A 51-year-old woman was subjected to a harrowing two-hour ordeal [on 16 Apr
2001] when she was imprisoned in a hi-tech public convenience. Maureen
Shotton, from Whitley Bay, was captured by the maverick cyberloo during a
shopping trip to Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The toilet, which boasts
state-of-the-art electronic auto-flush and door sensors, steadfastly refused
to release Maureen, and further resisted attempts by passers-by to force the
door. Maureen was finally liberated when the fire brigade ripped the roof
off the cantankerous crapper. Maureen's terrifying experience confirms that
it is a short step from belligerent bogs to Terminator-style cyborgs hunting
down and exterminating mankind.
The solution for this case is technical, not legal. If you don't want people to link to you, have your server check that their browser sends a referrer url from your site. If it doesn't redirect them to your front page or an error page.
Here is a link directly to the The Alameda County Computer Resource Center who are the folks that are doing the recycling. From their website, they charge $5 to take most computers. Their website has some broken links on the front page. You can probably figure out how to get to their donate page, but the link there is broken. It looks like you would have to bring the computer in to them, they don't have an address posted where you can mail it. (Too bad for us slashdot folks who aren't in CA).
PS-PDF is great for quickly mirroring webpages. I'm suprised that I don't see more people doing it here on slashdot to get some quick karma when sites get slashdotted. You have the webpage open in your browser (because you got there before the crowd). First you print it to a postscript file (netscape does this nicely). Then you run it through ps2pdf or some other tool like this and you have have the webpage (with all the pictures) mirrored in a single file. My friends were doing this on sept 11 when all the news sites were going down. Anything one of us saw, we all saw.
Webalizer itself is very configurable but its default configuration leaves a lot to be desired. I maintain a list of search engines and sits that should be added to the configuration of Webalizer to make it a lot more powerful. I also have a log sorting tool there to prevent webalizer from croaking on logs that are just a little bit out of order.
Even if you don't find stats packages that do what you want, you can make webalizer a lot better.
How long should a telephone number remain on the national "do not call" registry?
As long as the phone number is owned by the same person.
Who should be permitted to request that a telephone number be placed on the "do not call" registry? Should requests from the line subscriber's spouse or adult child be permitted? Should third parties (outside the FTC) be permitted to collect and forward requests to be put on the "do not call" registry?
Anybody who might have to answer the phone should be able to put it on the list.
What security measures are appropriate and necessary to ensure that only those people who want to place their telephone numbers on the "do not call" registry can do so? Should consumers be able to verify that their numbers have been placed on the registry? If so, how?
You must have access to that phone to put the number on the list. This could by done by using caller id or by calling the number and verifying that the person wants to be put on the list. ("Please press one if you don't want to be called by telemarketers.")
Should the "do not call" registry be an "all or nothing" option or should it instead allow consumers to specify the days or time of day that they are willing to accept telemarketing calls?
All or nothing is fine with me.
The proposed rule would permit consumers or donors who place their name and telephone number on the "do not call" registry to provide express verifiable authorization to specific sellers or organizations to make calls to them. How will this requirement affect those entities with which a consumer or donor has a pre-existing relationship?
They should have to ask for express verifiable authorization. Somebody is likely to go on this list to get away from people they have a pre-existing relationship with.
CPAN has done wonders for perl modules. Its easy to install them and all the CPAN modules I've used have good documentation, very nice dependency checking, and regression tests. Until I realized that it was a joke, I was thinking that the CPAN folks would be able to do some great work with Java libraries.
Java has a better library structure than perl, with each package being in a well defined place in the classpath. Also documentation for Java libraries tends to be better because of the javadoc comments that everybody writes. Regression tests and dependency checking for java libraries would be cool.
Luckily, there are great places to turn for java libraries even without CPAN supporting them. The Apache Project has many classes that I consider essential now. The Giant Java Tree has thousands of open source libraries. Not to mention the stuff I've written.
As a juggler, I would be very suprised if the earth's gravitational constant was totally pre-implanted in your brain. One way to teach people to juggle is to use handkercheifs or some other object that falls slowly due to air resistance. Learning to juggle when stuff moves more slowly is much easier, and people have no trouble catching handkerchiefs.
Also look at computer games which can have arbitrary G constants. People playing video games can get very very good at predicting when their character hits the ground no matter what G is thrown in.
Upon reading the article, it looks as though they have found evidence that we are attuned to normal earth gravity but they have proven nothing. Their experiments are all done with people who, after having grown up in normal gravity, are thrown off by less gravity. I don't think they have much in the way of nature/nurture on this. Better experiments would involve raising a kid in space and seeing how he could catch a ball.
