After reading this article, not only I think that smoking my one cigarette a day is nice, but I think that it is actually way a better method to prevent me from going back to one pack a day than not smoking at all.
I quit smoking the same way. I went from 15 a day to 2 a day-- morning and lunch. From 2 a day I dropped to 1 at lunch. At 1 a day it's not that hard to start skipping the weekends because it becomes associated with lunch at work. Once it became a "lunch at work" thing for me, it was pretty easy to take a 2 week vacation-- and quit.
So, you're actually promoting and condoning immoral and illegal activity?
Cripes, quit being such a troll. You can't equate morality with legality. It seems like every third post here is an interjection by you of "that's illegal" and nothing more. Copyright is essentially a gift, a favor bestowed upon authors and creators in exchange for encouraging enrichment of the public domain. For the vast majority of the history of literacy there has been no copyright protection. To claim that any behavior in opposition to or demands for alteration of copyright law as it currently stands simply because that's how the law currently stands flies in the face of history.
I have a REB1200 and a REB1100 that I picked up cheap a couple months ago. There are plenty of ways to put your own content on them. Here's one and here's the one I use for my REB1200. These devices' protocols have been hacked six ways from sunday already, so whether Gemstar vanishes completely or not, you'll still be able to load content onto your device.
Of course, the stuff you "bought" from Gemstar is only worth the paper it's printed on because of its DRM'd status. I personally wouldn't buy anything digital I couldn't keep a backup for.
Show me a man who can find a slightly asymmetric shape, and I'll show you a man who can find a slightly tritriangular number.
Or a slightly odd one...
I think the "slightly" refers to the degree of asymmetry. A barbell with 200kg on one side and 195kg on the other is slightly asymmetrical. One with 200kg on one and 5kg on the other would be grossly asymmetrical.
The same basic thing happened with the F-111 program in the 60s. The drawing had a piece that was installed upside down, but the technician installing them said, this ALWAYS goes right side up and installed it that way. A couple crashes and the grounding of the whole F-111 fleet later, and the trouble was found. I don't know what happened to the installer, but I can't imagine it was any good. Check twice, install once:)
This seems to happen a lot with factory workers. As I recall from the fog of memory, Chuck Yeager talked about this one old guy working on the assembly line building F-86's. His job was to rivet on an actuator attachment point for the aileron's or some such. Then one day they redesign the whole actuator mechanism and the attachment point has to be flipped over and installed the other way. Well, this old rivetter guy refused to believe it. He thought the change order was a mistake, so he ignored it and kept putting 'em in the old way. Killed a few F-86 pilots before they figured out the problem.
... or even eletrical parts specifications (connectors should be keyed to mate only one way: the right way).'
And even then, someone will crimp the cable in backwards:^)
Fortunately, the Stick of Correction is symmetrical and can be gripped by either end...
(thwack!) "OK!" (thwack!) "Red wire..." (thwack!) "...on the right!" (thwack!)"I'll remember!" (thwack!)
"If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it."
The important lesson here is about the design of critical parts. Nothing important should be made asymetrical and reversable. Even labeling it "THIS SIDE UP" on one side and "WRONG! DANGER! WRONG!" on the other isn't good enough. The part should either be symetrical, so it doesn't matter which way it goes, or non-reversable, so it wont fit upside down/backwards. Important thing to remember in mechanical engineering (gears|levers|*) or even eletrical parts specifications (connectors should be keyed to mate only one way: the right way).
I think there is a simple answer to that question - use human translators!
Thank you, Captain Obvious. Implicit in the original question was the caveat "when human translators are in unavailable". The problem is, linguists are always in short supply. Linguists in difficult languages (Russian, Arabic, Chinese, etc.) take over a year to go from enlistment to fully trained, so any need has to be predicted at least that far in advance. Need for large numbers of linguists have to be predicted even farther in advance, as the number of qualified applicants is pretty low. The Defense Language Institute is currently cranking out Arabic linguists like it was cranking out Russian linguists in '87 when I was there (60% Russian, %40 all other by my estimate), but this only get you like 150 Arabic linguists a year TOTAL. Nowhere near enough to put one or more with every platoon, which is how these IM devices will likely be distributed.
