That's good to know. Although I still don't see how Opera's method is considered a solution. Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I heard Opera still turns it off for.net,.com and.org top level domains. Those still need to show the properly rendered code because of the high spoofing risk that punycode represents.
What is needed is a way to easily show both versions (for instance in a bubble on mouseover, with a very distinctive addressbar colour change, to let encourage people to mouseover, or some other better idea, cause I'm not the most imaginative person around) of the address. Turning it off for some of the domains (particularly the most common domains) is not going to work any more that the current temporary solution.
Anyone heard if Firefox is going to implement a true solution? Turning it off is just not acceptable.
The only thing that turning it off does, is remove chances of spoofing a URL that has not international characters at the cost of increasing the spoofing risk of those that genuinely use international characters in their domain name (and YES those are needed. Not everybody speaks, nor wishes to speak, English).
The result of the current solution is that pages with genuine foreign characters show up as punycode, that is to say: "gibberish". Gibberish is very easy to spoof. If I have to distinguish between
http://www.xn--espaa-rta.com/ or http://www.xn--espa-rta.com/ or
http://www.xn--espaa--rta.com/ or
http://www.xn--espaaa-rta.com/
I could easily be fooled. There are URL that are much much more cryptic than this simple one, but it makes a good point.
All a phisher has to do is use a URL that looks like one of those, with . Turning it off is NOT the solution. Maybe showing the proper URL (i.e. http :// www. españa.com) but with a different color ( for instance red) as a warning. Or make it pulsating or something to warn us that it contains IDN characters, and on a mouseover have a little popup showing that punycode text that corresponds to it. This should make it easy to spot the spoofed address that should not contain IDN characters (or not the ones expected), without making it so much easier to spoof the ones that do use them legitimately.
Because, once again, punycode is EXTREMELY easy to spoof. Longs strings of apparently meaningless gibberish are hard for the brain to assimilate. A simple name when properly rendered now instead looks as difficult to remember, and distinguish from a spoofed address, as a purely numerical URL. It is NOT as solution, only a temporary patch.
I will therefore suggest that the IDN spoofing vulnerability is STILL present in Firefox. The type of URLs likely to be spoofed are the only difference.
I get mad as much as the next guy at government wasting my tax money, however, I do not believe that it is a specifically governmental characteristic.
Most companies, seem to have the same problems (project Monterey anyone?). The main difference, is that we (rightly) feel that government's money is our money, so it affects us more. On top of that, because it's our money media are much more likely to report those failures, particularly since governments are obligated to disclose such information. Secret projects in some company's lab are very likely to remain secret.
Peer review is not the only measure of a thing's veracity. Unfortunately, there is a great pressure to conform to what is accepted by the peers (or be discredited). It does not always happen that scientists will only base their opinions on recorded data. Preconceptions, credibility and politics come into play.
Cold fusion is an excellent example of it. Fleishman and Pons were not physicists but electrochemists. Controlled, fusion (by conventional high energy means) producing more energy than it consumed is still elusive (although correct me if I'm wrong, I think they managed to get slightly passed breakeven). Imagine the politics of having "newbies" in the field (as any physiscist would put it), manage with much less material investment what the best minds in the field haven't managed for decades and enormous investments. Before "peers" (or in this case, physicists, not their electrochemist peers) would accept it officially, they needed to have a theory... the numbers could not be accepted without a theory (which goes against the tenets of science, where if your observations do not match what the theory says, you have to start thinking if your theory is OK).
It wasn't trivial to reproduce the results. The proportion of electrode atoms and deuterons in contact had to be exact or from a 100% reproducibility you quickly fall to 10% reproducibility if you only have 90% saturation. But in the early days, much was still to verify... and because the peers couldn't accept the numbers you couldn't get favourably peer reviewed, although enough others got similar results to suggest that something was indeed happening, although it might not be trivial to reproduce. If it hadn't been for the media coverage, the whole thing would be dead now. Nobody would have heard of it, since it would have been killed before being published in a peer reviewed journal.
It does have striking similarities to the problems with fission. At first, uranium nuclei were bombarded with accelerated protons, but the energy threshold required to cause fission was too high. It was because of Leo Szilard's idea to use the neutrons to cause a chain reaction that fission was eventually made useful. Because Szilard was a physisist, and he had come up with the mechanism first his ideas were more readily accepted. The relative investment of time and money into fission was not comparable to the amounts invested in fusion. Other than that, the problem is similar. Breaking even is difficult when you ar trying to push protons together. finding a way to lower the threshold is the key.
