Allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment here...
Let's not also forget accessibility and backward compatibility. Neither of which you have if your site heavily relies on Ajax. Ajax is fun and all, but if you build a site or application that relies on Ajax (as so many do these days), you're completely leaving behind those with disability that prevents them from using a graphical browser and those who can't or won't use the latest versions of IE, Firefox, or Safari. (Let's at least be honest for a moment and admit that those are the only three browsers that Ajax authors ever attempt to target and even throwing Safari in there is a bit of a stretch.)
For awhile there, we were making good progress toward better adherence to web standards. Now it seems like "oooh shiny!" is rapidly taking over web design again.
Of course it's possible to build a site or application that is backwards compatible and accessible and thus uses Ajax only as a enhancement. But if the site works just fine without Ajax, why would you waste time implementing a few extra Ajax features just for show?
Whoever said that must have NEVER used an analogue cell phone. It's no better than AM radio and the signal fades in and out as you move around coverage.
It's actually an FM signal and true, it could be rather staticky if you were on the edge of the tower's signal radius. But I quite clearly recall that when analog phones were in their heyday, the voice quality was outstanding if you had line-of-sight to the tower. (And as long as you had a decent phone.) Most of the phone calls that I placed on ye olde bag phone were FAR superior to the gobbledegook that you get on the best digital signal these days.
The 2600 radio show, Off the Hook, regularly features a guy named Bernie S who calls into the show on his cell phone. They frequently discuss how voice quality of phones has dropped significantly as the cell phone networks went all digital and crammed as many conversations as they could into the smallest amount of bandwidth possible. Thus, like everyone else on a cell phone these days, Bernie's high-tech whiz-bang phone makes him sound like crap to everyone on the other end of the line.
Evidently, his phone is one of these that you can connect to your computer and get high-speed Internet access. One day, he called into the show via Skype and they discovered that when using VoIP through the phone's Internet connection, the voice quality was FAR better than when he just calls with the phone itself. (I imagine it wasn't any cheaper, though.)
Of course, after marveling at the voice quality, they went off into conspiracy theory land, but it makes you wonder what kind of service cell phone providers *could* be providing if they actually had an interest in providing any sort of quality to their customers.
We've done exactly this for a number of customers. The thin clients boot up, grab a kernel from the LTSP machine, then start X and a copy of rdesktop pointed at the Windows terminal server. The only major downfalls are that things like printers, USB devices, sound, and local removable media do not automatically get passed to the server. I understand that some of these are actually being worked on. We've also had a couple of employees complain that they couldn't play their music CDs in the machine. (And one of those actually had a brand new company-provided FM radio/CD player sitting on his desk right next to him...)
One word of caution: If you plan to run Windows 2003, do not expect certain peripherals (scanners and printers, mainly) and software to work properly. Since it's touted by MS as a server OS, many driver and application developers specifically exclude it from the software's internal compability list and the software will refuse to install. If you think you'll be hooking up a lot of peripherals or running a lot of odd little applications, consider Windows 2000 instead, which unfortunately is pretty much unsupported by Microsoft these days...
What did you expect to happen when you eliminated the stable/unstable cycle? At a minimum the individual parts of the kernel would achieve stability at different times so that the kernel as a whole was never stable.
I use FreeBSD and Linux, but I prefer Linux for most things because both the hardware and software compatibility is vastly better. Besides rock-solid stability, the main advantage that FreeBSD has over Linux is its development model. At all times, there is a stable branch and a development branch actively being worked on and releases are taken as snapshots from the stable branch after an approprite testing period.
As an aside, some distributions like Gentoo and Debian try to approximate the FreeBSD dev model. But they're hampered by the fact that much of the underlying software (including the Linux kernel itself) does not have a strict separation between stable and development code. Gentoo tries to enforce its own separation with masked and unmasked packages in portage, but this doesn't always work out for the best either. (In Gentoo, Firefox 1.5 is still considered "in testing" while the rest of the world has been using it just fine for months.)
Regarding the Linux kernel itself, I am also plauged by the 2.6 kernel's shoddy support for older hardware. I have a Tekram DC-390U2W SCSI card that's always had stellar support in Linux, but since 2.6, I can't burn CDs or play music CDs on the optical drive connected to it. It appears that whenever a program tries to scan the bus, the kernel goes wonky and won't allow new processes to be created for about 10-15 minutes. On a desktop system, that effectively means a temporarily hung machine. When I have the moolah, I intend to get an IDE DVD-RW drive just so I can burn things and listen to my CD collection again.
