I see people here hating on Seagate, and on WD, and I'll happily complain about Maxtor from before they got bought, but who's left? Are there any disk makers that people don't hate?
The HDD tool that I really needed that nobody supports is the one that lets you manage manufacturers' hidden disk partitions on PATA drives.
A couple of years ago I had a 200GB Maxtor external hard drive which eventually started getting bad blocks, so I replaced the disk with a new 500MB PATA drive. The box didn't recognize the drive (because it was newer than the box, so the model wasn't listed), so it reformatted it using the "hide a partition" feature, leaving me with a drive that pretended to be 200 GB. (The feature's sometimes used for hiding a small Windows recovery partition, but is also available so a manufacture can do things like turning a 300 GB drive with bad blocks into a 200 GB drive with only good blocks...) Windows couldn't see the extra space at all, and the one Linux tool that was supposed to be able to support it was able to make the partition smaller but not larger, because it really didn't know about LBA yet:-) I ended up buying pizza for my local kernel wizard, and we looked at the source code for the tools and recompiled the Linux kernel to get some things to work a bit better but still weren't able to get it going. At that point I decide it was more cost-effective to buy a new drive than keep wasting time, but it was still really annoying, and it was at least a working spare 200MB drive.
I hope that by now, SATA drives don't have that feature, or else Win7 or Linux can work with it (because the point of the feature is supposed to be that you can't have full access to that space...)
They're probably fine for dogs. At that price I assume they've got GPS and cellular service, as opposed to being a long-range powered RFID variant?
Neither of my cats are willing to wear a collar, and both of them will have gotten them off in a couple of days. (Most of my previous cats were ok with collars, but you do have to leave them stretchy enough so that they can get out of them if they get the collar stuck on something, and one of my cats has a neck that's fatter than her head anyway, so any collar I put on her is quickly hidden under furniture somewhere.) And cats are much safer if you keep them inside, though of course some cats will occasionally get out anyway, especially if you live in silly California houses that don't have airlocks for the doors.
Glad you're not in charge, then, because you'd get your town or organization sued for violating their rights, and they'd win, profit, laugh at you, and go find the next bunch of suckers to annoy into illegally suppressing their speech.
And they'll thank you for calling them despicable, because if they didn't get feedback like that from the public, they'd find something even more offensive to yell about. Dead soldiers are a pretty steady market for them, though.
WBC isn't camping out overnight in the park. They come to town, do their picketing, and leave to annoy their next target, or stay to sue the town if their rights were violated. "Free speech zones" are a hopelessly unconstitutional concept, but Occupy usually needs a bigger space than the sidewalk in front of City Hall or MegaComboBankstersInc. anyway. There's a lot of established law about where you can legally picket, and WBC knows it really well (as does Occupy), and most of their targets aren't somewhere that has specific restrictions. They stay on the sidewalk or public right-of-way, and if they have to keep walking instead of standing, they'll do it.
You can only disbar a lawyer for breaking formal bar rules. You can't disbar them just for being an asshole, or for taking unpopular cases (because justice depends on that.)
They're not committing crimes, so you can't disbar them for that - they're really careful.
They're primarily handling their own cases these days. So their clients don't complain, and even if they were disbarred, you don't need to be a lawyer to sue pro se.
Yes, there are consequences - most of the world hates them. They don't really care. And they hate everybody, as poisonous as that is to their souls, but they don't care. The police protect them well enough to prevent major injuries, and nobody's killed them, and when they have been physically attacked, they're quite successful about suing everybody involved, because you can't do that in America.
And if the consequences are that the police or a local government try to ban them or interfere with their speech, they win big, because in America and other civilized places, the government's not allowed to interfere with free speech. (Yeah, it has to be reminded periodically, so please go see the Freedom of the Press foundation that Xeni's just helped start.) So they can sue, and profit.
Maybe Anonymous can find some useful way to harass WBC that doesn't involve illegally threatening violence against them but is effective enough to get their attention. They're not people you can embarrass by publishing their names. They're not Chik-fil-A; they don't have a product you can boycott except publicity. If you can convince the press not to cover them, at all, cool! But while a few thousand emails to Arianna Huffington might keep her from running stories about them in HuffPo, it's a lot harder to convince your local TV news station not to cover them if they're coming to town.