For more info on Cold Fusion and current theories as to how this could be, check: http://www.lenr-canr.org/
I have found a more detailed article about the same research, where they explain the details of the study and the mechanism through which therapy was devised to fight tumors. There is only one human study, which wouldn't amount to much. It is however indicative that the conclusions obtained from extensive studies on
rats, where 80% to 90% of the animals were treated with success, is not specific to that species.
For those who don't I will try to summarize what I consider the
outstanding points presented:
What they found in vitro is that the dynamic of grow in all tumors is
the same. There is a dominan mechanisms for all types of cell
lineages. The main mathematical characteristics of the dynamic
are:
1) Most of the cell activity of the tumors is concentrated in the
external layer.
2) There is a superficial diffusion on the edge of the tumor. The
new tumor cell genrated from cellular division migrate on the surface
of the tumor until they find a concave location where they are
surrounded by a greater number of canncer cells than in their original
position.
3) The growth of the cancerous colony is constant in time, except in
the inital phase (when there are few cells) when the growth is
logically exponential.
That the proliferation is restricted to the edge of the colony means
also that the inner cells do not proliferate at the same rate as the
external ones. There is therefore an cellular inhibition
mechanism of the cancer cell similar (and later we discovered that is
was practically the same mechanism) to the inhibition through contact
that is seen in normal cell (non cancerous).
The next step was to confirm that the same type of mechanism also
governed the growth of the tumor "in vivo". We did several
studies on fifteen different types of tumors from which we took several
histological sections, and saw that most of the growth was always
limited to the edge of the tumor. Also "in vivo" the fundamental
characteristics of the growth dynamics observed "in vitro" have been
confirmed. The fenomenon was therefore the same as in the "in
vitro" case. The morphological parameters measured in the
colonies were also present in the "ín vivo" growth.
Most of the duplications of tumors occur on the periphery, and the
peripherical cell have therefore much higher mutations
rates. Where traditional models expected 32 cell divisions
to result from the division of the cells from the tumor for a given
growth, 800 divisions were actually occuring at the periphery.
This also explains why metastasis cell are so much more aggressive
since they consist entirely of peripherical cells.
One of the main questions they had was why the new cell would migrate
to the hollow areas where competition for nutrients is fiercest among
tumor cells, and where the PH is highest as a byproduct of cancer
cells' metabolic activity. They would have expected them to
migrate towards the high peaks. The results of the study suggests
that pressure from the surrounding normal tissue inhibits the growth of
the cancerous cells. They therefore migrate to these zones of
less pressure. Also, contrary to traditional views, the tumor
destroys the surrounding tissue before invading it (through the high
acidity resulting from the metabolic activity of the cancerous cells
and the secretion of other compounds), instead of invading it before
killing it as was commonly believed.
As for treatment, they discovered that the body's natural defences
agains this growth mechanism are the neutrophiles, one of the 5 types
of white blood cells. These neutrophiles can withstand the high
acidity surrounding the tumors and they can be in intimate contact with
the cancerous cells. In test on lab rats, they created a
neutrophilia (high concentration of netrophiles) in the tumor area by
stimulating their prod
Wasn't Victoria day last week? That's when it was celebrated in Canada anyway (except Québec where it used to be Dollar's day, and now is Patriote's day).
I just use my Yahoo Address Guarded account for this kind of stuff. Address guard is neet. You do get the registration e-mail and you can reactivate the specific e-mail that will get your forgotten password when you need it, and deactivate it at all other times. If you don't know about the Address Guard, go to your Yahoo mail, and under Options go to address guard and read the explanations. I highly recommend it. I have one, "basename"-forgottenpasswords@yahoo.com that I use for this specific case. Once the account is created with hta ID and you've replied to the e-mail, you can erase that entry (and never receive e-mail there). If you forget your password, go back to AddressGuard, add forgottenpasswords (or whatever you choose to call it) as one of your addresses, and on the site request your address again. It has changed the way I e-mail. Nobody gets my Yahoo ID based name. All get base-name, extension name compound addressguard address. It makes disposing of undesireable e-mails very very easy.
"common sense" can be used to explain all sorts of conflicting ideas.