Er, they already have... In a nutshell, you cannot involve anyone under the age of 18 in pornography in any way. Selling, buying, accessing, or starring in.
I was asked by my boss to evaluate VPN between the red interfaces of two IPCop machines. Talk about simple. I don't know exactly how well it scales, but it can't be horrible. Today, one of my tasks is find out if and how well it works with m0n0wall and in roadwarrior configuration.
I guess it depends on the application. 90% of the computer users Out There aren't going to need more than one monitor at a time. Your office workers, for example, typically don't multitask between programs. Home users browse the web and read email, but usually not at the same time. Gamers might see some advantages depending on the game that they're playing.
However, as an IT guy by day and a wannabe programmer by night, I find that my productivity is vastly improved by dual-head monitors. The primary reason: work on the left screen, documentation on the right. Like most sysadmins (hopefully), I live on documentation, whether reading or writing it. When having to make do with just one screen, I turn on focus-follows-mouse and layer the windows such that it takes minimal effort to switch back and forth between them. But even that gets tedious, especially when my documentation is a man page or configuration file example that I'm trying to duplicate.
I can envision some very rare situations where three or even four monitors would come in handy, but those are almost statistically insignificant.
Ideas have to come from somewhere and they usually come from the more creative element. Writers, usually.
Watch an old original series Star Trek episode. Half or more of their technology is already in use or being developed today. (Doors opening automatically when a person approaches, personal communicators that let you talk to anyone on the planet, laser cannons, etc.) And we're not far off from a lot of TNG technology either (full-size touch-screen interfaces, complicated computer simulations, voice recognition, robots that move and act convincingly human-like).
The point is, trying to envision the future is the only way progress can be made. If we take some far-fetched idea and set some really brilliant minds on it to evalute its practicality, we quite often find that the idea wasn't so far-fetched after all.
That's what we call "progress."
Re:Submitter waited for this?
on
Google Calendar
·
· Score: 1
The yahoo interface doesn't even compete with google's.
Maybe it's been awhile since you've used Yahoo's calendar. I'm looking at it right now and comparing side-by-side to Google calendar. Yeah, *some* details are different (Google's has some ajaxiness bits here and there), but they're nearly identical in almost every way. I know everyone thinks Google is going to revolutionize everything they touch but c'mon. You can only improve the web-based calendar thing by so much.
First there are no hotkeys,
By hotkeys, you must mean keyboard shortcuts. Maybe you haven't heard of this thing called a WEB browser. You operate it with a MOUSE. You POINT and you CLICK. Keyboard shortcuts are great for vi and Emacs users whose hands never leave the keyboard. But if I have to move my hand from the mouse to the keyboard for any reason other to enter text, no time has been saved. Move your mouse or move your whole arm, it's all a matter of which is faster and the mouse usually wins.
and to add an event, you specificially have to click on the number/date (waste of time).
e.g. In the month view, do you like having to click the number 13 to add an event (mind you that a new page loads) or do you like clicking anywhere inside the box, and having an instant prompt, as in google's?
Let me get this straight, aside from hotkeys, your ENTIRE argument that Google's calendar is better than Yahoo's is that to select a day in Yahoo's calendar, you have to click on the number instead of the date box?
Not only is that insane, it's misleading. Yahoo's calendar has "[Add]" links in every date box. But, more importantly, there's a field at the bottom of the calendar to quickly add an event. You just enter a description and click Add. Additionally, you can enter the time and date with this method. With Google's calendar, if you want to add any details at all to an event, you have to load a new page.
The Google calendar is nice, but it's not some huge leap forward in web-based calendars. Further, it still suffers from the same basic flaw that all web calendars share and that is the fact that my data is not truly private. The pages are transmitted unencryped and they're stored unencrypted. As long as either of these is true, I can't bring myself rely on a web calendar for anything serious.
1. Was this KWord 1.5 or an earlier version? 1.5 has had many fixes for OpenDocument and might very well work if you used an older version in your example.
It was an earlier version. I intend to try KOffice 1.5 once it's in Gentoo's portage.
2. If it WAS 1.5, could you report the bug to bugs.kde.org? If possible, attach the document, as this will make it easier for us to fix the bug.
