The bad is that you can't uninstall it (easily). But you can always disable it...
The "bad" is a couple of things - one being that you can't install it, but a "bigger bad" is that the install is really quite surreptitious. If it popped up like any other Firefox extension or was quite clearly labelled beforehand as existing, I doubt there'd be so many complaints here.
Just nitpicking, but it doesn't just "make it think" you're using - you actually are using IE with IE Tab - that tab contains an instance of IE itself (which gets annoying when your proxy settings are different between the two)
Yeh... I'm living in Germany at the moment, and have a 10 year old car. I've been considering upgrading to something newer since I'm doing pretty well for myself right now, and until I heard the details, I thought this might be interesting... however, my 1998 Renault Megane Cabrio is almost certainly worth more than 2500 as a trade-in at the dealer (especially since my plan is to simply upgrade to a 2008/2009 Renault Megane Cabrio - I think I can probably get at least 3500 for it as a trade-in), so there's no way I'd scrap it for 2500 instead.
Just in case you were unaware, Kangaroo is relatively commonly eaten in the great southern land of Oz. It's considered a generally "low quality" meat though, and is also used as pet food. Although, you can get kangaroo steaks and burgers intended for human consumption in most supermarkets or on the menus of some eateries, especially at tourist locations.
Koalas on the other hand are legally protected.
As a note, Australia is the only country in the world that eats both the animals displayed on its coat of arms (Kangaroo and Emu). I'm not sure the British could, even if they wanted, since they have a Lion and a Unicorn, and most Americans would probably be a little averse to the idea of Eagle for dinner.
I think the silkworms probably do make more sense than trying to get a bunch of roos on a space vessel (I'm loving the imagery of that though)
Depends on the personality test... once, many years ago while job hunting (thankfully I'm long past that, and in to the "career" part of life now where I get offered a new job every month by people trying to steal me away from my current employer), I applied for a job at an ISP as a "grunt that stops the servers falling over" (I think the title was actually something like "network engineer", but in reality it was just a dogsbody job).
I did "brilliantly" in the technical part of the interview they said. One last "formality" was then to fill out a little personality test.
Question 1: If you were a vegetable, what kind would you be?
No, I'm not kidding... that's really what it said. I had NO idea how to answer such a stupid question, and knowing at that point that I really COULD stand to keep looking for awhile (which turned out to be the best thing I could have done), I wrote, "This question is moronic", stood up, and left.
I certainly had no way to "lie" on that test to get hired, because I had NO idea what kind of answer they were looking for.
Since I generally play as a Wizard, I'll go for "a" if I'm low level (DIE Soldier Ants!) or "h" if I'm higher to get rid of the Mind Flayers (don't care about the dwarves of course, they're just "casualties of war")
Errr... perfectly correct English grammar? I believe more common modern usage in most of the English speaking world is to use "leave" instead of "let" (as in "leave it alone" rather than "let it alone") but "let" is still perfectly correct even if a little archaic sounding.
They didn't even let you make a copy of your data?
Nope, they quite literally burst in to the house waving the search warrant in my face, and proceeded to grab every piece of computer equipment they could find. One guy basically cornered me and "explained" the situation to me as the others went about grabbing everything (I got the feeling he was more or less "keeping me occupied" rather than any sense of trying to actually inform me of what was going on)
I'm not going to let my 15 years of documents be lost permanently
I didn't quite have 15 years worth of data at the time, but I'd say I had at least 5... and yeh, pretty much everything that my friends didn't already have a copy of was indeed lost (which of course didn't include more personal stuff such as my email archive including "first contact" emails between myself and my then girlfriend (who I still consider the love of my life even though we're no longer together)). I was VERY annoyed/upset about it as I'm sure you understand.
I know you were joking, but I have a story that is likely similar (not Linux though...).
Quite some years ago, I was running an Amiga as my main system (relatively high end Amiga 4000, not some toy games thing). I was talking to a guy on IRC and he was bragging about putting a bomb on a plane. This was well before 2001, so the world wasn't in the grips of "OMG terrorists!", but it still seemed like a fairly big deal to me. Now, from my perspective, I was pretty sure the guy was just talking out his arse, but I wasn't really 100% sure, so for safety's sake, I didn't really want to just leave it.