I couldn't agree more. A prof of mine told us a story about the dangers of "common sense" once. As a structural engineer, he had been contracted to design a cover for a terrasse for a cafe somewhere. The owner wanted open space, and so he designed it as a cantilever, only supported on the building side, with no column at the other end. In such a configuration the beams of the cantilever will be in tension on the top part, and compression in the bottom part. Concrete doesn't do very well in tension so you put more reinforcement in the top part. Case closed.
The contractor who was doing the job, had no experience with cantilevers. He managed to convince the owner that it would be safer with columns at the other end. And the owner agreed. Who could argue that a roof would be stronger with columns at both ends of the span? It's common sense, right?
What they failed to take into account, is that now the stress patterns were the opposite of the design stresses, with tension on the bottom of the beam, and compression at the top since the beam was now supported at both ends. They never consulted with the engineer who had made the original design, so of course after construction the beams shortly started cracking in the underside and the roof slowly sagged. It was forturnate that some steel reinforcement had been included for the compression part, or it might have failed without warning and there might have been victims.
The point of the story was that "common sense" was very often based on our limited experience. Unless you know what mechanisms make "common sense" true, you might be dead wrong. It never hurts to be sure; to have proof.
And of course, as ou pointed out, the details of the study, the mechanism of what is happening is often what the research is all about, but also what the journalists like to skip.
The one issue you will find is that OpenOffice.org has crappy charting capabilities and they are not compatible with excel's chart. OpenOffice must have all the X in the same column, which must be to the left of all others, and the order of the subsequent data series is set from the leftmost to the right most. Even if you would like to show them differently in the legend, you can't. As far as I know you cannot set the labels of the legend manually. And when in Line mode for X-Y scatter, you cannot change the area and border of the symbols individually.
Since Excel allows you to choose arbitrary columns for your X and Ys, many charts will not translate properly. In my particular case, since even in my Excel days I had stopped using its limited charting abilities for more flexible tools like gnuplot (I run many tests, and if I need to change the format of 100 or 200 graphs so they match, I like changing a couple of lines in a single gnuplot file and let the batch files update my whole report or thesis, and having better scientific (and 3D) plotting to boot) it hasn't made much difference, but if you have lots of charts you will have a harder time to switch. I still haven't been able to access Chart properties through OpenOffice macros, so overall its chart handling is it weakest feature.
That being said, the fact that it handles previous versions of MS Office documents (particularly Word) much better than different versions of MS Office programs do, is the main reason why I have managed to convert several of my fellow grad students to OpenOffice. After one of them spent most of the day trying to make a Word file compatible with our supervisor's, I asked him to send it to me, and I basically opened it (did very little to fix it) and sent it to our supervisor who had no trouble with it. That was it. 5 minutes tops. He went to his office, cursing Microsoft, downloaded OpenOffice and I never caught him using Word again. He still often uses Powerpoint and Excel (force of habit mostly), but he is slowly drifting to use OpenOffice Impress and Draw. Since I converted him to the use of gnuplot I have good hope that he will not feel the need to use Excel one day soon, but to each his own rithm.
So basically, if you are big on spreadsheet graphs, you may have some big issues (I'm trying to work on a macro on my spare time to easily create charts in OpenOffice using gnuplot as a back end and storing all property information in the graphic object's name, for later easy editing). If not, welcome to OpenOffice. It does a very good job importing and exporting equations too.
The article doesn't seem to touch anything about health concerns. This seems to be particularly bad for the frequent flyers and the security people. How much X-Ray radiation are we talking about? What are the effects of exposure on a daily basis?
Of course, if this is accepted, I don't think anybody has any kind of claim anymore about "gross indecency". Why shouldn't I be allowed to walk buck naked in the street if the security people can see me in my birthday suit? The reason that that concept is as embarassing right now, is that we are conditionned to thinking that being naked in public is wrong. Before this kind of thing becomes acceptable on a widely deployed basis, the social acceptance of nudity has to change. Then it would not be humiliating. Still likely to be unhealty, but not humiliating.
Can't it? I thought that if a trademark became associated with a generic thing it could lose its trademark status. As such, if you can show that people associate spam more readily to the junk e-mail than the meat product, it may just lose its trademark status. Granted, I don't know much on those things and I was only basing my comment on the fact that "Xerox" and "Google" were concerned because people "xerox" documents and "google" terms on the web on a daily basis... Hopefully better informed people will be able to light my bulb.
Is Microsoft even allowed to sell Windows in Cuba? Probably not since it is a US based company. Therefore, any Windows installation in Cuba is pirated and illegal. It just makes sense in those conditions to switch to another OS.