I'll do so if I discover it again. I didn't have the time before to submit a bug report, but now that I'm trying to be more active in submitting Gentoo bugs, I'd be happy to share what I find with developers.
Although both KOffice and OpenOffice use the same (open) document format, they're not quite compatible.
Example: Recently, I installed KOffice on my low-end laptop because it's much faster to load and use than OpenOffice. It may not have all the bells and whistles of OO, but it quite gets the job done 95% of the time. I thought everything would be great since they can both open and save ODFs, an open standard, by the way.
I drafted a document in OpenOffice containing a few paragraphs of text and one simple table. It opened just fine in KOffice. Made some changes, opened it again in OpenOffice which claimed that the document was corrupt and displayed a bunch of garage. The only way I could get it back into OpenOffice's dialect of ODF was to save it as a freaking Microsoft Word document in KOffice and then open and save it again in OpenOffice. I was able to repeat this about 50% of the time and found no clue as to what might have been causing the corruption.
As we've seen so many times before in the computing industry, agreeing on a standard is one thing, agreeing on an implementation of a standard is quite another.
Isn't this just a $500 VNC client? Yeah, maybe it does some other stuff too, but talk about highway robbery. On the surface, Apple seems gung-ho about proclaiming how well OS X interopterates with other platforms. Opening Microsoft file formats, mapping Windows network shares, and running Unix X11 applications all work great, but no effort is made to ensure that the same is true in the other direciton. Just try connecting and using a Mac desktop with a non-Apple VNC client and see how well that goes. It isn't pretty.
When remotely supporting our Mac customers, the best option we've found is to disable the builtin Remote Desktop and just have them use OSXvnc. Not only do you not have to pay the equivalent of a second computer, but it works fine with VNC clients on every platform. (Most importantly, Linux.)
A) School sucks. People ridicule you. You get embarrased. Then you grow up and realize that apart from the education itself, none of it matters AT ALL. If there's one thing I'm going to pound into my kids' head as they're growing up, it's this. I learned this, everybody learns this. Granted, this is on a different scale, but it's the same principle. (And I doubt that now he even looks anything at all like he did three years ago so he can't fall back on that, "but I'm ruined for life" excuse.)
B) Just what do you THINK is going to happen when you make a tape of yourself being an idiot an leave it lying around for anybody to find? He should sue HIMSELF for negligence. My friends and I made plenty of tapes JUST LIKE THIS and far worse when we were teens, but in our case, we showed them off to family and friends who laughed at us for being dorks. We laughed with them, because it was true. If Star Wars Kid can't laugh at himself, he's always going to have major confidence issues and $300,000 of someone else's money isn't going to fix that.
C) Why hasn't anyone yet brought up the fact that he had to have used the school's studio equipment WITHOUT authorization? (I'm dead certain he never asked a teacher or principal if he could use the studio to record himself being an idiot for a few minutes.) In most schools these days, one can easily get suspended and expelled for expressing an original idea, but apparently not for deliberately misusing the school's taxpayer-provided property to entertain a childish fantasy one boring afternoon.
KGB Adivsor: I hear they don't have secret arrests over there...
Army Commisar: They don't have secret laws or show trials.
Politburo Advisor: Oh... And they watch funny shows on TV... and have these things called elections so that everyone can have their input into the process...
Indeed, I'd been bitching and moaning all these years that in almost a decade, Slashdot had not changed its basic layout and style one iota since the very beginning.
After today, I'll never EVER complain about it again.
foresee these spy planes may omit the mufflers so they can get more airtime per tank. I do not welcome a sky full of noisy airplanes buzzing overhead at low altitude run by the "authorities".
I don't think the UAVs are all that noisy. One article used the term "stealth" or "stealthy". Wouldn't make a whole lot of sense for a "spy" plane to announce audibly announce itself every time it flew over unless its sole purpose is to tell citizens, "I'm watching you."
Please forgive my language, but every time I think about that damned noisy machine I can't do anything about, I start getting riled. It seems the only way I am going to get any peace is to move out to where it will just be economically infeasable for the authorities to go all the way out there to hover their noisy machines.
Maybe you give up too easy. There are certainly others like you in your neighborhood, so maybe you could get a group together and very publically ask the police deparment if there's somewhere else they can train. Failing that, get in touch with the local government, the FAA, and any local aero clubs and find out if there's a way to get an ordinance passed to prohibit these guys from training over populated areas. Or at least from training over the same area every single time.
