True story: I was walking my dog just the other day in my neighbourhood and decided to take a different route home. Came across a house where there was a miniature train track circling the front of the property (no trains were running) and saw what I first thought was one of those Roomba-type vacuum cleaners, except that being outside, I had to conclude it was for mowing the lawn.
Stood there a while amused as hell listening to the weird "Vroom" noises the bright yellow machine was making. The really funny part came when I realised what it was actually doing. If the programming didn't consist of:
10 FORWARD 20 BUMP INTO TREE 30 REVERSE 40 GO TO 10
there had to be an error message popping unnoticed somewhere that read:
Error. The operation completed successfully. Click OK to continue.
I tend to agree, but IIRC, casual searches for technical terms were never that good. In my case, I invariably still get an unfiltered (read "near-endless") list of links to mailing list posts (identical content hosted by different list aggregators), or my favourite, the same frigging README file stored on what seems to be every other server on the internet. At least in the past, some of us could rely on usenet (as archived by Google groups) searches to separate out the chaff, but today everyone insists that web-forums are the way to go, so the signal-to-noise ratio is higher than ever.
Granted, there's typically few ads possible for technical searches, so Google has no monetary incentive to improve them, but you'd think some geek employed by Google and trying to find useful information in a web search would step up and suggest an improvement or two.
Then, again, maybe he's searching for things like deals on cameras (or Britney Spears) like everyone else.;-)
If it was routable, remote management over SSH by the doctor might be useful. The cardiologist could, for example, do a few runs of dd(1) and determine whether you're ready to have sex with your wife, or whether some additional tweaks are first needed.
The downside, of course, is the patient being a Unix user and discovering the localhost interface.
"Honey, call 911! I just did an accidental rm -rf/!"
This is an emotion-driven argument. In many countries, people eat dogs and cats and some places consider them a delicacy. I have yet to hear of a country that fries up children and serves them. Pets are glorified livestock.
And a "cultural bias" argument is more valid than an "emotion-driven" argument?
Most of the Muslim world considers dogs as "dirty", but Arabs have no problem living with or making friends with their camels and goats. Jews demand kosherness and refuse to eat pork, while Americans love bacon, are known to have pigs as pets, and wouldn't think twice about eating deer that was road kill. Many cultures support the idea of female circumcision while others insist it to be wrong. I'm not aware of any culture that advocates eating children, but sacricing virigins was at times deemed necessary for some cultures, while abhorent to others.
There's a lot to be said for respecting the ideas of a given culture, but under reasonable scrutiny, many of those notions can be be seen to be what they are, just notions, and judged to be somewhere between absurd and barbaric. Offering an argument to the contrary by citing notions and asserting that, taken as a whole, they notions represent some universal truth (or the absence of one), is no less absurd.
When I read your "dogs are livestock" statement, I see someone playing word games for disingenous reasons. It demonstrates to me that you're not only ignorant of what livestock really means (historically, traditionally, and present day), but also you have some sort of an agenda or nutty perspective that needs validation for uniquely personal reasons.
Don't like dogs? Fine with me. You eat them because you don't know anything different? That's fine, too, and just as valid. The rest of your comments, however, are rubbish. At best, they reflect the outdated and discredited notions that the lives of lesser creatures bear no similarity or relationship to our own, and that our dominion over the them endows us with a God-given right to treat them as we choose. And with the implicit mandate to remove morality from any decisions concerning lesser animals, what more could we want? And what could possibly go wrong?
Face it. In most of the world, dogs are kept as pets and our relationship to them is unique, special, and valued. You're free to have a cat, rodent or, space permitting, a cow, or none at all, but please, leave dogs and their owners alone. None of us is interested in your comments or simplified world view. And, I'd wager, all of us are already in a better position than you to know the difference between wild animals, livestock, pets and children, and appreciate those differences.
I watched a program on Animal Planet a few years ago where they ran tests on wolves. They determined that wolves had no desire to 'please' (utilize) humans regardless of whether they were raised from pups or not.
There was a PBS documentary some time ago on dogs in general that offered an additional, somewhat expanded take on that subject.
