The ice cream was awesome, because we were kids, and it was ice cream from outer space! But basically, yeah, it's just camping food. The Russians also got vodka, but I guess they won't be giving that to US school kids.
Funny, what they taught me was that if Joe Farmer gets shot or or bombed or captured by Westerners while tending his garden or defending his family, the US government will announce that he was a terrorist and Al Qaeda will announce that he was a martyr, or if he gets shot by the Taliban then the US will announce that he was a friendly civilian and the Taliban will announce that he was an infidel traitor.
And if Joe Farmer is carrying a rifle, if he's in Texas the US right wing will say he's protected by the Second Amendment, but if he's in Afghanistan, they'll say he's a terrorist, whereas realistically, if he's a goat herder then of course he'll be carrying an AK47, because otherwise the Taliban or the government's army or the local warlord or some other guy with an AK47 will steal his goats.
In video games, I don't expect them to bleed realistically - I expect to see blood splattering all over the place, just like I expect to see cars in movies explode after they crash, even though they seldom do that in real life. If they don't bleed, it's supposed to be because they're melodramatically falling off a building after you shoot them, or something like that.
And yeah, that first Iraqi War started with the video-game-quality shots of the "smart" bomb blowing up the phone company building - which I as a phone company employee took offense at:-) (In real life, in the month or two before the war, I was alternating between going to the UN building for anti-war protests and working on a subcontract for a defense contractor who was bidding to rewire the Pentagon...) I later heard somebody saying that that video had looked really good when they saw it six months before the war started, but even pre-September-97 you couldn't believe everything you read on the net.
In general, killing innocents is bad luck, unless you're chaotic, in which case it's sometimes really cool, especially if they're unicorns. Killing shopkeepers or robbing shops gets the Kops chasing you, and killing soldiers tends to annoy the other soldiers - in those cases, it can be profitable if you get away with it, but it's more likely to get you killed.
I'm glad somebody got to the zombies before I did! I mean, I think I'm glad... they didn't bite you, did they? Because sometimes the zombies aren't civilians, they're your buddies who've been bitten, and then you've got to shoot them before they get you. You're not an Anonymous Coward, so you're not a Non-Player Character, but your user number's kind of high - were you wearing a red shirt when you left the house this morning?
Not patching unannounced is a really good policy. But dropping your VPN? Your employees were ok with having to come in to the office every day, and your management's ok with the loss of productivity? Wow!
Sure, if you OCR the TIFF file, you can turn it back into editable text, at the cost of a few percent of mistakes and the loss of most of your formatting and data structure. But otherwise all you've got is a bitmap, and while you can edit it, it's the modern-day equivalent of using white-out on a document.
Back when the movie came out, Arnie was already known as Conan the Republican - he got the nickname from GHWBush when he was campaigning for him, and he was already married to Maria Shriver, a well-known Democrat. After he was Governator for a few years, it was obvious that he wasn't going to be able to fix California's problems either, but he stayed popular until the illegitimate kid news got out. (And until then, people were still occasionally talking about the "Schwarzenegger Amendment" at least half-seriously.)
And that Taco Bell is in El Segundo, just south of LAX airport. I never got to it when I was working down there, probably should next time I'm in LA. (Of course it doesn't look like the classic Taco Bell design, which is made of painted brick - here in Northern California there are a few of those still around, no longer as Taco Bells - some of them even have real Mexican restaurants in them now.)
It's not just a UK thing - there are systems marketed to police in the US that you can mount on a car and read the license plates of all the parked cars you drive by, and by now they might even be able to read them on moving cars. Not surprisingly, the target market is parking enforcement - a city might not be able to justify buying them for surveillance purposes (unless they can scam some Homeland Security budget), but for parking ticket revenue generation, they're pretty much self-funding. And license plate reading has been around for a long time for catching tollbooth evaders, but all that needs is good image capture, and you can have humans read it.
Back in the 90s, San Francisco was tearing down the old Central Freeway because of earthquake damage, and a month before that they started tracking license plates of cars that used the freeway. They farmed out the job of reading the license plates to cheap prison labor, and sent everybody a postcard saying "Next month we're tearing down the freeway, please find yourself a different route to work." Worked fine. It didn't have to be real-time, and it didn't have to be close to 100% accurate or complete - it kept most of the regular commuters out of the area, and the local surface streets could cope with the traffic load from the small fraction of people who didn't know about it.
