As someone who just blundered past one morning on the way to work with an exibit only pass, I didn't have a clue there were community groups on the second floor.
I was wondering where the locals and nonprofits went. Not that there were all that many of them in previous years, but I always found at least a few interesting conversations on the floor. Guess not bothering to pick up a conference guide book was a mistake.
I've got nothing against big-money IT-centric vendors. Hell, it's more than that. I'm very glad they exist. As the most mainstream, lucrative, and visible aspect of FOSS in general and Linux in particular, they do a lot of good for the community. But, they sure do make for a boring floor show.
>Every time a new technology or a new way of doing something >appears, someone else figures out a way to possibly abuse it and >make a buck with it. That's how the world operates.
Usually, I'd agree with you.
But this seems to be the exception, in two ways.
The first (and less interesting) is that it wasn't actually an organized marketing ploy at all, assuming the two posters are to be believed. (It would certainly seems rather un-BBC-like if it were, and news if only for that reason.)
But, what's really interesting is that it failed. Unlike virtually every other medium out there where marketing agreements and dinner party handshaks force thinly disguised adverts on the audience, here's a case where an information delivery system proved so robust that within days it annihilated even a barely visible and seemingly harmless attempt at marketing.
In a world where television journalists hawk movies and products, newspapers add bylines to industry press-releases and ink them without so much as a word change, and public radio hosts are forced to recite advertising copy, it's incredible to find a forum which not only avoids active advertising deals but ruthlessly attacks at the first sign of marketing infiltration.
What I wouldn't give for some mod points to spend on the immediate parent.
This isn't a case of someone trying to get away with a MS-only policy by floating a proposal for comment and hoping no one responds.
It's a case of someone who realized *too late* that their site isn't entirely accessible and who is now doing the right thing by telling us about it. They'remore or less asking for permission to put up the flawed site as it is while they work on fixing it.
The fact that they've made this public statement at all, combined with specific references to mozilla, suggest that they're *already* onboard when it comes to the demand for a standards compliant web.
As much as I hate MS-only policies, this isn't one of them. Let's not waste our time and theirs writing to tell them that we don't have windows pcs. The best that can possibly happen is that they'll ignore the flood of irrelevant mail. In the worst case, they'll decide that we linux heads are a bunch of nutballs and bring that grudge to their next project.
Unless you're planning to release a film in the US in next couple of months and your company doesn't have access to a windows pc, your comments won't really mean much. That is, after all, the only people who are affected by this issue.
- Erik
Buy the cheapest used pda you can find.
on
Best PDA for College?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
My advice - get a cheap used or after market model from a couple years ago. Carry it around for a few months and see if you use it and how much damage it receives.
You may find that you use it constantly. Certainly true if your memory for names and numbers is anything like mine. If so, then you'll be in a position to make an informed choice when you buy the newest model in a few months. Informed, in this case, means that you'll know what features you'll actually use on a pda.
Or, you may find that you never touch the thing. Then you'll have saved hundreds of dollars that you can spend on something you really will use.
Or, you may find that you're the kind of person who destroys or loses several of pda's every year, in which case a constant supply of old cheap ones may be the ideal solution.
You can find used palm-IIIc's for $25, aftermarket new ones for a little more. Or, if any friends of family are pda users, they may will just hand you their old model if you ask them for it. (I've gone through two models this way myself, and passed each along to other people when upgrade time came.)
The only caveat is that the newer high(er) resolution screens are a lot nicer for reading lots of text. If you plan to view books on the thing, then the older models just won't cut it. (But unless you work in a cleanroom or you like to read in bed and you share a bedroom with someone who goes to sleep earlier than you, you may well find reading books on a pda isn't something you ever want to do.)
Cook'd and Bomb'd - Chris Morris site. Hunt around for mirrors that have archived radio programs. (The Blue Jam series is my personal favorite.) http://chilled.cream.org/
If you don't mind downloading material that's not supposed to be available for download (most easily done using mplayer, I find), then there are plenty of radio offerings. I'm a public radio junkie, and usually stock up on a few dozen shows before taking a long trip. Among my favorites:
Joe Frank. The greatest radio artist in the history of, well, radio artistry. (Subscription costs $10/mo, but is well worth it.) http://joefrank.com/
>I'm pretty sure I'd beat up any one who decided to
>start walking around my house, wouldn't you?
Really? I sure hope we're not neighbors.
Now, if someone sat down on my kitchen floor and refused to leave after being told to do so repeatedly, or if they started breaking important things, I'd try to physically force them out. But I wouldn't beat them up.
>Please don't take offense at me if I voice my inability >to believe the word of someone who breaks into military >computers to look for evidence of UFOs.
Breaking into a government computer to look for evidence for UFO's is a perfectly rational decision. If you believe that there's a conspiracy to hide information and that there's no legitimate way to obtain that information, going after it in this way makes perfect sense. (Allowing yourself to be caught doing it is pretty dumb, but he readily admits to having been dumb on that count.)
While he may be wrong, that doesn't make him insane or unreliable.
The fact that he claims not to have found the evidence he wanted - outside of a photograph of a weird looking aircraft and the phrase "non-terrestrial personnel" in a document - makes him seem all the more reliable. He's not a crackpot falling over himself to misenterpret or invent data.
