs repaid the favor by manipulating the stock price and ousting Amelio.
It's had multiple print runs, been published in both the US and the UK, where they've sold well, and has been nominated for and granted a range of literary awards.
For chrissakes, sales volume is not about quality; Lynne Spears' (no doubt ghostwritten) crap go on there higher than he did. Little Brother went on at #14, then #9, then barely crawled up to #8, probably in sole part because every boingboing reader with spawn anywhere within 2-3 degrees of themselves (ie, the neighbor's kid, their coworker's sister's kid, etc) bought a copy and forced it on the poor kid's parents, who most likely said "a book about a kid who gets interrogated by DHS? And starts hacking stuff?" and chucked it in the can and thankfully gave their kid some quality YA literature. His work is such a piece of shit, he had to get boingboing readers to buy copies and GIVE THEM to libraries because they wouldn't buy/print copies of their own:
My sincere thanks to all of you who talked about the book, gave it to your friends, sent it to teachers and librarians, and downloaded it -- you all helped make this the first-ever Creative Commons-licensed novel to get on the NYT list!
How fucking sad is that? If he wasn't editor of boingboing, nobody would have given the book even a first glance. Same as if Cmdr Taco wrote a book- it'd only have a prayer because of slashdot readers.
Also: FOUR HUNDRED PAGES. Jesus christ!
Checking the Boston Public Library catalog, all but one of the NINE copies in the system are sitting on the shelves.
Television news didn't eliminate the newspaper, and neither will the internet. Change it, of course, eliminate, no way !
Don't forget radio, the second-oldest medium. Still alive, kicking, and well. Why, we even have a huge radio system supported in large part by private donations...gasp! Shows like Lake Woebegone and Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me live and indeed embrace new media; I listen to WWDTM all the time via my my iPod, downloaded via podcasts.
This latest is just the gasp of a flunkie, uneducated has-been science fiction author whose work is so spectacularly bad that he had never had a commercially successful work.
Cory Doctorow learned that people didn't like having to pay to watch movies, TV, and movies. A simpleton pundit who appeals to naivete; at the end of the day, nobody's forcing you to pay to listen to music. While Doctorow has bitched and moaned about copyright, the rest of the world keeps right on truckin', same as always, writing and performing in all media without much care towards copyright. I can go right now to three local bars and listen to bands perform songs, and a fair number of 'em will probably be covers, copyrighted work by someone else.
The results. The published papers, etc.
It's an important and distinctive feature of Science that results are reproducible.
Having worked around academic groups that do medical research for three years now, I can tell you that is absolutely not what drives research.
Researchers will love to tell you about how it is the quest for knowledge and other pie-in-the-sky ideals, but when it comes down to it- it's mostly about making a living (or more than a living), and fame/prestige.
See, journals have what's called an "impact factor." An impact factor is how many times an article in a particular journal ends up being cited by other papers. In one lab I worked at, it was closely tracked who was published where, and how many times.
At the end of the year, when it came time to decide who went and who stayed, the scores were lined up and however many people needed to go came from the bottom. The top ones get a little closer to becoming a PI (Principle Investigator, aka someone who has postdocs and grad students working for them.)
PIs, all the people you read about in the paper- they survived the process, but they're now nothing more than management. They don't do lab work, they don't do research. They solicit ideas from their postdocs, put the final polish on a grant proposal the postdoc slaved over, and get big fat checks from NIH for millions of dollars. The PIs then pass the work down to postdocs, who dole it out to grad students. The grad students do it because a PhD is dangled in front of them while they run on the treadmill of endless, monotonous, repetitive lab work and analysis work. The postdocs do it because faculty positions and PI slots are dangled in front of them.
The problem with "the system" is that nobody is rewarded for reaching that brass ring. Just like Ford has no incentive to build a very durable car (no service/parts sales after the vehicle hits the end of the warranty, and the market quickly becomes saturated) researchers have no incentive to completely solve issues facing us today; their incentive is to come close enough to say "aha, look, we did find SOMETHING, so your grant money wasn't wasted."
What incentive does a massive industry have to solve cancer, when it would put them out of business? Tens of thousands of people have dedicated most of their adult lives, usually to studying specific mechanisms and biological functions so narrow that if cancer were cured tomorrow, they would be useless- their training and knowledge is so focused, so narrow- they cannot compete with the existing population of researchers in other biomedical fields. Journals which charge big bucks for subscriptions also would be useless. Billions of dollars of materials, equipment, supplies, chemicals- gone. "Centers", hospitals, colleges, universities which each rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in private, government, and non-profit sourced money would be useless.