No - but you can be booked for actually covering your plates on public roads. So if you've got a motorized gizmo that raises or lowers a cover, and you remember to uncover before you go out on the street, you're fine. The laws that apply when you're on Westfield's private property are just trespassing laws, so if Westfield feels paranoid about it and wants to kick your Anonymous Coward car out of their parking lot, they're fine.
The slippery slope in the US was airport parking lots. Some years before 9/11, pretty much all the parking lots at major US airports started putting license plate cameras at the entrance, and wouldn't raise the entrance gate unless they could see your plate. The lots were concessions operated by contractors, not by the government, so you couldn't complain about illegal surveillance, but obviously they were feeding that data to the cops, who could use it to track who's at what airport and when. And the contractors contended that they were doing it to prevent fraud (so if you parked there for a month, you couldn't walk up to the gate the day you left, press the button and get a new ticket, and pay for an hour's parking, which might be mostly bogus compared to the cost of the enforcement system but probably did happen on occasion.)
The legal justification for a license plate and registration tags is to show that you've paid taxes on your car, and you're not allowed to drive on the street in the state where you live unless you've paid the tax. Some states have expanded that justification to do things like annual safety inspection or air pollution inspection. Of course, once you've got license plates on the car, the police find them useful for all kinds of other things.
Parking cars on the street without current registration is no different legally from driving them on the street, just easier to catch. Parking on private property doesn't usually require your car to be licensed, though some jurisdictions have anti-blight or anti-redneck laws that ban parking unlicensed cars on your lawn, but parking them inside buildings is fine (assuming your building isn't also condemned by anti-blight laws.)
I used to use Hibernate fairly often with my laptop. But then Corporate IT installed Checkpoint's Full Disk Encryption feature, which disables Hibernate for some reason. Does this new version of hibernate have the same limitations?
I only use full reboot for three reasons - either I've installed some new software that needs it (usually Microsoft Patch Tuesday, or occasionally other software that insists on it), or else I've had my laptop unplugged for long enough that Sleep Mode has failed or gotten hosed(it used to go into Hibernate if the battery got low enough, but it can't do that any more), or occasionally I'll plug the laptop into an external monitor and it can't figure out what it's doing with video (sometimes an extra Sleep/wakeup fixes that.)
This new feature is helpful if I've shut the machine down because of battery, but otherwise I really do need a full shutdown.
I use a laptop, and work from home several days a week, especially the days I have early morning phone calls (i.e. mid-morning phone calls on the East Coast, which is not where I live:-) Overnight software installations that trigger reboots mean that occasionally I get downstairs and find that my machine has rebooted, so I have to log in, restart my VPN, restart Outlook, restart my browser, figure out what documents I had open and restart them, and it's at least 5 minutes before I'm able to dial in to a phone call, and more like 10 minutes before I'm ready to work.
And this new "fast startup mode" that doesn't save my sessions isn't going to help that.
Yes, I'm talking about the comparison of sending a fax vs. emailing the.doc.
And if you don't see compatibility problems between whatever version of Word is running on Macs and whatever version is running on Windows, or between WIndows users and Open Office users, or for that matter between version N on Windows and version N.2 or N+1 on Windows or even between the same versions with style sheets or custom fonts not getting included, with tables or pictures getting broken or "smart quotes" rendered incorrectly, then you're not emailing enough doc files between people with different platforms.
You could mail PDFs if you want, or.TIFs of your output format (which is pretty much what fax does), but that loses editability. Maybe that's what you want, but it's usually not what I want.
Great - My CPU will start generating kernel messages telling me it that it's the SON OF THE TECHNOLOGY MINISTER OF NIGERIA and that it has 25 GIGAFLOPS of PROCESSING that it needs help smuggling out from behind seven proxies and I can have 25% of it in return for overclocking the CPU by 10%.
Just as there were hundreds of patents for "1. Do something that people have done for a long time 2. But On a Computer!" and "1. Do something that people have done for a long time 2. But On the Internet!", this is a patent for "1. Use the videoconferencing tools you normally use for business. 2. But For a Party!"
And yes, it's already been done. I was at a party a couple of years ago where one of the people was attending remotely from the Netherlands by videoconference, and then later, when she was in town, some of the other people were attending that party from the East Coast by videoconference. And there's always Fahrenheit 451 as literary prior art, with TV walls and non-player characters.
