I could pose the counter-question of whether you think there is an Israeli consipracy and want others to know or whether the Israelis hired you to post unprovable speculation under the banner of an Israel critic to discredit all such critics? Can you undeniably prove you're not involved with them?
That's the problem with this kind of question: They're completely without substance because no matter what the answer is, you can always discount it by applying the question to the answer.
The problem is that they can't only use the information I give them but also the information I give anyone using their services, most notably Google Analytics. While what they can gather from the sites they know I visited is mostly noise but it's enough noise to be minable and for the largest sites it's feasible to have specific code to extract things like user names or even real names. (And no, it's not always completely inappropriate to omit one's real name; anytime you need to be able to assert copyright later you need to provide something you can be identified by.)
I'm not saying that they do but they certainly can. And if there's a solid business case for it they probably will.
Just assign -1 to Funny mods in your user properties. To quote Steven Paul Jobs: "Boom." Problem solved.
If you feel grumpy, assign -1 to all mods, browse Slashdot at 1 and then complain that these days people only make stupid comments as evidenced by the mods. (Note that nobody will notice you have changed your scoring settings.)
Re:This is what linguists have been waiting for
on
Monkeys With Syntax
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Note that it's appropriate to while about the mess Buch made for another few years. Politicians on the way out love to start programs they know their successors will not be able to successfully complete (or which will generate a lot of bad PR down the line). This gives their party opportunity to mock the successor for his "ineptitude". Everyone does this because it allows you cheap shots at the party/coalition who won the election while they can't do anything about it.
A related tactic is to declare the governing party incompetent or corrupt over a program that both parties promised to implement before the election but which "has always been a bad idea" now.
Hell, for 90% of all politicians it's perfectly appropriate to whine about them at all times.
Re:This is what linguists have been waiting for
on
Monkeys With Syntax
·
· Score: 1
The problem is that GWB's restricted range of expression allows one to catalogue his utterings and possibly infer whether he possesses the capacity for syntax. While Obama mostly uses sounds like "change", "healthcare" and "yes-we-can", he uses a large number of other, yet uncategorized "filler sounds" that we don't yet know the meaning of. This makes hm a less attractive target for linguistic analysis as we don't know much about the sounds he makes yet.
Re:Is the word for "leopard" really "tree"?
on
Monkeys With Syntax
·
· Score: 1
Why is the word "Israel" built into the company name? This smells of a psy-ops play for mind share.
So you argue that National Semiconductor is a CIA front (having "National" in its name and being American)? American Express was founded in 1850 but the olderst three-letter agency I can think of, the FBI, is half a century younger. Who does AmEx work for?
Also, this battery is interesting but hardly going to revolutionize the automotive world. From the specs they have released it sounds more like a replacement for zinc-air batteries used in hearing aids. Unless they invent a car that runs on ~1V these batteries are unlikely to power one.
So we have "hey, let's use a company with a name that will immediately put all the conspiracy theorists on high alert to release research data about a somewhat nice but not very exciting new battery technology so they will let us get away with whatever we want". Sorry, but either the Israelis are complete idiots or this is not a scheme to somehow keep us from scrutinizing them.
Then again, I haven't heard of a notebook being rendered useless due to ATI's inability to properly specify the package for their GPU. That very thing happened to me with a NVidia IGP. Experiences like that or NVidia's horrible OS X CUDA drivers (that may or may not work and may or may not negatively affect regular rendering) tend to make one suspicious of the quality of their offering.
Note that I didn't have many issues with their discrete graphics cards under Windows and Linux but that was before I used Mac notebooks almost exclusively for a while; plus, my current desktop's ATI IGP (didn't yet have the time and money to go discrete) also performs without any issue.
It says a lot that sending back a letter saying "I didn't do it and if you disagree we can discuss this in court" is often enough for them to close the case regardless of guilt...
I just tried it out under OS X and my verdict is mixed.
Good: Thunderbird 3 allows you to scroll widgets even when it doesn't have focus. This was something that always annoyed me with TB2. Also, TB3 says it has Spotlight integration although it seems that Spotlight hasn't yet deemed my mail boxes index-worthy. Maybe it only works for new mails.
Bad: Thunderbird 3 covers the entire screen when it starts up. There doesn't seem to be a way to get it to stop doing that.
Worth noting: If you use the "TB Change From and Fcc on Compose Extension" it won't work anymore as it's not rated for TB3 (and unmaintained). However, if you install the Nightly Tester Tools and override the compatibility check it will work just fine. I tested it (version 0.1.7) and it worked just like it did before.
Your name is Jesus_666. So that makes your post all the more ironic.
Why? Does any of the parts imply an anti-privacy stance?
I think you probably shouldn't be sticking your private info on the Internet. That's just common sense.
