Now would be a fantastic opportunity to install a citywide Wi-Fi network
People have no clothing, food, or water. They certainly don't have laptops with Wifi cards. Most of the people who were left behind could never afford a computer or even internet service. Many of them probably never owned a cell phone, either.
A cell network restricted to rescue/aid staff (nobody else has a good enough reason to be crowding a precious communications resource) and a couple of banks of free payphones for people to call loved ones to let them know they're alive- would do just fine.
Ease up, cowboy. There will be a dupe you can complain about coming along in 5 minutes.
I believe the parent poster was hinting to the fact that Slashdot, lately, is All Google, All The Time. Just like we got sick of 9/11, just like we got sick of the Tsunami, just like a lot of folks are already sick of hearing about Mississippi...people just get tired of hearing about something constantly. I'm sick of reading news that looks very much like it was spoon-fed by a PR agency. I worked for such an agency for a couple months in IT, and I was half shocked, half not-surprised at how often stuff that popped up in the paper was the result of efforts of the firm I worked for. Reporters these days are under pressure to get stories out as cheap as possible, and when a PR firm approaches them with what seems like a pretty tame position, some handy quotes all collected for them...they're all to happy to oblige. Sound familiar? The boys at slashdot haven't touched the site in years except to add advertisements; they're fully into cruise mode.
Google really has turned into another Microsoft; a giant company that really doesn't do anything all that clever, but because they're so big, everyone thinks the world revolves around them and fawns over every little thing. For example- Google Maps. It's not even remotely clever aside from the panning bit; it doesn't, for example, let me save any frequently used addresses. The printed maps are atrocious in quality (you have to have a big screen, and do a screen cap, and print that to get anything decent). Route numbers are RARELY displayed, and names of roads not often enough.
Google claims to release stuff half-baked to see where people go with it, but honestly? It's still half-baked. Some people point to Google Maps and say "look how clever it is!" and I turn around and say, "look at how clever it ISN'T for a product from a huge corporation with supposedly the best talent in the industry working for it."
I would have rpefered Apple going with AMD opteron's or contracting one of their other beefy 64 bit chips. Why intel?
AMD has, and always will be, something of an ugly duckling in the industry. Intel is the giant, the name every investor recognizes. Also, I seriously doubt AMD gave Apple a better offer pricing-wise than Intel.
I agree, it's disappointing, but among other things, there's nothing to guarantee that Apple won't, at some point, switch to/also offer AMD.
I do have another question though - Why don't consumers buying/wearing fake branded products get arrested? A Nike t-shirt is probably as easy and cheap to copy and produce as a DVD movie. Imagine law enforcement officers roaming the streets and ripping counterfeited t-shirts off materialistic girls.
You were obviously not paying much attention to what was going on around the Super Bowl. Every year, the NFL goes to great lengths to ID "official" superbowl goods. Hologram-bearing tags and whatnot.
This year, as with most, they also tied up the resources of the host city and state police forces (in this case, Worcester city and Massachusetts state police), shutting down the "counterfeit" sellers and seizing goods.
Why the police are involved with a civil issue (trademark infringement)...is beyond me. If they're carrying out court orders, that's one thing- but playing no-charge goon-squad for the NFL and Russel Athletic is another thing entirely.
Don't live in a city that is 8 feet below sea level. Flooding WILL occur.
...and if you do, build your pumping stations so that they can work submerged and without grid power, so that next time, they don't ALL FAIL. It's not like we don't have the technology- submarines, for example.
How much can it cost to build a solid foundation, and put a big diesel engine with a big fuel tank either in a sealed container with a snorkle, or put the engine bits up top a high tower (with substantial reinforcement)? This ain't rocket science.
Also, why don't the levees have anything but dirt in 'em? Why can't they have periodic concrete segments or something to stop breaks from spreading and to use as a base for emergency repairs?
So because Apple failed to patent its own interface, then that means the first one to the Patent Office doors gets to patent it?
I was under the impression that if I invent a Widget that does Foo in 1999 and have the documentation to prove it (ie, drawings, plans, a worklog or journal) and some witnesses for good measure- it doesn't matter if you "invent" it later and patent it, even if the invention was independent; I was first.
Of course, unlike many slashdot posters, I'm happy to admit I know next to nothing about current patent law and steer clear of statements-of-fact...