Hell yes. Ever removed the hard drive from an iBook?
I have, about a dozen times. It requires nearly complete dis-assembly. I had about sixteen PILES of different screws. When I took one apart that was for parts, the screws could have filled about a third of a shot glass. You need a large table, mostly to hold sheets of paper with areas marked out for keeping track of where the screws came from (not terribly hard to remember, but better safe than sorry.)
Total time to disassemble, swap drives, and re-assemble, after you've had practice? I think the fastest I ever did it was a little under an hour. Add extra if you refresh the loctite coatings on the screws that have it (recommended for machines which are young and will be kept for a while; the screws loosen up quite a bit with age.)
I don't know which was worse: the numerous (and continued, throughout the life of the series) major defects, or how badly it was designed WRT servicing. It's almost like they intentionally designed it to be a bitch to service to make up for thinner sales margins so they could nail people (mostly students and teachers) on labor after the glorious one-year warranty expires.
That was the most retarded thing that could possibly have been added to that summary.
No, it wasn't. It's perfectly valid to ask why two subs with competent sonar operators did not detect any noises from the other ship at such close range.
No, Nick. It wouldn't be, because nuclear weapons have to be detonated.
He was referring, most likely, to the nuclear POWER PLANT, moron.
Or, perhaps, to the fact that people who managed to ram each other are the same morons who are holding a huge number of the country's nuclear missiles.
Shake it at your PC and get an address book sync. and other such things... awesome.
Perhaps I have a healthy dose of skepticism of virtually anything that comes from the MIT Media lab, but I don't find this even remotely desirable. And have you noticed that the iPhone for two product generations has had the capability to utilize motion for gestures, and hasn't?
Also, notice what the little kid does with it, after watching other people play with it. The kid saw that they could change, make noise, etc. And what does he do?
He stacks them like regular building blocks. Completely treating them as just pure, inanimate physical objects, despite having it extensively demonstrated to him that they can be interacted with. Which pretty much shoots to hell Merrill's high-falutin' speech about...gah, it was so buzzword-laden, I can't even remember. Something about how we need these interactive blocks to learn?
Oh yes, and the sound/music thing was a direct ripoff of something that did exactly the same thing on a multi-touch table, about a year or two ago, recognizing shapes placed on the table and how they were manipulated.
This seems like a great possibility for adult-level gaming (nobody's going to buy something this expensive just for their kids), but nothing more.
Free usage of Sprint's 3G network. Not only for browsing the book store, but you can also check some blogs/news sites (including Slashdot), and you can access Wikipedia. No monthly fee, your $360 covers that "forever". Or until they change it, whatever comes first
I wouldn't count on the Kindle having wireless access past a year or two. Sprint is virtually on death's doorstep, and the first thing they'll do in bankruptcy court is get out of the contract with Amazon.
That's great for Amazon- when Sprint goes belly-up, people will have to buy new Kindles. Not to mention, Sprint was probably desperate for the business so the price and terms were right.
Why do we keep using a term that means, essentially, monarch or "supreme ruler"? Last I checked, these people aren't even members of the cabinet.
They're mid-level federal pencil-pushers, at best- and the only reason she got the job was because she was a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, which is basically a government consulting group (aka glorified money sinkhole.)
If that's not a conflict of interest, I don't know what is.
The hash isn't necessary. If the trust relationship between two academic peers includes "worried about him modify the paper after I review it", there is no trust relationship.
In fact, the whole thing isn't necessary. Pubmed, anyone? All someone has to do is pick up the phone and call the reference on a CV and say, "So, what did you think of Dr. X's work on Y?", and they learn more than they will running a program that says "Hashes verified."
This system is also never going to fly with researchers. Most (but not all) of the (brilliant) bio people I've worked with are completely helpless when it comes to technical stuff. Even some of the bioinformatics people who can write amazing algorithms aren't clued in on stuff outside of their field.
Rob Galbraith is the frequent butt of jokes about his ego and mouth- the man considers himself an expert on absolutely everything, loves to declare things horrible/worthless (he declared the Canon Mk3 autofocus to be "useless" as well, and that hasn't stopped news agencies the world-over from making the camera their standard equipment.)
His premise is that the laptop is worthless because of the glossy screen. Well, guess what? It's literally a $30 problem, and there will no doubt be at least a couple companies that produce lightweight fancy hoods that weigh next to nothing and shield the screen from glare for photographers who MUST do image adjustment in the field (which nobody does.)