I would not be suprised if we somewhat expect earth's gravity after years of evolution (the same way we are easily get phobias of snakes but not much more dangerous things like cars and electricity), but humans obviously have wide skills with other acceleration constants. This study is hardly conclusive from the summary of it in the news article.
An application shouldn't need an install program... you should be able to copy the files to a new folder, and the first time it runs, it should just work... no registry crap, etc.
Windows users are used to having programs in the start menu. Putting an icon there requires an install proccess. Goodness forbid that you want to integrate with Windows further by adding a right click menu to explorer.
Copying a program's directory should allow you to move a program from one computer to another, with all options intact.
Copying a program from one computer to another should allow you to move the program from one computer to another, with the default options. Under no cicumstance should user data be stored with the program. It is bad for backup, bloating the size of your backups. It is bad for privacy, if you give a friend an application and all your data by accident. It is bad for multi-user systems because storing data and program together is inherently single user. User options should be stored in the user directory. Copying the program directory and the user directory should copy the program with all options.
There are many classes for opening the system browser. I have them listed on dmoz. I use the one I wrote.
Executable jar files are the generic solution you were looking for to launch java apps. You should just be able to double-click on them. The only thing they lack is an icon. I would have to say that Windows options for launching java programs aren't much better than macintosh, however there are several command line installer builders that I can invoke when I need to use custom windows code.
When OS X was released I was very excited because Mac users would soon be able to use my java programs. I went and tested what I had written and I was both very impressed and somewhat frustrated.
I was impressed because almost everything that I have written that is pure java works flawlessly. The GUIs have the nice new bubbly plastic look and feel to them and life is good. This alone is enough to make we want to use OS X as my development platform.
On the other hand I was frustrated because java programs we so hard to use. Mac OS X.1 added the ability to double click on a jar file to start a java program. Until then you had to go to the command line to start java programs. For an OS that prides itself on being GUI oriented, that is just unacceptable. There is some sort of utility to put some sort of macintosh wrapper around your java files, add and icon and make them look like a mac program. It all looks nice but it means that you will have to offer a separate mac download. That would be ok sometimes, but unfortunatly the utility is only a mac GUI program. I didn't see a way to script the process and add it to my makefile. The program also doesn't run on linux and windows which is where I do most of my builds. If there were a java port of this utility which I could run from a makefile, I would be much happier.
The other frustration I had also dealt with lack of command line support. I wanted to open a web browser but was unable to find a command line to pop up IE. I finally found some class libraries to open a browser that were hidden (not in the classpath I might add) somewhere on the machine. Getting java to work with other programs is much easier on both Linux and Windows.
Other than those couple nits, I really think OS X and java have a very bright future.
This is a sign I have had in my computer room for some time now. It's a laminated xerox and I'm not sure where it came from, but I think it's pretty funny. Some people actually ask what language it is in. Have fun:-)
Achtung!
ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS
Das computenmachine is nicht fur gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Is easy schnappen der springwerk, blownfusen, und poppenoorken mit spittzensparken. Ist nicht fur gewerken by das dummkopfen.
Das rubbernecken signtseeren keepen hands in das pockets--relaxen und watch das blinkenlights.
I have a couple of internationalized java programs I've written. i18n works well in java but its not so much a language feature as a couple of simple libraries.
To internationalize, put all of your translatable strings, images, and formats into a resource. Your resource can be a text file, or an image, or whatever. Your must then get all the information from resources.
The basic idea is that you have a resource that needs to be translated: resource.txt. Your program determines the locale (say US_en) and then fetches resource.txt.en.US. If then merges that with resource.txt.en and resource.txt. The nice thing is this works even if you can't list your files (they may be on a web server for example). Also, because you are merging files, if something is the same for USA and Great Britian, it can go in resource.txt.en and you don't have to duplicate work in.US and.GB.
Besides having the libraries to handle this stuff the only thing that java makes it easy to do is determine the current locale. But the concept is simple and with a couple weeks of work you could have similar libraries up for any language.
The roller shoes are pretty much crap. They aren't meant to last long or support much weight. Given that they don't make them in anything above about a size 6.
The adult alternative is roller blades with detachable wheels. I bought some over two years ago and I still love them. When you get where you are going, you just snap the wheels off (2 seconds) and unlace the boots down to the ankles.