I wish Linus would arrive at a policy and just stick with it instead of all these gyrations of "we'll use this method from now on...no wait...we'll use this one from now on...and by the way I want everyone to switch revision control systems now...oh wait...sigh.
This PCI code rewrite doesn't bother me as much as some of the recent 2.6 releases including new drivers for obscure proprietary hardware.
A large number of organizations (as well as Debian Stable and Redhat) still use 2.4. It's pretty pathetic. 2.6 was released in December of 2003, over a year and a half ago. It offers significant performance advantages over 2.4 in many areas. Maybe instead of spending time switching policies, kernel developers should be consulting with end-users (note: this does not mean just/predominantly IBM and the other big fish. It means people like US, too) to find out why we're not using 2.6. Aside from security patches, any effort on 2.4 development/maintenance needs to stop. It's a brain drain, and active maintenance is encouraging people to be lazy in upgrading (and that's probably part of the issue).
Right now 2.6 is a lame-duck kernel, and if they keep trudging on and release the next stable without looking at why 2.6 isn't the defacto kernel of choice today, Linux will be rather fubar'd.
I have a friend whose wife is a grade school teacher. Spend 15 minutes with a teacher, and you'll realize just how truly ignorant that statement is. Many teachers I've met are far more dedicated to their job than any techie I've ever met. You don't teach to pay the bills- because it doesn't, not well at all. You teach because you love the concept of helping people learn and contributing to society. The standards are high- when it comes to education and training, they don't have a choice. Peer review is ongoing. Certification is required and often also ongoing. The amount of prep work my friend's wife does for teaching gradeschool classes is astounding.
Maybe -your- school is full of teachers who are in 'cruise mode', but most are full of people who have dedicated their lives to teaching your children. Show a little gratitude.
In some companies this isn't true, but at ours it was. If one of the other managers had an issue, they weren't supposed to talk to us about it. They were supposed to talk to our manager. That allowed him to do what he was supposed to do (manage) and gave us more time to do our work.
Ding. Other posters said the same. A good manager handles all the non-technical stuff, and as long as he/she knows his/her limits, they're fine. The worst is a technically saavy manager who has to stick his/her nose into absolutely everything.
I (very recently, though not my current job, thankfully) had a manager whose solution to the slightest complaint was to drag me into his office and talk with me for an hour, while work literally piled up. He refused to stand up to even the slightest complaint from the lowest employee- morale as a result was atrocious in the department.
Even better, in monthly status meetings, he'd complement me by comparing me to my coworkers. "Oh, you're much better than this stuff than Tim, he's not very bright when it comes to..." When I got out of one of those meetings, I realized he was doing the same thing with them- complementing them by insulting me, most likely. That night I started my job search.
Two weeks later I was "let go"- and I don't dare list him as a reference. Instead, I've gone through a 5 minute "why it didn't work out" explanation with prospective employers, and said I'd be happy to provide references in the forms of VP's at the agency who were my "customers". I've been careful not to insult him- be honest, but careful and reserved if you find yourself in the same position. Most have seemed understanding- most everyone's been in the position of being under a lousy boss too.
In which he speculates about the future of the WebOS.
This concept is mostly for half-wits who think "operating system" means "a suite of applications"- the same people who don't understand what an "operating system" does.
In the first, a person tries to enter a secure facility using an expired electronic access card; a computer detects and signals the security breach on an aerial photograph of the area.
And this is needed because a piece of paper with "where each card reader is physically located" isn't sexy enough?
Officials would pinpoint the site, watch the attempted entry on a video monitor and send a security officer to check out the situation.
...because you can't just send a "security officer" in the first place? And do we really think that our intrepit Bad Dude will stick around to have a chat with the "security officer"?
In the second, a briefcase is left on a busy Midtown subway platform. As a camera beams live images, software can differentiate the moving people from the motionless package, sending off an alert about an unattended, suspicious object. Police officers with bomb-sniffing dogs would be sent to the platform.
...and if it actually is a bomb, by the time they've figured out "hey, we should go down there and check it out", it blows up. If it doesn't, it's just some guy's briefcase he absent-mindedly forgot on the platform.
Plus thanks to cell phone coverage, terrorists can now leave IED's with cell phones for activators on a train...
If Google's livelihood is contingent on destroying these people, I hope they put something in the fruit punch...
More like they're trying to convert people to buy adspace, I suspect.
Funny how they'll throw these people a kegger, but they won't answer emails from "small" webmasters like me. We've been using Google search for a couple of years, and we have almost a decade and a half worth of email archives. We're the oldest internet resource for owners of a certain brand of cars, and we are widely considered one of the best resources.