At this point, let me elaborate that I was in fact a teenager, and also not particularly "worldly wise". It was at this point, I made somewhat of a mistake. I had access to a few servers I really shouldn't have, and decided that since I didn't want to get involved in the process of a police investigation (there's nothing more I could tell them other than what the guy said on IRC), I sent an email "anonymously" through a badly configured mail server (forging my own headers using telnet as my SMTP client) and informed the police and the airport in question about what the guy had said.
Two days later, the police arrived at my door (um, yeh, I'd sent the email "anonymously", but hadn't taken any steps to obscure my IP address, so all they needed to do was call the owner of the mail server, followed by my ISP). They had a search warrant stating they could seize any computer related equipment in my house, and stated it was issued "under suspicion of Attempted Murder and Breach of the Telecommunications Act" (no I'm not kidding... it really did say "Attempted Murder").
They took all my computers and related equipment (right down to a stack of old SCSI drives I had in my sock drawer). I spent a couple of MONTHS without them. I got a nice write-up in the local paper, but that wasn't much consolation. After two months, I made a complaint to the Police Complaints Authority stating that it really was ridiculous for the police to have my stuff for so long (their ongoing excuse was that they sent it to another city for analysis). I finally got it back about two weeks after that, only to find that they'd ripped the HDD out of my A4000 and erased it. I can only assume they stuck it in a PC, saw that it was "not formatted" and tried to "recover" the data from it.
They made no statements about whether my HDD had been "helpful" in their investigation or not, and I heard no further from them after that (including no further comments about the "suspicion of attempted murder"!). The best I could get from them was a weak apology about my data loss, as being a private individual (and unemployed at that), there was no protection for my data under the law (if I'd been a company, I probably could've sued, but a private individual's data was (may still be?) essentially considered worthless in the eyes of the law).
For reference: the country this happened in was New Zealand - normally a pretty nice place, but don't expect small town cops, or even the "computer analysis team" to have ANY idea what they're doing or admit that this is the case (actually, I would HOPE this has changed over the years, but I wouldn't bet on it).
Fully agree about Troughton - not my favourite, but definitely in the top few. It's such a shame that no-one who hasn't seen those episodes will get to experience them again - most of Troughton's episodes are "lost" (as are a few of Hartnell's, however much fewer). I have every episode of every Doctor in my collection, and for the "lost" episodes I have reconstructions. The reconstructions are okay for reminiscing, but I wouldn't expect someone who hadn't seen the original to get in to it at all.
If someone had some of these lost episodes somewhere, there'd actually be VERY good money in making it known.
For the record, my Doctor Who watching days began about mid-way through Troughton, and I started "never wanting to miss an episode" around mid-way through Pertwee. I'd rank them in order of my favourite to least favourite as:
David Tennant (10th)
Tom Baker (4th)
Patrick Troughton (2nd)
Jon Pertwee (3rd)
Peter Davison (5th)
William Hartnell (1st)
Sylvester McCoy (7th)
Christopher Eccleston (9th)
Paul McGann (8th - TV Movie)
Colin Baker (6th)
Choosing between McCoy and Eccleston was actually difficult, because I honestly do think McCoy was a better actor and a better Doctor, but Eccleston DID manage to re-kickstart the "feel" of the Doctor after such a long break, which would've been very difficult for anyone to manage I think.
Interesting yes, and based on those, I'll take back any genetic statements I made... however I won't take back the statement that I they really don't look the same (which is what my reply was mostly aimed at - the person I replied to said, "Actually, Israelis are mostly pretty swarthy. They don't look that different from Palestinians."). There are certainly a number of "swarthy" Israelis, but there's also quite a number of blond haired, blue eyed, fair skinned Israelis, which are not traits one finds in the Palestinian people.
Offtopic, but I'd just like to point out that your sig shouldn't have a comma in it to be grammatically correct. It's true you generally pause at that point in speech, so a comma "feels right" but grammatically it'd be similar to writing, "I, went to the shop", which is quite clearly wrong.
I wasn't really trying to promote the Commodore so much (honestly, while it was "okay" to drive, it's definitely not even my style of car in the least), just give a description of it since I knew most people would be unfamiliar with it if I only gave the name. It's definitely NOT a small sedan though - even by American standards (where perhaps you might call it "average sized" - I know the US loves big cars). It is a fairly typical GM vehicle though, nothing special (as I said, it was my company car, so you really can't expect anything exotic!). Looking again at the Wikipedia entry, it's also called a "Chevrolet Lumina" and weighs between 1569kg and 1654kg.