He speaks as if he's an expert- but check out the qualifications of him and his team. He's a former photographer for a no-name Canadian paper....eight years ago. His partner shoots horsies for work. A third dude doesn't seem to have any qualifications except for being industrious in writing about photography and a former Nikon lackey. None of them have had showings of note. None of them are retained by any wire services that matter. None of them currently work in the field.
Ever heard about "splitting", where people tend to consider something all good or all bad? Galbraith is an almost pathological splitter, and he's completely ignorant of some solutions to the problem, if you otherwise like working with, or are required to work with macs/mac software by your company/agency/wire service. It's also a problem solved with about $10 of cardboard or plastic to make a viewing hood, which used to be extremely common back when (GASP!) everyone had "glossy" CRTs.
It also demonstrates how ignorant he is of how "real" professional photographers these days work. The big boys are told to send everything, touch nothing- they're in the business of shooting photos, not editing or adjusting them. Anyone who is anyone has a team of people sitting back at "HQ", with fast machines, professionally calibrated displays in controlled lighting, etc. Nobody (at least nobody doing it for money) does anything beyond rate/categorize images on laptops...which is what he claims the MBP "is only good for."
They had an entire crew killed on the launchpad on the very first go, and the crew of Apollo 13 were dumb-shit-lucky to make it back to earth. Six of the missions actually landed on the moon, out of SEVENTEEN missions (yes, a number were not designed to land on the moon, or even leave earth orbit.)
Even if you're exceptionally kind, NASA failed to reach the moon 1 in 7 tries.
You know how FiOS is just about everywhere along the east coast? Well, everywhere except Boston.
Why? Because in MA, each town decides if it wants to grant a franchise for cable TV. Not internet- just TV.
Verizon doesn't like that, but the burbs are the best customers- they have lots of HDTV sets, they like the packages, and they don't do annoying things like share their Wifi connection to 6 other people in a apartment building.
Well, guess what? Verizon has been rolling out FiOS to damn near everywhere in the state, even west-nowhere places like 500-person towns out near Worcester nobody has heard of...yet still no FiOS for anyone in Boston. It's even been in the papers- THREE YEARS AGO- about how Verizon was cherrypicking. A year ago, someone asked Mayor Menino what the fuck was going on, and he pointed the finger squarely at Verizon. Not that I trust him, but in the meantime, some hick represetative from the western end of the state gave Verizon tens of millions of dollars to roll out services in the western end of the state...with no requirements that they provide service to the city.
Meanwhile, we're stuck with really crappy DSL offerings, Comcast's throttling and misleading advertising (go on, try to find the real speed, not the "powerboost" speed which you get for all of about 10MB of transfer), or RCN's overall shittyness. Worse still- Comcast has just started getting really nasty about incoming SMTP and HTTP; they've shut me off twice, despite best efforts to sneak under their radar. I suspect they're enforcing their ToS to try and catch small/home business owners saving $50/month (yes, you read that right- $100/mo for internet service for businesses.)
The story is filled with astroturfers, lobbyists and others spending millions to manufacture FUD about privacy and monopoly
Um...they don't need to manufacture. There are serious privacy and internet coherency issues. Google has already become a major, slim-but-possible single-point-of-failure.
It's so bad, I see people enter domain names for popular sites into the search bar and then click on the search results.
Not really. The only ship that is sailing is the executive pardon ship; there isn't a chance in hell Obama will pardon anyone from the Bush administration for the torture stuff, and when you're out of office, it makes it much harder for you to retaliate (or get anyone in the current administration to retaliate) for going after you criminally.
There was a long podcast on Fresh Air recently (I think this is the one) about how nobody in the Bush administration is traveling outside the US- no book deals, conferences, vacations, or speaking tours. It's uncharacteristic (look at Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Bush Sr., for example.) Basically, they're scared shitless of being arrested and extradited. The human rights violations (torture, for starters) are so heinous in international law that ANY COUNTRY that signed the various conventions can choose to prosecute- and any that does can use extradition treaties to get their hands on such a person. Worse still, they can press the US government to cooperate with the investigation; do you really think Obama will fight handing over evidence of human rights violations and war crimes? He's already pissing off people left and right with his inauguration choices and proposed appointments...
Now, suddenly, we also internally have no hold on the justice department (which will be working for Obama and a democrat-controlled congress) who could choose to investigate, mainly because it's much less embarrassing to take care of this in-house than not. It's practically a slam-dunk case; Cheney admitted on national TV that he reviewed (and thus authorized) the torture of gitmo prisoners.
Somehow if Bush could manage it, I think he can too:)
Obama is actually extremely close to his pick for press secretary, and is probably interested in strengthening the executive branch via non-authoritarian ways.