Some researcher in Russia in the early part of the last century decided to investigate whether the behaviour we associate with domesticated dogs could be learned by or bred into other animals, and if so, how long it would take. IIRC, minks were used. Turns out that after a dozen or so generations of carefully selected breeding with lots of "socialisation" in between, the film footage revealed the minks behaving like pet dogs.
Dogs, of course, have thousands of years head start on other animals. That means we're justified in happily taking their behaviour for granted, and with the wide array of breeds available, few really care about wolves or other animals. Still, the experiment was an interesting one. And if Kevin Costner's character in Dancing with Wolves is any indication, the idea does have a certain emotional appeal.
Surprisingly (or not), that's identical to the thinking of Cesar Milan and is demonstrated in each episode of the Dog Whisperer.
Episode 1:
Parent: My child insists on running around supermarket aisles yelling and breaking things.
Cesar Milan: Children need exercise, discipline and affection, in that order.
Episode 2:
Parent: My child is painfully shy and afraid of things things that go Bump.
Cesar Milan: Being a good pack leader means knowing that protecting your child from new situations is unhealthy for both of you. Children are naturally curious and are social creatures. Allow them to discover their world while maintaining control.
Episode 3:
Parent: I give my child everything he wants, but refuses to do what I say, fights all the time with others, and even kicks and bites me.
Cesar Milan: Excercise, discipline and affection. Be a good pack leader and learn to say NO. A single and firm NO, without conversation, discussion or negotation. Don't give rewards for bad behaviour. Start by regularly taking the child on a walk so he's not sitting on his ass watching TV the entire day.
The difference, of course, is that while dogs may have the intelligence or relative maturity of a 2yo, they stay that way. Which is kind of why we enjoy them so much.:-)
According to a report by the "Times Online" and another report by guardian.co.uk", today is the 1-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Georgia.
Aug 8 Dustin Hoffman born in Los Angeles, 1937 Aug 8 Montenegro declares war on Germany, 1914 Aug 8 Richard Nixon resigns the US presidency, 1974 Aug 8 The Great Train Robbery -- $7,368,000, 1963
The above suggests to me that it's American Neocons seeking to regain the power of the presidency, working in conjunction with Serbian terrorists angry at their Montenegrin brothers along with a few German Nazis still fighting the good fight, a plot funded by the money stolen in 1963, and spearheaded by none other than than Dustin Hoffman.
I don't know where you live, but around here with all the taxes the cigarettes are probably the most expensive imaginable way to get your nicotine fix.
Probably true if nicotine is what you're after. Seems to me that there's more to smoking than just nicotine just as there's more to brewing a fresh cup of great coffee and sitting down to drink it hot than what's offered in a caffeine pill. On any number of different levels.
I'm impressed at the advances of science in recent years, but I'm old enough to know that an advance here or there combined with a recommendation du jour doesn't necessarily mean much more than saying "Hey, we figured this much out!" You take what's complex and assert it's simple, then talk about poison without recognising that most anything in sufficient quantities can be lethal. And that what's called poison in small enough doses is often given the term "medicine" and sold by prescription.
Quite frankly, I find the reductio ad absurdum approach toward food and other substances an unfortunate trend. We have people spending their lives standing in aisles reading labels, believing that meat and fish are nothing more than protein, taking an iron pill is the equivalent of eating green leafy vegetables, drinking red wine equivalent of an intake of retrovil and alcohol, and the chocolate is just a bunch of calories.
Sorry, but I'm going to insist on going the less efficient and more expensive route. I'll buy my fruits and vegetables based on looks, taste and freshness, and I'll consume meat because my body tells me it's yummy and it's good for me. If I read a label, it'll be on the bottle of wine I'm drinking. When done, I'll drink my coffee and smoke a cigarette because I enjoy both of them (and their effects) too much to care what the latest scientific studies purport to tell me they do or don't do.
I find this part curious. Yes, nicotine is crazy addictive, well up there with the zestiest of the drugs that the state doesn't approve of. However, in this case, does it matter?