Which means never releasing anything and never participating in any FOSS project. When I write a program and want to be able to asert copyright over it I need to associate my name with it. Bang, my name is online. It might not be online together with any nickname I use but it's online and easily minable.
One bad thing about Google's ubiquity is that they can use data from anywhere to identify me. Just because I used an account name on one site any nowhere else doesn't mean they can't associate that account with the rest of my online activity.
You don't need to stick your personal info on a social networking site to be identifiable.
There's still a difference between "any site can use my usage data for them to profile me" (privacy laws in most sane countries keep them from legally selling it to third parties) and "one corporation is so omnipresent on the web that they can effectively track me on any website I visit". In the latter case the corporation can build a fairly comprehensive profile of me.
I'd barely trust a corporation that explicitly respects privacy with that kind of data and I certainly won't trust a corporation that tells me I can choose between allowing them to build a profile of my life and not using the WWW.
"Nice" and "evil" are not mutually exclusive. Google can very well donate lots of code to OSS project and rape our privacy at the same time. And, quite serious, what Schmidt said there is virtually equivalent to "only criminals need privacy".
I oppose blanket surveillance, whether by a government or by a corporation. If Google is of the opinion that I shouldn't have a right to privacy then Google is evil. Simple as that.
The GP meant heat dissipation from the CPU and GPU.
One could make a larger battery that supports the netbooks; however, the implications are that the netbook becomes more like a traditional notebook: A high-end netbook would weigh upwards of 2.5 kg (5.5 lb) and require a quite noisy fan to cool the desktop-grade components.
There haven't been any fantastic breakthoughs in batters or cooling technology that are feasible for mobile computing right now so what you have are LiPo patteries and fans. If you can live with the battery weighing more than a low-end netbook and the fans being distinctly noticeable in a crowded room - by all means, go for it.
But then again... If you already pay a lot of money for a computer with desktop-grade components that loses the light weight of traditional netbooks - why do you buy one with a 10" screen? You have a GPU capable of doing 1080p at all times and the thing is going to be uncomfortable in a backpack or briefcase anyhow so why not get the same device with a display almost twice as large for a similar price?
Whether we argue battery size, heat dissipation or the questionable sense in using a computer with a 13" screen and possibly no video output that has a high-end GPU - we (you, the GP and me) agree there are practical limits to what you can sensibly do with a netbook.
Wasn't the whole point of a netbook to put in components that draw as little power as possible to enable a smaller form factor at a longer uptime for the simple tasks most people want to do? If you want a small, powerful device that's a subnotebook.
Of course, in the domain of portable computers there is a plethora of ill-defined and somethimes trademarked terms that ensure nobody knows what anyone else is talking about - als The Register commented on earlier this year. In twelve months "netbook" and "notebook" may very well be synonymous.
That's why they invented the "crossover". In the domain of offroading, a crossover is a mix between a truck and something designed to have the wheels on top.
Actually, it's more like discovering a new shade of blue that you could theoretically color your car but won't because it looks horribly old-fashioned.
ARM processors are getting seriously powerful. A good example of just how powerful they are is the Pandora, a homebrew handheld about to be released: It runs on a slightly bigger version of the same processor as the Palm Pre (a Cortex A8-based SoC from TI with dedicated DSP). There already are videos on the net of Pandora test boards running early unoptimized versions of PSX and N64 emulators.
We're talking about a device using a slightly better smartphone CPU being capable of emulating the Nintendo 64. Today's smartphones pack some serious processing power.
As I said, Germany has almost 100% GSM coverage by all networks while the States don't, which makes randomly switching the network much harder and gives less incentive to create competition.
Your observation of the low population density causing problems does sound... sound. It makes reaching most of the population (and thus competing everywhere) much harder, no matter which technology is used.
Well yeah, but Firefox has adopted Cocoa with version 3.0, that's one big release back. The question is why Thunderbird hasn't yet followed suit. (I also actually like what Firefox does for three-finger scrolling; it's pretty amazing to see Firefox as one of the first non-Apple apps that actually make use of multitouch.)
You'll cry but this has happened in Germany. Essentially, one of our MPs appointed to child porn investigation was about to quit his job because he disagreed with the way his agency does business. This displeased a group of politicians who then kicked him out of the office and immediately had him investigated because he had - gasp! - child porn on his notebook. Cue the tabloids boing berserk and portraying him as a borderline child rapist.
The upshot of this as that he left his party in disgust and became the German Pirate Party's first MP - until the legislative period ended a few weeks later.
D2 is a time-waster if you play it over and over. It's decent multiplayer if you casually play through the storyline with a friend.
Every game has a point where it's more mork than play. MMOs generally tend to reach that point fairly early; D2 is another example of a game that can be turned into a job easily.
I, for my part, am glad to recently have infected two of my friends with UFO: Enemy Unknown addiction (with a third infection pending). There's only so much grinding you can do before all your soldiers have 80+ in all stats and you have more money than God from mass-producing Laser Cannons. Plus, the game doesn't try to upsell you on anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Why translated? That's the original title!