He's just a guy who went too far following a reasonable (if wrong) idea, and the care with which he described what he did observe is admirable. If all the UFO nutters were as precise as him, there'd be a lot fewer UFO nutters out there.
>"I see people breaking into these comptuers all the time." >Was that before or after you were pulled into the mothership >and shown the proof that we never landed on the moon?
LTFI.
That's exactly the sort of thing he didn't say. (I was expecting to hear something similar myself.)
There shouldn't be a problem, assuming you handle the opt-in and opt-out reasonably. That means:
- opt-in isn't required to access any of your services (except of course the "service" of receiving your junk mail)
- the opt-in option isn't obscured or labeled ambiguously when initially signing up
- the opt-in isn't automatically selected every time someone does something on your site, forcing them to constantly un-opt-in
By not trying to trick people, you'll be treating you customers far better than the vast majority of legitimate online marketers.
The only drawback is that you may well find that when offered a real choice, no one actually wants to opt-in for your lists. (In which case the ethical choice would be to go out of business peacefully rather than reverting to spam tactics. . . although convincing your boss of that may prove difficult.)
P.S. While you're at it, offer people a choice of plain text email! Nothing pisses me off more than a company that insists on sending me html.
>I think it stinks that I can get all the theory, >build circuits, program PCs, and fix just about >anything, but I can't transmit below 50MHz because >I can't seem to learn a 150 year old communications >method.
As someone who passed the 20 wpm a decade ago and who actually does use cw more than any other mode when on the radio, I couldn't agree with you more.
Sure, there are instances where cw is really important - say, passing emergency traffic when conditions are poor - but it's absurd to suggest that such a thing happens often enough in the average ham's experience to justify hundreds of hours of study.
For half a century the code test has served primarily as an artificial barrier to licenses.
One could argue that's a worthwhile purpose in itself; adding a challenge to entering any field, however meaningless, can serve to weed out a lot of people who aren't serious about the hobby. An ear full of most CB conversation is enough to convince me that some barrier to entry is probably a good thing. (Although I'm all in favor of having more free-for-all unregulated spectrum out there which anyone can play with than we currently allow.) Our world is full of hurdles put in place solely for the purpose of turning away those who aren't serious about pursuing something. The subject specific GREs are an obvious example from academia. It's never ideal, but it sometimes can serve a worthwhile purpose.
None the less, there are some very good reasons that a code requirement is a bad idea.
First of all, it places an unequal burden on people. I had a pretty easy time with the code - a few tens of hours to get to 5wpm, and an easy couple hours a week after that on the air to get up past 20. But a lot of people have much more difficulty with it. The guy who taught me everything I know about electronics was unable to get a license until the no-code techs came out because dyslexia made learning the code impossible. He's not only an awesome person to chat with and a friend and advisor to many, but has spent countless hours volunteering for emergency communications groups. By any standard, Amateur Radio lost out by keeping him away for so long.
Even among those without learning disabilities, there are many for whom code is really hard. It's unfair to force them to jump what turns out to be an outrageously large hurdle in order to attain something for which actually knowing code isn't necessary.
Second, if we're going to force people to spend hours studying something in order to get a license, there are a lot of more useful things they could study. At least 90% of the hams I meet on phone study code, pass their tests, and then never use it again. What a waste of effort! Instead, why not beef up the technical tests (or get rid of the pre-printed "suggested" multiple choice answers that every VE uses).
Or - if you really want to do something useful - how about requiring something like first aid certification instead? If every ham who spent a hundred hours learning code and then never used it again spent their time learning CPR, just think about how many extra first responders we'd have walking around our streets!
The only remaining question is, what will become of CW when no one is forced to learn it? It's true that I might not have ever learned code if it weren't required, and it's true that I'm glad I did learn it. But there's got to be some other way to provide an incentive to keep at least a few people out there on the bands.
Perhaps you reserve some choice CW-only spectrum for those who've passed code tests. And, so long as there's a strong and active community of code lovers, we can always work to create other incentives with cw-only special event DX stations, extra cw points and freeby stations in contests, and so on. Is that enough to keep the hobby alive? I'm not sure. But if it isn't, then perhaps keeping cw alive isn't worth the cost.
>Do you shop more than once at the same store? gas >station? cvs? etc? What is the differnce between a >cookie, and a clerk who recognizes your face?
The difference is that when, six years from now, the local sheriff's buddy buys the gas station and asks the new clerk for a list of names and addresses for "every commie bastard who's browsed through those leftist magazines the old owner used to sell," he's unlikely to find his way to my house.
There's a world of difference between a shopkeeper knowing your face and occasionally noticing what you do in a store, and a system that records everything you look at along with all your personal information and keeps it forever.
If every time I walked into the local gas station a guy followed me around with clipboard that had my name and address on it, taking notes, then filed the documents in a huge stack of filing cabinets when I left, I'd be concerned about that too.
Even for those who aren't paranoid, there are reasons you might not want anyone who is ever associated with an online retailer to know about every page you've read:
"So, John, I'm glad to hear that you're interested in working for us here at bigonlinebookstore.com. I've got to say, I was really impressed by your resume. There's just one thing - looking over the logs for littleboughtoutbookstore.com, we've noticed that you read reviews for a surprising number of clown-porn magazines back in the mid nineties. .."