I agree with what you're saying, but I'd suggest it matters, but in a different way. A doctor schooled in the habit of prescribing "meds" for behavioural problems prefers that his patients rely on those meds. As would the pharmaceutical companies. And just about everyone even remotely involved in the care of such patients.
We can't have people smoking pot to cure nausea, self-medicating their pain with "illegal" drugs, or generally relying on non-traditional forms of medicine. There's huge amounts of money at stake, and the biases and prejudices against any non-mainstream treatment is pervasive.
I have a brother who's schizophrenic. I'm painfully aware of the limited success offered by the various regimens he's been on for decades just as I'm aware of all the other problems (physical health included) he's developed as a direct result of those regimens. He quit smoking some years ago around the time it became unfashionable to smoke. I wish he'd start again. Hell, I'd even go so far as to suggest if he spent his days chain-smoking and stopped his medications, he'd be better off.
Everything is surprising when something assumed to private gets made public. Googling your name for the first time is one example. A better one would be what I recall happening in towns in the South. People would take pictures of cars (with license plates showing) parked in the lot of an adult bookstore or strip club and publish them somehwere or just put them up for display on supermarket bulletin boards. Why be surprised at a picture of your car, right?
Granted, electronic eavesdropping is more subtle, but the same principle applies. You can argue in the abstract about the need for wireless encryption until the cows come home, but it won't get through to the average person until you can demonstrate a lack of security by actually showing them the passwords you sniffed. In the DefCon case, they took a photo and plastered it up for everyone to see.
They probably just forgot to wear their tin-foil hats
You mean tin-foil wallets. Humorously enough, Farraday-shielded wallets were on sale.
There's only one situation I can think of where the GUI is better, when I need to select a number of arbitrary files from a directory. Since globbing or find can't be used to quickly match the files you want I find control-clicking a bunch of icons is quicker than typing out a bunch of file names. That's the exception though, the rest of the time the CLI is better.
For a few files, ordinary tab completion is faster and works better. For a lot of files, you have two options:
1. If you're using bash and have mastered the finer points of readline(3), you'd be doing
command [META-*] # dump the current directory contents into the line foo="[META-*]" # assign the current directory contents to a variable command X[META-*] # just give me the X files command Y[META-*] # just give me the Y files command [XY]*[META-*] # give me both the X and Y files command [0-9]*[META-*] # dump the numbered files into the line
Note that [META-*] typically means holding down the ALT key while pressing the asterisk key.
Once everything is dumped on your line, you can edit it as you please or just hit ENTER.
2. Use a tempfile
ls [basic glob pattern] | vim -
You should be able to delete lines faster than using a mouse to select them in a GUI. Granted, if the file list is too long to pass to a command or the command takes its arguments differently, you'll need to iterate over the contents of that tempfile using a construct like
while read line; do something "$line"; done << tempfile
Extra step? Perhaps, but with the tempfile and your history file, you have a record of what you actually did. GUI selection, by contrast, disappers without a trace.
We know our operating system sucks so we've decided to help our customers by making it even easier to shut it down!
A bit inflammatory, doncha think? If they did want to want to make things easier for their customers, they would have added a default icon to the desktop labelled "REBOOT".
Between the dozens of third-party utilities people generally download and install (Sysinternals, among others), and Microsoft adding/subtracting what's in the various Resource Kits or generally making things up as they go along, I've always relied on Cygwin's own version of shutdown.
I think anyone who owns a dog or who has taken their kids out for a stroll in a carriage can relate to what you wrote.
The problem, I think, with rollerbladers and skaters is one of scale. If you're a normally functioning biped going about your business, someone travelling at speeds highly disproportionate to your own (or making a helluva lot more noise than you make as skateboarders do) can only be characterised (from your perspective) as somewhere between a danger and a threat.
Cars even more so. Walking your dog or and having cars drive by at 25-30 mph can be acceptable if there's a barrier, or enough distance separating you. Someone speeding by at 35-45 mph, on the other hand, will most likely elicit an extreme reaction from you. The guy in the car, of course, doesn't care and doesn't notice as he considers himself perfectly safe from you.