There are those of us looking from the outside who fear this has already happened. (not everyone of course, and not even a "majority", but still a significant enough portion to be serious concern)
But you don't see Muslims protesting against suicide terrorists. And that's the big problem with Islam.
Actually, it happens, but the "mainstream" media don't seem to make a big deal of it - probably because it doesn't fit the Zeitgeist, and so isn't going to help their ratings as much as other kinds of "news" could.
There are of course many more examples - Google is your friend.
Another interesting note is that you don't really see Christian groups protesting against radical Christianity either. It does happen from time to time, but it's rarely reported on as it fits the Zeitgeist even less (both the radical Christianity and opposition to it are uninteresting right now from a news perspective)
Just to note: I'm not Muslim - in fact, I think they're all a bunch of kooks for believing in an invisible sky god. I think the same thing about Christians, Jews, Satanists, Wiccans and pretty much every other religion as well though.
What?! For your own sake, please do a Google Image search for "Israeli". Results for me are full of white girls (oddly, the search seems to give 95% female, 5% male - I guess Israeli girls are popular!) that look no different to the typical Western European or American. Also, keep in mind that this makes perfect sense, as the state of Israel was formed about 60 years ago and people of Jewish descent from primarily Western Europe and America flooded in to the region - most of these people having at least some non-Jewish relatives (if I, as a non-Jew, marry a Jewish girl, our kids will be termed "Jewish" although even if my wife can trace 100% Jewish lineage back for centuries, our kids are genetically 50% at best. If my wife were 50%, our kids would be 25%. Go back for as long as the Jewish people were centred in Europe and America, and it's a fair bet that the vast majority are genetically more European than anything else). Living in a hot sunny places (such as Israel) tends to darken you up a bit, but there's still plenty of blond haired, blue eyed fair skinned Israelis. (I myself am not of Jewish background, but am quite light skinned generally - I lived in Australia for 6 years and got a couple of shades darker just from that - now I've been out of Australia for coming up on 2 and my skin is paling again)
Sorry, but I'd classify that as "still your fault". As SOON as the asshat swooped in front of you (which he certainly was an asshat for doing, no doubt there), you should've been on the brakes to increase the distance between you and him (not saying slam them on, just press them enough to slow rapidly, but safely). When he swooped out again, you would've already been braking and so wouldn't have hit the guy at the front (you'd needed to have increased your braking more of course, but if you were going fast enough that you couldn't, then you were too close BEFORE the asshat swooped in).
If I'm maintaining a proper following distance of 2 seconds
2 seconds?! I had it drilled in to me many years ago when I was learning to drive that the minimum distance you should keep is 3 seconds, and "4 is better". I tend to stick by that and aim for at least 4 seconds at any time. If I'm at 3 seconds, that's okay but I'll back off a little as opportunity presents. If I'm closer than 3 seconds, alarm bells will ring in my head (especially on the Autobahn here in Germany, where I typically drive between 160km/h and 180km/h)
Have you ever met someone who was convinced that a specific safety feature in their car (or it's excellent engineering) saved their life?
Yes, me (I know your statement was in the positive about this, so I'm not arguing with you, just giving my own little story here).
I was driving my company car in Australia (a Holden VZ Commodore Acclaim (3.6 Litre "Alloytec" engine, 5 speed Automatic, Sedan body)) a couple of years back, and it was raining. As I was going through a roundabout, a guy came on in front of me WAY too close (I had right of way, but he claimed later that he didn't see me). Now, the Holden Commodore is a bit of a tank really - big, heavy and not so manoeuvrable compared to the "sportier" kind of cars I normally drive. I slammed my foot on the brake pedal and turned to move to the next lane of the roundabout - the ESP ("Electronic Stability Program") did its job PERFECTLY and I made it off to the side of the roundabout without a collision. The other guy saw me at that point, and we both stopped just up the road, where he apologised.