That's where the much more significant debate has been; the press are excited at the possibility of a press secretary who is very close to the to-be President, but also wondering if it'll work out for the administration or not as it tries to pursue its goals.
I highly recommend listening to NPR/PRI podcasts, like On Point with Tom Ashbrook, and Fresh Air if you want to learn more about this stuff.
Can we stop all this portmanteau crap? Please? It's like the imaginary label "President-Elect"...
PS:
And as I've noted elsewhere, the 'Omigod, he left his Blackberry behind at dinner' issue is absurd
No, it's not. The people who surround the president have (practically since the inception of nuclear weapons) had problems keeping the codes or the authorization mechanisms physically secure, despite the fact that the fucking thing is in fact attached to the person carrying it:
On occasion the President has left his aide carrying the football behind. This happened to Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush[2] and, most recently, Bill Clinton on April 24, 1999.[3] In none of these cases was the integrity of the football breached.clicky.
It's one thing for a "football" which is specifically designed to not rely just on restricted access, but if someone got ahold of Obama's blackberry, getting into it isn't nearly as challenging.
Also, the article submitter doesn't have the remotest understanding of how things work at a presidential level in regards to information security; its not as simple as "zOMG, do not email the sec of defense on blackberry!" Bush went so far as to keep his press secretary at arm's length so that he was truly ignorant on stuff that Bush didn't want the press to know about.
Much of information security at that level isn't about actual classified information, but dissemination of unclassified information to the media that is either beneficial or hurtful to other political entities and individuals, domestic or foreign.
Im pretty sure that the majority of cops that became criminals were the hardest to catch. They know all the tricks and what other cops/detectives will be looking for.
What about those that use color of law? It's not terribly surprising that the FBI only receives about 200 complaints of color-of-law, and doesn't investigate, much less prosecute, a single one.
Simply being a police officer offers enormous immunity from the general public accusing you of crimes, and further means that most of your fellow officers won't "rat" on you (instead of being disgusted at your behavior and bringing disrepute to the supposed "profession.")
The guy who wants to quit but doesn't because he'll only get unemployment benefits if he's fired:)
Um...which goes to show how little you know about unemployment. At least in MA, you don't get shit if it is "termination with cause", ie fired. If you're laid off, great- but even then, your employer gets a phone call from the unemployment department asking whether you were fired or laid off. Nothing stops them from lying and saying you were fired with cause- and then you've got a legal battle on your hands, which you can't afford.
Other fun facts about unemployment in MA: you don't get paid for two full weeks after you FILED- not after you were laid off, but after you FILED. You get a pittance compared to your normal salary; you'd be lucky to make rent on a studio apartment in Boston based off an entire month's unemployment checks.
Any income is deducted from your UA check. Say for example you find a 2-3 hour consulting thing on CL and make $150 helping someone fix their computer. Guess what? Your unemployment check for that week will be $150 smaller. This basically means that you have no incentive to find any kind of income while you're on UA.
Last but certainly not least: you have to pay taxes, medicare, medicaid, etc on your unemployment benefits. It's not bad enough that you're basically on welfare- you have to fork over a portion of the money the government is giving you, BACK to the government. Cute, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
"That's not encryption. THIS, now THIS is encryption."
While that is technically true (at least according to Wikipedia), for a large portion of the rest of the world, it's pretty much Close Enough.
Try that argument on someone from Ireland and see how well they react to being described as "British."
You know, I don't like to be treated as a criminal by default when visiting a foreign country
According to whois, you live in Japan. Which has probably been the most xenophobic country in the last 500-1000 years. It's still culturally acceptable, if not expected, to refer to foreigners as gaijin- and god help you if you're Asian but not Japanese. Please tell me how many non-Japanese people you se on your way to work today? Uh huh- your country is one of the least racially-integrated on the planet.
Wikipedia says Japan in the 80's tortured prisoners (held for 72 hours, then another 10 days without any charges, all in line with your constitution) to extract confessions- and in the 70's, suspects were tortured until they signed blank confessions. We've had trial-by-jury for 200 years; you had it for 20 years around 1920, and now you're just finally getting it back.
Shall we go into freedom of the press? http://www.google.com/search?q=japan+media+blackout
...so pardon me if I say a giant "what the fuck?" to you complaining about the US being a "police state" or US xenophobia.
I was looking forward to go back to the US and see NYC (I liked Massachusetts).
You might want to try getting your geography straight- NYC is in NY, not Massachusetts.