Segways typically don't speed, and they don't make a lot of noise, but they certainly share much in common with what we perceive as threats: something bigger than we are and something which is capable of moving faster than we move. Practically speaking that means they don't belong on the sidewalk, or anywhere people gather or walk normally. And because a slow-moving object on a roadway is also a threat, they certainly don't belong there. That essentially leaves them with nowhere that's appropriate.
Doesn't help that we tend to view mechanical devices generally with suspicion, and Segway owners specifically as oddballs. That's not to say that Segways themselves aren't interesting.
I actually read TFA! "Churn" is apparently when people switch from one carrier to another, presumably at the end of the contract. (This answers both the parent poster, and one in this same thread)
I'm not sure I understand. Is this an IBM version of Amazon's "Customers who bought this also bought..." in a profit-threatening (whatever that means) context? If so, maybe we can integrate it into Slashdot's moderation system and identify basement dwellers, astroturfers, and Mac fanboys.;-)
He was probably wearing a high-vis jacket and wearing heavy leather gloves. He'd have looked like an ordinary electrician. If anyone asks he was 'reparing' the meter.
San Francisco may be different, but I'd imagine that in most cities, if someone was seen beating a parking meter with a baseball bat, people passing by would nod approvingly, or perhaps cheer.
The fire, of course, chased the thieving duo away after a couple of minutes, and they thankfully only got away with some sausages and most of a bottle of pancake syrup... The damn bears are smarter than you'd think.
Smarter than I think would generally be OK, but two smart bears prowling for sausages or pancake syrup not so much.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
10 PRINT "Destroy all humans!"
20 GOTO 10
True story: I was walking my dog just the other day in my neighbourhood and decided to take a different route home. Came across a house where there was a miniature train track circling the front of the property (no trains were running) and saw what I first thought was one of those Roomba-type vacuum cleaners, except that being outside, I had to conclude it was for mowing the lawn.
Stood there a while amused as hell listening to the weird "Vroom" noises the bright yellow machine was making. The really funny part came when I realised what it was actually doing. If the programming didn't consist of:
10 FORWARD
20 BUMP INTO TREE
30 REVERSE
40 GO TO 10
there had to be an error message popping unnoticed somewhere that read:
Error.
The operation completed successfully. Click OK to continue.
. . . and to summarize TFA - Prof. Man Cuntz says, "Wear lots of sunscreen"
I prefer the Baz Luhrmann version.
His version was less informative, no less depressing, but after listening to it, you somehow felt a bit better. And you could dance to it. :-)
Google used to be a much more technical search ...
I tend to agree, but IIRC, casual searches for technical terms were never that good. In my case, I invariably still get an unfiltered (read "near-endless") list of links to mailing list posts (identical content hosted by different list aggregators), or my favourite, the same frigging README file stored on what seems to be every other server on the internet. At least in the past, some of us could rely on usenet (as archived by Google groups) searches to separate out the chaff, but today everyone insists that web-forums are the way to go, so the signal-to-noise ratio is higher than ever.
Granted, there's typically few ads possible for technical searches, so Google has no monetary incentive to improve them, but you'd think some geek employed by Google and trying to find useful information in a web search would step up and suggest an improvement or two.
Then, again, maybe he's searching for things like deals on cameras (or Britney Spears) like everyone else. ;-)
My new app will let you know whenever any of your fiends are freed from prison.
I'm in prison you insensitive clod!
Sounds like both Apple and the Major Labels are infringing on my patented Digital Album Format. The working project title is 'Directory' ...
Ha! But I've already patented `.' and `..' so all of you are infringing.
Would you want one with an IP address?
If it was routable, remote management over SSH by the doctor might be useful. The cardiologist could, for example, do a few runs of dd(1) and determine whether you're ready to have sex with your wife, or whether some additional tweaks are first needed.
The downside, of course, is the patient being a Unix user and discovering the localhost interface.
"Honey, call 911! I just did an accidental rm -rf /!"
I wonder how quiet it is, some of the pictures had fans...