Of course they're immoral and rude to disrupt funerals and taunt survivors.
But the rest of your argument falls apart - assault is illegal, so people whose services are being disrupted aren't allowed to go beat up the WBC trolls, and if they do, they'll be sued, successfully, and possibly jailed (or if they're not jailed, the town may get sued for that.) Most you can do is tell them to get off your property, and they already know to do that.
Not sure why Anon. Coward got marked "Funny"? It's the most likely explanation, because it's in fact a common trick. If your machine is compromised, or even better if an email you sent to a bunch of people is received/stolen, it's fairly likely that many of the recipients know each other. And it's more effective to forge mail from one of the recipients than from the account that got compromised, because that leads to "You must have gotten hacked" "No, not me, must have been you" conversations between you and your uncle, instead of "Did you get hacked?" "Oh, yes, better fix that!" between your uncle and your cousin Alice who really did get infected.
Recreational users aren't usually a Federal target (with a few exceptions like confiscating a boat that had a roach in the ashtray.) They're a really big target for local police, because it's a way to get a lot of arrests for your quota, and to arrest people you suspect are gang users but can more easily convict for having a joint in their pockets. Too much volume to waste the time of a small number of Feds.
But the Feds are really more interested in going after large growers, and here in California they've been aggressive about going after the large and medium dispensaries, because they're a serious threat to the Drug War business. Obama promised us last election that he'd leave medical marijuana alone, and kept that promise for almost a month after he got in office, but that doesn't mean that this time we can trust anything he says about it.
Half a million dollars - or as we call it in California, two bedrooms! (And wood's a much better building material in earthquake country than brick or stone are, but even in the East Coast, I've worked on woodframe houses over a century old; they last just fine if you keep them dry.)
And the asset-forfeiture drug warriors don't really care if you owe half a million dollars on your mortgage, as long as it officially belongs to you, because they're confiscating your assets, not your net worth. If you're stuck with the debt afterwords, they don't care, and if you go bankrupt to get rid of it, that's not the police department's problem, that's the banking regulators' problem, and that bank was too big to fail anyway.
But for the most part they'd really rather confiscate your car, because it's easier for them to get away with, and it lets them drive Porsches as cop cars, while it's tough for the cops to benefit personally from having confiscated a house. (It happens, especially in corruption-friendly places like New Jersey, but it's tougher.)
I've got the third-generation Kindle. The price was right because it was a trade-show raffle gimme. I still haven't registered it with Amazon, after two years, because there are so many other sources of books that I'm interested in. It's a bit thinner than the earlier Kindle, which makes it fit better in my pockets (about half my shirt pockets are big enough if I'm not carrying anything else.) If the DX had been the same price, I'd have preferred that, since it has more reading area, but pocket sized is really convenient. At home I generally prefer paperback books - I don't trust reading the Kindle in the bathtub, for instance, even in a baggie. But for travelling, the Kindle absolutely rocks, a bit lighter than a paperback, and it holds hundreds of books.
The page turning speed is fast enough - comparable to turning pages in an actual book. Unlike tablets, it's easy to read in bright sunlight, and much more comfortable to look at than a glowing backlit device. On the other hand, you can't read it in the dark, but I have a clip-on light for that. The biggest problem with the Kindle is reading PDFs - it works, but if they're laid out for letter-sized paper, shrinking them down to Kindle size makes the print too small, and if they're two-column material, reading them with the Kindle in sideways mode means a lot of annoying scrolling up and down. But for books that are distributed in bookreader formats, it's really flexible, and I can crank the font size up a reasonable amount.
I'm sorry, but if you're injecting Javascript and other text into my web sessions, that's a Web Outage (and a serious security threat.) If you're doing it to announce that your email service is down, that's probably annoying to customers who do use your email service, and much more annoying to customers who don't.
(Unlike many people here, I actually do use my ISP's email service, because it includes a shell account where I'm running procmail, in addition to the spam filtering they do, so email that gets forwarded by my primary email address does go through there. But otherwise I'd be running the filters somewhere else. And it still doesn't justify breaking my http sessions.)