Groklaw is biased against SCO already. Can we trust them to be fair and unbiased in their "research"?
Bias doesn't automatically indicate dishonesty. Are they biased against SCO? Sure. Does this mean they're looking primarily at SCO rather than the OSS community for evidence of malfeasance? Sure does. Does this mean that evidence they find is worthless? Nope (it's PGP signed by Caldera fer gosh sakes). Just because Groklaw isn't also out looking for "the real killers" deosn't mean they're lying about SCO. You have to judge the honesty of an organization separately. Just because some people lie to support their biases doesn't mean all biased people are liars.
Since the ships were moving too, the ship's speed had to be known (which was calculated by latitude and longitude and time).
Actually, I think you have it backwards. As I recall, longitude was done via dead reckoning, which requires speed and time. Speed was measured by flipping a 28-second glass timer and dragging a rope with knots tied at regular intervals-- the faster the ship went the more knots went over the side in 28 seconds. Time was essentially measured in days (which requires no clock, obviously). Sextants, while indeed quite accurate, only give you latitude.
Actually, medicare and medicaid pay less than half of the "market value" for most medical services.
That's exactly my point. If medicare/caid covered the full value, there'd be no problem (at least for those covered). If medicare payed nothing, market forces would bring prices down.
whole seems to be from about 2001-2003, and some messages simply can't be found.
I emailed google pointing out the problem, and after 2-3 weeks, got a long-walk-short-pier kind of email that basically said "we can't really control how much we index, sucks to be you". Thanks google.
Soon as we find a free, full-text search DB engine that doesn't suck, we're switching
You know, if you want to use Google as your organiziation's database search engine and you want Google to listen to you when you complain, you can pay for it like everyone else. Google as you're using it is free, so you're getting what you paid for.
P.S. - some friendly advice so you don't get burned - you may want to compare total per-capita health care spending between say Canada and the U.S., and level of coverage after all that money is spent, before you use the health care system as an example of how well the market works...
I think that's exactly his point: the prices in US health care are so high because it's not ruled by the iron fist of government, but the government is pouring limitless amounts of cash into it via medicare et al, which prices everyone but government out of the market. As far as "level of coverage", I'd take the US system over the Canadian any day. Sure, it costs me money to see a doctor and buy antibiotics for an infection, but if I were to need, say, an MRI to check if I have cancer, I better hope it can wait 6 months or more. Or if I needed open heart surgery after October, I might have to wait till the first of the year because my province has run out of cardiac surgery funding for the year. But hey, it's all free, right? The Canadian health care system is an underregulated monopoly with no performance requirements. Privatized and regulated performs better in this case.
Metacity is a window manager for Gnome. Expocity is a patch for it that pops up a bunch of "thumbnails" of all your open windows. You can then click on one of those thumbnails to bring that window to the front, rather than having to semi-randomly click taskbar buttons and hope you find the window you want.
Why can't Microsoft just licence the patent? Its interesting to see to matter what happens and what it costs microsoft will aways prefer to get round something that pay for it, even if it would be cheaper to pay for it.
The owner of the patent has stated that he will not license to Microsoft. Essentially, he has admitted that he's using the patent as a cudgel to pound MS. While I find MS as distasteful a company as most here do, I am very uncomfortable with this abuse of patent law. I would rather see MS win on appeal than let some crackpot patent the obvious and decide to grant and deny usage based on his whims and fancies.
Didi you notice that the pop-up has only one button?
I mean, it's just a stupid OK button... If they said "Active Content Flash Plugin about to be loaded" then Yes or No it would make much more sense...
There's already a spot in IE's settings where you can tell it you want to be asked "yes or no" before loading ActiveX(or whatever) things. This one button popup is what you get when you say you DON'T want to be asked. Yeah, it's stupid, but so is the patent it's avoiding.
No one says "Let me grab my hammer for a nail-pounding Experience." or "I just had a fearsome toilet Experience.."