In the US, of course, it was merged into Robotech.
I could pose the counter-question of whether you think there is an Israeli consipracy and want others to know or whether the Israelis hired you to post unprovable speculation under the banner of an Israel critic to discredit all such critics? Can you undeniably prove you're not involved with them?
That's the problem with this kind of question: They're completely without substance because no matter what the answer is, you can always discount it by applying the question to the answer.
The problem is that they can't only use the information I give them but also the information I give anyone using their services, most notably Google Analytics. While what they can gather from the sites they know I visited is mostly noise but it's enough noise to be minable and for the largest sites it's feasible to have specific code to extract things like user names or even real names. (And no, it's not always completely inappropriate to omit one's real name; anytime you need to be able to assert copyright later you need to provide something you can be identified by.)
I'm not saying that they do but they certainly can. And if there's a solid business case for it they probably will.
Remember that flinging poo at someone's face is not considered torture yet. Then again, it's only a matter of time until the DHS exploits this.
Just assign -1 to Funny mods in your user properties. To quote Steven Paul Jobs: "Boom." Problem solved.
If you feel grumpy, assign -1 to all mods, browse Slashdot at 1 and then complain that these days people only make stupid comments as evidenced by the mods. (Note that nobody will notice you have changed your scoring settings.)
Note that it's appropriate to while about the mess Buch made for another few years. Politicians on the way out love to start programs they know their successors will not be able to successfully complete (or which will generate a lot of bad PR down the line). This gives their party opportunity to mock the successor for his "ineptitude". Everyone does this because it allows you cheap shots at the party/coalition who won the election while they can't do anything about it.
A related tactic is to declare the governing party incompetent or corrupt over a program that both parties promised to implement before the election but which "has always been a bad idea" now.
Hell, for 90% of all politicians it's perfectly appropriate to whine about them at all times.
The problem is that GWB's restricted range of expression allows one to catalogue his utterings and possibly infer whether he possesses the capacity for syntax. While Obama mostly uses sounds like "change", "healthcare" and "yes-we-can", he uses a large number of other, yet uncategorized "filler sounds" that we don't yet know the meaning of. This makes hm a less attractive target for linguistic analysis as we don't know much about the sounds he makes yet.
Stop giving spurious warnings, you krak!
So you argue that National Semiconductor is a CIA front (having "National" in its name and being American)? American Express was founded in 1850 but the olderst three-letter agency I can think of, the FBI, is half a century younger. Who does AmEx work for?
Also, this battery is interesting but hardly going to revolutionize the automotive world. From the specs they have released it sounds more like a replacement for zinc-air batteries used in hearing aids. Unless they invent a car that runs on ~1V these batteries are unlikely to power one.
So we have "hey, let's use a company with a name that will immediately put all the conspiracy theorists on high alert to release research data about a somewhat nice but not very exciting new battery technology so they will let us get away with whatever we want". Sorry, but either the Israelis are complete idiots or this is not a scheme to somehow keep us from scrutinizing them.
No problem. Just implement the Fan interface and stay the hell away from your new class.
Then again, I haven't heard of a notebook being rendered useless due to ATI's inability to properly specify the package for their GPU. That very thing happened to me with a NVidia IGP. Experiences like that or NVidia's horrible OS X CUDA drivers (that may or may not work and may or may not negatively affect regular rendering) tend to make one suspicious of the quality of their offering.
Note that I didn't have many issues with their discrete graphics cards under Windows and Linux but that was before I used Mac notebooks almost exclusively for a while; plus, my current desktop's ATI IGP (didn't yet have the time and money to go discrete) also performs without any issue.
It says a lot that sending back a letter saying "I didn't do it and if you disagree we can discuss this in court" is often enough for them to close the case regardless of guilt...
I just tried it out under OS X and my verdict is mixed.
Good: Thunderbird 3 allows you to scroll widgets even when it doesn't have focus. This was something that always annoyed me with TB2. Also, TB3 says it has Spotlight integration although it seems that Spotlight hasn't yet deemed my mail boxes index-worthy. Maybe it only works for new mails.
Bad: Thunderbird 3 covers the entire screen when it starts up. There doesn't seem to be a way to get it to stop doing that.
Worth noting: If you use the "TB Change From and Fcc on Compose Extension" it won't work anymore as it's not rated for TB3 (and unmaintained). However, if you install the Nightly Tester Tools and override the compatibility check it will work just fine. I tested it (version 0.1.7) and it worked just like it did before.
Why? Does any of the parts imply an anti-privacy stance?
Which means never releasing anything and never participating in any FOSS project. When I write a program and want to be able to asert copyright over it I need to associate my name with it. Bang, my name is online. It might not be online together with any nickname I use but it's online and easily minable.