That said- when I contacted Google's CR people asking why, for over a year, nothing new had been indexed on our site- Google's answer was a form letter "if you don't like how we index your site, that's just too bad". They didn't even bother to read my email all the way through- I specifically said I DIDN'T care about ranking, I DIDN'T care about complete indexing. I DIDN'T care about regular re-indexing. I just wanted to know why NOTHING new had been indexed in quite some time- almost 2 years.
They're about one install of htdig away from a big "fuck you" in the form of a complete block via robots.txt, a redirect on any hit with a google referral, etc. We've been around longer than they have, and we'll probably outlast them as well. I've long since stopped recommending Google to people. Now I point them to, among other things, Teoma.
Google Blogger is introducing Word Verification for user comments to prevent comment spam
I once spoke with the VP of a company that was merging with the company I was doing contract work for (both companies were very small, so we had a lunchroom chat).
He revealed that there were a number of "email blast" (ie email spam outsourcers) that were happy to have dozens of Indian employees on staff ready to do the image-word verification and reply-to-this-email-to-be-whitelisted emails many think-they're-super-smart people had set up.
Why does anyone think the "illegitimate" spammers don't do exactly the same thing? Especially when, at $5/hr (about what US min wage is, I think) 5 seconds of effort (an overestimate, most likely, after you've been doing it for an hour) works out to about 2/3rds of a CENT...and that has the potential to reach hundreds of people before someone flags it? ONE worker could do 720 an hour...
I got into games because my sister complained that I never called her. She set up an account for me on GEnie so I would at least email her. Not long afterwards, she suggested I check out GemStone III... Eventually, I ended up... [at] my current position as a designer for EverQuest II
The sort of implied-between-the-lines story here is that "I didn't talk to my sister, so I got into game programming a zillion years later". Ah, the irony of this kind of one-thing-leads-to-another stuff from the game industry.
"John Smith, 18, shot two cops execution-style after getting pulled over for having a broken headlight and speeding. Friends say Smith enjoyed Grand Theft Auto and would play it for hours. The producers of Grand Theft Auto stated it was absurd to imply any sort of connection whatsoever."
(I know it's not even remotely commonplace for this sort of thing to happen, and the story above is fictional- but it happens every once in a while. The rarity of its occurance does not mean it's not a valid problem).
"We have moved the release date of V For Vendetta to March 17, 2006, to accommodate the movie's post-production schedule."
Bullshit. Post-production is "scheduled" to the day. It has to be. You don't suddenly go "whups, let's take another 4 or more months".
The spokesperson, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, denied that the delay had anything to do with the movie's subject matter or the current political climate.
Are we really as stupid as we look? What the fuck is with an "anonymous spokesperson"? If you can't quote them, don't print the story. Oh wait, it's not a story, it's a clever press release.
V for Vendetta has come under scrutiny for the coincidence of its subject matter and the recent terrorist bombings in London.
It has? Could have fooled me. Most everyone in the (US) theaters I've seen the preview have murmered "looks good" etc. Since a few hours after the train bombings, a lot of Londoners were saying "look, could you all get over it? We have." Especially given the typical audience for this film, I doubt any of the said audience will give a crap.
"It's that horrible word: intellectual. I mean, you have to think about the movie"
What? They laid out the entire plot in the trailers (or so we're led to believe). Facist, authoritarian government. Agents of whom attempt to rape Portman. "Good" guy rescues/befriends her. He's doing the whole "government is evil, I'm gonna blow it up, yo" and she's doing the "I'll die for you, yo. I am stretched on your grave, I'll lie here forever, yo." The government is all "Your ass is ours, yo."
What part of that requires any "thought"? The fact that it's blatantly playing off how fascist US/UK government has become?
Appropriate quote: "Ah, MIND taxing time again, now is it?"
The whole thing reminds me of Gilbert Godfried's joke at Hugh Heffner's roast, a couple says after the WTC attacks. "I'm kinda concerned, my flight has a layover at the Empire State building". Most everyone laughed. One or two people yelled "too soon, too soon." So he told the Aristocrats joke, and boy did those two people wish they had kept their mouths shut:-)
I dunno about you, but I WANT my phone to have GPS. Simply so they can locate me if I call 911 on my wireless phone.