Then again, I watched with amazement as an ABC reporter said he was in NY and then said "Here in New England..."
New York state never has, and never will be, part of New England. It's MA, RI, VT, NH, ME.
Apple would have gone bankrupt too (goodbye Macintosh) if it had not been saved at the last minute by Gates.
Gates didn't "save apple". Microsoft bought $150M in non-voting-rights stock.
At the time, Apple had BILLIONS of dollars in CASH (well, not real cash, but in bank accounts of course.) It was losing money, but it wasn't in need of a bailout or rescue- and the money "bought" MS a couple of things, one of which was IE being the default shipping browser. More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple#The_Microsoft_deal
Let me make that perfectly clear: the amount of money involved in the deal was insignificant to BOTH parties, and Microsoft got what it paid for.
Furthermore, Office for the Macintosh has always been one of Microsoft's most profitable products.
PS:It wasn't Jobs that was responsible for OS X. It was Amelio- he bought NEXT after BeOS stuck its thumb up at Apple and demanded a fortune. Jobs repaid the favor by manipulating the stock price and ousting Amelio.
It's had multiple print runs, been published in both the US and the UK, where they've sold well, and has been nominated for and granted a range of literary awards.
For chrissakes, sales volume is not about quality; Lynne Spears' (no doubt ghostwritten) crap go on there higher than he did. Little Brother went on at #14, then #9, then barely crawled up to #8, probably in sole part because every boingboing reader with spawn anywhere within 2-3 degrees of themselves (ie, the neighbor's kid, their coworker's sister's kid, etc) bought a copy and forced it on the poor kid's parents, who most likely said "a book about a kid who gets interrogated by DHS? And starts hacking stuff?" and chucked it in the can and thankfully gave their kid some quality YA literature. His work is such a piece of shit, he had to get boingboing readers to buy copies and GIVE THEM to libraries because they wouldn't buy/print copies of their own:
My sincere thanks to all of you who talked about the book, gave it to your friends, sent it to teachers and librarians, and downloaded it -- you all helped make this the first-ever Creative Commons-licensed novel to get on the NYT list!
How fucking sad is that? If he wasn't editor of boingboing, nobody would have given the book even a first glance. Same as if Cmdr Taco wrote a book- it'd only have a prayer because of slashdot readers.
Also: FOUR HUNDRED PAGES. Jesus christ!
Checking the Boston Public Library catalog, all but one of the NINE copies in the system are sitting on the shelves.
Television news didn't eliminate the newspaper, and neither will the internet. Change it, of course, eliminate, no way !
Don't forget radio, the second-oldest medium. Still alive, kicking, and well. Why, we even have a huge radio system supported in large part by private donations...gasp! Shows like Lake Woebegone and Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me live and indeed embrace new media; I listen to WWDTM all the time via my my iPod, downloaded via podcasts.
This latest is just the gasp of a flunkie, uneducated has-been science fiction author whose work is so spectacularly bad that he had never had a commercially successful work.
Cory Doctorow learned that people didn't like having to pay to watch movies, TV, and movies. A simpleton pundit who appeals to naivete; at the end of the day, nobody's forcing you to pay to listen to music. While Doctorow has bitched and moaned about copyright, the rest of the world keeps right on truckin', same as always, writing and performing in all media without much care towards copyright. I can go right now to three local bars and listen to bands perform songs, and a fair number of 'em will probably be covers, copyrighted work by someone else.
The results. The published papers, etc. It's an important and distinctive feature of Science that results are reproducible.
Having worked around academic groups that do medical research for three years now, I can tell you that is absolutely not what drives research.
Researchers will love to tell you about how it is the quest for knowledge and other pie-in-the-sky ideals, but when it comes down to it- it's mostly about making a living (or more than a living), and fame/prestige.
See, journals have what's called an "impact factor." An impact factor is how many times an article in a particular journal ends up being cited by other papers. In one lab I worked at, it was closely tracked who was published where, and how many times.
At the end of the year, when it came time to decide who went and who stayed, the scores were lined up and however many people needed to go came from the bottom. The top ones get a little closer to becoming a PI (Principle Investigator, aka someone who has postdocs and grad students working for them.)
PIs, all the people you read about in the paper- they survived the process, but they're now nothing more than management. They don't do lab work, they don't do research. They solicit ideas from their postdocs, put the final polish on a grant proposal the postdoc slaved over, and get big fat checks from NIH for millions of dollars. The PIs then pass the work down to postdocs, who dole it out to grad students. The grad students do it because a PhD is dangled in front of them while they run on the treadmill of endless, monotonous, repetitive lab work and analysis work. The postdocs do it because faculty positions and PI slots are dangled in front of them.