Can anybody recommend a mailing list manager that handles periodic email reminders to people? Say every x days a user (where x is that user's pref) gets a "Have you washed your dog.txt" emailed to them if they are on the dog_wash_reminder mailing list.
The list manager would have to handle bounced email, subscribe/unsubsribe requests, etc. Bonus if it could handle mailmerge type functionality (templates), html/text multipart mime, or more advanced features such as cross-list digest. Does anybody know of such a product?
If I don't find such a beast, I will probably have to write one.
When I got it up to about 90 MPH it needed the electric to keep that speed up. It could probably go a bit faster than that but I've never tried it. You can easily drive it 75 MPH on long trips. The gas milage goes down with speed though. At 55 MPH I get 75 MPG, at 65 MPH I get 65 MPH, at 75 MPH, I get 60 MPG.
I bought a Honday Insight when they first came out. I've had the car for over a year and a half now. I'd have to say that Honday went well out of their way to make the car affordable. Honda sold me the car for about $20,000 even though it cost them double that to make. From my understanding, much of that cost will come down with mass production. They only made a couple thousand of the vehicles.
As far as maintenance goes, I have found that I can get great deals on routince stuff. My dealership offered me a the same card as for other cars with 10 oil changes for $100. Because the car uses special oil and it is extra work to take off the wind screens under the car to change the oil, the changes can cost up to $50.
The other big expense will be replacing the batteries when they wear out. They are designed to last about half the life of the car and need to be replaced at about 80,000 miles. That should run about $5000.
In the end you are paying a bit of a premium for a hybrid, but you may find, as I did, that it is worth it. I can go 700 miles on a 10 gallon tank of gas. I also love explaining the tech features of my car. Everybody that sees it asks about it.
I call my car "The FJM". When I first got it, I went out to lunch at the local sandwich shop. There was construction on the street outside and it was hard to get around and into the parking lot. As a result, the parking lot was mostly empty. The sandwich shop hand unusually few customers. I parked my hybrid in the middle of the lot (no other cars around it at all) and went in to pick up lunch. The only other people in the shop we a couple of painters. Total redneck hicks. Beards, crooked teeth, the works. They got their sandwiches just before I did and I walked out the door just behind them. The first thing they saw when you walked out was a profile view of my car with little antenna an the roof and the wheel covers over the back tires. (Very sleek looking I think.;-) As soon as they saw it, they stopped so abrubtly I just about ran into them. They stared for a couple seconds and then one of them put his hands on his hips and then crowed, "What the FUCK is that? A fuckin' Jetson mobile?". I showed them around the car, I don't think they were so keen on it, but I really liked the name they gave it.
Be aware that changing for user agent string can have unintended consequences.
On my homepage I'm experimenting with a rather unique CSS positioning layout on the front page. Mozilla does a great job with it, IE does a poor (but readable) job with it, and NS 4 royally screws it up. To overcome this, I included some javascript that checks the user agent string and comments out the link to the stylesheet if it finds NS4.
Basically if you are running NS4 with a false user agent string, you will see a bunch of garbage when you visit my web site.
I usually search for similar bugs and then file a bug in the same area. It works pretty well.
I would like to see dups handled better though. Ideally dups shouldn't be "closed" until the bug that they were marked a dup of is also closed. I have found that an oft duplicated bug isn't found because the title uses slightly different terminology than the search terms. Keeping dups around in the search results would basically allow different descriptions for the same bug and steer people searching for bugs in the right direction.
On April fools day a friend of mine got on my computer and swapped the names of many of people on my ICQ list. He swapped himself with my girlfriend and started sending me notes from her. They seemed a bit strange, but hey.
I didn't really catch on until I got a note from my mother that said "Yo, what's up beeyatch?"
It is easy to wrap social engineering around unique IDs. Look at the "The real xxx has slashdot ID number yyy" that people put in their sigs.
Slashdot Mirror
The solution for this case is technical, not legal. If you don't want people to link to you, have your server check that their browser sends a referrer url from your site. If it doesn't redirect them to your front page or an error page.
Try this to start
Then try this for more detailed information
There site navigation is totally borked so here are all the links on the site I could find:
Home
About
Donations
Internships
Press
PS-PDF is great for quickly mirroring webpages. I'm suprised that I don't see more people doing it here on slashdot to get some quick karma when sites get slashdotted. You have the webpage open in your browser (because you got there before the crowd). First you print it to a postscript file (netscape does this nicely). Then you run it through ps2pdf or some other tool like this and you have have the webpage (with all the pictures) mirrored in a single file. My friends were doing this on sept 11 when all the news sites were going down. Anything one of us saw, we all saw.