Yes, there are dozens of all-in-one scanner/printer/copiers for cheap, and pretty much all of them also work as fax machines, because once you've got the expensive mechanical parts and a computer smart enough to send data to your PC, adding fax capabilities costs you $1-2 for a keypad and $1-2 for a modem chip.
And they'll be compatible with all the other fax machines you might want to talk to, not get into arguments about which Microsoft Word versions are currently emulated on Macs, and while they're not blazingly fast, they're usually fast enough for whatever you actually need to do.
And if your company has a fancy mail server, it probably has a fax receiver as a standard feature, and probably also a fax-sending gateway.
I don't know what Google was thinking offering them $6B for the company a while back, but I especially don't know what Groupon's owners were thinking for not taking it. Yes, most of it would be in Google stock, that's just fine (even though it would decline a bit after everybody figured out that Groupon was a dumb idea at that price.) Yes, they'd lose a lot of their autonomy, but you don't build a coupon-advertising company to change the world, you build one to make money, and that was real money.
Hear hear for your correction of the bogus "here here" - people are really loosing their hold on English grammer.
But yes, you do need to read CDs or DVDs on a computer, and USB drives are really just fine for that, plus you've probably got one left over from some previous computer by now.
Back in the late 70s / early 80s recession, chemical engineers getting out of college could get really decent salaries (usually with oil companies), while civil engineers could get anything (the joke was that oil companies would hire them too, but only to pump gas.) They might end up with odd working conditions (e.g. working at an oil field out in the middle of nowhere in 120-degree heat or arctic cold), but they'd also get to learn a whole lot of in-depth operations and practical engineering (like how to fix things that break out in the middle of nowhere when you don't have the right parts.) But a lot of that depended on how the chemical industry and their suppliers in the oil industry were doing, and oil booms, plastic-stuff booms, and computer booms don't all happen at the same time, much less at the same time as the rest of the economy. And aircraft engineering had a really strong 4-year cycle, driven by which political parties got elected in the US and how much they liked to buy military aircraft.
Slashdot Mirror
Ye wouldna be needin' all that loot if there weren't landlubbers to fence it to, mate!
The ice cream was awesome, because we were kids, and it was ice cream from outer space! But basically, yeah, it's just camping food. The Russians also got vodka, but I guess they won't be giving that to US school kids.
It's link spam. Does Slashdot have a way to actually delete the comment, not just mod it -1 Troll?
Might as well get it over with by making the Obvious Reference in the article.
Funny, what they taught me was that if Joe Farmer gets shot or or bombed or captured by Westerners while tending his garden or defending his family, the US government will announce that he was a terrorist and Al Qaeda will announce that he was a martyr, or if he gets shot by the Taliban then the US will announce that he was a friendly civilian and the Taliban will announce that he was an infidel traitor.
And if Joe Farmer is carrying a rifle, if he's in Texas the US right wing will say he's protected by the Second Amendment, but if he's in Afghanistan, they'll say he's a terrorist, whereas realistically, if he's a goat herder then of course he'll be carrying an AK47, because otherwise the Taliban or the government's army or the local warlord or some other guy with an AK47 will steal his goats.
In video games, I don't expect them to bleed realistically - I expect to see blood splattering all over the place, just like I expect to see cars in movies explode after they crash, even though they seldom do that in real life. If they don't bleed, it's supposed to be because they're melodramatically falling off a building after you shoot them, or something like that.
And yeah, that first Iraqi War started with the video-game-quality shots of the "smart" bomb blowing up the phone company building - which I as a phone company employee took offense at :-) (In real life, in the month or two before the war, I was alternating between going to the UN building for anti-war protests and working on a subcontract for a defense contractor who was bidding to rewire the Pentagon...) I later heard somebody saying that that video had looked really good when they saw it six months before the war started, but even pre-September-97 you couldn't believe everything you read on the net.
In general, killing innocents is bad luck, unless you're chaotic, in which case it's sometimes really cool, especially if they're unicorns. Killing shopkeepers or robbing shops gets the Kops chasing you, and killing soldiers tends to annoy the other soldiers - in those cases, it can be profitable if you get away with it, but it's more likely to get you killed.
Well you'd fscking well better not frag Lt. Niedermeyer....