The problem with "the system" is that nobody is rewarded for reaching that brass ring. Just like Ford has no incentive to build a very durable car (no service/parts sales after the vehicle hits the end of the warranty, and the market quickly becomes saturated) researchers have no incentive to completely solve issues facing us today; their incentive is to come close enough to say "aha, look, we did find SOMETHING, so your grant money wasn't wasted."
What incentive does a massive industry have to solve cancer, when it would put them out of business? Tens of thousands of people have dedicated most of their adult lives, usually to studying specific mechanisms and biological functions so narrow that if cancer were cured tomorrow, they would be useless- their training and knowledge is so focused, so narrow- they cannot compete with the existing population of researchers in other biomedical fields. Journals which charge big bucks for subscriptions also would be useless. Billions of dollars of materials, equipment, supplies, chemicals- gone. "Centers", hospitals, colleges, universities which each rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in private, government, and non-profit sourced money would be useless.
Just 16 screws?
Hell yes. Ever removed the hard drive from an iBook?
I have, about a dozen times. It requires nearly complete dis-assembly. I had about sixteen PILES of different screws. When I took one apart that was for parts, the screws could have filled about a third of a shot glass. You need a large table, mostly to hold sheets of paper with areas marked out for keeping track of where the screws came from (not terribly hard to remember, but better safe than sorry.)
Total time to disassemble, swap drives, and re-assemble, after you've had practice? I think the fastest I ever did it was a little under an hour. Add extra if you refresh the loctite coatings on the screws that have it (recommended for machines which are young and will be kept for a while; the screws loosen up quite a bit with age.)
I don't know which was worse: the numerous (and continued, throughout the life of the series) major defects, or how badly it was designed WRT servicing. It's almost like they intentionally designed it to be a bitch to service to make up for thinner sales margins so they could nail people (mostly students and teachers) on labor after the glorious one-year warranty expires.
That was the most retarded thing that could possibly have been added to that summary.
No, it wasn't. It's perfectly valid to ask why two subs with competent sonar operators did not detect any noises from the other ship at such close range.
No, Nick. It wouldn't be, because nuclear weapons have to be detonated.
He was referring, most likely, to the nuclear POWER PLANT, moron.
Or, perhaps, to the fact that people who managed to ram each other are the same morons who are holding a huge number of the country's nuclear missiles.
Glad to see you were paying attention there. You forgot that Nukes "don't react well to bullets".
Shake it at your PC and get an address book sync. and other such things... awesome.
Perhaps I have a healthy dose of skepticism of virtually anything that comes from the MIT Media lab, but I don't find this even remotely desirable. And have you noticed that the iPhone for two product generations has had the capability to utilize motion for gestures, and hasn't?
Also, notice what the little kid does with it, after watching other people play with it. The kid saw that they could change, make noise, etc. And what does he do?
He stacks them like regular building blocks. Completely treating them as just pure, inanimate physical objects, despite having it extensively demonstrated to him that they can be interacted with. Which pretty much shoots to hell Merrill's high-falutin' speech about...gah, it was so buzzword-laden, I can't even remember. Something about how we need these interactive blocks to learn?
Oh yes, and the sound/music thing was a direct ripoff of something that did exactly the same thing on a multi-touch table, about a year or two ago, recognizing shapes placed on the table and how they were manipulated.
This seems like a great possibility for adult-level gaming (nobody's going to buy something this expensive just for their kids), but nothing more.
Free usage of Sprint's 3G network. Not only for browsing the book store, but you can also check some blogs/news sites (including Slashdot), and you can access Wikipedia. No monthly fee, your $360 covers that "forever". Or until they change it, whatever comes first
I wouldn't count on the Kindle having wireless access past a year or two. Sprint is virtually on death's doorstep, and the first thing they'll do in bankruptcy court is get out of the contract with Amazon.
That's great for Amazon- when Sprint goes belly-up, people will have to buy new Kindles. Not to mention, Sprint was probably desperate for the business so the price and terms were right.
They're mid-level federal pencil-pushers, at best- and the only reason she got the job was because she was a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, which is basically a government consulting group (aka glorified money sinkhole.)
If that's not a conflict of interest, I don't know what is.
tweaks computers to let them tap vast amounts of storage at very quick rates
In other words, Yet Another Half-Baked Clustered/Distributed Filesystem we can add to the list of dozens of failed distributed/clustered filesystems.
The hash isn't necessary. If the trust relationship between two academic peers includes "worried about him modify the paper after I review it", there is no trust relationship.