It has to be possible, because Albuquerque's two runways are shared by commercial airlines and the military. The airport is in close proximity to more than a few neighborhoods. Commercial jets can land and take off however they please, but the Air National Guard's F-16s are only allowed to use one runway because some kind of local noise ordinance prohibits them from ascending and descending over heavily populated areas.
I agree with the sentiment that this whole plan infringes most grievously upon our freedoms, however, this comment is a more than a little asine:
But what happens when lots of relatively dumb drones have to share airspace with aircraft carrying passengers?
UAVs are unmanned in the sense that there is no pilot aboard the aircraft itself. NOT in the sense that they're flying around up there on autopilot, oblivious to other air traffic. A UAV is operated by a trained pilot on the ground. I don't know about these civilian jobbies, but the military ones have radar and IFF transponders so that the pilots can see other aircraft in the area and, just as importantly, other aircraft can see the UAV.
Summary of differences between normal aircraft and UAV: - UAVs cost far less (no need for a cockpit) - Pilot avoids hazards normally associated with flying, most of them involving gravity
and China lacks the geographic location to every conventionally threaten the US or Europe.
Geographic location means squat if you have air power. See nearly the last century the United States military for many examples.
Whether they have air power or not is a different story. Almost every country in the world has an eye on China, but so far nobody seems to be worried that they're planning to start something. I would be surprised if they were, given all the business relationships they have with the world (and especially the U.S.).
Do as the librarians do: divide the books into major subjects and then alphabetize by author. If you need to search by something else, Google is your cross-reference.
Slashdot Mirror
Allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment here...
Let's not also forget accessibility and backward compatibility. Neither of which you have if your site heavily relies on Ajax. Ajax is fun and all, but if you build a site or application that relies on Ajax (as so many do these days), you're completely leaving behind those with disability that prevents them from using a graphical browser and those who can't or won't use the latest versions of IE, Firefox, or Safari. (Let's at least be honest for a moment and admit that those are the only three browsers that Ajax authors ever attempt to target and even throwing Safari in there is a bit of a stretch.)
For awhile there, we were making good progress toward better adherence to web standards. Now it seems like "oooh shiny!" is rapidly taking over web design again.
Of course it's possible to build a site or application that is backwards compatible and accessible and thus uses Ajax only as a enhancement. But if the site works just fine without Ajax, why would you waste time implementing a few extra Ajax features just for show?
Whoever said that must have NEVER used an analogue cell phone. It's no better than AM radio and the signal fades in and out as you move around coverage.
It's actually an FM signal and true, it could be rather staticky if you were on the edge of the tower's signal radius. But I quite clearly recall that when analog phones were in their heyday, the voice quality was outstanding if you had line-of-sight to the tower. (And as long as you had a decent phone.) Most of the phone calls that I placed on ye olde bag phone were FAR superior to the gobbledegook that you get on the best digital signal these days.
The 2600 radio show, Off the Hook, regularly features a guy named Bernie S who calls into the show on his cell phone. They frequently discuss how voice quality of phones has dropped significantly as the cell phone networks went all digital and crammed as many conversations as they could into the smallest amount of bandwidth possible. Thus, like everyone else on a cell phone these days, Bernie's high-tech whiz-bang phone makes him sound like crap to everyone on the other end of the line.
Evidently, his phone is one of these that you can connect to your computer and get high-speed Internet access. One day, he called into the show via Skype and they discovered that when using VoIP through the phone's Internet connection, the voice quality was FAR better than when he just calls with the phone itself. (I imagine it wasn't any cheaper, though.)
Of course, after marveling at the voice quality, they went off into conspiracy theory land, but it makes you wonder what kind of service cell phone providers *could* be providing if they actually had an interest in providing any sort of quality to their customers.
We've done exactly this for a number of customers. The thin clients boot up, grab a kernel from the LTSP machine, then start X and a copy of rdesktop pointed at the Windows terminal server. The only major downfalls are that things like printers, USB devices, sound, and local removable media do not automatically get passed to the server. I understand that some of these are actually being worked on. We've also had a couple of employees complain that they couldn't play their music CDs in the machine. (And one of those actually had a brand new company-provided FM radio/CD player sitting on his desk right next to him...)