If you want to be located when you call 911, maintain a land-line. Where is the goddamn rocket science here, people?
You know what? If you don't have a land-line and you have to call 911 and can't speak...well, maybe you die. It happens. Sucks, but it happens. I hate this society...we've become obsessed with throwing huge wads of cash, effort, and legislation at the stupidest problems. 700,000 people die each year of heart disease; zero people a year die from terrorism. We spend billions on one, not on the other...and when Little Timmy dies because he choked on a marble 'cause mommy wasn't watching him, we get "Timmy's Law" which solves a Darwinism problem.
"It's the worst kind of vigilante approach," said John Levine, a board member with the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail. "Deliberate attacks against people's Web sites are illegal."
How's the quote go? "Capitalism is terrible, but beats the alternatives"?
So we should ignore the fact that all previous solutions have failed, and users have become completely complacent with the advent of spam filtering software? (currently, antispam software is a spammer's best dream; he/she doesn't irritate the users who care enough about spam to do something about it; either install software, or switch to a different ISP, etc.) Should we ignore that ISPs/MHP's don't care? That backbone companies gleefully watch the bucks roll in from traffic from spam?(would YOU say goodbye to 1/3rd of your revenue stream?).
The internet is very much like the Wild West. It's a brave new frontier, the government doesn't have the ability to maintain order, and so on. In a vacuum, someone's going to step up to the plate to maintain order. Thusfar it's been spammers.
I've heard claims that vigilantes will endanger legitimate businesses. That's just too bad. If you can't play baseball because Mommy took away your baseball bat- well, maybe you shouldn't have gone around smacking people on the head with it. At every oppertunity the commercial world has failed to regulate itself (example- HP could chase after the spammers offering HP toner cartridges. Drug companies could chase after spammers offering viagra. Do they? Only with a token effort.)
I think commercial interests have had plenty of free run with "the whole internet thing"; we've seen a huge boom and collapse because they made false promises and lied through their teeth, and now they're running what is left into the ground via spam. People are finally realizing "fight back" is the best way.
If a few eggs get broken to make the omlette, so fuckin' be it. It's time to remind businesses that the internet is for everyone, and not in the "rape, pillage, and burn" sense.
that'd be like blaming Law and Order: SVU for a rape charge.
I am a HUGE fan of Law and Order: Lenny (aka the original series). "SVU" or "CI" never made an impression on me; they just seemed "slightly more extreme and more dodads to keep the unwashed masses watching".
The final straw was last weekend, when I caught a Law and Order Criminal Intent (I think) episode- where a young man was drugging young women and doing things to them. One victim had her calf muscles cut out of her legs while she was alive. Another had a hole drilled in her skull and hot water poured in.
That was the day I swore I'd never watch the two new variants for any longer than it took to change channels. It was absafuckingloutely disgusting.
We don't do them in real life because we understand the difference between the two things.
Is that why children think there's Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, etc? Is that why children imitate everything around them? Watch a bunch of kids playing for about 15 minutes, and I guarantee you'll see something "pop culture" woven into their play. Children up until a certain age have NO CONCEPT of the difference between cartoons and real life, or video and real life. They have little developed sense of judgement, either.
Anyone who has ever upgraded a package that keeps many files in/etc...say, webmin- knows exactly what I'm talking about. Even if the contents of a file in/etc haven't changed since they were put there by a package, I'm given no indication of this by etc-update, and I have to approve each one of DOZENS of files by hand. There's no simple facility to even say "update all the config files in this directory". This one example gives you an idea of how bad things are overall.
There are some X alternatives, but guess what? I don't run X on my gentoo box, because I don't want to wait for 16 hours for X to compile. Also, the boys who maintain portage have been refusing to allow these third-party tools into the portage tree because "it might confuse users" and the tool (in use and active maintenance for 2 years by a sizable group) isn't "proven".
I posted about how much gentoo config handling sucks in the last slashdot story about gentoo, and I'll keep doing so until they do something to fix it. I refuse to recommend gentoo to anyone anymore on this basis; gentoo has not matured in the slightest as a distribution since its first release or two.
Professor George Fraser, director of Leicester University's Space Research Centre says this exhaust gas, made from the combination of hydrogen and oxygen, consists of water vapour and as such does not harm the atmosphere, making the use of Nasa's main shuttle engines fairly environmentally safe.
I'm sorry, but this is the same argument used with why we need to be driving hydrogen cars, and it irritates the shit out of me.