This reminds me of a story I heard several years back (I don't know how true it was) where they said that after Bill Gates had said that if the speed of cars had evolved at the same rate as computers they would be going at [insert here a very high speed] blabla. To which a car industry representative replied that if cars were built like Windows, they would randomly crash or stall, for no obvious reason, in he middle of the highway.
It's nice to finally be able to verify the veracity of the comparison. When cars are built like [read "requiring"] computer software...
Then your site is probably a site I don't want to see. You are free to put anything you want on your site, but I am free to see it as I please. The artist cannot impose limitations on how someone sees their art. When I go to the museum, nobody tells me:
you "must" stand here like so... dangling upside down from this bar here, yes that's it. NOW you may see the painting.
I routinely turn off Java support and Flash animations. Whatever the web designer thinks I want to see, I reserve the right to choose. If what you are providing is content, then how the content is viewed is not of your concern. Only the redistribution of your content is of your "jurisdiction".
No we don't have SETI@home but we have something very similar calle STI@tarpit. However, the search for terrestrial intelligence keeps coming up empty. This is creating a lot of noise around here about the high cost of such an endeavour.
The consensus is that if there ever was intelligent life on Terra, it has been long extinct. Ancient texts speak of some big rock hitting the third planet a few millions years back (as observed by the now famous astronomers Nibil and Boop). Some people believe that it wiped out all potential for uplift on that poor world. Of course, texts that old are not always reliable. Anything older than 2 million years contains more fantasy than fact.
But most scientists say that the third planet could never have fostered life, since the ground temperature is high enough on most of the planet to totally melt the rock. They say that the planet is covered in "oceans" of molten rock at temperatures exceeding 273 K. It's scary to imagine such an inferno, and makes it very dubious that life was ever possible there... much less intelligent life.
Yes they do. They mostly involve some alien probes crashing on our turf. Of course, the "Saturn" thing is only a vague geographical reference. Most people here live on Titan. Actually, a cousin, of a cousin of my uncle, had some alien probe crash through the roof of his house a couple of months ago.
He never knew what hit him, poor guy. It's really too bad, because he lives in lake country, where everybody dreams of owning a cottage... and we were going to babysit his home during next summer. Talk about bad timing. Of course it could have been worse, as we might have been the ones stuck in the house the the crash happened.
And from what I hear, that's a shame, as by all accounts, the show has really become much better toward the end.
I thought so too. What I liked from what had started happening was the filling of the background stories as to how the Federation came to be. They were beginning to show some of the Worlds of the federation and the interaction of their peoples, most notably Vulcans and Andorians. It would have been nice to see the development of those interactions into the Federation.
Slashdot Mirror
That's good to know. Although I still don't see how Opera's method is considered a solution. Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I heard Opera still turns it off for .net, .com and .org top level domains. Those still need to show the properly rendered code because of the high spoofing risk that punycode represents.
What is needed is a way to easily show both versions (for instance in a bubble on mouseover, with a very distinctive addressbar colour change, to let encourage people to mouseover, or some other better idea, cause I'm not the most imaginative person around) of the address. Turning it off for some of the domains (particularly the most common domains) is not going to work any more that the current temporary solution.
Anyone heard if Firefox is going to implement a true solution? Turning it off is just not acceptable.
The only thing that turning it off does, is remove chances of spoofing a URL that has not international characters at the cost of increasing the spoofing risk of those that genuinely use international characters in their domain name (and YES those are needed. Not everybody speaks, nor wishes to speak, English).
The result of the current solution is that pages with genuine foreign characters show up as punycode, that is to say: "gibberish". Gibberish is very easy to spoof. If I have to distinguish between http://www.xn--espaa-rta.com/ or http://www.xn--espa-rta.com/ or http://www.xn--espaa--rta.com/ or http://www.xn--espaaa-rta.com/ I could easily be fooled. There are URL that are much much more cryptic than this simple one, but it makes a good point. All a phisher has to do is use a URL that looks like one of those, with . Turning it off is NOT the solution. Maybe showing the proper URL (i.e. http : // www. españa.com) but with a different color ( for instance red) as a warning. Or make it pulsating or something to warn us that it contains IDN characters, and on a mouseover have a little popup showing that punycode text that corresponds to it. This should make it easy to spot the spoofed address that should not contain IDN characters (or not the ones expected), without making it so much easier to spoof the ones that do use them legitimately.