One word of caution: If you plan to run Windows 2003, do not expect certain peripherals (scanners and printers, mainly) and software to work properly. Since it's touted by MS as a server OS, many driver and application developers specifically exclude it from the software's internal compability list and the software will refuse to install. If you think you'll be hooking up a lot of peripherals or running a lot of odd little applications, consider Windows 2000 instead, which unfortunately is pretty much unsupported by Microsoft these days...
What did you expect to happen when you eliminated the stable/unstable cycle? At a minimum the individual parts of the kernel would achieve stability at different times so that the kernel as a whole was never stable.
I use FreeBSD and Linux, but I prefer Linux for most things because both the hardware and software compatibility is vastly better. Besides rock-solid stability, the main advantage that FreeBSD has over Linux is its development model. At all times, there is a stable branch and a development branch actively being worked on and releases are taken as snapshots from the stable branch after an approprite testing period.
As an aside, some distributions like Gentoo and Debian try to approximate the FreeBSD dev model. But they're hampered by the fact that much of the underlying software (including the Linux kernel itself) does not have a strict separation between stable and development code. Gentoo tries to enforce its own separation with masked and unmasked packages in portage, but this doesn't always work out for the best either. (In Gentoo, Firefox 1.5 is still considered "in testing" while the rest of the world has been using it just fine for months.)
Regarding the Linux kernel itself, I am also plauged by the 2.6 kernel's shoddy support for older hardware. I have a Tekram DC-390U2W SCSI card that's always had stellar support in Linux, but since 2.6, I can't burn CDs or play music CDs on the optical drive connected to it. It appears that whenever a program tries to scan the bus, the kernel goes wonky and won't allow new processes to be created for about 10-15 minutes. On a desktop system, that effectively means a temporarily hung machine. When I have the moolah, I intend to get an IDE DVD-RW drive just so I can burn things and listen to my CD collection again.
Or how about every U.S. state?
Er, they already have... In a nutshell, you cannot involve anyone under the age of 18 in pornography in any way. Selling, buying, accessing, or starring in.
I was asked by my boss to evaluate VPN between the red interfaces of two IPCop machines. Talk about simple. I don't know exactly how well it scales, but it can't be horrible. Today, one of my tasks is find out if and how well it works with m0n0wall and in roadwarrior configuration.
I guess it depends on the application. 90% of the computer users Out There aren't going to need more than one monitor at a time. Your office workers, for example, typically don't multitask between programs. Home users browse the web and read email, but usually not at the same time. Gamers might see some advantages depending on the game that they're playing.
However, as an IT guy by day and a wannabe programmer by night, I find that my productivity is vastly improved by dual-head monitors. The primary reason: work on the left screen, documentation on the right. Like most sysadmins (hopefully), I live on documentation, whether reading or writing it. When having to make do with just one screen, I turn on focus-follows-mouse and layer the windows such that it takes minimal effort to switch back and forth between them. But even that gets tedious, especially when my documentation is a man page or configuration file example that I'm trying to duplicate.
I can envision some very rare situations where three or even four monitors would come in handy, but those are almost statistically insignificant.
I wonder how much time it... Oh wait, their server is already down.
The next server is almost ready. Subscribers can slashdot it early!
Ideas have to come from somewhere and they usually come from the more creative element. Writers, usually.
Watch an old original series Star Trek episode. Half or more of their technology is already in use or being developed today. (Doors opening automatically when a person approaches, personal communicators that let you talk to anyone on the planet, laser cannons, etc.) And we're not far off from a lot of TNG technology either (full-size touch-screen interfaces, complicated computer simulations, voice recognition, robots that move and act convincingly human-like).
The point is, trying to envision the future is the only way progress can be made. If we take some far-fetched idea and set some really brilliant minds on it to evalute its practicality, we quite often find that the idea wasn't so far-fetched after all.
That's what we call "progress."
The yahoo interface doesn't even compete with google's.
Maybe it's been awhile since you've used Yahoo's calendar. I'm looking at it right now and comparing side-by-side to Google calendar. Yeah, *some* details are different (Google's has some ajaxiness bits here and there), but they're nearly identical in almost every way. I know everyone thinks Google is going to revolutionize everything they touch but c'mon. You can only improve the web-based calendar thing by so much.
