Re:See a doctor
on
Cyberchondria
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Those who are already prone to certain mental attitudes will simply use the internet to go overboard. Whether that's researching health matters, looking at porn, or surfing Slashdot all day is largely irrelevant...
Who the hell decided talking to someone on a cellphone while in a restaurant is any different than talking to a person physically there?
Well, I'm not sure who came up with it, but they sorta have a point. The thing is that very often people who are talking on a mobile phone talk a lot louder than if they are talking to someone across the table from them. Sure, not everyone does, but a lot of people do. That's what gets annoying - people talking like they're trying to project their voice round the whole restaurant or whatever. I was walking round town yesterday and heard a guy talking very loudly. I looked round to see who it was, and managed to pinpoint the voice to some guy about 50 metres away who was talking on a mobile phone. I could hardly hear anything that anyone who was actually close to me was saying, but I could hear him clear as day. So it does happen.
I could make a few guesses why people do this. Maybe poor signal means they have to talk louder to be heard. Maybe they or the other person have their phone volume down too low. Maybe because you can't see someone's lips moving it's harder to make out what they're saying on the phone than if they were sat opposite you or whatever. I mean, my fiancee can lip read (she's deaf in one ear) which means she can understand people talking in the noisiest places - stands to reason that all of us lip read to some extent so talking on the phone will make it harder to be hear and understand.
Now, I don't have a problem with people talking at a regular volume on their phones, because as you say it is no different to people in person. It's that set of people who shout into their phones that disturbs me and winds me up.
All the damn time I'm reading "Linux isn't ready for the desktop".
I'musing Linux on the desktop.
It works fine. Does this mean I'm doing something wrong? I mean, it's not meant to work, is it?
Linux is ready for the desktop, as shown by the countless people using it on the desktop. Hell, you're at Slashdot, look around you...
The real issue is that Linux isn't ready for mass consumption in the same way that Windows is, but that's largely because people have had Microsoft stuffed down their throats for... ooh... 20 years? Something like that. People have issues with Linux because they're so used to doing everything the Microsoft way. People are taught that computers run Windows, and for 90% of people there is no other OS. Most people wouldn't know what an OS even is! It's inconveivable for computers to run any other way.
There are distro's combatting this though. I mean, first up there's obvious candidate's like Lindows; but things like Redhat (Fedora, whatever) and Mandrake are getting extremely user friendly. For the average end user a decent RedHat install will do most things - e-mail, internet, Office type stuff. It's only the hardcore minority among us that need more complex stuff and thus spend sleepless nights tweaking the kernel, trying to get Wine to run properly, trawling the net for those obscure drivers... But most people never even think about that type of stuff
Long story short - Linux is ready for the desktop, but people just need a bit of re-education to get their head round it, same as a lot of people need education to use Windows in the first place. A lot of end users need training to use Windows in the first place, and then need training with each new version of Windows, so training in Linux shouldn't be too much harder.
I thought the cron daemon checked for tasks that got missed when the computer was off, and ran them the next time it was on? I've read about it doing that, and I'm pretty sure that's what it's doing on my Fedora box...
"When the strong man fully armed guardeth his own court, his goods are in peace." -Jesus Christ [Luke 11:21.6]
"But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one." -Jesus Christ [Luke 22:36]
Please, please, please never use Bible verses in an argument like this. Wanna know why? Because if you do someone like me will turn up and point out how badly you're misquoting things.
The first one, about the strong man guarding his house... Surprisingly, Jesus is not talking about bearing arms to defend your house or possessions or self, and certainly is not advocating the possession of weapons for this purpose. He's talking about Satan, and the fact that though Satan (the strong man) has charge of the world (the goods). Verse 22 goes on to say that someone stronger (Jesus) will come to overthrow him and take away the armour that he (Satan) trusted in and take the spoils (the earth).
The second one is closer the mark, but I'd still be wary of using it to advocate the carrying of a gun for self defence. The disciples being sent out were going to face severe persecution for spreading the gospel, and would need swords for protection. It's hardly comparable to every person in the country carrying a gun. Indeed, if you look on to verse 38 it says (in the NIV translation, I assume yours is KJV): The disciples said, "See, Lord, here are two swords." "That is enough" he replied. It's not exactly a massive arsenal, is it? Also, there is no record of the disciples killing anyone in spite of the persecution they faced.
I don't see why everyone needs a gun. Self defence? Against what? Murder? Rape? Mugging? Especially mugging. What are they going to take, your wallet? Just cancel your cards and say goodbye to the $20 you had in cash. You can live without $20, right? Sure, rape and murder are more serious but I doubt many rapes and murders are actually prevented by the victim being in possession of a gun. If you must have a weapon, make it a non-lethal one at least.