Because, once again, punycode is EXTREMELY easy to spoof. Longs strings of apparently meaningless gibberish are hard for the brain to assimilate. A simple name when properly rendered now instead looks as difficult to remember, and distinguish from a spoofed address, as a purely numerical URL. It is NOT as solution, only a temporary patch.
I will therefore suggest that the IDN spoofing vulnerability is STILL present in Firefox. The type of URLs likely to be spoofed are the only difference.
I get mad as much as the next guy at government wasting my tax money, however, I do not believe that it is a specifically governmental characteristic.
Most companies, seem to have the same problems (project Monterey anyone?). The main difference, is that we (rightly) feel that government's money is our money, so it affects us more. On top of that, because it's our money media are much more likely to report those failures, particularly since governments are obligated to disclose such information. Secret projects in some company's lab are very likely to remain secret.
Peer review is not the only measure of a thing's veracity. Unfortunately, there is a great pressure to conform to what is accepted by the peers (or be discredited). It does not always happen that scientists will only base their opinions on recorded data. Preconceptions, credibility and politics come into play.
Cold fusion is an excellent example of it. Fleishman and Pons were not physicists but electrochemists. Controlled, fusion (by conventional high energy means) producing more energy than it consumed is still elusive (although correct me if I'm wrong, I think they managed to get slightly passed breakeven). Imagine the politics of having "newbies" in the field (as any physiscist would put it), manage with much less material investment what the best minds in the field haven't managed for decades and enormous investments. Before "peers" (or in this case, physicists, not their electrochemist peers) would accept it officially, they needed to have a theory... the numbers could not be accepted without a theory (which goes against the tenets of science, where if your observations do not match what the theory says, you have to start thinking if your theory is OK).
It wasn't trivial to reproduce the results. The proportion of electrode atoms and deuterons in contact had to be exact or from a 100% reproducibility you quickly fall to 10% reproducibility if you only have 90% saturation. But in the early days, much was still to verify... and because the peers couldn't accept the numbers you couldn't get favourably peer reviewed, although enough others got similar results to suggest that something was indeed happening, although it might not be trivial to reproduce. If it hadn't been for the media coverage, the whole thing would be dead now. Nobody would have heard of it, since it would have been killed before being published in a peer reviewed journal.
It does have striking similarities to the problems with fission. At first, uranium nuclei were bombarded with accelerated protons, but the energy threshold required to cause fission was too high. It was because of Leo Szilard's idea to use the neutrons to cause a chain reaction that fission was eventually made useful. Because Szilard was a physisist, and he had come up with the mechanism first his ideas were more readily accepted. The relative investment of time and money into fission was not comparable to the amounts invested in fusion. Other than that, the problem is similar. Breaking even is difficult when you ar trying to push protons together. finding a way to lower the threshold is the key.
For more info on Cold Fusion and current theories as to how this could be, check: http://www.lenr-canr.org/
The link to the page is, for those who speak spanish:
http://www.dsalud.com/numero65_1.htm
For those who don't I will try to summarize what I consider the outstanding points presented:
What they found in vitro is that the dynamic of grow in all tumors is the same. There is a dominan mechanisms for all types of cell lineages. The main mathematical characteristics of the dynamic are:
Most of the duplications of tumors occur on the periphery, and the peripherical cell have therefore much higher mutations rates. Where traditional models expected 32 cell divisions to result from the division of the cells from the tumor for a given growth, 800 divisions were actually occuring at the periphery. This also explains why metastasis cell are so much more aggressive since they consist entirely of peripherical cells.
One of the main questions they had was why the new cell would migrate to the hollow areas where competition for nutrients is fiercest among tumor cells, and where the PH is highest as a byproduct of cancer cells' metabolic activity. They would have expected them to migrate towards the high peaks. The results of the study suggests that pressure from the surrounding normal tissue inhibits the growth of the cancerous cells. They therefore migrate to these zones of less pressure. Also, contrary to traditional views, the tumor destroys the surrounding tissue before invading it (through the high acidity resulting from the metabolic activity of the cancerous cells and the secretion of other compounds), instead of invading it before killing it as was commonly believed.
As for treatment, they discovered that the body's natural defences agains this growth mechanism are the neutrophiles, one of the 5 types of white blood cells. These neutrophiles can withstand the high acidity surrounding the tumors and they can be in intimate contact with the cancerous cells. In test on lab rats, they created a neutrophilia (high concentration of netrophiles) in the tumor area by stimulating their prod
Wasn't Victoria day last week? That's when it was celebrated in Canada anyway (except Québec where it used to be Dollar's day, and now is Patriote's day).