A couple of days later, it was raining again, and I was at a similar roundabout. I made sure there were no cars in any direction, turned off the ESP (the driver can toggle it on/off with a simple button press) and tried a similar manoeuvre to see what the car would do - the wheels locked, skidded on the wet road, the car spun around twice and ended up off the side of the roundabout (just a dirt patch, so it was fine to do). I am therefore EXTREMELY grateful for the ESP when I needed it.
The worst one I ever had was a black and white scan of a printed screenshot. I asked the guy about it and he apparently had taken the screenshot, pasted it in to Word, printed that and then used an MFP's "scan to email" function to send it to me. I am still boggled about how anyone could do this and NOT stop to think for a second they could've just emailed me the screenshot to begin with.
Before my current job (writing software and supporting software developers for the MFP industry), I did "connectivity support" for the same company. I didn't deal with end users, I dealt with technicians. Many of these guys however were NOT IT techs, the vast majority were old curmudgeony copier techs that were a bit hesitant to enter the wonderful world of connected copiers (keeping in mind this was several years back, and I did deal with small dealerships' techs as well as our branch staff). As such, I have quite a few wonderful tales from my time on the other end of the phone/email/escalation system. Some names of people and companies altered to protect the guilty (but yes, my name is Ben, and I do work for Konica Minolta).
Story 1) The magical wireless RJ45 socket. *Ring ring*, *ring ring* Me: "Konica Minolta, Ben speaking." John: "Hi Ben, it's John from Small Rural Copier Company here. I just hooked up a second hand Di251 at a customer and they said they want it connected to their PC to print. So, we sold them the Pi3502 (print controller), but it's not printing, what could be the problem?" Me: "I'm gonna need a bit more info John. You've installed the controller and the NIC, and plugged everything in right?" John: "Yep, I even set an 'IP Address' and installed the 'print driver' like the setup instructions said!" Me: "Okay, good start. Tell me happens when you try to print." John: "Nothing at all. The customer opens a document, selects to print it, and after a while it just says it failed to print" Me: "Right, the most likely cause then is just that it can't communicate for some reason. Can you ping the MFP from the PC?" John asks how to do that, and I talk him through it John: "Nope, it says no reply." Me: "Okay, tell me the IP address of the Pi3502 and the computer." John does so, and I'm actually a little stunned that they're actually valid, on the same subnet, and everything sounded like it should be okay. Me: "Hmmm... this might be a faulty NIC in the Pi3502, since we've seen a couple of those on this model, and it is second hand. Could you check if the link light is on?" John: "Sure, where do I find the link light?" Me: "The NIC has two LEDs - right on top of where the ethernet cable is plugged in, one should flash from time to time and the other should be on permanently - that's the link light." John: "Ethernet cable? Is that the blue one that was in the box? I didn't know what to do with that, so I haven't done anything with it, it's still in the box." Me: "... so, just to get this straight... what cables are currently connected to the Di251?" John: "Just the power cable." I then explained the 'finer points' of the concept of networking to John, who eventually became enlightened as to the purpose of an ethernet cable, and managed to get everything working about 10 minutes later
Story 2) How to scan. *Ring ring*, *ring ring* Me: "Konica Minolta, Ben speaking." Peter: "Hi Ben, it's Peter from Moderately Sized City Dealership here. I've never set up scanning before, but the customer wants to use the 'Scan to FTP' function. Can you talk me through setting that up?" Me: [stifling a groan] "Sure Peter. Do you have the details of the customer's FTP server?" Peter: "Server? They don't have one of those. Do they need that for scanning?" Me: "If you want to scan to FTP, you need an FTP server. They could install one on a desktop PC if they don't have a dedicated server though. Talk to their admin and ask if they'll install one somewhere for scanning. There's one on the CD that came with the MFP if they don't have a preference, and I can talk you through the setup of that" (The one on the CD was basically a dead simple little "write only" FTP server specifically designed with scanning in min
If I had significantly less money (I know I earn fairly well above average) and had to pay 20c per message I'm sure I'd feel the same. But, as it stands, I make enough money (high 5 figure or low 6 figure in USD terms depending on exchange rate at the time), don't pay for texts anyway, and they're less than half that price here in Germany on most plans anyway even if I did have to pay for them (actually, I think "most plans" tend to include a certain number per month "free" (as in, bundled in to the monthly bill whether you use them or not)).