We had a guy from BT come in and do a business type lecture instead of our regular software engineering ones.
It was some pretty crazy stuff. He kept going on about all these weird things that were straight out of sci fi movies, as though the R&D dept. had just been watching films and playing futuristic games for the past 10 years.
He went on about nanites (Deus Ex) and robots (Terminator series) and virtual reality (Matrix) and artificial intelligence (Matrix again) and robotic modifications to your body (Deus Ex again)... It was pretty weird stuff, and kinda scary too.
Well, the fact of the matter is that he actually sang "The FCC won't let me be, or let me be me" so the quote should be "The FCC won't let [VoIP] be, or let [VoIP] be [VoIP]".
Is this the part where I get downvoted for quoting song lyrics, even though they were quoted (wrongly) in the title?
Taking long distance freight off the roads and putting it back onto rail where it belongs would be a major vote winner I reckon.
Yes, but it would require money, and the government just isn't willing to spend that. That's why the government in the UK is spending a fortune widening motorways when they could spend far less improving the rail service to the point that those people they are widening the motorways for might actually use the trains.
Man, just don't get me started on the UK rail system! It's a disaster!
I've been riding the trains in the UK for the past 6 months ish and I don't understand what people's problem with them is. If they are delayed it is almost never more than 10 minutes and if it is greater than 10 minutes it's usually due to something weird like lightning hitting the tracks or some other thing. 9 times out of 10 your train is never delayed and you don't run into problems.
Are you joking? The trains in Britain are appallingly bad! I mean desperately so. I'm routinely delayed for hours. Only delayed for 10 minutes? I think not. It's all well and good when your journey is on one train, but when you have to changetrains, then things turn into a nightmare, and that ten minutes is a long time when you only have seven minutes to change trains at the next station.
To me, as an american, the trains are fan-fucking-tastic. American mass transportation systems can't come close to the ease and convience that the British get from the train system. Personally, I love it. Get on whatever train you want come back on whatever train you want at any time. It's great.
Well, your trains must be atrocious if they're worse than ours! Man, I guess I can always be thankful I don't have to put up with your trains next time I'm stuck at Peterborough or Nuneaton or any other dull station. As for getting on any train you like and going back on any train you like at any time... it all depends on the tickets, and there's times when that really doesn't apply. Try getting on a GNER train up the East Coast main line when you're carrying a Virgin train that says you have to travel through Sheffield... See how far that gets you.
Now, for me, I want wireless and I want it now;). The 4 hour train ride to London would be much much much easier to deal with if I could have my precious intarweb with me.
No, I really would rather they got the trains to run on time and at a sensible price. Have you seen the cost of tickets? It's extortion! I pay 40 to be 2 hours late. Marvellous. Screw wireless.
RPMs and DEBs supply GPL'ed software, but the source isn't included right in there, is it? Well, not unless you're downloading a.src.rpm or something. The package generally contains pre-compiled files for your distribution and architecture, no source is involved.
The point is, I think if it were a violation of the GPL to distribute software explicitly without the source included, then someone would have cracked down on the whole package system a loooong time ago. As it is, the people supplying the packages just supply source alongside the compiled binary packages, so presumably all you need to do is make the sourc available, as people have said.
There's been a couple of murderers and rapists and the like in the UK lately who have been caught based on mobile phone records. A murder trial - two young girls, very nasty - that's currently taking place involves the evidence that one of the victim's mobile phones was switched off outside the suspect's house the evening that the girls went missing.
It's all fairly simple stuff at this stage, though it's kinda the stuff we've been seeing in films for years and scoffing at on the basis that it's "so unrealistic". Just the idea of being able to track where a phone signal for a particular phone number is coming from, and tying that to GPS and the like.
There's also the idea that they keep track of what you talk about on the phone - they start recording if you say bomb or president or whatever, that kind of thing.
It is only going to get worse though, as you say. When phones start doing more interesting stuff, there'll only be more for them to watch you do...
The article isn't very clear about what is actually behind this problem. Over in the UK we've had text messaging (SMS, whatever you want to call it) for as long as I can remember - I was actually shocked to hear that most American mobile phone companies didn't use it. Anyway...
Point is, I don't think text messages are really the problem here. I've never heard of anything like this happening in text messages. A text message is a text message - a bunch of text. The cleverest thing I've ever seen done with text is being able to send messages that appear in flashing text, and even that only works on Nokia handsets. The only other remotely clever thing you can do with text messages is ASCII art, and we all know how clever that is.