I'm with you on the hammer-and-nail one, but I'm sure a LOT of us could describe one or more bathroom events in our lives as a "fearsome toilet experience".
Having 99% replaced ie with mozilla all I can say is "who gives a shit !"
Now that Eolas has a victory versus Microsoft, what makes you think they're not going to come after Mozilla? I suspect they plan to "vigorously defend their intellectual property", like all those other corp's following the "patent the obvious and sue" business plan.
The developer preview they have is a standalone version of IE. In other words, it doesn't affect anything else on your system, and it can be completely uninstalled.
Didn't Microsoft say this sort of thing was impossible, back in the days of the antitrust suit? Might we have evidence of perjury on our hands?
Nope. You're looking at it from the wrong end. They didn't say it was impossible to code a standalone browser, because obviously it's not-- look at Mozilla, Opera, etc. What they said is that web browsing capability couldn't be removed from Windows because it was integral to their file manager. Whether that asserion is true or false, the existence of a self-contained version of IE is irrelevant.
.. a month or two ago, a friend's hyperagressive cat was prescribed an antidepressant(!). I was curious so I did a google search on "feline paxil" and got very low quality and repetitive search results; most of the top few screens appeared to be related scams by online pill-pushers trying to get you to use their "search engine".
This one's been up-and-coming for a while. It's a dodge for improving google ranking. It works like this:
1. Set up "search engine" that always returns "no match"
2. Fill "no match" result page with spam-like links on the side
3. Get a some suckers to try to use the engine
4. Archive the "search results" pages, with search terms prominently placed, where Google's spiders can find them
5. watch the Google hits roll in
Try, for example, this search. Everything below the second match is a faux-search page. The worst part is that the more people who get directed to this non-search engine, the more fake search pages get generated when people try to use them. It's evil. I think Google should rate these clowns in particular down, either by their domain names or by recognizing these "search results" pages for the trash that they are. I've seen a lot of Google searches polluted by this garbage.
Maybe a small scale multi-colored "Google" would work just fine? It certainly wouldn't take much time to create.
Yeah, I think that'd be the best way too, but is it good enough for the/. masters? I mean it's got no flash to it like Borg Bill. I personally think the icons have gotten over-specific. Like you pointed out, The Matrix has its own icon, fer bog's sake! I think Google does perhaps deserve its own icon, but a LOT of the schlock on/. doesn't.
For example, if you search for "GroupWise cbt" (Novell GroupWise Computer Based Training), a lot of really interesting results come up. This has been happening with enough frequency lately that I've been pondering switching search engines...
Hah! That's just one BDS&M site under different domain names that managed to slip a spurious term into its pagerank index or something. The ones that are driving ME nuts are the "hits" that come from a crapola "search engine" site. Anyone else gotten this? Try, for example, searching for audio codec download. The first two hits are good, but check out all the crap after that! Do these "search engines" keep old search result pages indexed somewhere so that google will find them? I'm all for Google down-ranking those domains. It seriously pollutes the results.
Come on already. 2 stories on the frontpage in one day, and still no Icon/Topic for Google? It's slashdot's favorite search engine. Every time something new, different, interesting, pointless, etc. happens with Google, we get a story on it. If the freaking Matrix movie has its own topic/icon, why not Google?
Maybe they can't think of a cutesy enough icon for it. All Google has on its site is the multi-colored "Google"-- everything else is plain text.
According to Patterson and Hennessy's Computer Organization and Design textbook, "Time is the measure of computer performance: the computer that performs the same amount of work in the least time is the fastest." (Page 58, Second Edition).
Of course, just because it's the fastest doesn't mean it is the one YOU should buy, but I think the standard of 'performance' is execution time.
I think his point was that comparing things like boot times and application start times is not an equal measure of performance. Linux boots faster on my 400mHz box than Win XP does on my 850mHz machine. In order to actually compare performance the exact same task must be done by each, such as the application of a specific filter in photoshop, or creating an MPEG-4 video from an MPREG-2.