I'm sure the telcos make a small fortune out of teenagers sitting around texting each other all day and night, but that doesn't make it any less valuable to me and the many others in my situation or similar. Even if I paid for the texts myself, I'd not bat an eyelid as I probably send 5 to 10 a month at most - even at 20c, that'd be $1 to $2 a month, which is truly insignificant.
If I wanted to actively avoid SMS, then sure, a smartphone or netbook would be the way to go... but why NOT use SMS in these circumstances? It's quick, easy and does what it needs to do (and of course there's the point that the other party would have to know to send me an email or vice versa, whereas it's a given that I can receive SMS anywhere, anytime and I make this same assumption about them)
Also note that since I'm talking about work here, cost is pretty much irrelevant - I'm sure it's cheap enough anyway since my phone is on some kind of business plan (no idea to be honest, I don't see the bills), and no matter what the cost is, I'm sure it's negligible compared to whatever the company is paying for me to fly all over Europe (and occasionally around the world) and stay in nice hotels.
I do the same, however most texts I write are in German, so I generally just switch between the 'quick' way for German and the slow way for other languages - I got used to it and it really doesn't bother me to do both. Switching between the 'quick' and 'slow' ways is just a matter of pressing # twice. If I need to write a longer text message in a language other than German (rare, but I do do it from time to time - especially when English speaking friends are visiting me here), I've just memorised the Nokia menu shortcut for language (menu - 4 - 9 - 1 on a Nokia 6230) so changing doesn't take too long.
I noticed a while back my phone does have a "shortcut" function to allow me to assign a menu option to a single press of the rightmost button beside the direction pad, but when I checked it, there's no setting there for language - you can only assign shortcuts to "common" tasks and apparently changing language isn't so common in the minds of the Nokia devs.
For awhile, my phone was set to "Automatic" for the language, but that got annoying when visiting countries where I don't speak the language but my phone does.
If it's sufficiently in advance that we're trading addresses, sure. But if I'm sitting at an airport somewhere, and at that point need to know an address, it's much easier if someone sends me a text rather than an email. A text I am sure to get, whereas an email I'd have to have my laptop on, which I'm not likely to do without specifically knowing someone's sent me something. That especially applies to last minute changes or things that were rushed (which happens a lot in my job)
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The bad is that you can't uninstall it (easily). But you can always disable it...
The "bad" is a couple of things - one being that you can't install it, but a "bigger bad" is that the install is really quite surreptitious. If it popped up like any other Firefox extension or was quite clearly labelled beforehand as existing, I doubt there'd be so many complaints here.
Just nitpicking, but it doesn't just "make it think" you're using - you actually are using IE with IE Tab - that tab contains an instance of IE itself (which gets annoying when your proxy settings are different between the two)
Yeh... I'm living in Germany at the moment, and have a 10 year old car. I've been considering upgrading to something newer since I'm doing pretty well for myself right now, and until I heard the details, I thought this might be interesting... however, my 1998 Renault Megane Cabrio is almost certainly worth more than 2500 as a trade-in at the dealer (especially since my plan is to simply upgrade to a 2008/2009 Renault Megane Cabrio - I think I can probably get at least 3500 for it as a trade-in), so there's no way I'd scrap it for 2500 instead.
Just in case you were unaware, Kangaroo is relatively commonly eaten in the great southern land of Oz. It's considered a generally "low quality" meat though, and is also used as pet food. Although, you can get kangaroo steaks and burgers intended for human consumption in most supermarkets or on the menus of some eateries, especially at tourist locations.
Koalas on the other hand are legally protected.
As a note, Australia is the only country in the world that eats both the animals displayed on its coat of arms (Kangaroo and Emu). I'm not sure the British could, even if they wanted, since they have a Lion and a Unicorn, and most Americans would probably be a little averse to the idea of Eagle for dinner.
I think the silkworms probably do make more sense than trying to get a bunch of roos on a space vessel (I'm loving the imagery of that though)
Depends on the personality test... once, many years ago while job hunting (thankfully I'm long past that, and in to the "career" part of life now where I get offered a new job every month by people trying to steal me away from my current employer), I applied for a job at an ISP as a "grunt that stops the servers falling over" (I think the title was actually something like "network engineer", but in reality it was just a dogsbody job).
I did "brilliantly" in the technical part of the interview they said. One last "formality" was then to fill out a little personality test.