I just use my Yahoo Address Guarded account for this kind of stuff. Address guard is neet. You do get the registration e-mail and you can reactivate the specific e-mail that will get your forgotten password when you need it, and deactivate it at all other times. If you don't know about the Address Guard, go to your Yahoo mail, and under Options go to address guard and read the explanations. I highly recommend it. I have one, "basename"-forgottenpasswords@yahoo.com that I use for this specific case. Once the account is created with hta ID and you've replied to the e-mail, you can erase that entry (and never receive e-mail there). If you forget your password, go back to AddressGuard, add forgottenpasswords (or whatever you choose to call it) as one of your addresses, and on the site request your address again. It has changed the way I e-mail. Nobody gets my Yahoo ID based name. All get base-name, extension name compound addressguard address. It makes disposing of undesireable e-mails very very easy.
I couldn't agree more. A prof of mine told us a story about the dangers of "common sense" once. As a structural engineer, he had been contracted to design a cover for a terrasse for a cafe somewhere. The owner wanted open space, and so he designed it as a cantilever, only supported on the building side, with no column at the other end. In such a configuration the beams of the cantilever will be in tension on the top part, and compression in the bottom part. Concrete doesn't do very well in tension so you put more reinforcement in the top part. Case closed.
The contractor who was doing the job, had no experience with cantilevers. He managed to convince the owner that it would be safer with columns at the other end. And the owner agreed. Who could argue that a roof would be stronger with columns at both ends of the span? It's common sense, right?
What they failed to take into account, is that now the stress patterns were the opposite of the design stresses, with tension on the bottom of the beam, and compression at the top since the beam was now supported at both ends. They never consulted with the engineer who had made the original design, so of course after construction the beams shortly started cracking in the underside and the roof slowly sagged. It was forturnate that some steel reinforcement had been included for the compression part, or it might have failed without warning and there might have been victims.
The point of the story was that "common sense" was very often based on our limited experience. Unless you know what mechanisms make "common sense" true, you might be dead wrong. It never hurts to be sure; to have proof.
And of course, as ou pointed out, the details of the study, the mechanism of what is happening is often what the research is all about, but also what the journalists like to skip.
The one issue you will find is that OpenOffice.org has crappy charting capabilities and they are not compatible with excel's chart. OpenOffice must have all the X in the same column, which must be to the left of all others, and the order of the subsequent data series is set from the leftmost to the right most. Even if you would like to show them differently in the legend, you can't. As far as I know you cannot set the labels of the legend manually. And when in Line mode for X-Y scatter, you cannot change the area and border of the symbols individually.
Since Excel allows you to choose arbitrary columns for your X and Ys, many charts will not translate properly. In my particular case, since even in my Excel days I had stopped using its limited charting abilities for more flexible tools like gnuplot (I run many tests, and if I need to change the format of 100 or 200 graphs so they match, I like changing a couple of lines in a single gnuplot file and let the batch files update my whole report or thesis, and having better scientific (and 3D) plotting to boot) it hasn't made much difference, but if you have lots of charts you will have a harder time to switch. I still haven't been able to access Chart properties through OpenOffice macros, so overall its chart handling is it weakest feature.
That being said, the fact that it handles previous versions of MS Office documents (particularly Word) much better than different versions of MS Office programs do, is the main reason why I have managed to convert several of my fellow grad students to OpenOffice. After one of them spent most of the day trying to make a Word file compatible with our supervisor's, I asked him to send it to me, and I basically opened it (did very little to fix it) and sent it to our supervisor who had no trouble with it. That was it. 5 minutes tops. He went to his office, cursing Microsoft, downloaded OpenOffice and I never caught him using Word again. He still often uses Powerpoint and Excel (force of habit mostly), but he is slowly drifting to use OpenOffice Impress and Draw. Since I converted him to the use of gnuplot I have good hope that he will not feel the need to use Excel one day soon, but to each his own rithm.
So basically, if you are big on spreadsheet graphs, you may have some big issues (I'm trying to work on a macro on my spare time to easily create charts in OpenOffice using gnuplot as a back end and storing all property information in the graphic object's name, for later easy editing). If not, welcome to OpenOffice. It does a very good job importing and exporting equations too.