One bad thing about Google's ubiquity is that they can use data from anywhere to identify me. Just because I used an account name on one site any nowhere else doesn't mean they can't associate that account with the rest of my online activity.
You don't need to stick your personal info on a social networking site to be identifiable.
There's still a difference between "any site can use my usage data for them to profile me" (privacy laws in most sane countries keep them from legally selling it to third parties) and "one corporation is so omnipresent on the web that they can effectively track me on any website I visit". In the latter case the corporation can build a fairly comprehensive profile of me.
I'd barely trust a corporation that explicitly respects privacy with that kind of data and I certainly won't trust a corporation that tells me I can choose between allowing them to build a profile of my life and not using the WWW.
"Nice" and "evil" are not mutually exclusive. Google can very well donate lots of code to OSS project and rape our privacy at the same time. And, quite serious, what Schmidt said there is virtually equivalent to "only criminals need privacy".
I oppose blanket surveillance, whether by a government or by a corporation. If Google is of the opinion that I shouldn't have a right to privacy then Google is evil. Simple as that.
The GP meant heat dissipation from the CPU and GPU.
One could make a larger battery that supports the netbooks; however, the implications are that the netbook becomes more like a traditional notebook: A high-end netbook would weigh upwards of 2.5 kg (5.5 lb) and require a quite noisy fan to cool the desktop-grade components.
There haven't been any fantastic breakthoughs in batters or cooling technology that are feasible for mobile computing right now so what you have are LiPo patteries and fans. If you can live with the battery weighing more than a low-end netbook and the fans being distinctly noticeable in a crowded room - by all means, go for it.
But then again... If you already pay a lot of money for a computer with desktop-grade components that loses the light weight of traditional netbooks - why do you buy one with a 10" screen? You have a GPU capable of doing 1080p at all times and the thing is going to be uncomfortable in a backpack or briefcase anyhow so why not get the same device with a display almost twice as large for a similar price?
Whether we argue battery size, heat dissipation or the questionable sense in using a computer with a 13" screen and possibly no video output that has a high-end GPU - we (you, the GP and me) agree there are practical limits to what you can sensibly do with a netbook.
Wasn't the whole point of a netbook to put in components that draw as little power as possible to enable a smaller form factor at a longer uptime for the simple tasks most people want to do? If you want a small, powerful device that's a subnotebook.
Of course, in the domain of portable computers there is a plethora of ill-defined and somethimes trademarked terms that ensure nobody knows what anyone else is talking about - als The Register commented on earlier this year. In twelve months "netbook" and "notebook" may very well be synonymous.
That's why they invented the "crossover". In the domain of offroading, a crossover is a mix between a truck and something designed to have the wheels on top.
Actually, it's more like discovering a new shade of blue that you could theoretically color your car but won't because it looks horribly old-fashioned.
ARM processors are getting seriously powerful. A good example of just how powerful they are is the Pandora, a homebrew handheld about to be released: It runs on a slightly bigger version of the same processor as the Palm Pre (a Cortex A8-based SoC from TI with dedicated DSP). There already are videos on the net of Pandora test boards running early unoptimized versions of PSX and N64 emulators.
We're talking about a device using a slightly better smartphone CPU being capable of emulating the Nintendo 64. Today's smartphones pack some serious processing power.
As I said, Germany has almost 100% GSM coverage by all networks while the States don't, which makes randomly switching the network much harder and gives less incentive to create competition.
Your observation of the low population density causing problems does sound... sound. It makes reaching most of the population (and thus competing everywhere) much harder, no matter which technology is used.
Well yeah, but Firefox has adopted Cocoa with version 3.0, that's one big release back. The question is why Thunderbird hasn't yet followed suit. (I also actually like what Firefox does for three-finger scrolling; it's pretty amazing to see Firefox as one of the first non-Apple apps that actually make use of multitouch.)
You'll cry but this has happened in Germany. Essentially, one of our MPs appointed to child porn investigation was about to quit his job because he disagreed with the way his agency does business. This displeased a group of politicians who then kicked him out of the office and immediately had him investigated because he had - gasp! - child porn on his notebook. Cue the tabloids boing berserk and portraying him as a borderline child rapist.
The upshot of this as that he left his party in disgust and became the German Pirate Party's first MP - until the legislative period ended a few weeks later.
D2 is a time-waster if you play it over and over. It's decent multiplayer if you casually play through the storyline with a friend.
Every game has a point where it's more mork than play. MMOs generally tend to reach that point fairly early; D2 is another example of a game that can be turned into a job easily.
I, for my part, am glad to recently have infected two of my friends with UFO: Enemy Unknown addiction (with a third infection pending). There's only so much grinding you can do before all your soldiers have 80+ in all stats and you have more money than God from mass-producing Laser Cannons. Plus, the game doesn't try to upsell you on anything.