IO9's article about what the story's really about. First of all, a Kirin isn't really that much like a unicorn, though it is a mythical beast. But it's really about finding a site related to Tongmyng, ruler of an ancient kingdom in northern Korea, who was symbolized by the Kirin, kind of like calling somebody "The Dragon King" or whatever. There's some question about whether their announcement is more like "we found some cities from Troy / another Mayan pyramid / etc." type of history or more like "We found King Arthur's castle Camelot" sort of national mythology, which would certainly be the kind of thing you'd do when you've got a new Fearless Leader.
One lesson my Time Series Analysis professor taught us in college was "If you stare at the numbers long enough you'll see all sorts of patterns in it!", pretty much regardless of whether they're there or not.
This "maze" looks to me a lot like there's more structure than you'd get from a good i.i.d. random number stream. Is it just the mind finding patterns when they're not there, or are there patterns because the BASIC RNG isn't very good and is splattering artifacts all over the output? Most of the BASIC systems I've seen didn't begin to approach cryptographic quality, and were typically simple linear congruential multipliers.
For tolls, California has been trying to force us all to use FastTrack; I'd rather not be tracked fast, thank you very much.
And for parking, most of the meters are old enough that they don't take dollar coins, and when parking fees are high enough that that's a problem, the rapidly decreasing cost of dollar-bill readers makes it economical for cities to install fancier machines that cover a bunch of parking places on the block and rip you off by not letting you use unexpired meter time if the previous person leaves early. (They're probably also more efficient about telling meter maids whether they've got expired spaces, so they don't need to look at every meter as they drive by.)
Hating to carry a big pile of metal around in my pockets is not irrational. And a dollar now may be worth what a quarter was then, but it's bigger and clunkier, and if we replace dollar bills with coins we'll start needing a lot more $5 bills, because right now if you buy something with a $20 yuppie food coupon and the change is in $1 bills, it's ok, but getting a dozen heavy coins is really annoying (and pretty common, if you use transit fare machines or post office stamp vending machines.)
Half-pennies and 2c coins are long long gone. 1/10 cent coins were issued by many states on a not-legal-tender basis, both because nobody had money during the Depression and because they were useful for paying sales taxes before everybody decided that that was stupid and rounded off the payment thresholds.
But I've used 10p and 20p banknotes (in Egypt, in the 80s) which were in dual circulation along with coins, and they were pretty convenient. They were about 1/4 the size of a 1-pound note, which was about the size of a dollar or pound.
They're not radically different colors like the banknotes in most of the wold, but they're not all green any more, and they've moved the Dead Presidents' faces around to different parts of the front.
They've got far more of them printed than the public wants to carry around, and they're talking about stopping minting them. I'm disappointed - I really want the Richard Nixon dollar coin to come out, and it's still scheduled for a few years away.
The old silver dollars were cool because they were actually silver, and actually worth something, and the quarter and dime coins are the same size as when they were worth that weight of silver. But now that it's all cheap metals, there's no reason that a coin is more useful than an otherwise-worthless banknote.
I don't know why you want to force me to carry around a big pile of metal in my pocket instead of convenient flat paper, but I assume your reasons are irrational. As far as Congresscritters having spines goes, yes, they're well-known not to possess them, but this isn't an issue where I want Congress deciding to inconvenience me just to make you happy, and enough other people don't like dollar coins that they're not going to push it.
Some countries have gone the other direction - I was in Egypt in the mid-80s, and they had 10p and 20p banknotes in addition to coins; I think the pound was worth about US$2 at the time. They were small notes, maybe 1/4 as large as the pound note, so they were moderately convenient for making change.
Replacing dollar bills with dollar coins doesn't change transaction prices, just the tokens used for the transaction. Junking the penny does change prices. (And we junked the 2c coin long long ago, and the $2 bill is around but not common.) I wouldn't mind junking pennies.
For most purposes, I hate dollar coins. The two ways I acquire the things are change from the train-ticket machines and from the post-office stamp vending machine, and in both cases I end up with a big heavy pile of metal in my pants pocket. It's too clunky to carry around, and if we had old-style silver dollars it would be even clunkier. Nothing irrational about it, the things are a lot more trouble than flat pieces of paper.
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I see people here hating on Seagate, and on WD, and I'll happily complain about Maxtor from before they got bought, but who's left? Are there any disk makers that people don't hate?