Sure, the chances that you will be personally the victim of a bad cookie experience may may be small. But somewhere, someone is going to get busted for something that you and I don't find objectionable because a cookie-based database fell into the wrong hands. Laws change, and bad people get privileged positions in companies. Only by refusing to cooperate in mass with mechanisms that unnecessarily strip us of our privacy can we protect that person, whoever it may be.
And while we're on the topic - what on earth are these consumer experience improvements the ad-men are always going on about? Without cookies, I get to browse through an online store. With cookies, I get to browse through the same online store, but it mentions my name at the top of every page. That's either harmless or creepy, but it sure isn't useful to anyone but a marketer.
Re:Astronomy hack - plumbing your yard for liquid
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Astronomy Hacks
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· Score: 1
>I dunno, "astronomy hack" seems more like plumbing >your yard for liquid nitrogen using existing >sprinkler system pipe, or turning a Mattel Barbie >Photo Designer into a functioning spectrograph.
Very funny!
And, it also leads to an idea: a test equipment or laboratory hacks collection. We've all heard about or witnessed the occasional ingenuous non-standard lab trick. Collecting a bunch of anecdotal stories of real lab hacks could make for an entertaining read. It's no stupider than a lot of other collections out there.
Would I buy it in the form of a book? No. Probably not. But if it were an online collection it might be worth a few chuckles. While we're at it, why not a full franchise: cryogenic hacks, optics hacks, frequency domain hacks, etc. }8^)
That's true, but the chances that it is mechanical, wiring, or a simple stand alone component are *still* pretty damn good.
Sure, when you fry some custom IC (no doubt unlabeled, potted in epoxy, and impossible to order from the manufacturer, just to make repair more difficult than it needs to be), you're hosed.
But as often as not the parts that die first are the easiest to replace: mechanical bits that wear down, discrete capacitors and voltage regulators that fry, solder joints on connectors that get wiggled around, etc. Unless you do something spectacular to a piece of equipment or it was designed really badly, it's usually kind of hard to fry the microprocessors.
I've rescued a fair number of high tech gizmos that were left for dead and uninvestigated by their owners - several CD players of various sizes and price tags, two palm pilots (which have a total of about four discrete components in them, but in each case it turned out one of those was the culprit), a large hard drive, several almost new microwaves, a scanner and a nice big pc monitor, etc.
For those of us in wealthy countries, it may be uneconomical to hire someone to fix stuff rather than to replace it with new stuff. But it's often well worth the time to at least diagnose a broken piece of gear before tossing it. (Not to mention the brief anti-consumer rush you get from it, given the appropriate world view.)
I'm a rank amateur when it comes to T-hunting (a sport among ham radio operators that consists of trying to find a hidden transmitter with directional antennas), but after a couple excursions I can guarantee that hunting for a few GHz signal inside an office building is going to be tough. Even with equipment that will let you look at only the offending signal and dedicated df'ing antenna (whether nulling loops or something that chops between multiple antennas and actively compared phase from each), you'll spend a long time chasing reflections.
That's not to say it wouldn't be a fun thing to try, of course.
An alternative might be to attenuate the signal - by replacing the antenna on your wireless card with a badly tuned little stub of wire or sticking it in a metal biscuit tin grounded to the laptop chasis - and then walk the building floors looking for a peak.
Chances are you can cover all the floor space in your building in less time than it will take you to chase reflections around with a directional antenna.
>As for why he'd want to do that, it's simple: Lots of music pla > offer recording capabilities. Some people actually put those to > use.
Sounds plausible, and not a bad reason to demand secure audio players.
But in this case, the poster hasn't said anything about preventing people from using headphones to listen to his audio. His emphasis on one-way copying mechanisms suggests that keeping his audio private isn't a goal at all, he just wants to make sure no one copies the files themselves.
Why anyone would spend time worrying about such a thing is beyond me. Perhaps he listens to files which have personalized signatures embedded in them and he's afraid someone's going to come knocking on his door when they escape into the wild? Sounds more than a little paranoid, but perhaps not totally insane. We certainly live in a world in which media companies do attack individual people for file sharing.
As for the original poster, I'd say try to switch to a job where people don't tend to access your hardware without permission, or failing that, ask for a desk drawer with a lock on it. (Then again, it's possible the poster is such a paranoid nutball that perfectly normal co-workers actually are likely to play with his toys just for the fun of seeing him go berserk. In that situation, I'd be more likely to *upload* tracks onto his player, but perhaps that's just me.)
We've got some multi-user equipment with a shared log book which many people need to access, and a wiki on an internal password protected site seems to work fine.
We happen to be using plain phpwiki, because it's easy to deal with and including images in pages is simple, but any wiki backend should work.
One problem, though - if you anticipate needing the dated material in your logbook for some official reason (patent claims, oversight by a funding agency or supervisor, etc), then going electronic might be a bad idea.
> 75% of music listeners are using *A* download service
Nope.
If your reading of the article is correct, then there's no reason to exclude overlap between those group who download music. It might just as well be that 40% use illegal download services, and 87% of those also use legal download services, while 60% purchase media.
Something closer to that is certainly in line with anecdotal discussions with the people I happen to know.
