It's not actually meant for anything like that at all.
In the video, the cops explain (in Dutch, so I completely understand that this isn't obvious to parent) that it's meant to take out the odd drone that is - often inadvertently - flying somewhere where it really shouldn't, such as near an airport, or somewhere where an air ambulance needs to land. Nowhere in the video is it claimed that the system will be used to stop terrorists, smuggling, mass idiocy, or anything like that. Consider it the air equivalent of a police canine unit.
By what metric? According to this list they are not even close to that. (And neither is Japan.) Which makes a lot of sense considering that they are situated in one of the safest parts of the world, and are not very interested in sending military abroad.
Geolocation needs to die. Every site that uses it assumes that my location is a perfect indicator of my language preferences. Real helpful to have all websites in a language I don't understand whenever I'm traveling through Eastern Europe or Asia.
I sure wish someone had thought of a standardized way for people to automatically let websites know their language preferences. Oh wait, that already exists.
If only the code picking the quotes below the stories was just a tiny bit better. Right now I see the quote for April on Mark Twain's "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar". Had it been the October quote, it would have been incredibly apt.
October: this is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.
Yeah, Widenius is not exactly occupying the moral high ground here. I just love it when he gives us quotes like these:
"Why is the price for a MySQL OEM license higher than for Oracle Express?" Widenius asks.
It's hard to be cheaper than free of charge. And Monty's old company was all about selling licenses. I distinctly remember them trying to scare people into thinking that the GPL meant that no program could so much as connect to MySQL without having to become GPL itself. (This was back when the client libraries were LGPL.) Which of course could be avoided if you bought a commercial license from them. Nevermind that the GPL says no such thing.
I wonder how dissimilar the world would be, had Monte and Larry's lives been swapped. Maybe not that much.
You realize Cyberbunker is situated in a bunker designed to survive a nuclear war. It was designed to function independently for 10 years. Not sure how long that would work with the servers at full load, but i'd think they could still run their generators for quite some time without interruption.
Sure. Is a great way to spend a couple years in a small concrete room with no internet or other contact with the outside world. (You don't think the police won't cut the phone and internet, do you?) Much more efficient than letting the police in and getting a trial first.;-)
Dutch authorities and the police have made several attempts to enter the bunker by force but failed to do so.
From TFA:
Cyberbunker brags on its Web site that it has been a frequent target of law enforcement because of its “many controversial customers.” The company claims that at one point it fended off a Dutch SWAT team.
“Dutch authorities and the police have made several attempts to enter the bunker by force,” the site said. “None of these attempts were successful.”
In other words: Cyberbunker is not currently under assault by police, and we have only their word that they ever have been. I suspect that at one time they were successful in having visiting cops think nobody was home by being real quiet and quickly turning off all the lights.
Expect this dispute to drag out for a while. Steve is dead, and the market for mega-yachts is never brisk. If the contract had a high content of handshakes and winks instead of numbers with signatures, the dispute could get uglier than the yacht, and that's saying something.
Nope. It's already been resolved with the family promising to pay the extra 3 million.
As far as I know, I'm the only AmEx card holder who has a pin set to something other than the customer's mother's birthday.
You're not, or at least you wouldn't be if I still had the corporate AmEx card from my previous job. When the customer support person from AmEx asked me about my mother's birthday I told him that I'm terrible with dates (which is true) and I don't know it by heart. After that he asked me some other dates to which I gave the same reply. He then just let me have whatever 4-digit number I liked, and I picked one that isn't a valid date.
Honestly, the process was pretty painless. Apparently this is not universally true, but the AmEx helpdesk in my region (The Netherlands) has always been polite and helpful to me.
By what definition? I would consider war to be a negative-sum game.
Only if you don't consider the consequences of not going to war. For instance, I'm very glad that France and Britain declared war on the Axis. I have little doubt that the world would have been a worse place now if they hadn't.
That's nothing! I have a tuna sandwich that will last up to 1 billion years! (Your pick of long or short scale.) I absolutely guarantee that it will last no longer than that!
...
When will we stop giving an upper bound on the time until something will break when we should be giving a (preferably maximal) lower bound?
(Still mighty cool work of the University of Oslo.)
The silliness enters the picture when you consider how many non-terrorists own such watches, not when you just look at all the suspected or actual terrorists who do.
How many people running around Afghanistan wear digital watches, much less this particular model? If it's very common in the region, I would agree. But I honestly don't know.
I remember seeing these in many stores in The Netherlands in the '90s. Owned one myself. In many ways it's a better watch than the fancy Swiss one I've got now. Very reliable, user-friendly, incredibly long battery life (people report 8+ years; I know I never had to change the battery in mine), and dirt cheap to boot ($8 on the web). I wouldn't be surprised at all if it's still popular in places like Afghanistan. If it wasn't so ugly I'd still be wearing mine.
Thanks for posting this story. This issue doesn't affect me, as I don't use EA forums, but it is still something that I find completely unacceptable. I've bought (yes, with money) every RPG Bioware ever released for the PC (and I think I also have a copy of Shattered Steel), but combined with the emphasis on DLC (which requires logging in) in recent titles, this means I will not be buying (or pirating) DA2.
(Apologies for all the parentheses. I'm in the middle of On Lisp.)
The morphing occurred in the exact opposite direction. See wikipedia or (highly recommended if you have the time) these free lectures by Yale's prof. Donald Kagan.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not actually meant for anything like that at all.