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I quit smoking the same way. I went from 15 a day to 2 a day-- morning and lunch. From 2 a day I dropped to 1 at lunch. At 1 a day it's not that hard to start skipping the weekends because it becomes associated with lunch at work. Once it became a "lunch at work" thing for me, it was pretty easy to take a 2 week vacation-- and quit.
Cripes, quit being such a troll. You can't equate morality with legality. It seems like every third post here is an interjection by you of "that's illegal" and nothing more. Copyright is essentially a gift, a favor bestowed upon authors and creators in exchange for encouraging enrichment of the public domain. For the vast majority of the history of literacy there has been no copyright protection. To claim that any behavior in opposition to or demands for alteration of copyright law as it currently stands simply because that's how the law currently stands flies in the face of history.
Of course, the stuff you "bought" from Gemstar is only worth the paper it's printed on because of its DRM'd status. I personally wouldn't buy anything digital I couldn't keep a backup for.
Yeah, THAT'S the one. Thanks.
I think the "slightly" refers to the degree of asymmetry. A barbell with 200kg on one side and 195kg on the other is slightly asymmetrical. One with 200kg on one and 5kg on the other would be grossly asymmetrical.
This seems to happen a lot with factory workers. As I recall from the fog of memory, Chuck Yeager talked about this one old guy working on the assembly line building F-86's. His job was to rivet on an actuator attachment point for the aileron's or some such. Then one day they redesign the whole actuator mechanism and the attachment point has to be flipped over and installed the other way. Well, this old rivetter guy refused to believe it. He thought the change order was a mistake, so he ignored it and kept putting 'em in the old way. Killed a few F-86 pilots before they figured out the problem.
And even then, someone will crimp the cable in backwards :^)
Fortunately, the Stick of Correction is symmetrical and can be gripped by either end...
(thwack!) "OK!" (thwack!) "Red wire..." (thwack!) "...on the right!" (thwack!)"I'll remember!" (thwack!)
The important lesson here is about the design of critical parts. Nothing important should be made asymetrical and reversable. Even labeling it "THIS SIDE UP" on one side and "WRONG! DANGER! WRONG!" on the other isn't good enough. The part should either be symetrical, so it doesn't matter which way it goes, or non-reversable, so it wont fit upside down/backwards. Important thing to remember in mechanical engineering (gears|levers|*) or even eletrical parts specifications (connectors should be keyed to mate only one way: the right way).
Thank you, Captain Obvious. Implicit in the original question was the caveat "when human translators are in unavailable". The problem is, linguists are always in short supply. Linguists in difficult languages (Russian, Arabic, Chinese, etc.) take over a year to go from enlistment to fully trained, so any need has to be predicted at least that far in advance. Need for large numbers of linguists have to be predicted even farther in advance, as the number of qualified applicants is pretty low. The Defense Language Institute is currently cranking out Arabic linguists like it was cranking out Russian linguists in '87 when I was there (60% Russian, %40 all other by my estimate), but this only get you like 150 Arabic linguists a year TOTAL. Nowhere near enough to put one or more with every platoon, which is how these IM devices will likely be distributed.
Bias doesn't automatically indicate dishonesty. Are they biased against SCO? Sure. Does this mean they're looking primarily at SCO rather than the OSS community for evidence of malfeasance? Sure does. Does this mean that evidence they find is worthless? Nope (it's PGP signed by Caldera fer gosh sakes). Just because Groklaw isn't also out looking for "the real killers" deosn't mean they're lying about SCO. You have to judge the honesty of an organization separately. Just because some people lie to support their biases doesn't mean all biased people are liars.
Actually, I think you have it backwards. As I recall, longitude was done via dead reckoning, which requires speed and time. Speed was measured by flipping a 28-second glass timer and dragging a rope with knots tied at regular intervals-- the faster the ship went the more knots went over the side in 28 seconds. Time was essentially measured in days (which requires no clock, obviously). Sextants, while indeed quite accurate, only give you latitude.
That's exactly my point. If medicare/caid covered the full value, there'd be no problem (at least for those covered). If medicare payed nothing, market forces would bring prices down.
You know, if you want to use Google as your organiziation's database search engine and you want Google to listen to you when you complain, you can pay for it like everyone else. Google as you're using it is free, so you're getting what you paid for.