But without more detail about how the study was conducted, it's tough to say anything meaningful.
slickery (adj): having a surface that is wet and icy
So in other words, slickery means the same thing as slick? Yeah, that's a useful word. Right up there with confuzled on the list of neologisms don't actually add anything to the language.
Mangling an existing word and then claiming that it means the same thing as the old word is just dumb when there are so many useful concepts out there for which words don't exist and so many interesting sounds that aren't already incorporated into words. Come on, pop-culture, you can do better!
Woot isn't all that interesting either, come to think of it, but at least it's new.
Now foo, on the other hand, is a neologism with some real substance.
My thoughts exactly. An okay movie, but it belongs pretty far down the list of the best movies of Kurasawa, let alone the world.
On the other hand, I was surprised and pleased to see Ikiru in there. If you ask me, it actually is Kurasawa's best, yet one that rarely gets mentioned. (Although I certainly wouldn't object to seeing Rashomon or Seven Samauri on the list.)
Adding Yojimbo to the list is rather like starting an article with "Steven Spielberg, known for directing the film 1941..."
How can someone write an article that says something has won an award. . . and then leave out which award has been received?
here is a UPI version with almost identical text, but which makes it clear (well, precise - clear isn't possible in this case) what they've won: "the No. 1 arcade game of all time."
That is, of course, assuming it's the first story that mangled the press release, and not the second story that made a guess at trying to fill in the obvious missing information.
Now all we need to figure out is what the heck being the No. 1 arcade game of all time actually means.
No. There are plenty of reasons to avoid html email. Here's the one that may convince your boss: not everyone *can* read it, even today. At the very least, not everyone who is able to read it will be able to see the html formatting. One of the best things about plain text is that it forces you to format your message in a way that everyone will be able to read.
There are a lot of people who will never see your formatted html: businessmen and geeks using cellphones and PDA's, blind people with text readers, people whose spam filters decide that all html messages are spam, people who don't have computers and use stand-alone email terminals or webtv style appliances, people who use public terminals that have restrictive security settings, people using remote unix servers that lack recent text browsers, and people like me to go out of their way to avoid seeing inline html.
What's more, even if your email is readable and makes it through the spam filters, it will still make life difficult for many of your recipients. Mail sorting routines and client filters may choke or misfile your messages. Text searches will miss your messages. If you send your customers an invoice that can't be found in a search, you'll really piss them off.
Don't waste your time and money creating something that will reach *fewer* of your clients than plain old text.
> Should I trust our client-base to be fully equipped for such a mailer?
No. Most of the people in my office aren't, most by choice. While I'm capable of reading such a mailer, chances are I won't. Around 95% of the html email I receive gets instantly deleted without being read. If you aren't one of my personal friends and you send me html, you're wasting your bandwidth.
>Should I worry about improper delivery marring our professional image?
Yup. And not only improper delivery - even if your message gets through fine, sending people html is likely to annoy them. Sending html email is common to spammers,and amateur would-be-businesses. I've actively made a decision to avoid companies that refuse to send me plain text. (UpgradeSource comes to mind.)
I find it really strange that mutt beat out pine by such a large margin in 2003.
I'm a big fan of mutt, but just about everyone I know seems to use pine or a graphical mail reader. Whenever the subject comes up, few people seem to have ever heard of mutt.
Then again, almost everyone I know has been brought up in academic computing environements with historical roots in solaris and other unixes, so they're probably not a representative group. Still, it seems pretty weird to me to see mutt scoring so high. I'd be tempted to write off the 2003 showing for both mutt and debian as anomolous.
Perhaps in 2003 news of the survey made it onto a hand full of particular sub-sub-culture mailing lists?
Either that or there's been a trend in desktoplinux.com readership toward a more mainstream linux user base. (ie. desktop users rather than desktop coders.) Based on anecdote and little else, I'd expect a correlation between debian and mutt use among the geekiest crowd and an anti-correlation with KDE use.
The strange thing is that I'd expect slackware to show a similar trend, and yet it doesn't show up in the survey. Odd.
Doh! Sorry about the stupid formatting in the above. Fixed version follows
>Clearly, businesses are not in the business of providing >jobs.. they are in the business of transacting business.. >With the lowest costs possible.. which means the highest >efficiency..
That's not at all clear.
Or rather, it's clear that they're not *currently* in the business of providing jobs, but it's far from clear that they shouldn't be. Corporations are chartered by the government for the public good - it's up to us to decide what that means. (And maximizing profit for investors by any means sure isn't what I'd call public good.) Even private companies depend on their community for the infrastructure that allows them to exist. It doesn't seem unreasonable to require that they also operate in a way that benefits that community.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who just blundered past one morning on the way to work with an exibit only pass, I didn't have a clue there were community groups on the second floor.
I was wondering where the locals and nonprofits went. Not that there were all that many of them in previous years, but I always found at least a few interesting conversations on the floor. Guess not bothering to pick up a conference guide book was a mistake.
I've got nothing against big-money IT-centric vendors. Hell, it's more than that. I'm very glad they exist. As the most mainstream, lucrative, and visible aspect of FOSS in general and Linux in particular, they do a lot of good for the community. But, they sure do make for a boring floor show.
>Every time a new technology or a new way of doing something
>appears, someone else figures out a way to possibly abuse it and
>make a buck with it. That's how the world operates.