The article doesn't seem to touch anything about health concerns. This seems to be particularly bad for the frequent flyers and the security people. How much X-Ray radiation are we talking about? What are the effects of exposure on a daily basis?
Of course, if this is accepted, I don't think anybody has any kind of claim anymore about "gross indecency". Why shouldn't I be allowed to walk buck naked in the street if the security people can see me in my birthday suit? The reason that that concept is as embarassing right now, is that we are conditionned to thinking that being naked in public is wrong. Before this kind of thing becomes acceptable on a widely deployed basis, the social acceptance of nudity has to change. Then it would not be humiliating. Still likely to be unhealty, but not humiliating.
And from the same people we get the man's prayer:
Hopefully many fans of duck tape (aka duct tape, aka gaff tape, aka 100 mph tape, aka............) will recognize them.Thanks for pointing this out. That's what happens when you type your sigs while holding a conversation with the people in the office at the same time.
It should read:
I'll try to fix it as soon as I stop getting the "Eror 503 service unavailable" message.
Can't it? I thought that if a trademark became associated with a generic thing it could lose its trademark status. As such, if you can show that people associate spam more readily to the junk e-mail than the meat product, it may just lose its trademark status. Granted, I don't know much on those things and I was only basing my comment on the fact that "Xerox" and "Google" were concerned because people "xerox" documents and "google" terms on the web on a daily basis... Hopefully better informed people will be able to light my bulb.
Since Archimedes was Greek and not Roman, that should be: "F1RSTOS P0STO5"
Is Microsoft even allowed to sell Windows in Cuba? Probably not since it is a US based company. Therefore, any Windows installation in Cuba is pirated and illegal. It just makes sense in those conditions to switch to another OS.
Does it mean it's not Red E?
This reminds me of a story I heard several years back (I don't know how true it was) where they said that after Bill Gates had said that if the speed of cars had evolved at the same rate as computers they would be going at [insert here a very high speed] blabla. To which a car industry representative replied that if cars were built like Windows, they would randomly crash or stall, for no obvious reason, in he middle of the highway.
It's nice to finally be able to verify the veracity of the comparison. When cars are built like [read "requiring"] computer software...
Then your site is probably a site I don't want to see. You are free to put anything you want on your site, but I am free to see it as I please. The artist cannot impose limitations on how someone sees their art. When I go to the museum, nobody tells me:
I routinely turn off Java support and Flash animations. Whatever the web designer thinks I want to see, I reserve the right to choose. If what you are providing is content, then how the content is viewed is not of your concern. Only the redistribution of your content is of your "jurisdiction".
My computer at school has been infected with Windows. Maybe they'll be able to remove it.
It's because they like "the power of 3"
I thought it was supposed to be "things to eat" not "beauty mask recipes"
No we don't have SETI@home but we have something very similar calle STI@tarpit. However, the search for terrestrial intelligence keeps coming up empty. This is creating a lot of noise around here about the high cost of such an endeavour.
The consensus is that if there ever was intelligent life on Terra, it has been long extinct. Ancient texts speak of some big rock hitting the third planet a few millions years back (as observed by the now famous astronomers Nibil and Boop). Some people believe that it wiped out all potential for uplift on that poor world. Of course, texts that old are not always reliable. Anything older than 2 million years contains more fantasy than fact.
But most scientists say that the third planet could never have fostered life, since the ground temperature is high enough on most of the planet to totally melt the rock. They say that the planet is covered in "oceans" of molten rock at temperatures exceeding 273 K. It's scary to imagine such an inferno, and makes it very dubious that life was ever possible there... much less intelligent life.
Yes they do. They mostly involve some alien probes crashing on our turf. Of course, the "Saturn" thing is only a vague geographical reference. Most people here live on Titan. Actually, a cousin, of a cousin of my uncle, had some alien probe crash through the roof of his house a couple of months ago.
He never knew what hit him, poor guy. It's really too bad, because he lives in lake country, where everybody dreams of owning a cottage... and we were going to babysit his home during next summer. Talk about bad timing. Of course it could have been worse, as we might have been the ones stuck in the house the the crash happened.
I don't get that movie icon when I do the same search.
I thought so too. What I liked from what had started happening was the filling of the background stories as to how the Federation came to be. They were beginning to show some of the Worlds of the federation and the interaction of their peoples, most notably Vulcans and Andorians. It would have been nice to see the development of those interactions into the Federation.