At least you clicked the link. ;-)
In the text accompanying those pictures it said 27dB. Not quiet, but not noisy either.
This is an emotion-driven argument. In many countries, people eat dogs and cats and some places consider them a delicacy. I have yet to hear of a country that fries up children and serves them. Pets are glorified livestock.
And a "cultural bias" argument is more valid than an "emotion-driven" argument?
Most of the Muslim world considers dogs as "dirty", but Arabs have no problem living with or making friends with their camels and goats. Jews demand kosherness and refuse to eat pork, while Americans love bacon, are known to have pigs as pets, and wouldn't think twice about eating deer that was road kill. Many cultures support the idea of female circumcision while others insist it to be wrong. I'm not aware of any culture that advocates eating children, but sacricing virigins was at times deemed necessary for some cultures, while abhorent to others.
There's a lot to be said for respecting the ideas of a given culture, but under reasonable scrutiny, many of those notions can be be seen to be what they are, just notions, and judged to be somewhere between absurd and barbaric. Offering an argument to the contrary by citing notions and asserting that, taken as a whole, they notions represent some universal truth (or the absence of one), is no less absurd.
When I read your "dogs are livestock" statement, I see someone playing word games for disingenous reasons. It demonstrates to me that you're not only ignorant of what livestock really means (historically, traditionally, and present day), but also you have some sort of an agenda or nutty perspective that needs validation for uniquely personal reasons.
Don't like dogs? Fine with me. You eat them because you don't know anything different? That's fine, too, and just as valid. The rest of your comments, however, are rubbish. At best, they reflect the outdated and discredited notions that the lives of lesser creatures bear no similarity or relationship to our own, and that our dominion over the them endows us with a God-given right to treat them as we choose. And with the implicit mandate to remove morality from any decisions concerning lesser animals, what more could we want? And what could possibly go wrong?
Face it. In most of the world, dogs are kept as pets and our relationship to them is unique, special, and valued. You're free to have a cat, rodent or, space permitting, a cow, or none at all, but please, leave dogs and their owners alone. None of us is interested in your comments or simplified world view. And, I'd wager, all of us are already in a better position than you to know the difference between wild animals, livestock, pets and children, and appreciate those differences.
I watched a program on Animal Planet a few years ago where they ran tests on wolves. They determined that wolves had no desire to 'please' (utilize) humans regardless of whether they were raised from pups or not.
There was a PBS documentary some time ago on dogs in general that offered an additional, somewhat expanded take on that subject.
Some researcher in Russia in the early part of the last century decided to investigate whether the behaviour we associate with domesticated dogs could be learned by or bred into other animals, and if so, how long it would take. IIRC, minks were used. Turns out that after a dozen or so generations of carefully selected breeding with lots of "socialisation" in between, the film footage revealed the minks behaving like pet dogs.
Dogs, of course, have thousands of years head start on other animals. That means we're justified in happily taking their behaviour for granted, and with the wide array of breeds available, few really care about wolves or other animals. Still, the experiment was an interesting one. And if Kevin Costner's character in Dancing with Wolves is any indication, the idea does have a certain emotional appeal.
Surprisingly (or not), that's identical to the thinking of Cesar Milan and is demonstrated in each episode of the Dog Whisperer.
Episode 1:
Episode 2:
Episode 3:
The difference, of course, is that while dogs may have the intelligence or relative maturity of a 2yo, they stay that way. Which is kind of why we enjoy them so much. :-)
According to a report by the "Times Online" and another report by guardian.co.uk", today is the 1-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Georgia.
Aug 8 Dustin Hoffman born in Los Angeles, 1937
Aug 8 Montenegro declares war on Germany, 1914
Aug 8 Richard Nixon resigns the US presidency, 1974
Aug 8 The Great Train Robbery -- $7,368,000, 1963
The above suggests to me that it's American Neocons seeking to regain the power of the presidency, working in conjunction with Serbian terrorists angry at their Montenegrin brothers along with a few German Nazis still fighting the good fight, a plot funded by the money stolen in 1963, and spearheaded by none other than than Dustin Hoffman.