Skipping over the solid rocket boosters as cheerfully as the article summary did- perhaps Professor Fraser would care to explain to us where all the hydrogen and oxygen came from?
If you do the math in terms of the energy produced, and realize that both distillation-by-refridgeration and electrolysis are hugely inefficient, you start to realize the amount of energy required to make all that hydrogen and oxygen is incredible. Chemical methods involve pretty toxic chemicals, so you're not getting out of it that way. Guess how most of our (United States) electricity is supplied? That's right- coal. Which generates huge amounts of carbon soot, carbon dioxide, and radioactive particulate.
I noticed that they also skipped quite nicely over hydrazine, used in the thrusters...
Slashdot Mirror
People have no clothing, food, or water. They certainly don't have laptops with Wifi cards. Most of the people who were left behind could never afford a computer or even internet service. Many of them probably never owned a cell phone, either.
A cell network restricted to rescue/aid staff (nobody else has a good enough reason to be crowding a precious communications resource) and a couple of banks of free payphones for people to call loved ones to let them know they're alive- would do just fine.
I believe the parent poster was hinting to the fact that Slashdot, lately, is All Google, All The Time. Just like we got sick of 9/11, just like we got sick of the Tsunami, just like a lot of folks are already sick of hearing about Mississippi...people just get tired of hearing about something constantly. I'm sick of reading news that looks very much like it was spoon-fed by a PR agency. I worked for such an agency for a couple months in IT, and I was half shocked, half not-surprised at how often stuff that popped up in the paper was the result of efforts of the firm I worked for. Reporters these days are under pressure to get stories out as cheap as possible, and when a PR firm approaches them with what seems like a pretty tame position, some handy quotes all collected for them...they're all to happy to oblige. Sound familiar? The boys at slashdot haven't touched the site in years except to add advertisements; they're fully into cruise mode.
Google really has turned into another Microsoft; a giant company that really doesn't do anything all that clever, but because they're so big, everyone thinks the world revolves around them and fawns over every little thing. For example- Google Maps. It's not even remotely clever aside from the panning bit; it doesn't, for example, let me save any frequently used addresses. The printed maps are atrocious in quality (you have to have a big screen, and do a screen cap, and print that to get anything decent). Route numbers are RARELY displayed, and names of roads not often enough.
Google claims to release stuff half-baked to see where people go with it, but honestly? It's still half-baked. Some people point to Google Maps and say "look how clever it is!" and I turn around and say, "look at how clever it ISN'T for a product from a huge corporation with supposedly the best talent in the industry working for it."
AMD has, and always will be, something of an ugly duckling in the industry. Intel is the giant, the name every investor recognizes. Also, I seriously doubt AMD gave Apple a better offer pricing-wise than Intel.
I agree, it's disappointing, but among other things, there's nothing to guarantee that Apple won't, at some point, switch to/also offer AMD.
I don't know about you, but anyone who picks Itanium as a desirable platform to migrate to, can't be very bright.
Also- who is Unilever?
You were obviously not paying much attention to what was going on around the Super Bowl. Every year, the NFL goes to great lengths to ID "official" superbowl goods. Hologram-bearing tags and whatnot.
This year, as with most, they also tied up the resources of the host city and state police forces (in this case, Worcester city and Massachusetts state police), shutting down the "counterfeit" sellers and seizing goods.
Why the police are involved with a civil issue (trademark infringement)...is beyond me. If they're carrying out court orders, that's one thing- but playing no-charge goon-squad for the NFL and Russel Athletic is another thing entirely.
...and if you do, build your pumping stations so that they can work submerged and without grid power, so that next time, they don't ALL FAIL. It's not like we don't have the technology- submarines, for example.
How much can it cost to build a solid foundation, and put a big diesel engine with a big fuel tank either in a sealed container with a snorkle, or put the engine bits up top a high tower (with substantial reinforcement)? This ain't rocket science.
Also, why don't the levees have anything but dirt in 'em? Why can't they have periodic concrete segments or something to stop breaks from spreading and to use as a base for emergency repairs?
I was under the impression that if I invent a Widget that does Foo in 1999 and have the documentation to prove it (ie, drawings, plans, a worklog or journal) and some witnesses for good measure- it doesn't matter if you "invent" it later and patent it, even if the invention was independent; I was first.
Of course, unlike many slashdot posters, I'm happy to admit I know next to nothing about current patent law and steer clear of statements-of-fact...