Usually, I'd agree with you.
But this seems to be the exception, in two ways.
The first (and less interesting) is that it wasn't actually an organized marketing ploy at all, assuming the two posters are to be believed. (It would certainly seems rather un-BBC-like if it were, and news if only for that reason.)
But, what's really interesting is that it failed. Unlike virtually every other medium out there where marketing agreements and dinner party handshaks force thinly disguised adverts on the audience, here's a case where an information delivery system proved so robust that within days it annihilated even a barely visible and seemingly harmless attempt at marketing.
In a world where television journalists hawk movies and products, newspapers add bylines to industry press-releases and ink them without so much as a word change, and public radio hosts are forced to recite advertising copy, it's incredible to find a forum which not only avoids active advertising deals but ruthlessly attacks at the first sign of marketing infiltration.
Score one for wikipedia.
For those browsing at >0 points, by "immediate parent" I mean this comment:
d =13282021
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158499&ci
The way slashdot displays threads containing below-threshold posts sure is strange.
What I wouldn't give for some mod points to spend on the immediate parent.
This isn't a case of someone trying to get away with a MS-only policy by floating a proposal for comment and hoping no one responds.
It's a case of someone who realized *too late* that their site isn't entirely accessible and who is now doing the right thing by telling us about it. They'remore or less asking for permission to put up the flawed site as it is while they work on fixing it.
The fact that they've made this public statement at all, combined with specific references to mozilla, suggest that they're *already* onboard when it comes to the demand for a standards compliant web.
As much as I hate MS-only policies, this isn't one of them. Let's not waste our time and theirs writing to tell them that we don't have windows pcs. The best that can possibly happen is that they'll ignore the flood of irrelevant mail. In the worst case, they'll decide that we linux heads are a bunch of nutballs and bring that grudge to their next project.
Unless you're planning to release a film in the US in next couple of months and your company doesn't have access to a windows pc, your comments won't really mean much. That is, after all, the only people who are affected by this issue.
- Erik
My advice - get a cheap used or after market model from a couple years ago. Carry it around for a few months and see if you use it and how much damage it receives.
You may find that you use it constantly. Certainly true if your memory for names and numbers is anything like mine. If so, then you'll be in a position to make an informed choice when you buy the newest model in a few months. Informed, in this case, means that you'll know what features you'll actually use on a pda.
Or, you may find that you never touch the thing. Then you'll have saved hundreds of dollars that you can spend on something you really will use.
Or, you may find that you're the kind of person who destroys or loses several of pda's every year, in which case a constant supply of old cheap ones may be the ideal solution.
You can find used palm-IIIc's for $25, aftermarket new ones for a little more. Or, if any friends of family are pda users, they may will just hand you their old model if you ask them for it. (I've gone through two models this way myself, and passed each along to other people when upgrade time came.)
The only caveat is that the newer high(er) resolution screens are a lot nicer for reading lots of text. If you plan to view books on the thing, then the older models just won't cut it. (But unless you work in a cleanroom or you like to read in bed and you share a bedroom with someone who goes to sleep earlier than you, you may well find reading books on a pda isn't something you ever want to do.)
For those who don't mind finding ways to download streaming content -
http://publicradiofan.com/
The Jean Shepherd Archive has hundreds of hours of unrestricted downloadable audio collected by fans over the years:
http://shep-archives.com/
Some other sources of unrestricted material:
Transom public radio workshop/showcase:
http://www.transom.org/
Archive.org has some good audio.
http://www.archive.org/
Benjamin Walker's site:
http://toeradio.org/
Cook'd and Bomb'd - Chris Morris site. Hunt around for mirrors that have archived radio programs. (The Blue Jam series is my personal favorite.)
http://chilled.cream.org/
If you don't mind downloading material that's not supposed to be available for download (most easily done using mplayer, I find), then there are plenty of radio offerings. I'm a public radio junkie, and usually stock up on a few dozen shows before taking a long trip. Among my favorites:
Joe Frank. The greatest radio artist in the history of, well, radio artistry. (Subscription costs $10/mo, but is well worth it.)
http://joefrank.com/
This American Life. (free)
http://thislife.org/
Fresh Air. (free, but a pain in the ass to navigate)
http://freshair.npr.org/
>I'm pretty sure I'd beat up any one who decided to >start walking around my house, wouldn't you? Really? I sure hope we're not neighbors. Now, if someone sat down on my kitchen floor and refused to leave after being told to do so repeatedly, or if they started breaking important things, I'd try to physically force them out. But I wouldn't beat them up.
>Please don't take offense at me if I voice my inability
>to believe the word of someone who breaks into military
>computers to look for evidence of UFOs.
Breaking into a government computer to look for evidence for UFO's is a perfectly rational decision. If you believe that there's a conspiracy to hide information and that there's no legitimate way to obtain that information, going after it in this way makes perfect sense. (Allowing yourself to be caught doing it is pretty dumb, but he readily admits to having been dumb on that count.)
While he may be wrong, that doesn't make him insane or unreliable.
The fact that he claims not to have found the evidence he wanted - outside of a photograph of a weird looking aircraft and the phrase "non-terrestrial personnel" in a document - makes him seem all the more reliable. He's not a crackpot falling over himself to misenterpret or invent data.