I'm glad somebody got to the zombies before I did! I mean, I think I'm glad... they didn't bite you, did they? Because sometimes the zombies aren't civilians, they're your buddies who've been bitten, and then you've got to shoot them before they get you. You're not an Anonymous Coward, so you're not a Non-Player Character, but your user number's kind of high - were you wearing a red shirt when you left the house this morning?
Not patching unannounced is a really good policy. But dropping your VPN? Your employees were ok with having to come in to the office every day, and your management's ok with the loss of productivity? Wow!
Sure, if you OCR the TIFF file, you can turn it back into editable text, at the cost of a few percent of mistakes and the loss of most of your formatting and data structure. But otherwise all you've got is a bitmap, and while you can edit it, it's the modern-day equivalent of using white-out on a document.
My batteries are even cleaner! They use positive current, so they power equipment by transmitting holes!
Back when the movie came out, Arnie was already known as Conan the Republican - he got the nickname from GHWBush when he was campaigning for him, and he was already married to Maria Shriver, a well-known Democrat. After he was Governator for a few years, it was obvious that he wasn't going to be able to fix California's problems either, but he stayed popular until the illegitimate kid news got out. (And until then, people were still occasionally talking about the "Schwarzenegger Amendment" at least half-seriously.)
And that Taco Bell is in El Segundo, just south of LAX airport. I never got to it when I was working down there, probably should next time I'm in LA. (Of course it doesn't look like the classic Taco Bell design, which is made of painted brick - here in Northern California there are a few of those still around, no longer as Taco Bells - some of them even have real Mexican restaurants in them now.)
It's not just a UK thing - there are systems marketed to police in the US that you can mount on a car and read the license plates of all the parked cars you drive by, and by now they might even be able to read them on moving cars. Not surprisingly, the target market is parking enforcement - a city might not be able to justify buying them for surveillance purposes (unless they can scam some Homeland Security budget), but for parking ticket revenue generation, they're pretty much self-funding. And license plate reading has been around for a long time for catching tollbooth evaders, but all that needs is good image capture, and you can have humans read it.
Back in the 90s, San Francisco was tearing down the old Central Freeway because of earthquake damage, and a month before that they started tracking license plates of cars that used the freeway. They farmed out the job of reading the license plates to cheap prison labor, and sent everybody a postcard saying "Next month we're tearing down the freeway, please find yourself a different route to work." Worked fine. It didn't have to be real-time, and it didn't have to be close to 100% accurate or complete - it kept most of the regular commuters out of the area, and the local surface streets could cope with the traffic load from the small fraction of people who didn't know about it.
No - but you can be booked for actually covering your plates on public roads. So if you've got a motorized gizmo that raises or lowers a cover, and you remember to uncover before you go out on the street, you're fine. The laws that apply when you're on Westfield's private property are just trespassing laws, so if Westfield feels paranoid about it and wants to kick your Anonymous Coward car out of their parking lot, they're fine.
The slippery slope in the US was airport parking lots. Some years before 9/11, pretty much all the parking lots at major US airports started putting license plate cameras at the entrance, and wouldn't raise the entrance gate unless they could see your plate. The lots were concessions operated by contractors, not by the government, so you couldn't complain about illegal surveillance, but obviously they were feeding that data to the cops, who could use it to track who's at what airport and when. And the contractors contended that they were doing it to prevent fraud (so if you parked there for a month, you couldn't walk up to the gate the day you left, press the button and get a new ticket, and pay for an hour's parking, which might be mostly bogus compared to the cost of the enforcement system but probably did happen on occasion.)
The legal justification for a license plate and registration tags is to show that you've paid taxes on your car, and you're not allowed to drive on the street in the state where you live unless you've paid the tax. Some states have expanded that justification to do things like annual safety inspection or air pollution inspection. Of course, once you've got license plates on the car, the police find them useful for all kinds of other things.
Parking cars on the street without current registration is no different legally from driving them on the street, just easier to catch. Parking on private property doesn't usually require your car to be licensed, though some jurisdictions have anti-blight or anti-redneck laws that ban parking unlicensed cars on your lawn, but parking them inside buildings is fine (assuming your building isn't also condemned by anti-blight laws.)
I used to use Hibernate fairly often with my laptop. But then Corporate IT installed Checkpoint's Full Disk Encryption feature, which disables Hibernate for some reason. Does this new version of hibernate have the same limitations?