I can imagine it being more of a problem when you get on to the idea of sending more sophisticated stuff, like video or more complex data. Hence I'm not surprised this has already been happening in Japan, as they are miles ahead of everyone on the mobile phone front.
The way I figure it, is there should be no means for a message to do anything remotely clever to your phone. In the same way that a properly set up mail client won't execute any old attachment, but merely present it to the user, a phone should present data or messages and have some means to keep them away from more sensitive parts of the phones software.
The way I see it, mobile phones have got too complicated for their own good. If you want a phone to make calls (remember the days when that was what a phone did?), then buy a phone. If you want to pick up your e-mail, send files to people, or surf the web, buy a PDA for pity's sake. At least the software for PDAs (Windows CE and it's more recent brethren) has been written with a decent knowledge of OS security in mind.
Well, no matter how hard it is working on the LinuxBIOS, I figure there'll start working a whole lot harder if it's a choice between that and this Trusted Computing...
It simply cannot be done. There's always ways round it, and it's kinda futile.
Copy protection programs generally only work under Windows/Mac, and can often be disabled, a la the shift key debacle of recent months.
If the copy protection is a bit better than that, and can't be disabled, then youc an always use a different OS. I couldn't rip the Dido CD in Windows, but Grip in Linux did it just fine.
Even if they were to tighten up on things like even including blocking for Linux (and I don't know how they'd pull that off) then there'd still be ways round it. If you can hear the sound then you can record it, and that's good enough. You can hook a CD player up to a PC and record the audio, or a PC to another PC... you name it.
Granted, most people aren't going to go to such lengths - the general public doesn't really care for Linux:) - but there are already systems like Kazaa in place to distribute MP3s, so it only takes one keen person to create the MP3 in the first place, and everyone else is laughing.
The music industry should stop worrying about DRM and all this rubbish. The horse has bolted, the cat is out of the bag, etc etc. The only way people are going to stop pirating CDs and start buying them again is if the record companies start selling good quality music at a fair price.
Here endeth the lesson.
Certainly does work well. I'm running Redhat, but I have apt-get installed and it works fine. It has a source list full of RPM sites, and it just pulls down RPMs instead of.debs.
Slashdot Mirror
Those who are already prone to certain mental attitudes will simply use the internet to go overboard. Whether that's researching health matters, looking at porn, or surfing Slashdot all day is largely irrelevant...
Well, I guess two out of three ain't so bad.
Who the hell decided talking to someone on a cellphone while in a restaurant is any different than talking to a person physically there?
Well, I'm not sure who came up with it, but they sorta have a point. The thing is that very often people who are talking on a mobile phone talk a lot louder than if they are talking to someone across the table from them. Sure, not everyone does, but a lot of people do. That's what gets annoying - people talking like they're trying to project their voice round the whole restaurant or whatever. I was walking round town yesterday and heard a guy talking very loudly. I looked round to see who it was, and managed to pinpoint the voice to some guy about 50 metres away who was talking on a mobile phone. I could hardly hear anything that anyone who was actually close to me was saying, but I could hear him clear as day. So it does happen.
I could make a few guesses why people do this. Maybe poor signal means they have to talk louder to be heard. Maybe they or the other person have their phone volume down too low. Maybe because you can't see someone's lips moving it's harder to make out what they're saying on the phone than if they were sat opposite you or whatever. I mean, my fiancee can lip read (she's deaf in one ear) which means she can understand people talking in the noisiest places - stands to reason that all of us lip read to some extent so talking on the phone will make it harder to be hear and understand.
Now, I don't have a problem with people talking at a regular volume on their phones, because as you say it is no different to people in person. It's that set of people who shout into their phones that disturbs me and winds me up.
All the damn time I'm reading "Linux isn't ready for the desktop".
I'musing Linux on the desktop.
It works fine. Does this mean I'm doing something wrong? I mean, it's not meant to work, is it?
Linux is ready for the desktop, as shown by the countless people using it on the desktop. Hell, you're at Slashdot, look around you...
The real issue is that Linux isn't ready for mass consumption in the same way that Windows is, but that's largely because people have had Microsoft stuffed down their throats for... ooh... 20 years? Something like that. People have issues with Linux because they're so used to doing everything the Microsoft way. People are taught that computers run Windows, and for 90% of people there is no other OS. Most people wouldn't know what an OS even is! It's inconveivable for computers to run any other way.