Well, given iChat is Jabber compatible, and Google Talk is Jabber based...
Well, shouldn't the two work together?
This PCI code rewrite doesn't bother me as much as some of the recent 2.6 releases including new drivers for obscure proprietary hardware.
A large number of organizations (as well as Debian Stable and Redhat) still use 2.4. It's pretty pathetic. 2.6 was released in December of 2003, over a year and a half ago. It offers significant performance advantages over 2.4 in many areas. Maybe instead of spending time switching policies, kernel developers should be consulting with end-users (note: this does not mean just/predominantly IBM and the other big fish. It means people like US, too) to find out why we're not using 2.6. Aside from security patches, any effort on 2.4 development/maintenance needs to stop. It's a brain drain, and active maintenance is encouraging people to be lazy in upgrading (and that's probably part of the issue).
Right now 2.6 is a lame-duck kernel, and if they keep trudging on and release the next stable without looking at why 2.6 isn't the defacto kernel of choice today, Linux will be rather fubar'd.
I have a friend whose wife is a grade school teacher. Spend 15 minutes with a teacher, and you'll realize just how truly ignorant that statement is. Many teachers I've met are far more dedicated to their job than any techie I've ever met. You don't teach to pay the bills- because it doesn't, not well at all. You teach because you love the concept of helping people learn and contributing to society. The standards are high- when it comes to education and training, they don't have a choice. Peer review is ongoing. Certification is required and often also ongoing. The amount of prep work my friend's wife does for teaching gradeschool classes is astounding.
Maybe -your- school is full of teachers who are in 'cruise mode', but most are full of people who have dedicated their lives to teaching your children. Show a little gratitude.
Ding. Other posters said the same. A good manager handles all the non-technical stuff, and as long as he/she knows his/her limits, they're fine. The worst is a technically saavy manager who has to stick his/her nose into absolutely everything.
I (very recently, though not my current job, thankfully) had a manager whose solution to the slightest complaint was to drag me into his office and talk with me for an hour, while work literally piled up. He refused to stand up to even the slightest complaint from the lowest employee- morale as a result was atrocious in the department.
Even better, in monthly status meetings, he'd complement me by comparing me to my coworkers. "Oh, you're much better than this stuff than Tim, he's not very bright when it comes to..." When I got out of one of those meetings, I realized he was doing the same thing with them- complementing them by insulting me, most likely. That night I started my job search.
Two weeks later I was "let go"- and I don't dare list him as a reference. Instead, I've gone through a 5 minute "why it didn't work out" explanation with prospective employers, and said I'd be happy to provide references in the forms of VP's at the agency who were my "customers". I've been careful not to insult him- be honest, but careful and reserved if you find yourself in the same position. Most have seemed understanding- most everyone's been in the position of being under a lousy boss too.
This concept is mostly for half-wits who think "operating system" means "a suite of applications"- the same people who don't understand what an "operating system" does.
Ie, handle processor interrupts and whatnot.
And this is needed because a piece of paper with "where each card reader is physically located" isn't sexy enough?
Officials would pinpoint the site, watch the attempted entry on a video monitor and send a security officer to check out the situation.
...because you can't just send a "security officer" in the first place? And do we really think that our intrepit Bad Dude will stick around to have a chat with the "security officer"?
In the second, a briefcase is left on a busy Midtown subway platform. As a camera beams live images, software can differentiate the moving people from the motionless package, sending off an alert about an unattended, suspicious object. Police officers with bomb-sniffing dogs would be sent to the platform.
...and if it actually is a bomb, by the time they've figured out "hey, we should go down there and check it out", it blows up. If it doesn't, it's just some guy's briefcase he absent-mindedly forgot on the platform.
Plus thanks to cell phone coverage, terrorists can now leave IED's with cell phones for activators on a train...
Great, just what we (your system administrators) need. This is like "calculate all folder sizes" on the Mac...all over again.
I think I just heard the RAID array have a conniption.
For those of you tuning in on your TI calculators:
/\
N=NEO
G=GUY
T=TRIN
Act One:
N G
|-R ~~~~~~*X <- Bullet time
/\ /\
Act Two:
|---Nice shot.
|
T
B <----- N
/\ |
|---"Whoa. Nice Latex"
Act Three:
>-Z
|---- "Whoa. Nice punch"
Could've done it in 3 lines of RPN, incidentally.
More like they're trying to convert people to buy adspace, I suspect.