I don't know where you live, but around here with all the taxes the cigarettes are probably the most expensive imaginable way to get your nicotine fix.
Probably true if nicotine is what you're after. Seems to me that there's more to smoking than just nicotine just as there's more to brewing a fresh cup of great coffee and sitting down to drink it hot than what's offered in a caffeine pill. On any number of different levels.
I'm impressed at the advances of science in recent years, but I'm old enough to know that an advance here or there combined with a recommendation du jour doesn't necessarily mean much more than saying "Hey, we figured this much out!" You take what's complex and assert it's simple, then talk about poison without recognising that most anything in sufficient quantities can be lethal. And that what's called poison in small enough doses is often given the term "medicine" and sold by prescription.
Quite frankly, I find the reductio ad absurdum approach toward food and other substances an unfortunate trend. We have people spending their lives standing in aisles reading labels, believing that meat and fish are nothing more than protein, taking an iron pill is the equivalent of eating green leafy vegetables, drinking red wine equivalent of an intake of retrovil and alcohol, and the chocolate is just a bunch of calories.
Sorry, but I'm going to insist on going the less efficient and more expensive route. I'll buy my fruits and vegetables based on looks, taste and freshness, and I'll consume meat because my body tells me it's yummy and it's good for me. If I read a label, it'll be on the bottle of wine I'm drinking. When done, I'll drink my coffee and smoke a cigarette because I enjoy both of them (and their effects) too much to care what the latest scientific studies purport to tell me they do or don't do.
I find this part curious. Yes, nicotine is crazy addictive, well up there with the zestiest of the drugs that the state doesn't approve of. However, in this case, does it matter?
I agree with what you're saying, but I'd suggest it matters, but in a different way. A doctor schooled in the habit of prescribing "meds" for behavioural problems prefers that his patients rely on those meds. As would the pharmaceutical companies. And just about everyone even remotely involved in the care of such patients.
We can't have people smoking pot to cure nausea, self-medicating their pain with "illegal" drugs, or generally relying on non-traditional forms of medicine. There's huge amounts of money at stake, and the biases and prejudices against any non-mainstream treatment is pervasive.
I have a brother who's schizophrenic. I'm painfully aware of the limited success offered by the various regimens he's been on for decades just as I'm aware of all the other problems (physical health included) he's developed as a direct result of those regimens. He quit smoking some years ago around the time it became unfashionable to smoke. I wish he'd start again. Hell, I'd even go so far as to suggest if he spent his days chain-smoking and stopped his medications, he'd be better off.
How could they be surprised by this?
Everything is surprising when something assumed to private gets made public. Googling your name for the first time is one example. A better one would be what I recall happening in towns in the South. People would take pictures of cars (with license plates showing) parked in the lot of an adult bookstore or strip club and publish them somehwere or just put them up for display on supermarket bulletin boards. Why be surprised at a picture of your car, right?
Granted, electronic eavesdropping is more subtle, but the same principle applies. You can argue in the abstract about the need for wireless encryption until the cows come home, but it won't get through to the average person until you can demonstrate a lack of security by actually showing them the passwords you sniffed. In the DefCon case, they took a photo and plastered it up for everyone to see.
They probably just forgot to wear their tin-foil hats
You mean tin-foil wallets. Humorously enough, Farraday-shielded wallets were on sale.
There's only one situation I can think of where the GUI is better, when I need to select a number of arbitrary files from a directory. Since globbing or find can't be used to quickly match the files you want I find control-clicking a bunch of icons is quicker than typing out a bunch of file names. That's the exception though, the rest of the time the CLI is better.
For a few files, ordinary tab completion is faster and works better. For a lot of files, you have two options:
1. If you're using bash and have mastered the finer points of readline(3), you'd be doing
Note that [META-*] typically means holding down the ALT key while pressing the asterisk key.
Once everything is dumped on your line, you can edit it as you please or just hit ENTER.