In fact, the whole thing isn't necessary. Pubmed, anyone? All someone has to do is pick up the phone and call the reference on a CV and say, "So, what did you think of Dr. X's work on Y?", and they learn more than they will running a program that says "Hashes verified."
This system is also never going to fly with researchers. Most (but not all) of the (brilliant) bio people I've worked with are completely helpless when it comes to technical stuff. Even some of the bioinformatics people who can write amazing algorithms aren't clued in on stuff outside of their field.
They also often represent "jump the shark" moments for a series.
Did you ever watch the show? They jumped the shark at least once an episode. That's part of what made it so great.
Rob Galbraith is the frequent butt of jokes about his ego and mouth- the man considers himself an expert on absolutely everything, loves to declare things horrible/worthless (he declared the Canon Mk3 autofocus to be "useless" as well, and that hasn't stopped news agencies the world-over from making the camera their standard equipment.)
His premise is that the laptop is worthless because of the glossy screen. Well, guess what? It's literally a $30 problem, and there will no doubt be at least a couple companies that produce lightweight fancy hoods that weigh next to nothing and shield the screen from glare for photographers who MUST do image adjustment in the field (which nobody does.)
He speaks as if he's an expert- but check out the qualifications of him and his team. He's a former photographer for a no-name Canadian paper....eight years ago. His partner shoots horsies for work. A third dude doesn't seem to have any qualifications except for being industrious in writing about photography and a former Nikon lackey. None of them have had showings of note. None of them are retained by any wire services that matter. None of them currently work in the field.
Ever heard about "splitting", where people tend to consider something all good or all bad? Galbraith is an almost pathological splitter, and he's completely ignorant of some solutions to the problem, if you otherwise like working with, or are required to work with macs/mac software by your company/agency/wire service. It's also a problem solved with about $10 of cardboard or plastic to make a viewing hood, which used to be extremely common back when (GASP!) everyone had "glossy" CRTs.
It also demonstrates how ignorant he is of how "real" professional photographers these days work. The big boys are told to send everything, touch nothing- they're in the business of shooting photos, not editing or adjusting them. Anyone who is anyone has a team of people sitting back at "HQ", with fast machines, professionally calibrated displays in controlled lighting, etc. Nobody (at least nobody doing it for money) does anything beyond rate/categorize images on laptops...which is what he claims the MBP "is only good for."
They had an entire crew killed on the launchpad on the very first go, and the crew of Apollo 13 were dumb-shit-lucky to make it back to earth. Six of the missions actually landed on the moon, out of SEVENTEEN missions (yes, a number were not designed to land on the moon, or even leave earth orbit.)
Even if you're exceptionally kind, NASA failed to reach the moon 1 in 7 tries.
You know how FiOS is just about everywhere along the east coast? Well, everywhere except Boston.
Why? Because in MA, each town decides if it wants to grant a franchise for cable TV. Not internet- just TV.
Verizon doesn't like that, but the burbs are the best customers- they have lots of HDTV sets, they like the packages, and they don't do annoying things like share their Wifi connection to 6 other people in a apartment building.
Well, guess what? Verizon has been rolling out FiOS to damn near everywhere in the state, even west-nowhere places like 500-person towns out near Worcester nobody has heard of...yet still no FiOS for anyone in Boston. It's even been in the papers- THREE YEARS AGO- about how Verizon was cherrypicking. A year ago, someone asked Mayor Menino what the fuck was going on, and he pointed the finger squarely at Verizon. Not that I trust him, but in the meantime, some hick represetative from the western end of the state gave Verizon tens of millions of dollars to roll out services in the western end of the state...with no requirements that they provide service to the city.
Meanwhile, we're stuck with really crappy DSL offerings, Comcast's throttling and misleading advertising (go on, try to find the real speed, not the "powerboost" speed which you get for all of about 10MB of transfer), or RCN's overall shittyness. Worse still- Comcast has just started getting really nasty about incoming SMTP and HTTP; they've shut me off twice, despite best efforts to sneak under their radar. I suspect they're enforcing their ToS to try and catch small/home business owners saving $50/month (yes, you read that right- $100/mo for internet service for businesses.)
The story is filled with astroturfers, lobbyists and others spending millions to manufacture FUD about privacy and monopoly
Um...they don't need to manufacture. There are serious privacy and internet coherency issues. Google has already become a major, slim-but-possible single-point-of-failure.
It's so bad, I see people enter domain names for popular sites into the search bar and then click on the search results.
Really people this is over.