The HDD tool that I really needed that nobody supports is the one that lets you manage manufacturers' hidden disk partitions on PATA drives.
A couple of years ago I had a 200GB Maxtor external hard drive which eventually started getting bad blocks, so I replaced the disk with a new 500MB PATA drive. The box didn't recognize the drive (because it was newer than the box, so the model wasn't listed), so it reformatted it using the "hide a partition" feature, leaving me with a drive that pretended to be 200 GB. (The feature's sometimes used for hiding a small Windows recovery partition, but is also available so a manufacture can do things like turning a 300 GB drive with bad blocks into a 200 GB drive with only good blocks...) Windows couldn't see the extra space at all, and the one Linux tool that was supposed to be able to support it was able to make the partition smaller but not larger, because it really didn't know about LBA yet :-) I ended up buying pizza for my local kernel wizard, and we looked at the source code for the tools and recompiled the Linux kernel to get some things to work a bit better but still weren't able to get it going. At that point I decide it was more cost-effective to buy a new drive than keep wasting time, but it was still really annoying, and it was at least a working spare 200MB drive.
I hope that by now, SATA drives don't have that feature, or else Win7 or Linux can work with it (because the point of the feature is supposed to be that you can't have full access to that space...)
They're probably fine for dogs. At that price I assume they've got GPS and cellular service, as opposed to being a long-range powered RFID variant?
Neither of my cats are willing to wear a collar, and both of them will have gotten them off in a couple of days. (Most of my previous cats were ok with collars, but you do have to leave them stretchy enough so that they can get out of them if they get the collar stuck on something, and one of my cats has a neck that's fatter than her head anyway, so any collar I put on her is quickly hidden under furniture somewhere.) And cats are much safer if you keep them inside, though of course some cats will occasionally get out anyway, especially if you live in silly California houses that don't have airlocks for the doors.
Glad you're not in charge, then, because you'd get your town or organization sued for violating their rights, and they'd win, profit, laugh at you, and go find the next bunch of suckers to annoy into illegally suppressing their speech.
And they'll thank you for calling them despicable, because if they didn't get feedback like that from the public, they'd find something even more offensive to yell about. Dead soldiers are a pretty steady market for them, though.
WBC isn't camping out overnight in the park. They come to town, do their picketing, and leave to annoy their next target, or stay to sue the town if their rights were violated. "Free speech zones" are a hopelessly unconstitutional concept, but Occupy usually needs a bigger space than the sidewalk in front of City Hall or MegaComboBankstersInc. anyway. There's a lot of established law about where you can legally picket, and WBC knows it really well (as does Occupy), and most of their targets aren't somewhere that has specific restrictions. They stay on the sidewalk or public right-of-way, and if they have to keep walking instead of standing, they'll do it.
You can only disbar a lawyer for breaking formal bar rules. You can't disbar them just for being an asshole, or for taking unpopular cases (because justice depends on that.)
They're not committing crimes, so you can't disbar them for that - they're really careful.
They're primarily handling their own cases these days. So their clients don't complain, and even if they were disbarred, you don't need to be a lawyer to sue pro se.
Yes, there are consequences - most of the world hates them. They don't really care. And they hate everybody, as poisonous as that is to their souls, but they don't care. The police protect them well enough to prevent major injuries, and nobody's killed them, and when they have been physically attacked, they're quite successful about suing everybody involved, because you can't do that in America.
And if the consequences are that the police or a local government try to ban them or interfere with their speech, they win big, because in America and other civilized places, the government's not allowed to interfere with free speech. (Yeah, it has to be reminded periodically, so please go see the Freedom of the Press foundation that Xeni's just helped start.) So they can sue, and profit.
Maybe Anonymous can find some useful way to harass WBC that doesn't involve illegally threatening violence against them but is effective enough to get their attention. They're not people you can embarrass by publishing their names. They're not Chik-fil-A; they don't have a product you can boycott except publicity. If you can convince the press not to cover them, at all, cool! But while a few thousand emails to Arianna Huffington might keep her from running stories about them in HuffPo, it's a lot harder to convince your local TV news station not to cover them if they're coming to town.
Of course they're immoral and rude to disrupt funerals and taunt survivors.