Question 1: If you were a vegetable, what kind would you be?
No, I'm not kidding... that's really what it said. I had NO idea how to answer such a stupid question, and knowing at that point that I really COULD stand to keep looking for awhile (which turned out to be the best thing I could have done), I wrote, "This question is moronic", stood up, and left.
I certainly had no way to "lie" on that test to get hired, because I had NO idea what kind of answer they were looking for.
Since I generally play as a Wizard, I'll go for "a" if I'm low level (DIE Soldier Ants!) or "h" if I'm higher to get rid of the Mind Flayers (don't care about the dwarves of course, they're just "casualties of war")
Errr... perfectly correct English grammar? I believe more common modern usage in most of the English speaking world is to use "leave" instead of "let" (as in "leave it alone" rather than "let it alone") but "let" is still perfectly correct even if a little archaic sounding.
They didn't even let you make a copy of your data?
Nope, they quite literally burst in to the house waving the search warrant in my face, and proceeded to grab every piece of computer equipment they could find. One guy basically cornered me and "explained" the situation to me as the others went about grabbing everything (I got the feeling he was more or less "keeping me occupied" rather than any sense of trying to actually inform me of what was going on)
I'm not going to let my 15 years of documents be lost permanently
I didn't quite have 15 years worth of data at the time, but I'd say I had at least 5... and yeh, pretty much everything that my friends didn't already have a copy of was indeed lost (which of course didn't include more personal stuff such as my email archive including "first contact" emails between myself and my then girlfriend (who I still consider the love of my life even though we're no longer together)). I was VERY annoyed/upset about it as I'm sure you understand.
I know you were joking, but I have a story that is likely similar (not Linux though...).
Quite some years ago, I was running an Amiga as my main system (relatively high end Amiga 4000, not some toy games thing). I was talking to a guy on IRC and he was bragging about putting a bomb on a plane. This was well before 2001, so the world wasn't in the grips of "OMG terrorists!", but it still seemed like a fairly big deal to me. Now, from my perspective, I was pretty sure the guy was just talking out his arse, but I wasn't really 100% sure, so for safety's sake, I didn't really want to just leave it.
At this point, let me elaborate that I was in fact a teenager, and also not particularly "worldly wise". It was at this point, I made somewhat of a mistake. I had access to a few servers I really shouldn't have, and decided that since I didn't want to get involved in the process of a police investigation (there's nothing more I could tell them other than what the guy said on IRC), I sent an email "anonymously" through a badly configured mail server (forging my own headers using telnet as my SMTP client) and informed the police and the airport in question about what the guy had said.
Two days later, the police arrived at my door (um, yeh, I'd sent the email "anonymously", but hadn't taken any steps to obscure my IP address, so all they needed to do was call the owner of the mail server, followed by my ISP). They had a search warrant stating they could seize any computer related equipment in my house, and stated it was issued "under suspicion of Attempted Murder and Breach of the Telecommunications Act" (no I'm not kidding... it really did say "Attempted Murder").
They took all my computers and related equipment (right down to a stack of old SCSI drives I had in my sock drawer). I spent a couple of MONTHS without them. I got a nice write-up in the local paper, but that wasn't much consolation. After two months, I made a complaint to the Police Complaints Authority stating that it really was ridiculous for the police to have my stuff for so long (their ongoing excuse was that they sent it to another city for analysis). I finally got it back about two weeks after that, only to find that they'd ripped the HDD out of my A4000 and erased it. I can only assume they stuck it in a PC, saw that it was "not formatted" and tried to "recover" the data from it.
They made no statements about whether my HDD had been "helpful" in their investigation or not, and I heard no further from them after that (including no further comments about the "suspicion of attempted murder"!). The best I could get from them was a weak apology about my data loss, as being a private individual (and unemployed at that), there was no protection for my data under the law (if I'd been a company, I probably could've sued, but a private individual's data was (may still be?) essentially considered worthless in the eyes of the law).
For reference: the country this happened in was New Zealand - normally a pretty nice place, but don't expect small town cops, or even the "computer analysis team" to have ANY idea what they're doing or admit that this is the case (actually, I would HOPE this has changed over the years, but I wouldn't bet on it).