He's just a guy who went too far following a reasonable (if wrong) idea, and the care with which he described what he did observe is admirable. If all the UFO nutters were as precise as him, there'd be a lot fewer UFO nutters out there.
>"I see people breaking into these comptuers all the time."
>Was that before or after you were pulled into the mothership
>and shown the proof that we never landed on the moon?
LTFI.
That's exactly the sort of thing he didn't say.
(I was expecting to hear something similar myself.)
There shouldn't be a problem, assuming you handle the opt-in and opt-out reasonably. That means:
- opt-in isn't required to access any of your services (except of course the "service" of receiving your junk mail)
- the opt-in option isn't obscured or labeled ambiguously when initially signing up
- the opt-in isn't automatically selected every time someone does something on your site, forcing them to constantly un-opt-in
By not trying to trick people, you'll be treating you customers far better than the vast majority of legitimate online marketers.
The only drawback is that you may well find that when offered a real choice, no one actually wants to opt-in for your lists. (In which case the ethical choice would be to go out of business peacefully rather than reverting to spam tactics. . . although convincing your boss of that may prove difficult.)
P.S. While you're at it, offer people a choice of plain text email! Nothing pisses me off more than a company that insists on sending me html.
>I think it stinks that I can get all the theory,
>build circuits, program PCs, and fix just about
>anything, but I can't transmit below 50MHz because
>I can't seem to learn a 150 year old communications
>method.
As someone who passed the 20 wpm a decade ago and who actually does use cw more than any other mode when on the radio, I couldn't agree with you more.
Sure, there are instances where cw is really important - say, passing emergency traffic when conditions are poor - but it's absurd to suggest that such a thing happens often enough in the average ham's experience to justify hundreds of hours of study.
For half a century the code test has served primarily as an artificial barrier to licenses.
One could argue that's a worthwhile purpose in itself; adding a challenge to entering any field, however meaningless, can serve to weed out a lot of people who aren't serious about the hobby. An ear full of most CB conversation is enough to convince me that some barrier to entry is probably a good thing. (Although I'm all in favor of having more free-for-all unregulated spectrum out there which anyone can play with than we currently allow.) Our world is full of hurdles put in place solely for the purpose of turning away those who aren't serious about pursuing something. The subject specific GREs are an obvious example from academia. It's never ideal, but it sometimes can serve a worthwhile purpose.
None the less, there are some very good reasons that a code requirement is a bad idea.
First of all, it places an unequal burden on people. I had a pretty easy time with the code - a few tens of hours to get to 5wpm, and an easy couple hours a week after that on the air to get up past 20. But a lot of people have much more difficulty with it. The guy who taught me everything I know about electronics was unable to get a license until the no-code techs came out because dyslexia made learning the code impossible. He's not only an awesome person to chat with and a friend and advisor to many, but has spent countless hours volunteering for emergency communications groups. By any standard, Amateur Radio lost out by keeping him away for so long.
Even among those without learning disabilities, there are many for whom code is really hard. It's unfair to force them to jump what turns out to be an outrageously large hurdle in order to attain something for which actually knowing code isn't necessary.
Second, if we're going to force people to spend hours studying something in order to get a license, there are a lot of more useful things they could study. At least 90% of the hams I meet on phone study code, pass their tests, and then never use it again. What a waste of effort! Instead, why not beef up the technical tests (or get rid of the pre-printed "suggested" multiple choice answers that every VE uses).
Or - if you really want to do something useful - how about requiring something like first aid certification instead? If every ham who spent a hundred hours learning code and then never used it again spent their time learning CPR, just think about how many extra first responders we'd have walking around our streets!
The only remaining question is, what will become of CW when no one is forced to learn it? It's true that I might not have ever learned code if it weren't required, and it's true that I'm glad I did learn it. But there's got to be some other way to provide an incentive to keep at least a few people out there on the bands.
Perhaps you reserve some choice CW-only spectrum for those who've passed code tests. And, so long as there's a strong and active community of code lovers, we can always work to create other incentives with cw-only special event DX stations, extra cw points and freeby stations in contests, and so on. Is that enough to keep the hobby alive? I'm not sure. But if it isn't, then perhaps keeping cw alive isn't worth the cost.
>Do you shop more than once at the same store? gas
."
>station? cvs? etc? What is the differnce between a
>cookie, and a clerk who recognizes your face?
The difference is that when, six years from now, the local sheriff's buddy buys the gas station and asks the new clerk for a list of names and addresses for "every commie bastard who's browsed through those leftist magazines the old owner used to sell," he's unlikely to find his way to my house.
There's a world of difference between a shopkeeper knowing your face and occasionally noticing what you do in a store, and a system that records everything you look at along with all your personal information and keeps it forever.
If every time I walked into the local gas station a guy followed me around with clipboard that had my name and address on it, taking notes, then filed the documents in a huge stack of filing cabinets when I left, I'd be concerned about that too.
Even for those who aren't paranoid, there are reasons you might not want anyone who is ever associated with an online retailer to know about every page you've read:
"So, John, I'm glad to hear that you're interested in working for us here at bigonlinebookstore.com. I've got to say, I was really impressed by your resume. There's just one thing - looking over the logs for littleboughtoutbookstore.com, we've noticed that you read reviews for a surprising number of clown-porn magazines back in the mid nineties. .