I only use full reboot for three reasons - either I've installed some new software that needs it (usually Microsoft Patch Tuesday, or occasionally other software that insists on it), or else I've had my laptop unplugged for long enough that Sleep Mode has failed or gotten hosed(it used to go into Hibernate if the battery got low enough, but it can't do that any more), or occasionally I'll plug the laptop into an external monitor and it can't figure out what it's doing with video (sometimes an extra Sleep/wakeup fixes that.)
This new feature is helpful if I've shut the machine down because of battery, but otherwise I really do need a full shutdown.
I use a laptop, and work from home several days a week, especially the days I have early morning phone calls (i.e. mid-morning phone calls on the East Coast, which is not where I live :-) Overnight software installations that trigger reboots mean that occasionally I get downstairs and find that my machine has rebooted, so I have to log in, restart my VPN, restart Outlook, restart my browser, figure out what documents I had open and restart them, and it's at least 5 minutes before I'm able to dial in to a phone call, and more like 10 minutes before I'm ready to work.
And this new "fast startup mode" that doesn't save my sessions isn't going to help that.
Yes, I'm talking about the comparison of sending a fax vs. emailing the .doc.
And if you don't see compatibility problems between whatever version of Word is running on Macs and whatever version is running on Windows, or between WIndows users and Open Office users, or for that matter between version N on Windows and version N.2 or N+1 on Windows or even between the same versions with style sheets or custom fonts not getting included, with tables or pictures getting broken or "smart quotes" rendered incorrectly, then you're not emailing enough doc files between people with different platforms.
You could mail PDFs if you want, or .TIFs of your output format (which is pretty much what fax does), but that loses editability. Maybe that's what you want, but it's usually not what I want.
Great - My CPU will start generating kernel messages telling me it that it's the SON OF THE TECHNOLOGY MINISTER OF NIGERIA and that it has 25 GIGAFLOPS of PROCESSING that it needs help smuggling out from behind seven proxies and I can have 25% of it in return for overclocking the CPU by 10%.
Just as there were hundreds of patents for "1. Do something that people have done for a long time 2. But On a Computer!" and "1. Do something that people have done for a long time 2. But On the Internet!", this is a patent for "1. Use the videoconferencing tools you normally use for business. 2. But For a Party!"
And yes, it's already been done. I was at a party a couple of years ago where one of the people was attending remotely from the Netherlands by videoconference, and then later, when she was in town, some of the other people were attending that party from the East Coast by videoconference. And there's always Fahrenheit 451 as literary prior art, with TV walls and non-player characters.
Yes, there are dozens of all-in-one scanner/printer/copiers for cheap, and pretty much all of them also work as fax machines, because once you've got the expensive mechanical parts and a computer smart enough to send data to your PC, adding fax capabilities costs you $1-2 for a keypad and $1-2 for a modem chip.
And they'll be compatible with all the other fax machines you might want to talk to, not get into arguments about which Microsoft Word versions are currently emulated on Macs, and while they're not blazingly fast, they're usually fast enough for whatever you actually need to do.
And if your company has a fancy mail server, it probably has a fax receiver as a standard feature, and probably also a fax-sending gateway.
I don't know what Google was thinking offering them $6B for the company a while back, but I especially don't know what Groupon's owners were thinking for not taking it. Yes, most of it would be in Google stock, that's just fine (even though it would decline a bit after everybody figured out that Groupon was a dumb idea at that price.) Yes, they'd lose a lot of their autonomy, but you don't build a coupon-advertising company to change the world, you build one to make money, and that was real money.
Hear hear for your correction of the bogus "here here" - people are really loosing their hold on English grammer.
But yes, you do need to read CDs or DVDs on a computer, and USB drives are really just fine for that, plus you've probably got one left over from some previous computer by now.
Back in the late 70s / early 80s recession, chemical engineers getting out of college could get really decent salaries (usually with oil companies), while civil engineers could get anything (the joke was that oil companies would hire them too, but only to pump gas.) They might end up with odd working conditions (e.g. working at an oil field out in the middle of nowhere in 120-degree heat or arctic cold), but they'd also get to learn a whole lot of in-depth operations and practical engineering (like how to fix things that break out in the middle of nowhere when you don't have the right parts.) But a lot of that depended on how the chemical industry and their suppliers in the oil industry were doing, and oil booms, plastic-stuff booms, and computer booms don't all happen at the same time, much less at the same time as the rest of the economy. And aircraft engineering had a really strong 4-year cycle, driven by which political parties got elected in the US and how much they liked to buy military aircraft.