2. Use a tempfile
ls [basic glob pattern] | vim -
You should be able to delete lines faster than using a mouse to select them in a GUI. Granted, if the file list is too long to pass to a command or the command takes its arguments differently, you'll need to iterate over the contents of that tempfile using a construct like
Extra step? Perhaps, but with the tempfile and your history file, you have a record of what you actually did. GUI selection, by contrast, disappers without a trace.
We know our operating system sucks so we've decided to help our customers by making it even easier to shut it down!
A bit inflammatory, doncha think? If they did want to want to make things easier for their customers, they would have added a default icon to the desktop labelled "REBOOT".
from commandline: shutdown -f -t 0
For completeness' sake :
shutdown -f -t 0 # shutdown
shutdown -f -t 0 # reboot
shutdown -h -t 0 # hibernate
shutdown -l -t 0 # logoff
At least that applies to /c/WINDOWS/system32/shutdown.exe.
PowerShell users should be happy to know they can type:
(Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_OperatingSystem -ComputerName ).shutdown()
Between the dozens of third-party utilities people generally download and install (Sysinternals, among others), and Microsoft adding/subtracting what's in the various Resource Kits or generally making things up as they go along, I've always relied on Cygwin's own version of shutdown.
Here's a randomly selected page that details some of the ugliness.
You fight disease with the spleen you have. Not the spleen you want.
Or if you prefer something more highbrow, All The Bard's Spleens.
For fun, be sure to check out the alt.spleen FAQ.
they don't want to shepherd some high-maintenance bird around that has to be hacked ...
Shepherding birds?
Flocking hell. Forget beowulf clusters, imagine a bevy of quails! ;-)
I think anyone who owns a dog or who has taken their kids out for a stroll in a carriage can relate to what you wrote.
The problem, I think, with rollerbladers and skaters is one of scale. If you're a normally functioning biped going about your business, someone travelling at speeds highly disproportionate to your own (or making a helluva lot more noise than you make as skateboarders do) can only be characterised (from your perspective) as somewhere between a danger and a threat.
Cars even more so. Walking your dog or and having cars drive by at 25-30 mph can be acceptable if there's a barrier, or enough distance separating you. Someone speeding by at 35-45 mph, on the other hand, will most likely elicit an extreme reaction from you. The guy in the car, of course, doesn't care and doesn't notice as he considers himself perfectly safe from you.
Segways typically don't speed, and they don't make a lot of noise, but they certainly share much in common with what we perceive as threats: something bigger than we are and something which is capable of moving faster than we move. Practically speaking that means they don't belong on the sidewalk, or anywhere people gather or walk normally. And because a slow-moving object on a roadway is also a threat, they certainly don't belong there. That essentially leaves them with nowhere that's appropriate.
Doesn't help that we tend to view mechanical devices generally with suspicion, and Segway owners specifically as oddballs. That's not to say that Segways themselves aren't interesting.
I actually read TFA! "Churn" is apparently when people switch from one carrier to another, presumably at the end of the contract. (This answers both the parent poster, and one in this same thread)
I'm not sure I understand. Is this an IBM version of Amazon's "Customers who bought this also bought ..." in a profit-threatening (whatever that means) context? If so, maybe we can integrate it into Slashdot's moderation system and identify basement dwellers, astroturfers, and Mac fanboys. ;-)
Where exactly is the code stored, that survives reboots?
Start here. For more info, you can read the Wiki article.
Alternatively, try opening your computer and actually looking at what's inside. ;-)
He was probably wearing a high-vis jacket and wearing heavy leather gloves. He'd have looked like an ordinary electrician. If anyone asks he was 'reparing' the meter.
San Francisco may be different, but I'd imagine that in most cities, if someone was seen beating a parking meter with a baseball bat, people passing by would nod approvingly, or perhaps cheer.
The fire, of course, chased the thieving duo away after a couple of minutes, and they thankfully only got away with some sausages and most of a bottle of pancake syrup ... The damn bears are smarter than you'd think.
Smarter than I think would generally be OK, but two smart bears prowling for sausages or pancake syrup not so much. ;-)
Great story!
I didn't realize that Mission Viejo was such a hot market... No one goes to The Shops except for locals.
A strategy that suggests it's Republicans who prefer Microsoft products?