First there are no hotkeys,
By hotkeys, you must mean keyboard shortcuts. Maybe you haven't heard of this thing called a WEB browser. You operate it with a MOUSE. You POINT and you CLICK. Keyboard shortcuts are great for vi and Emacs users whose hands never leave the keyboard. But if I have to move my hand from the mouse to the keyboard for any reason other to enter text, no time has been saved. Move your mouse or move your whole arm, it's all a matter of which is faster and the mouse usually wins.
and to add an event, you specificially have to click on the number/date (waste of time).
e.g. In the month view, do you like having to click the number 13 to add an event (mind you that a new page loads) or do you like clicking anywhere inside the box, and having an instant prompt, as in google's?
Let me get this straight, aside from hotkeys, your ENTIRE argument that Google's calendar is better than Yahoo's is that to select a day in Yahoo's calendar, you have to click on the number instead of the date box?
Not only is that insane, it's misleading. Yahoo's calendar has "[Add]" links in every date box. But, more importantly, there's a field at the bottom of the calendar to quickly add an event. You just enter a description and click Add. Additionally, you can enter the time and date with this method. With Google's calendar, if you want to add any details at all to an event, you have to load a new page.
The Google calendar is nice, but it's not some huge leap forward in web-based calendars. Further, it still suffers from the same basic flaw that all web calendars share and that is the fact that my data is not truly private. The pages are transmitted unencryped and they're stored unencrypted. As long as either of these is true, I can't bring myself rely on a web calendar for anything serious.
1. Was this KWord 1.5 or an earlier version? 1.5 has had many fixes for OpenDocument and might very well work if you used an older version in your example.
It was an earlier version. I intend to try KOffice 1.5 once it's in Gentoo's portage.
2. If it WAS 1.5, could you report the bug to bugs.kde.org? If possible, attach the document, as this will make it easier for us to fix the bug.
I'll do so if I discover it again. I didn't have the time before to submit a bug report, but now that I'm trying to be more active in submitting Gentoo bugs, I'd be happy to share what I find with developers.
Although both KOffice and OpenOffice use the same (open) document format, they're not quite compatible.
Example: Recently, I installed KOffice on my low-end laptop because it's much faster to load and use than OpenOffice. It may not have all the bells and whistles of OO, but it quite gets the job done 95% of the time. I thought everything would be great since they can both open and save ODFs, an open standard, by the way.
I drafted a document in OpenOffice containing a few paragraphs of text and one simple table. It opened just fine in KOffice. Made some changes, opened it again in OpenOffice which claimed that the document was corrupt and displayed a bunch of garage. The only way I could get it back into OpenOffice's dialect of ODF was to save it as a freaking Microsoft Word document in KOffice and then open and save it again in OpenOffice. I was able to repeat this about 50% of the time and found no clue as to what might have been causing the corruption.
As we've seen so many times before in the computing industry, agreeing on a standard is one thing, agreeing on an implementation of a standard is quite another.
Isn't this just a $500 VNC client? Yeah, maybe it does some other stuff too, but talk about highway robbery. On the surface, Apple seems gung-ho about proclaiming how well OS X interopterates with other platforms. Opening Microsoft file formats, mapping Windows network shares, and running Unix X11 applications all work great, but no effort is made to ensure that the same is true in the other direciton. Just try connecting and using a Mac desktop with a non-Apple VNC client and see how well that goes. It isn't pretty.
When remotely supporting our Mac customers, the best option we've found is to disable the builtin Remote Desktop and just have them use OSXvnc. Not only do you not have to pay the equivalent of a second computer, but it works fine with VNC clients on every platform. (Most importantly, Linux.)
Whether or not the product in question was exciting doesn't make it any more legal to report trade secrets.
Unless the story was about Microsoft. Then everyone here would be screaming up and down about their dirty, foul, strong-arm legal tactics.
But since it's Apple, it's okay, they're just trying to protect their business from the damaging effects of journalist scum.
Note to Apple: If you want to keep something a trade secret, work a little harder on keeping it a secret first.
No, I'm sorry, this is all idiotic and stupid.
A) School sucks. People ridicule you. You get embarrased. Then you grow up and realize that apart from the education itself, none of it matters AT ALL. If there's one thing I'm going to pound into my kids' head as they're growing up, it's this. I learned this, everybody learns this. Granted, this is on a different scale, but it's the same principle. (And I doubt that now he even looks anything at all like he did three years ago so he can't fall back on that, "but I'm ruined for life" excuse.)