But the rest of your argument falls apart - assault is illegal, so people whose services are being disrupted aren't allowed to go beat up the WBC trolls, and if they do, they'll be sued, successfully, and possibly jailed (or if they're not jailed, the town may get sued for that.) Most you can do is tell them to get off your property, and they already know to do that.
The real goal for drilling all this ice is to cool beer. You did notice that the drill bit was the same diameter as a Foster's can, didn't you?
Not sure why Anon. Coward got marked "Funny"? It's the most likely explanation, because it's in fact a common trick. If your machine is compromised, or even better if an email you sent to a bunch of people is received/stolen, it's fairly likely that many of the recipients know each other. And it's more effective to forge mail from one of the recipients than from the account that got compromised, because that leads to "You must have gotten hacked" "No, not me, must have been you" conversations between you and your uncle, instead of "Did you get hacked?" "Oh, yes, better fix that!" between your uncle and your cousin Alice who really did get infected.
Recreational users aren't usually a Federal target (with a few exceptions like confiscating a boat that had a roach in the ashtray.) They're a really big target for local police, because it's a way to get a lot of arrests for your quota, and to arrest people you suspect are gang users but can more easily convict for having a joint in their pockets. Too much volume to waste the time of a small number of Feds.
But the Feds are really more interested in going after large growers, and here in California they've been aggressive about going after the large and medium dispensaries, because they're a serious threat to the Drug War business. Obama promised us last election that he'd leave medical marijuana alone, and kept that promise for almost a month after he got in office, but that doesn't mean that this time we can trust anything he says about it.
Half a million dollars - or as we call it in California, two bedrooms! (And wood's a much better building material in earthquake country than brick or stone are, but even in the East Coast, I've worked on woodframe houses over a century old; they last just fine if you keep them dry.)
And the asset-forfeiture drug warriors don't really care if you owe half a million dollars on your mortgage, as long as it officially belongs to you, because they're confiscating your assets, not your net worth. If you're stuck with the debt afterwords, they don't care, and if you go bankrupt to get rid of it, that's not the police department's problem, that's the banking regulators' problem, and that bank was too big to fail anyway.
But for the most part they'd really rather confiscate your car, because it's easier for them to get away with, and it lets them drive Porsches as cop cars, while it's tough for the cops to benefit personally from having confiscated a house. (It happens, especially in corruption-friendly places like New Jersey, but it's tougher.)
I've got the third-generation Kindle. The price was right because it was a trade-show raffle gimme. I still haven't registered it with Amazon, after two years, because there are so many other sources of books that I'm interested in. It's a bit thinner than the earlier Kindle, which makes it fit better in my pockets (about half my shirt pockets are big enough if I'm not carrying anything else.) If the DX had been the same price, I'd have preferred that, since it has more reading area, but pocket sized is really convenient. At home I generally prefer paperback books - I don't trust reading the Kindle in the bathtub, for instance, even in a baggie. But for travelling, the Kindle absolutely rocks, a bit lighter than a paperback, and it holds hundreds of books.
The page turning speed is fast enough - comparable to turning pages in an actual book. Unlike tablets, it's easy to read in bright sunlight, and much more comfortable to look at than a glowing backlit device. On the other hand, you can't read it in the dark, but I have a clip-on light for that. The biggest problem with the Kindle is reading PDFs - it works, but if they're laid out for letter-sized paper, shrinking them down to Kindle size makes the print too small, and if they're two-column material, reading them with the Kindle in sideways mode means a lot of annoying scrolling up and down. But for books that are distributed in bookreader formats, it's really flexible, and I can crank the font size up a reasonable amount.
I'm sorry, but if you're injecting Javascript and other text into my web sessions, that's a Web Outage (and a serious security threat.) If you're doing it to announce that your email service is down, that's probably annoying to customers who do use your email service, and much more annoying to customers who don't.
(Unlike many people here, I actually do use my ISP's email service, because it includes a shell account where I'm running procmail, in addition to the spam filtering they do, so email that gets forwarded by my primary email address does go through there. But otherwise I'd be running the filters somewhere else. And it still doesn't justify breaking my http sessions.)
He wants to live out his declining years in peace? Awww! Y'know, I bet Gregory Faull probably wanted to do the same thing eventually!
And yes, McAfee does deserve a fair trial, and may or may not be able to get one in Belize, considering how much he's upset the local authorities.