There are distro's combatting this though. I mean, first up there's obvious candidate's like Lindows; but things like Redhat (Fedora, whatever) and Mandrake are getting extremely user friendly. For the average end user a decent RedHat install will do most things - e-mail, internet, Office type stuff. It's only the hardcore minority among us that need more complex stuff and thus spend sleepless nights tweaking the kernel, trying to get Wine to run properly, trawling the net for those obscure drivers... But most people never even think about that type of stuff
Long story short - Linux is ready for the desktop, but people just need a bit of re-education to get their head round it, same as a lot of people need education to use Windows in the first place. A lot of end users need training to use Windows in the first place, and then need training with each new version of Windows, so training in Linux shouldn't be too much harder.
Here endeth the lesson.I thought the cron daemon checked for tasks that got missed when the computer was off, and ran them the next time it was on? I've read about it doing that, and I'm pretty sure that's what it's doing on my Fedora box...
The site to read when you want to see whatever was on Slashdot 48 hours ago.
"When the strong man fully armed guardeth his own court, his goods are in peace." -Jesus Christ [Luke 11:21.6]
"But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one." -Jesus Christ [Luke 22:36]
Please, please, please never use Bible verses in an argument like this. Wanna know why? Because if you do someone like me will turn up and point out how badly you're misquoting things.
The first one, about the strong man guarding his house... Surprisingly, Jesus is not talking about bearing arms to defend your house or possessions or self, and certainly is not advocating the possession of weapons for this purpose. He's talking about Satan, and the fact that though Satan (the strong man) has charge of the world (the goods). Verse 22 goes on to say that someone stronger (Jesus) will come to overthrow him and take away the armour that he (Satan) trusted in and take the spoils (the earth).
The second one is closer the mark, but I'd still be wary of using it to advocate the carrying of a gun for self defence. The disciples being sent out were going to face severe persecution for spreading the gospel, and would need swords for protection. It's hardly comparable to every person in the country carrying a gun. Indeed, if you look on to verse 38 it says (in the NIV translation, I assume yours is KJV):
The disciples said, "See, Lord, here are two swords."
"That is enough" he replied.
It's not exactly a massive arsenal, is it? Also, there is no record of the disciples killing anyone in spite of the persecution they faced.
I don't see why everyone needs a gun. Self defence? Against what? Murder? Rape? Mugging? Especially mugging. What are they going to take, your wallet? Just cancel your cards and say goodbye to the $20 you had in cash. You can live without $20, right? Sure, rape and murder are more serious but I doubt many rapes and murders are actually prevented by the victim being in possession of a gun. If you must have a weapon, make it a non-lethal one at least.
Here endeth the flamebait.
We had a guy from BT come in and do a business type lecture instead of our regular software engineering ones.
It was some pretty crazy stuff. He kept going on about all these weird things that were straight out of sci fi movies, as though the R&D dept. had just been watching films and playing futuristic games for the past 10 years.
He went on about nanites (Deus Ex) and robots (Terminator series) and virtual reality (Matrix) and artificial intelligence (Matrix again) and robotic modifications to your body (Deus Ex again)... It was pretty weird stuff, and kinda scary too.
Well, the fact of the matter is that he actually sang "The FCC won't let me be, or let me be me" so the quote should be "The FCC won't let [VoIP] be, or let [VoIP] be [VoIP]". Is this the part where I get downvoted for quoting song lyrics, even though they were quoted (wrongly) in the title?
Taking long distance freight off the roads and putting it back onto rail where it belongs would be a major vote winner I reckon.
Yes, but it would require money, and the government just isn't willing to spend that. That's why the government in the UK is spending a fortune widening motorways when they could spend far less improving the rail service to the point that those people they are widening the motorways for might actually use the trains.
Man, just don't get me started on the UK rail system! It's a disaster!
I've been riding the trains in the UK for the past 6 months ish and I don't understand what people's problem with them is. If they are delayed it is almost never more than 10 minutes and if it is greater than 10 minutes it's usually due to something weird like lightning hitting the tracks or some other thing. 9 times out of 10 your train is never delayed and you don't run into problems.
Are you joking? The trains in Britain are appallingly bad! I mean desperately so. I'm routinely delayed for hours. Only delayed for 10 minutes? I think not. It's all well and good when your journey is on one train, but when you have to changetrains, then things turn into a nightmare, and that ten minutes is a long time when you only have seven minutes to change trains at the next station.
To me, as an american, the trains are fan-fucking-tastic. American mass transportation systems can't come close to the ease and convience that the British get from the train system. Personally, I love it. Get on whatever train you want come back on whatever train you want at any time. It's great.