Not really. The only ship that is sailing is the executive pardon ship; there isn't a chance in hell Obama will pardon anyone from the Bush administration for the torture stuff, and when you're out of office, it makes it much harder for you to retaliate (or get anyone in the current administration to retaliate) for going after you criminally.
There was a long podcast on Fresh Air recently (I think this is the one) about how nobody in the Bush administration is traveling outside the US- no book deals, conferences, vacations, or speaking tours. It's uncharacteristic (look at Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Bush Sr., for example.) Basically, they're scared shitless of being arrested and extradited. The human rights violations (torture, for starters) are so heinous in international law that ANY COUNTRY that signed the various conventions can choose to prosecute- and any that does can use extradition treaties to get their hands on such a person. Worse still, they can press the US government to cooperate with the investigation; do you really think Obama will fight handing over evidence of human rights violations and war crimes? He's already pissing off people left and right with his inauguration choices and proposed appointments...
Now, suddenly, we also internally have no hold on the justice department (which will be working for Obama and a democrat-controlled congress) who could choose to investigate, mainly because it's much less embarrassing to take care of this in-house than not. It's practically a slam-dunk case; Cheney admitted on national TV that he reviewed (and thus authorized) the torture of gitmo prisoners.
Somehow if Bush could manage it, I think he can too :)
Obama is actually extremely close to his pick for press secretary, and is probably interested in strengthening the executive branch via non-authoritarian ways.
That's where the much more significant debate has been; the press are excited at the possibility of a press secretary who is very close to the to-be President, but also wondering if it'll work out for the administration or not as it tries to pursue its goals.
I highly recommend listening to NPR/PRI podcasts, like On Point with Tom Ashbrook, and Fresh Air if you want to learn more about this stuff.
Can we stop all this portmanteau crap? Please? It's like the imaginary label "President-Elect"...
PS:
And as I've noted elsewhere, the 'Omigod, he left his Blackberry behind at dinner' issue is absurd
No, it's not. The people who surround the president have (practically since the inception of nuclear weapons) had problems keeping the codes or the authorization mechanisms physically secure, despite the fact that the fucking thing is in fact attached to the person carrying it:
On occasion the President has left his aide carrying the football behind. This happened to Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush[2] and, most recently, Bill Clinton on April 24, 1999.[3] In none of these cases was the integrity of the football breached. clicky.
It's one thing for a "football" which is specifically designed to not rely just on restricted access, but if someone got ahold of Obama's blackberry, getting into it isn't nearly as challenging.
Also, the article submitter doesn't have the remotest understanding of how things work at a presidential level in regards to information security; its not as simple as "zOMG, do not email the sec of defense on blackberry!" Bush went so far as to keep his press secretary at arm's length so that he was truly ignorant on stuff that Bush didn't want the press to know about.
Much of information security at that level isn't about actual classified information, but dissemination of unclassified information to the media that is either beneficial or hurtful to other political entities and individuals, domestic or foreign.
Im pretty sure that the majority of cops that became criminals were the hardest to catch. They know all the tricks and what other cops/detectives will be looking for.
What about those that use color of law? It's not terribly surprising that the FBI only receives about 200 complaints of color-of-law, and doesn't investigate, much less prosecute, a single one.
Simply being a police officer offers enormous immunity from the general public accusing you of crimes, and further means that most of your fellow officers won't "rat" on you (instead of being disgusted at your behavior and bringing disrepute to the supposed "profession.")
The guy who wants to quit but doesn't because he'll only get unemployment benefits if he's fired :)
Um...which goes to show how little you know about unemployment. At least in MA, you don't get shit if it is "termination with cause", ie fired. If you're laid off, great- but even then, your employer gets a phone call from the unemployment department asking whether you were fired or laid off. Nothing stops them from lying and saying you were fired with cause- and then you've got a legal battle on your hands, which you can't afford.
Other fun facts about unemployment in MA: you don't get paid for two full weeks after you FILED- not after you were laid off, but after you FILED. You get a pittance compared to your normal salary; you'd be lucky to make rent on a studio apartment in Boston based off an entire month's unemployment checks.
Any income is deducted from your UA check. Say for example you find a 2-3 hour consulting thing on CL and make $150 helping someone fix their computer. Guess what? Your unemployment check for that week will be $150 smaller. This basically means that you have no incentive to find any kind of income while you're on UA.
Last but certainly not least: you have to pay taxes, medicare, medicaid, etc on your unemployment benefits. It's not bad enough that you're basically on welfare- you have to fork over a portion of the money the government is giving you, BACK to the government. Cute, eh?