And I sold several hundred old macs for $1 to $5 apeice at the MIT Flea Market last year.
Even if you don't find stats packages that do what you want, you can make webalizer a lot better.
How long should a telephone number remain on the national "do not call" registry?
As long as the phone number is owned by the same person.
Who should be permitted to request that a telephone number be placed on the "do not call" registry? Should requests from the line subscriber's spouse or adult child be permitted? Should third parties (outside the FTC) be permitted to collect and forward requests to be put on the "do not call" registry?
Anybody who might have to answer the phone should be able to put it on the list.
What security measures are appropriate and necessary to ensure that only those people who want to place their telephone numbers on the "do not call" registry can do so? Should consumers be able to verify that their numbers have been placed on the registry? If so, how?
You must have access to that phone to put the number on the list. This could by done by using caller id or by calling the number and verifying that the person wants to be put on the list. ("Please press one if you don't want to be called by telemarketers.")
Should the "do not call" registry be an "all or nothing" option or should it instead allow consumers to specify the days or time of day that they are willing to accept telemarketing calls?
All or nothing is fine with me.
The proposed rule would permit consumers or donors who place their name and telephone number on the "do not call" registry to provide express verifiable authorization to specific sellers or organizations to make calls to them. How will this requirement affect those entities with which a consumer or donor has a pre-existing relationship?
They should have to ask for express verifiable authorization. Somebody is likely to go on this list to get away from people they have a pre-existing relationship with.
Java has a better library structure than perl, with each package being in a well defined place in the classpath. Also documentation for Java libraries tends to be better because of the javadoc comments that everybody writes. Regression tests and dependency checking for java libraries would be cool.
Luckily, there are great places to turn for java libraries even without CPAN supporting them. The Apache Project has many classes that I consider essential now. The Giant Java Tree has thousands of open source libraries. Not to mention the stuff I've written.
Also look at computer games which can have arbitrary G constants. People playing video games can get very very good at predicting when their character hits the ground no matter what G is thrown in.
Upon reading the article, it looks as though they have found evidence that we are attuned to normal earth gravity but they have proven nothing. Their experiments are all done with people who, after having grown up in normal gravity, are thrown off by less gravity. I don't think they have much in the way of nature/nurture on this. Better experiments would involve raising a kid in space and seeing how he could catch a ball.
I would not be suprised if we somewhat expect earth's gravity after years of evolution (the same way we are easily get phobias of snakes but not much more dangerous things like cars and electricity), but humans obviously have wide skills with other acceleration constants. This study is hardly conclusive from the summary of it in the news article.
Windows users are used to having programs in the start menu. Putting an icon there requires an install proccess. Goodness forbid that you want to integrate with Windows further by adding a right click menu to explorer.
Copying a program from one computer to another should allow you to move the program from one computer to another, with the default options. Under no cicumstance should user data be stored with the program. It is bad for backup, bloating the size of your backups. It is bad for privacy, if you give a friend an application and all your data by accident. It is bad for multi-user systems because storing data and program together is inherently single user. User options should be stored in the user directory. Copying the program directory and the user directory should copy the program with all options.
I'll bet you won't guess my password...
Executable jar files are the generic solution you were looking for to launch java apps. You should just be able to double-click on them. The only thing they lack is an icon. I would have to say that Windows options for launching java programs aren't much better than macintosh, however there are several command line installer builders that I can invoke when I need to use custom windows code.
I was impressed because almost everything that I have written that is pure java works flawlessly. The GUIs have the nice new bubbly plastic look and feel to them and life is good. This alone is enough to make we want to use OS X as my development platform.
On the other hand I was frustrated because java programs we so hard to use. Mac OS X.1 added the ability to double click on a jar file to start a java program. Until then you had to go to the command line to start java programs. For an OS that prides itself on being GUI oriented, that is just unacceptable. There is some sort of utility to put some sort of macintosh wrapper around your java files, add and icon and make them look like a mac program. It all looks nice but it means that you will have to offer a separate mac download. That would be ok sometimes, but unfortunatly the utility is only a mac GUI program. I didn't see a way to script the process and add it to my makefile. The program also doesn't run on linux and windows which is where I do most of my builds. If there were a java port of this utility which I could run from a makefile, I would be much happier.
The other frustration I had also dealt with lack of command line support. I wanted to open a web browser but was unable to find a command line to pop up IE. I finally found some class libraries to open a browser that were hidden (not in the classpath I might add) somewhere on the machine. Getting java to work with other programs is much easier on both Linux and Windows.