B) Just what do you THINK is going to happen when you make a tape of yourself being an idiot an leave it lying around for anybody to find? He should sue HIMSELF for negligence. My friends and I made plenty of tapes JUST LIKE THIS and far worse when we were teens, but in our case, we showed them off to family and friends who laughed at us for being dorks. We laughed with them, because it was true. If Star Wars Kid can't laugh at himself, he's always going to have major confidence issues and $300,000 of someone else's money isn't going to fix that.
C) Why hasn't anyone yet brought up the fact that he had to have used the school's studio equipment WITHOUT authorization? (I'm dead certain he never asked a teacher or principal if he could use the studio to record himself being an idiot for a few minutes.) In most schools these days, one can easily get suspended and expelled for expressing an original idea, but apparently not for deliberately misusing the school's taxpayer-provided property to entertain a childish fantasy one boring afternoon.
KGB Adivsor: I hear they don't have secret arrests over there...
... and have these things called elections so that everyone can have their input into the process...
Army Commisar: They don't have secret laws or show trials.
Politburo Advisor: Oh... And they watch funny shows on TV
*sniff* I miss the old us.
I'm probably not the first to make this realization (nothing like it showed up at +3, though).
Anyone else notice that the name of the site is Port 25? The same port that spammers and viruses attack looking for open relays?
Seems an odd but chillingly appropriate choice for a Microsoft website.
Indeed, I'd been bitching and moaning all these years that in almost a decade, Slashdot had not changed its basic layout and style one iota since the very beginning.
After today, I'll never EVER complain about it again.
foresee these spy planes may omit the mufflers so they can get more airtime per tank. I do not welcome a sky full of noisy airplanes buzzing overhead at low altitude run by the "authorities".
I don't think the UAVs are all that noisy. One article used the term "stealth" or "stealthy". Wouldn't make a whole lot of sense for a "spy" plane to announce audibly announce itself every time it flew over unless its sole purpose is to tell citizens, "I'm watching you."
Please forgive my language, but every time I think about that damned noisy machine I can't do anything about, I start getting riled. It seems the only way I am going to get any peace is to move out to where it will just be economically infeasable for the authorities to go all the way out there to hover their noisy machines.
Maybe you give up too easy. There are certainly others like you in your neighborhood, so maybe you could get a group together and very publically ask the police deparment if there's somewhere else they can train. Failing that, get in touch with the local government, the FAA, and any local aero clubs and find out if there's a way to get an ordinance passed to prohibit these guys from training over populated areas. Or at least from training over the same area every single time.
It has to be possible, because Albuquerque's two runways are shared by commercial airlines and the military. The airport is in close proximity to more than a few neighborhoods. Commercial jets can land and take off however they please, but the Air National Guard's F-16s are only allowed to use one runway because some kind of local noise ordinance prohibits them from ascending and descending over heavily populated areas.
I agree with the sentiment that this whole plan infringes most grievously upon our freedoms, however, this comment is a more than a little asine:
But what happens when lots of relatively dumb drones have to share airspace with aircraft carrying passengers?
UAVs are unmanned in the sense that there is no pilot aboard the aircraft itself. NOT in the sense that they're flying around up there on autopilot, oblivious to other air traffic. A UAV is operated by a trained pilot on the ground. I don't know about these civilian jobbies, but the military ones have radar and IFF transponders so that the pilots can see other aircraft in the area and, just as importantly, other aircraft can see the UAV.
Summary of differences between normal aircraft and UAV:
- UAVs cost far less (no need for a cockpit)
- Pilot avoids hazards normally associated with flying, most of them involving gravity
and China lacks the geographic location to every conventionally threaten the US or Europe.
Geographic location means squat if you have air power. See nearly the last century the United States military for many examples.
Whether they have air power or not is a different story. Almost every country in the world has an eye on China, but so far nobody seems to be worried that they're planning to start something. I would be surprised if they were, given all the business relationships they have with the world (and especially the U.S.).
So you're speaking out as a proponent of fair, balanced, and equal-opportunity wars? Thank you, you just made my morning.
We should counter it with the "icare" tag. :)
Do as the librarians do: divide the books into major subjects and then alphabetize by author. If you need to search by something else, Google is your cross-reference.