I think that's exactly his point: the prices in US health care are so high because it's not ruled by the iron fist of government, but the government is pouring limitless amounts of cash into it via medicare et al, which prices everyone but government out of the market. As far as "level of coverage", I'd take the US system over the Canadian any day. Sure, it costs me money to see a doctor and buy antibiotics for an infection, but if I were to need, say, an MRI to check if I have cancer, I better hope it can wait 6 months or more. Or if I needed open heart surgery after October, I might have to wait till the first of the year because my province has run out of cardiac surgery funding for the year. But hey, it's all free, right? The Canadian health care system is an underregulated monopoly with no performance requirements. Privatized and regulated performs better in this case.
Metacity is a window manager for Gnome. Expocity is a patch for it that pops up a bunch of "thumbnails" of all your open windows. You can then click on one of those thumbnails to bring that window to the front, rather than having to semi-randomly click taskbar buttons and hope you find the window you want.
The owner of the patent has stated that he will not license to Microsoft. Essentially, he has admitted that he's using the patent as a cudgel to pound MS. While I find MS as distasteful a company as most here do, I am very uncomfortable with this abuse of patent law. I would rather see MS win on appeal than let some crackpot patent the obvious and decide to grant and deny usage based on his whims and fancies.
There's already a spot in IE's settings where you can tell it you want to be asked "yes or no" before loading ActiveX(or whatever) things. This one button popup is what you get when you say you DON'T want to be asked. Yeah, it's stupid, but so is the patent it's avoiding.
I'm with you on the hammer-and-nail one, but I'm sure a LOT of us could describe one or more bathroom events in our lives as a "fearsome toilet experience".
Now that Eolas has a victory versus Microsoft, what makes you think they're not going to come after Mozilla? I suspect they plan to "vigorously defend their intellectual property", like all those other corp's following the "patent the obvious and sue" business plan.
Nope. You're looking at it from the wrong end. They didn't say it was impossible to code a standalone browser, because obviously it's not-- look at Mozilla, Opera, etc. What they said is that web browsing capability couldn't be removed from Windows because it was integral to their file manager. Whether that asserion is true or false, the existence of a self-contained version of IE is irrelevant.
This one's been up-and-coming for a while. It's a dodge for improving google ranking. It works like this:
1. Set up "search engine" that always returns "no match"
2. Fill "no match" result page with spam-like links on the side
3. Get a some suckers to try to use the engine
4. Archive the "search results" pages, with search terms prominently placed, where Google's spiders can find them
5. watch the Google hits roll in
Try, for example, this search. Everything below the second match is a faux-search page. The worst part is that the more people who get directed to this non-search engine, the more fake search pages get generated when people try to use them. It's evil. I think Google should rate these clowns in particular down, either by their domain names or by recognizing these "search results" pages for the trash that they are. I've seen a lot of Google searches polluted by this garbage.
Yeah, I think that'd be the best way too, but is it good enough for the /. masters? I mean it's got no flash to it like Borg Bill. I personally think the icons have gotten over-specific. Like you pointed out, The Matrix has its own icon, fer bog's sake! I think Google does perhaps deserve its own icon, but a LOT of the schlock on /. doesn't.
Hah! That's just one BDS&M site under different domain names that managed to slip a spurious term into its pagerank index or something. The ones that are driving ME nuts are the "hits" that come from a crapola "search engine" site. Anyone else gotten this? Try, for example, searching for audio codec download. The first two hits are good, but check out all the crap after that! Do these "search engines" keep old search result pages indexed somewhere so that google will find them? I'm all for Google down-ranking those domains. It seriously pollutes the results.
Maybe they can't think of a cutesy enough icon for it. All Google has on its site is the multi-colored "Google"-- everything else is plain text.
I think his point was that comparing things like boot times and application start times is not an equal measure of performance. Linux boots faster on my 400mHz box than Win XP does on my 850mHz machine. In order to actually compare performance the exact same task must be done by each, such as the application of a specific filter in photoshop, or creating an MPEG-4 video from an MPREG-2.