Fully agree about Troughton - not my favourite, but definitely in the top few. It's such a shame that no-one who hasn't seen those episodes will get to experience them again - most of Troughton's episodes are "lost" (as are a few of Hartnell's, however much fewer). I have every episode of every Doctor in my collection, and for the "lost" episodes I have reconstructions. The reconstructions are okay for reminiscing, but I wouldn't expect someone who hadn't seen the original to get in to it at all.
If someone had some of these lost episodes somewhere, there'd actually be VERY good money in making it known.
For the record, my Doctor Who watching days began about mid-way through Troughton, and I started "never wanting to miss an episode" around mid-way through Pertwee. I'd rank them in order of my favourite to least favourite as:
Choosing between McCoy and Eccleston was actually difficult, because I honestly do think McCoy was a better actor and a better Doctor, but Eccleston DID manage to re-kickstart the "feel" of the Doctor after such a long break, which would've been very difficult for anyone to manage I think.
Interesting yes, and based on those, I'll take back any genetic statements I made... however I won't take back the statement that I they really don't look the same (which is what my reply was mostly aimed at - the person I replied to said, "Actually, Israelis are mostly pretty swarthy. They don't look that different from Palestinians."). There are certainly a number of "swarthy" Israelis, but there's also quite a number of blond haired, blue eyed, fair skinned Israelis, which are not traits one finds in the Palestinian people.
Offtopic, but I'd just like to point out that your sig shouldn't have a comma in it to be grammatically correct. It's true you generally pause at that point in speech, so a comma "feels right" but grammatically it'd be similar to writing, "I, went to the shop", which is quite clearly wrong.
I wasn't really trying to promote the Commodore so much (honestly, while it was "okay" to drive, it's definitely not even my style of car in the least), just give a description of it since I knew most people would be unfamiliar with it if I only gave the name. It's definitely NOT a small sedan though - even by American standards (where perhaps you might call it "average sized" - I know the US loves big cars). It is a fairly typical GM vehicle though, nothing special (as I said, it was my company car, so you really can't expect anything exotic!). Looking again at the Wikipedia entry, it's also called a "Chevrolet Lumina" and weighs between 1569kg and 1654kg.
There are those of us looking from the outside who fear this has already happened. (not everyone of course, and not even a "majority", but still a significant enough portion to be serious concern)
But you don't see Muslims protesting against suicide terrorists. And that's the big problem with Islam.
Actually, it happens, but the "mainstream" media don't seem to make a big deal of it - probably because it doesn't fit the Zeitgeist, and so isn't going to help their ratings as much as other kinds of "news" could.
There are of course many more examples - Google is your friend.
Another interesting note is that you don't really see Christian groups protesting against radical Christianity either. It does happen from time to time, but it's rarely reported on as it fits the Zeitgeist even less (both the radical Christianity and opposition to it are uninteresting right now from a news perspective)
Just to note: I'm not Muslim - in fact, I think they're all a bunch of kooks for believing in an invisible sky god. I think the same thing about Christians, Jews, Satanists, Wiccans and pretty much every other religion as well though.
What?! For your own sake, please do a Google Image search for "Israeli". Results for me are full of white girls (oddly, the search seems to give 95% female, 5% male - I guess Israeli girls are popular!) that look no different to the typical Western European or American. Also, keep in mind that this makes perfect sense, as the state of Israel was formed about 60 years ago and people of Jewish descent from primarily Western Europe and America flooded in to the region - most of these people having at least some non-Jewish relatives (if I, as a non-Jew, marry a Jewish girl, our kids will be termed "Jewish" although even if my wife can trace 100% Jewish lineage back for centuries, our kids are genetically 50% at best. If my wife were 50%, our kids would be 25%. Go back for as long as the Jewish people were centred in Europe and America, and it's a fair bet that the vast majority are genetically more European than anything else). Living in a hot sunny places (such as Israel) tends to darken you up a bit, but there's still plenty of blond haired, blue eyed fair skinned Israelis. (I myself am not of Jewish background, but am quite light skinned generally - I lived in Australia for 6 years and got a couple of shades darker just from that - now I've been out of Australia for coming up on 2 and my skin is paling again)
Sorry, but I'd classify that as "still your fault". As SOON as the asshat swooped in front of you (which he certainly was an asshat for doing, no doubt there), you should've been on the brakes to increase the distance between you and him (not saying slam them on, just press them enough to slow rapidly, but safely). When he swooped out again, you would've already been braking and so wouldn't have hit the guy at the front (you'd needed to have increased your braking more of course, but if you were going fast enough that you couldn't, then you were too close BEFORE the asshat swooped in).