IO9's article about what the story's really about. First of all, a Kirin isn't really that much like a unicorn, though it is a mythical beast. But it's really about finding a site related to Tongmyng, ruler of an ancient kingdom in northern Korea, who was symbolized by the Kirin, kind of like calling somebody "The Dragon King" or whatever. There's some question about whether their announcement is more like "we found some cities from Troy / another Mayan pyramid / etc." type of history or more like "We found King Arthur's castle Camelot" sort of national mythology, which would certainly be the kind of thing you'd do when you've got a new Fearless Leader.
One lesson my Time Series Analysis professor taught us in college was "If you stare at the numbers long enough you'll see all sorts of patterns in it!", pretty much regardless of whether they're there or not.
This "maze" looks to me a lot like there's more structure than you'd get from a good i.i.d. random number stream. Is it just the mind finding patterns when they're not there, or are there patterns because the BASIC RNG isn't very good and is splattering artifacts all over the output? Most of the BASIC systems I've seen didn't begin to approach cryptographic quality, and were typically simple linear congruential multipliers.
For tolls, California has been trying to force us all to use FastTrack; I'd rather not be tracked fast, thank you very much.
And for parking, most of the meters are old enough that they don't take dollar coins, and when parking fees are high enough that that's a problem, the rapidly decreasing cost of dollar-bill readers makes it economical for cities to install fancier machines that cover a bunch of parking places on the block and rip you off by not letting you use unexpired meter time if the previous person leaves early. (They're probably also more efficient about telling meter maids whether they've got expired spaces, so they don't need to look at every meter as they drive by.)
Yarrr! You've got it exactly correct.
Hating to carry a big pile of metal around in my pockets is not irrational. And a dollar now may be worth what a quarter was then, but it's bigger and clunkier, and if we replace dollar bills with coins we'll start needing a lot more $5 bills, because right now if you buy something with a $20 yuppie food coupon and the change is in $1 bills, it's ok, but getting a dozen heavy coins is really annoying (and pretty common, if you use transit fare machines or post office stamp vending machines.)
Half-pennies and 2c coins are long long gone. 1/10 cent coins were issued by many states on a not-legal-tender basis, both because nobody had money during the Depression and because they were useful for paying sales taxes before everybody decided that that was stupid and rounded off the payment thresholds.
But I've used 10p and 20p banknotes (in Egypt, in the 80s) which were in dual circulation along with coins, and they were pretty convenient. They were about 1/4 the size of a 1-pound note, which was about the size of a dollar or pound.
They're not radically different colors like the banknotes in most of the wold, but they're not all green any more, and they've moved the Dead Presidents' faces around to different parts of the front.
They've got far more of them printed than the public wants to carry around, and they're talking about stopping minting them. I'm disappointed - I really want the Richard Nixon dollar coin to come out, and it's still scheduled for a few years away.
The old silver dollars were cool because they were actually silver, and actually worth something, and the quarter and dime coins are the same size as when they were worth that weight of silver. But now that it's all cheap metals, there's no reason that a coin is more useful than an otherwise-worthless banknote.
I don't know why you want to force me to carry around a big pile of metal in my pocket instead of convenient flat paper, but I assume your reasons are irrational. As far as Congresscritters having spines goes, yes, they're well-known not to possess them, but this isn't an issue where I want Congress deciding to inconvenience me just to make you happy, and enough other people don't like dollar coins that they're not going to push it.
Some countries have gone the other direction - I was in Egypt in the mid-80s, and they had 10p and 20p banknotes in addition to coins; I think the pound was worth about US$2 at the time. They were small notes, maybe 1/4 as large as the pound note, so they were moderately convenient for making change.
Replacing dollar bills with dollar coins doesn't change transaction prices, just the tokens used for the transaction. Junking the penny does change prices. (And we junked the 2c coin long long ago, and the $2 bill is around but not common.) I wouldn't mind junking pennies.
For most purposes, I hate dollar coins. The two ways I acquire the things are change from the train-ticket machines and from the post-office stamp vending machine, and in both cases I end up with a big heavy pile of metal in my pants pocket. It's too clunky to carry around, and if we had old-style silver dollars it would be even clunkier. Nothing irrational about it, the things are a lot more trouble than flat pieces of paper.