Funny how they'll throw these people a kegger, but they won't answer emails from "small" webmasters like me. We've been using Google search for a couple of years, and we have almost a decade and a half worth of email archives. We're the oldest internet resource for owners of a certain brand of cars, and we are widely considered one of the best resources.
That said- when I contacted Google's CR people asking why, for over a year, nothing new had been indexed on our site- Google's answer was a form letter "if you don't like how we index your site, that's just too bad". They didn't even bother to read my email all the way through- I specifically said I DIDN'T care about ranking, I DIDN'T care about complete indexing. I DIDN'T care about regular re-indexing. I just wanted to know why NOTHING new had been indexed in quite some time- almost 2 years.
They're about one install of htdig away from a big "fuck you" in the form of a complete block via robots.txt, a redirect on any hit with a google referral, etc. We've been around longer than they have, and we'll probably outlast them as well. I've long since stopped recommending Google to people. Now I point them to, among other things, Teoma.
I once spoke with the VP of a company that was merging with the company I was doing contract work for (both companies were very small, so we had a lunchroom chat).
He revealed that there were a number of "email blast" (ie email spam outsourcers) that were happy to have dozens of Indian employees on staff ready to do the image-word verification and reply-to-this-email-to-be-whitelisted emails many think-they're-super-smart people had set up.
Why does anyone think the "illegitimate" spammers don't do exactly the same thing? Especially when, at $5/hr (about what US min wage is, I think) 5 seconds of effort (an overestimate, most likely, after you've been doing it for an hour) works out to about 2/3rds of a CENT...and that has the potential to reach hundreds of people before someone flags it? ONE worker could do 720 an hour...
The sort of implied-between-the-lines story here is that "I didn't talk to my sister, so I got into game programming a zillion years later". Ah, the irony of this kind of one-thing-leads-to-another stuff from the game industry.
"John Smith, 18, shot two cops execution-style after getting pulled over for having a broken headlight and speeding. Friends say Smith enjoyed Grand Theft Auto and would play it for hours. The producers of Grand Theft Auto stated it was absurd to imply any sort of connection whatsoever."
(I know it's not even remotely commonplace for this sort of thing to happen, and the story above is fictional- but it happens every once in a while. The rarity of its occurance does not mean it's not a valid problem).
Bullshit. Post-production is "scheduled" to the day. It has to be. You don't suddenly go "whups, let's take another 4 or more months".
The spokesperson, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, denied that the delay had anything to do with the movie's subject matter or the current political climate.
Are we really as stupid as we look? What the fuck is with an "anonymous spokesperson"? If you can't quote them, don't print the story. Oh wait, it's not a story, it's a clever press release.
V for Vendetta has come under scrutiny for the coincidence of its subject matter and the recent terrorist bombings in London.
It has? Could have fooled me. Most everyone in the (US) theaters I've seen the preview have murmered "looks good" etc. Since a few hours after the train bombings, a lot of Londoners were saying "look, could you all get over it? We have." Especially given the typical audience for this film, I doubt any of the said audience will give a crap.
"It's that horrible word: intellectual. I mean, you have to think about the movie"
What? They laid out the entire plot in the trailers (or so we're led to believe). Facist, authoritarian government. Agents of whom attempt to rape Portman. "Good" guy rescues/befriends her. He's doing the whole "government is evil, I'm gonna blow it up, yo" and she's doing the "I'll die for you, yo. I am stretched on your grave, I'll lie here forever, yo." The government is all "Your ass is ours, yo."
What part of that requires any "thought"? The fact that it's blatantly playing off how fascist US/UK government has become?
Appropriate quote: "Ah, MIND taxing time again, now is it?"
The whole thing reminds me of Gilbert Godfried's joke at Hugh Heffner's roast, a couple says after the WTC attacks. "I'm kinda concerned, my flight has a layover at the Empire State building". Most everyone laughed. One or two people yelled "too soon, too soon." So he told the Aristocrats joke, and boy did those two people wish they had kept their mouths shut :-)
If you want to be located when you call 911, maintain a land-line. Where is the goddamn rocket science here, people?
You know what? If you don't have a land-line and you have to call 911 and can't speak...well, maybe you die. It happens. Sucks, but it happens. I hate this society...we've become obsessed with throwing huge wads of cash, effort, and legislation at the stupidest problems. 700,000 people die each year of heart disease; zero people a year die from terrorism. We spend billions on one, not on the other...and when Little Timmy dies because he choked on a marble 'cause mommy wasn't watching him, we get "Timmy's Law" which solves a Darwinism problem.