Other than those couple nits, I really think OS X and java have a very bright future.
Achtung!
ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS
Das computenmachine is nicht fur gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Is easy schnappen der springwerk, blownfusen, und poppenoorken mit spittzensparken. Ist nicht fur gewerken by das dummkopfen.
Das rubbernecken signtseeren keepen hands in das pockets--relaxen und watch das blinkenlights.
To internationalize, put all of your translatable strings, images, and formats into a resource. Your resource can be a text file, or an image, or whatever. Your must then get all the information from resources.
The basic idea is that you have a resource that needs to be translated: resource.txt. Your program determines the locale (say US_en) and then fetches resource.txt.en.US. If then merges that with resource.txt.en and resource.txt. The nice thing is this works even if you can't list your files (they may be on a web server for example). Also, because you are merging files, if something is the same for USA and Great Britian, it can go in resource.txt.en and you don't have to duplicate work in .US and .GB.
Besides having the libraries to handle this stuff the only thing that java makes it easy to do is determine the current locale. But the concept is simple and with a couple weeks of work you could have similar libraries up for any language.
The adult alternative is roller blades with detachable wheels. I bought some over two years ago and I still love them. When you get where you are going, you just snap the wheels off (2 seconds) and unlace the boots down to the ankles.
The list manager would have to handle bounced email, subscribe/unsubsribe requests, etc. Bonus if it could handle mailmerge type functionality (templates), html/text multipart mime, or more advanced features such as cross-list digest. Does anybody know of such a product?
If I don't find such a beast, I will probably have to write one.
When I got it up to about 90 MPH it needed the electric to keep that speed up. It could probably go a bit faster than that but I've never tried it. You can easily drive it 75 MPH on long trips. The gas milage goes down with speed though. At 55 MPH I get 75 MPG, at 65 MPH I get 65 MPH, at 75 MPH, I get 60 MPG.
As far as maintenance goes, I have found that I can get great deals on routince stuff. My dealership offered me a the same card as for other cars with 10 oil changes for $100. Because the car uses special oil and it is extra work to take off the wind screens under the car to change the oil, the changes can cost up to $50.
The other big expense will be replacing the batteries when they wear out. They are designed to last about half the life of the car and need to be replaced at about 80,000 miles. That should run about $5000.
In the end you are paying a bit of a premium for a hybrid, but you may find, as I did, that it is worth it. I can go 700 miles on a 10 gallon tank of gas. I also love explaining the tech features of my car. Everybody that sees it asks about it.
I call my car "The FJM". When I first got it, I went out to lunch at the local sandwich shop. There was construction on the street outside and it was hard to get around and into the parking lot. As a result, the parking lot was mostly empty. The sandwich shop hand unusually few customers. I parked my hybrid in the middle of the lot (no other cars around it at all) and went in to pick up lunch. The only other people in the shop we a couple of painters. Total redneck hicks. Beards, crooked teeth, the works. They got their sandwiches just before I did and I walked out the door just behind them. The first thing they saw when you walked out was a profile view of my car with little antenna an the roof and the wheel covers over the back tires. (Very sleek looking I think. ;-) As soon as they saw it, they stopped so abrubtly I just about ran into them. They stared for a couple seconds and then one of them put his hands on his hips and then crowed, "What the FUCK is that? A fuckin' Jetson mobile?". I showed them around the car, I don't think they were so keen on it, but I really liked the name they gave it.
On my homepage I'm experimenting with a rather unique CSS positioning layout on the front page. Mozilla does a great job with it, IE does a poor (but readable) job with it, and NS 4 royally screws it up. To overcome this, I included some javascript that checks the user agent string and comments out the link to the stylesheet if it finds NS4.
Basically if you are running NS4 with a false user agent string, you will see a bunch of garbage when you visit my web site.
I brought back Ladder, a Donkey Kong like game that was played on old CPM machines. Graphics are way too new for my taste, let alone 3D graphics.
That's sick.
I would like to see dups handled better though. Ideally dups shouldn't be "closed" until the bug that they were marked a dup of is also closed. I have found that an oft duplicated bug isn't found because the title uses slightly different terminology than the search terms. Keeping dups around in the search results would basically allow different descriptions for the same bug and steer people searching for bugs in the right direction.
I didn't really catch on until I got a note from my mother that said "Yo, what's up beeyatch?"
It is easy to wrap social engineering around unique IDs. Look at the "The real xxx has slashdot ID number yyy" that people put in their sigs.