Sure, the chances that you will be personally the victim of a bad cookie experience may may be small. But somewhere, someone is going to get busted for something that you and I don't find objectionable because a cookie-based database fell into the wrong hands. Laws change, and bad people get privileged positions in companies. Only by refusing to cooperate in mass with mechanisms that unnecessarily strip us of our privacy can we protect that person, whoever it may be.
And while we're on the topic - what on earth are these consumer experience improvements the ad-men are always going on about? Without cookies, I get to browse through an online store. With cookies, I get to browse through the same online store, but it mentions my name at the top of every page. That's either harmless or creepy, but it sure isn't useful to anyone but a marketer.
>I dunno, "astronomy hack" seems more like plumbing
>your yard for liquid nitrogen using existing
>sprinkler system pipe, or turning a Mattel Barbie
>Photo Designer into a functioning spectrograph.
Very funny!
And, it also leads to an idea: a test equipment or laboratory hacks collection. We've all heard about or witnessed the occasional ingenuous non-standard lab trick. Collecting a bunch of anecdotal stories of real lab hacks could make for an entertaining read. It's no stupider than a lot of other collections out there.
Would I buy it in the form of a book? No. Probably not. But if it were an online collection it might be worth a few chuckles. While we're at it, why not a full franchise: cryogenic hacks, optics hacks, frequency domain hacks, etc. }8^)
On a more serious note, I agree that this book title seems misleading. Even someone who knows nothing about optical astronomy like me has run across a few *real* hacks, like the webcam astronomy folks (http://www.usno.navy.mil/pao/QuickCamAstro.shtml and others), or the many mirror-grinders out there turning plate glass into instruments. A few minutes with google turned up dozens of other examples (http://www.britastro.org/iandi/articles.htm, http://www.atmsite.org/date.html, etc.) A
real astro hack book could be interesting. Shame this isn't one.
That's true, but the chances that it is mechanical, wiring, or a simple stand alone component are *still* pretty damn good.
Sure, when you fry some custom IC (no doubt unlabeled, potted in epoxy, and impossible to order from the manufacturer, just to make repair more difficult than it needs to be), you're hosed.
But as often as not the parts that die first are the easiest to replace: mechanical bits that wear down, discrete capacitors and voltage regulators that fry, solder joints on connectors that get wiggled around, etc. Unless you do something spectacular to a piece of equipment or it was designed really badly, it's usually kind of hard to fry the microprocessors.
I've rescued a fair number of high tech gizmos that were left for dead and uninvestigated by their owners - several CD players of various sizes and price tags, two palm pilots (which have a total of about four discrete components in them, but in each case it turned out one of those was the culprit), a large hard drive, several almost new microwaves, a scanner and a nice big pc monitor, etc.
For those of us in wealthy countries, it may be uneconomical to hire someone to fix stuff rather than to replace it with new stuff. But it's often well worth the time to at least diagnose a broken piece of gear before tossing it. (Not to mention the brief anti-consumer rush you get from it, given the appropriate world view.)
Yup. Reflections are going to be a big problem.
I'm a rank amateur when it comes to T-hunting (a sport among ham radio operators that consists of trying to find a hidden transmitter with directional antennas), but after a couple excursions I can guarantee that hunting for a few GHz signal inside an office building is going to be tough. Even with equipment that will let you look at only the offending signal and dedicated df'ing antenna (whether nulling loops or something that chops between multiple antennas and actively compared phase from each), you'll spend a long time chasing reflections.
That's not to say it wouldn't be a fun thing to try, of course.
An alternative might be to attenuate the signal - by replacing the antenna on your wireless card with a badly tuned little stub of wire or sticking it in a metal biscuit tin grounded to the laptop chasis - and then walk the building floors looking for a peak.
Chances are you can cover all the floor space in your building in less time than it will take you to chase reflections around with a directional antenna.
>As for why he'd want to do that, it's simple: Lots of music pla
> offer recording capabilities. Some people actually put those to
> use.
Sounds plausible, and not a bad reason to demand secure audio players.
But in this case, the poster hasn't said anything about preventing people from using headphones to listen to his audio. His emphasis on one-way copying mechanisms suggests that keeping his audio private isn't a goal at all, he just wants to make sure no one copies the files themselves.
Why anyone would spend time worrying about such a thing is beyond me. Perhaps he listens to files which have personalized signatures embedded in them and he's afraid someone's going to come knocking on his door when they escape into the wild? Sounds more than a little paranoid, but perhaps not totally insane. We certainly live in a world in which media companies do attack individual people for file sharing.
As for the original poster, I'd say try to switch to a job where people don't tend to access your hardware without permission, or failing that, ask for a desk drawer with a lock on it. (Then again, it's possible the poster is such a paranoid nutball that perfectly normal co-workers actually are likely to play with his toys just for the fun of seeing him go berserk. In that situation, I'd be more likely to *upload* tracks onto his player, but perhaps that's just me.)
We've got some multi-user equipment with a shared log book which many people need to access, and a wiki on an internal password protected site seems to work fine.
We happen to be using plain phpwiki, because it's easy to deal with and including images in pages is simple, but any wiki backend should work.