How's the quote go? "Capitalism is terrible, but beats the alternatives"?
So we should ignore the fact that all previous solutions have failed, and users have become completely complacent with the advent of spam filtering software? (currently, antispam software is a spammer's best dream; he/she doesn't irritate the users who care enough about spam to do something about it; either install software, or switch to a different ISP, etc.) Should we ignore that ISPs/MHP's don't care? That backbone companies gleefully watch the bucks roll in from traffic from spam?(would YOU say goodbye to 1/3rd of your revenue stream?).
The internet is very much like the Wild West. It's a brave new frontier, the government doesn't have the ability to maintain order, and so on. In a vacuum, someone's going to step up to the plate to maintain order. Thusfar it's been spammers.
I've heard claims that vigilantes will endanger legitimate businesses. That's just too bad. If you can't play baseball because Mommy took away your baseball bat- well, maybe you shouldn't have gone around smacking people on the head with it. At every oppertunity the commercial world has failed to regulate itself (example- HP could chase after the spammers offering HP toner cartridges. Drug companies could chase after spammers offering viagra. Do they? Only with a token effort.)
I think commercial interests have had plenty of free run with "the whole internet thing"; we've seen a huge boom and collapse because they made false promises and lied through their teeth, and now they're running what is left into the ground via spam. People are finally realizing "fight back" is the best way.
If a few eggs get broken to make the omlette, so fuckin' be it. It's time to remind businesses that the internet is for everyone, and not in the "rape, pillage, and burn" sense.
I am a HUGE fan of Law and Order: Lenny (aka the original series). "SVU" or "CI" never made an impression on me; they just seemed "slightly more extreme and more dodads to keep the unwashed masses watching".
The final straw was last weekend, when I caught a Law and Order Criminal Intent (I think) episode- where a young man was drugging young women and doing things to them. One victim had her calf muscles cut out of her legs while she was alive. Another had a hole drilled in her skull and hot water poured in.
That was the day I swore I'd never watch the two new variants for any longer than it took to change channels. It was absafuckingloutely disgusting.
We don't do them in real life because we understand the difference between the two things.
Is that why children think there's Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, etc? Is that why children imitate everything around them? Watch a bunch of kids playing for about 15 minutes, and I guarantee you'll see something "pop culture" woven into their play. Children up until a certain age have NO CONCEPT of the difference between cartoons and real life, or video and real life. They have little developed sense of judgement, either.
Call me when etc-update doesn't blow goats.
Anyone who has ever upgraded a package that keeps many files in /etc...say, webmin- knows exactly what I'm talking about. Even if the contents of a file in /etc haven't changed since they were put there by a package, I'm given no indication of this by etc-update, and I have to approve each one of DOZENS of files by hand. There's no simple facility to even say "update all the config files in this directory". This one example gives you an idea of how bad things are overall.
There are some X alternatives, but guess what? I don't run X on my gentoo box, because I don't want to wait for 16 hours for X to compile. Also, the boys who maintain portage have been refusing to allow these third-party tools into the portage tree because "it might confuse users" and the tool (in use and active maintenance for 2 years by a sizable group) isn't "proven".
I posted about how much gentoo config handling sucks in the last slashdot story about gentoo, and I'll keep doing so until they do something to fix it. I refuse to recommend gentoo to anyone anymore on this basis; gentoo has not matured in the slightest as a distribution since its first release or two.
Perhaps MIT would have faired better if they hadn't spent time and money on making uniforms with NASA/boyscout-style patches.
I'm sorry, but this is the same argument used with why we need to be driving hydrogen cars, and it irritates the shit out of me.
Skipping over the solid rocket boosters as cheerfully as the article summary did- perhaps Professor Fraser would care to explain to us where all the hydrogen and oxygen came from?
If you do the math in terms of the energy produced, and realize that both distillation-by-refridgeration and electrolysis are hugely inefficient, you start to realize the amount of energy required to make all that hydrogen and oxygen is incredible. Chemical methods involve pretty toxic chemicals, so you're not getting out of it that way. Guess how most of our (United States) electricity is supplied? That's right- coal. Which generates huge amounts of carbon soot, carbon dioxide, and radioactive particulate.
I noticed that they also skipped quite nicely over hydrazine, used in the thrusters...