Well, your trains must be atrocious if they're worse than ours! Man, I guess I can always be thankful I don't have to put up with your trains next time I'm stuck at Peterborough or Nuneaton or any other dull station. As for getting on any train you like and going back on any train you like at any time... it all depends on the tickets, and there's times when that really doesn't apply. Try getting on a GNER train up the East Coast main line when you're carrying a Virgin train that says you have to travel through Sheffield... See how far that gets you.
Now, for me, I want wireless and I want it now ;). The 4 hour train ride to London would be much much much easier to deal with if I could have my precious intarweb with me.
No, I really would rather they got the trains to run on time and at a sensible price. Have you seen the cost of tickets? It's extortion! I pay 40 to be 2 hours late. Marvellous. Screw wireless.
RPMs and DEBs supply GPL'ed software, but the source isn't included right in there, is it? Well, not unless you're downloading a .src.rpm or something. The package generally contains pre-compiled files for your distribution and architecture, no source is involved.
The point is, I think if it were a violation of the GPL to distribute software explicitly without the source included, then someone would have cracked down on the whole package system a loooong time ago. As it is, the people supplying the packages just supply source alongside the compiled binary packages, so presumably all you need to do is make the sourc available, as people have said.
There's been a couple of murderers and rapists and the like in the UK lately who have been caught based on mobile phone records. A murder trial - two young girls, very nasty - that's currently taking place involves the evidence that one of the victim's mobile phones was switched off outside the suspect's house the evening that the girls went missing.
It's all fairly simple stuff at this stage, though it's kinda the stuff we've been seeing in films for years and scoffing at on the basis that it's "so unrealistic". Just the idea of being able to track where a phone signal for a particular phone number is coming from, and tying that to GPS and the like.
There's also the idea that they keep track of what you talk about on the phone - they start recording if you say bomb or president or whatever, that kind of thing.
It is only going to get worse though, as you say. When phones start doing more interesting stuff, there'll only be more for them to watch you do...
The article isn't very clear about what is actually behind this problem. Over in the UK we've had text messaging (SMS, whatever you want to call it) for as long as I can remember - I was actually shocked to hear that most American mobile phone companies didn't use it. Anyway...
Point is, I don't think text messages are really the problem here. I've never heard of anything like this happening in text messages. A text message is a text message - a bunch of text. The cleverest thing I've ever seen done with text is being able to send messages that appear in flashing text, and even that only works on Nokia handsets. The only other remotely clever thing you can do with text messages is ASCII art, and we all know how clever that is.
I can imagine it being more of a problem when you get on to the idea of sending more sophisticated stuff, like video or more complex data. Hence I'm not surprised this has already been happening in Japan, as they are miles ahead of everyone on the mobile phone front.
The way I figure it, is there should be no means for a message to do anything remotely clever to your phone. In the same way that a properly set up mail client won't execute any old attachment, but merely present it to the user, a phone should present data or messages and have some means to keep them away from more sensitive parts of the phones software.
The way I see it, mobile phones have got too complicated for their own good. If you want a phone to make calls (remember the days when that was what a phone did?), then buy a phone. If you want to pick up your e-mail, send files to people, or surf the web, buy a PDA for pity's sake. At least the software for PDAs (Windows CE and it's more recent brethren) has been written with a decent knowledge of OS security in mind.
Well, no matter how hard it is working on the LinuxBIOS, I figure there'll start working a whole lot harder if it's a choice between that and this Trusted Computing...
It simply cannot be done. There's always ways round it, and it's kinda futile. Copy protection programs generally only work under Windows/Mac, and can often be disabled, a la the shift key debacle of recent months. If the copy protection is a bit better than that, and can't be disabled, then youc an always use a different OS. I couldn't rip the Dido CD in Windows, but Grip in Linux did it just fine. Even if they were to tighten up on things like even including blocking for Linux (and I don't know how they'd pull that off) then there'd still be ways round it. If you can hear the sound then you can record it, and that's good enough. You can hook a CD player up to a PC and record the audio, or a PC to another PC... you name it. Granted, most people aren't going to go to such lengths - the general public doesn't really care for Linux :) - but there are already systems like Kazaa in place to distribute MP3s, so it only takes one keen person to create the MP3 in the first place, and everyone else is laughing.
The music industry should stop worrying about DRM and all this rubbish. The horse has bolted, the cat is out of the bag, etc etc. The only way people are going to stop pirating CDs and start buying them again is if the record companies start selling good quality music at a fair price.
Here endeth the lesson.
Certainly does work well. I'm running Redhat, but I have apt-get installed and it works fine. It has a source list full of RPM sites, and it just pulls down RPMs instead of .debs.
Works like a charm.