One problem, though - if you anticipate needing the dated material in your logbook for some official reason (patent claims, oversight by a funding agency or supervisor, etc), then going electronic might be a bad idea.
> 75% of music listeners are using *A* download service
Nope.
If your reading of the article is correct, then there's no reason to exclude overlap between those group who download music. It might just as well be that 40% use illegal download services, and 87% of those also use legal download services, while 60% purchase media.
Something closer to that is certainly in line with anecdotal discussions with the people I happen to know.
But without more detail about how the study was conducted, it's tough to say anything meaningful.
. . . or is their absurdly broad domain name section begging for a mozillatrademarkpolicysucks.org website?
From the article:
slickery (adj): having a surface that is wet and icy
So in other words, slickery means the same thing as slick? Yeah, that's a useful word. Right up there with confuzled on the list of neologisms don't actually add anything to the language.
Mangling an existing word and then claiming that it means the same thing as the old word is just dumb when there are so many useful concepts out there for which words don't exist and so many interesting sounds that aren't already incorporated into words. Come on, pop-culture, you can do better!
Woot isn't all that interesting either, come to think of it, but at least it's new.
Now foo, on the other hand, is a neologism with some real substance.
>Yojimbo???
My thoughts exactly. An okay movie, but it belongs pretty far down the list of the best movies of Kurasawa, let alone the world.
On the other hand, I was surprised and pleased to see Ikiru in there. If you ask me, it actually is Kurasawa's best, yet one that rarely gets mentioned. (Although I certainly wouldn't object to seeing Rashomon or Seven Samauri on the list.)
Adding Yojimbo to the list is rather like starting an article with "Steven Spielberg, known for directing the film 1941..."
here is a UPI version with almost identical text, but which makes it clear (well, precise - clear isn't possible in this case) what they've won: "the No. 1 arcade game of all time."
That is, of course, assuming it's the first story that mangled the press release, and not the second story that made a guess at trying to fill in the obvious missing information.
Now all we need to figure out is what the heck being the No. 1 arcade game of all time actually means.
I'm guessing it means very, very little.
>. . . but is it now an outdated concern?
No. There are plenty of reasons to avoid html email. Here's the one that may convince your boss: not everyone *can* read it, even today. At the very least, not everyone who is able to read it will be able to see the html formatting. One of the best things about plain text is that it forces you to format your message in a way that everyone will be able to read.
There are a lot of people who will never see your formatted html: businessmen and geeks using cellphones and PDA's, blind people with text readers, people whose spam filters decide that all html messages are spam, people who don't have computers and use stand-alone email terminals or webtv style appliances, people who use public terminals that have restrictive security settings, people using remote unix servers that lack recent text browsers, and people like me to go out of their way to avoid seeing inline html.
What's more, even if your email is readable and makes it through the spam filters, it will still make life difficult for many of your recipients. Mail sorting routines and client filters may choke or misfile your messages. Text searches will miss your messages. If you send your customers an invoice that can't be found in a search, you'll really piss them off.
Don't waste your time and money creating something that will reach *fewer* of your clients than plain old text.
> Should I trust our client-base to be fully equipped for such a mailer?
No. Most of the people in my office aren't, most by choice. While I'm capable of reading such a mailer, chances are I won't. Around 95% of the html email I receive gets instantly deleted without being read. If you aren't one of my personal friends and you send me html, you're wasting your bandwidth.
>Should I worry about improper delivery marring our professional image?
Yup. And not only improper delivery - even if your message gets through fine, sending people html is likely to annoy them. Sending html email is common to spammers,and amateur would-be-businesses. I've actively made a decision to avoid companies that refuse to send me plain text. (UpgradeSource comes to mind.)
I find it really strange that mutt beat out pine by such a large margin in 2003.
I'm a big fan of mutt, but just about everyone I know seems to use pine or a graphical mail reader. Whenever the subject comes up, few people seem to have ever heard of mutt.
Then again, almost everyone I know has been brought up in academic computing environements with historical roots in solaris and other unixes, so they're probably not a representative group. Still, it seems pretty weird to me to see mutt scoring so high. I'd be tempted to write off the 2003 showing for both mutt and debian as anomolous.
Perhaps in 2003 news of the survey made it onto a hand full of particular sub-sub-culture mailing lists?
Either that or there's been a trend in desktoplinux.com readership toward a more mainstream linux user base. (ie. desktop users rather than desktop coders.) Based on anecdote and little else, I'd expect a correlation between debian and mutt use among the geekiest crowd and an anti-correlation with KDE use.
The strange thing is that I'd expect slackware to show a similar trend, and yet it doesn't show up in the survey. Odd.
Doh! Sorry about the stupid formatting in the above. Fixed version follows
>Clearly, businesses are not in the business of providing
>jobs.. they are in the business of transacting business..
>With the lowest costs possible.. which means the highest
>efficiency..
That's not at all clear.
Or rather, it's clear that they're not *currently* in the business of providing jobs, but it's far from clear that they shouldn't be. Corporations are chartered by the government for the public good - it's up to us to decide what that means. (And maximizing profit for investors by any means sure isn't what I'd call public good.) Even private companies depend on their community for the infrastructure that allows them to exist. It doesn't seem unreasonable to require that they also operate in a way that benefits that community.
Ellipses rarely make for a sound argument.