In the video, the cops explain (in Dutch, so I completely understand that this isn't obvious to parent) that it's meant to take out the odd drone that is - often inadvertently - flying somewhere where it really shouldn't, such as near an airport, or somewhere where an air ambulance needs to land. Nowhere in the video is it claimed that the system will be used to stop terrorists, smuggling, mass idiocy, or anything like that. Consider it the air equivalent of a police canine unit.
They were indeed hidden, but the location has never been disclosed. Source: http://www.royal.gov.uk/Monarc...
By what metric? According to this list they are not even close to that. (And neither is Japan.) Which makes a lot of sense considering that they are situated in one of the safest parts of the world, and are not very interested in sending military abroad.
Geolocation needs to die. Every site that uses it assumes that my location is a perfect indicator of my language preferences. Real helpful to have all websites in a language I don't understand whenever I'm traveling through Eastern Europe or Asia.
I sure wish someone had thought of a standardized way for people to automatically let websites know their language preferences. Oh wait, that already exists.
Ah, damn. Good point; I stand corrected. :-)
So if it's invasive on every continent except Antarctica, shouldn't that mean that it is native to Antarctica? Or possibly not land-based at all?
(Hint: it's from Europe.)
In the Netherlands rats (and dogs) as well as their training are paid in Euros, not Pounds...
I suppose they're paid in pounds of food. Though in that case it is more properly kilos.
October: this is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.
"Why is the price for a MySQL OEM license higher than for Oracle Express?" Widenius asks.
It's hard to be cheaper than free of charge. And Monty's old company was all about selling licenses. I distinctly remember them trying to scare people into thinking that the GPL meant that no program could so much as connect to MySQL without having to become GPL itself. (This was back when the client libraries were LGPL.) Which of course could be avoided if you bought a commercial license from them. Nevermind that the GPL says no such thing.
I wonder how dissimilar the world would be, had Monte and Larry's lives been swapped. Maybe not that much.
You realize Cyberbunker is situated in a bunker designed to survive a nuclear war. It was designed to function independently for 10 years. Not sure how long that would work with the servers at full load, but i'd think they could still run their generators for quite some time without interruption.
Sure. Is a great way to spend a couple years in a small concrete room with no internet or other contact with the outside world. (You don't think the police won't cut the phone and internet, do you?) Much more efficient than letting the police in and getting a trial first. ;-)
From TFA:
In other words: Cyberbunker is not currently under assault by police, and we have only their word that they ever have been. I suspect that at one time they were successful in having visiting cops think nobody was home by being real quiet and quickly turning off all the lights.
Expect this dispute to drag out for a while. Steve is dead, and the market for mega-yachts is never brisk. If the contract had a high content of handshakes and winks instead of numbers with signatures, the dispute could get uglier than the yacht, and that's saying something.
Nope. It's already been resolved with the family promising to pay the extra 3 million.
Source (Dutch; google translate doesn't handle it well): http://www.nu.nl/internet/2990610/familie-steve-jobs-lost-geschil-rond-boot.html
And then keep both the examples and docs up to date, for god's sake! The only thing worse than no documentation is useless documentation.
You're not, or at least you wouldn't be if I still had the corporate AmEx card from my previous job. When the customer support person from AmEx asked me about my mother's birthday I told him that I'm terrible with dates (which is true) and I don't know it by heart. After that he asked me some other dates to which I gave the same reply. He then just let me have whatever 4-digit number I liked, and I picked one that isn't a valid date.
Honestly, the process was pretty painless. Apparently this is not universally true, but the AmEx helpdesk in my region (The Netherlands) has always been polite and helpful to me.
Indeed. If only he'd started in India rather than France... ;-)
Except ... you know who pays for the whole thing.
The EU?
I've got several invites now. Thanks everyone!
I'm getting very curious about G+, so I'd love to get an invite. Thanks! monstermanual at gmail dot com
Only if you don't consider the consequences of not going to war. For instance, I'm very glad that France and Britain declared war on the Axis. I have little doubt that the world would have been a worse place now if they hadn't.
Fail.
That's nothing! I have a tuna sandwich that will last up to 1 billion years! (Your pick of long or short scale.) I absolutely guarantee that it will last no longer than that!
...
When will we stop giving an upper bound on the time until something will break when we should be giving a (preferably maximal) lower bound?
(Still mighty cool work of the University of Oslo.)
The silliness enters the picture when you consider how many non-terrorists own such watches, not when you just look at all the suspected or actual terrorists who do.
How many people running around Afghanistan wear digital watches, much less this particular model? If it's very common in the region, I would agree. But I honestly don't know.
I remember seeing these in many stores in The Netherlands in the '90s. Owned one myself. In many ways it's a better watch than the fancy Swiss one I've got now. Very reliable, user-friendly, incredibly long battery life (people report 8+ years; I know I never had to change the battery in mine), and dirt cheap to boot ($8 on the web). I wouldn't be surprised at all if it's still popular in places like Afghanistan. If it wasn't so ugly I'd still be wearing mine.
Thanks for posting this story. This issue doesn't affect me, as I don't use EA forums, but it is still something that I find completely unacceptable. I've bought (yes, with money) every RPG Bioware ever released for the PC (and I think I also have a copy of Shattered Steel), but combined with the emphasis on DLC (which requires logging in) in recent titles, this means I will not be buying (or pirating) DA2.
(Apologies for all the parentheses. I'm in the middle of On Lisp.)
The morphing occurred in the exact opposite direction. See wikipedia or (highly recommended if you have the time) these free lectures by Yale's prof. Donald Kagan.
Just NoScript.
So there's a 4th page if you have javascript enabled? My apologies to the submitter then.