If I'm maintaining a proper following distance of 2 seconds
2 seconds?! I had it drilled in to me many years ago when I was learning to drive that the minimum distance you should keep is 3 seconds, and "4 is better". I tend to stick by that and aim for at least 4 seconds at any time. If I'm at 3 seconds, that's okay but I'll back off a little as opportunity presents. If I'm closer than 3 seconds, alarm bells will ring in my head (especially on the Autobahn here in Germany, where I typically drive between 160km/h and 180km/h)
Have you ever met someone who was convinced that a specific safety feature in their car (or it's excellent engineering) saved their life?
Yes, me (I know your statement was in the positive about this, so I'm not arguing with you, just giving my own little story here).
I was driving my company car in Australia (a Holden VZ Commodore Acclaim (3.6 Litre "Alloytec" engine, 5 speed Automatic, Sedan body)) a couple of years back, and it was raining. As I was going through a roundabout, a guy came on in front of me WAY too close (I had right of way, but he claimed later that he didn't see me). Now, the Holden Commodore is a bit of a tank really - big, heavy and not so manoeuvrable compared to the "sportier" kind of cars I normally drive. I slammed my foot on the brake pedal and turned to move to the next lane of the roundabout - the ESP ("Electronic Stability Program") did its job PERFECTLY and I made it off to the side of the roundabout without a collision. The other guy saw me at that point, and we both stopped just up the road, where he apologised.
A couple of days later, it was raining again, and I was at a similar roundabout. I made sure there were no cars in any direction, turned off the ESP (the driver can toggle it on/off with a simple button press) and tried a similar manoeuvre to see what the car would do - the wheels locked, skidded on the wet road, the car spun around twice and ended up off the side of the roundabout (just a dirt patch, so it was fine to do). I am therefore EXTREMELY grateful for the ESP when I needed it.
The worst one I ever had was a black and white scan of a printed screenshot. I asked the guy about it and he apparently had taken the screenshot, pasted it in to Word, printed that and then used an MFP's "scan to email" function to send it to me. I am still boggled about how anyone could do this and NOT stop to think for a second they could've just emailed me the screenshot to begin with.
Before my current job (writing software and supporting software developers for the MFP industry), I did "connectivity support" for the same company. I didn't deal with end users, I dealt with technicians. Many of these guys however were NOT IT techs, the vast majority were old curmudgeony copier techs that were a bit hesitant to enter the wonderful world of connected copiers (keeping in mind this was several years back, and I did deal with small dealerships' techs as well as our branch staff). As such, I have quite a few wonderful tales from my time on the other end of the phone/email/escalation system. Some names of people and companies altered to protect the guilty (but yes, my name is Ben, and I do work for Konica Minolta).
Story 1) The magical wireless RJ45 socket.
*Ring ring*, *ring ring*
Me: "Konica Minolta, Ben speaking."
John: "Hi Ben, it's John from Small Rural Copier Company here. I just hooked up a second hand Di251 at a customer and they said they want it connected to their PC to print. So, we sold them the Pi3502 (print controller), but it's not printing, what could be the problem?"
Me: "I'm gonna need a bit more info John. You've installed the controller and the NIC, and plugged everything in right?"
John: "Yep, I even set an 'IP Address' and installed the 'print driver' like the setup instructions said!"
Me: "Okay, good start. Tell me happens when you try to print."
John: "Nothing at all. The customer opens a document, selects to print it, and after a while it just says it failed to print"
Me: "Right, the most likely cause then is just that it can't communicate for some reason. Can you ping the MFP from the PC?"
John asks how to do that, and I talk him through it
John: "Nope, it says no reply."
Me: "Okay, tell me the IP address of the Pi3502 and the computer."
John does so, and I'm actually a little stunned that they're actually valid, on the same subnet, and everything sounded like it should be okay.
Me: "Hmmm... this might be a faulty NIC in the Pi3502, since we've seen a couple of those on this model, and it is second hand. Could you check if the link light is on?"
John: "Sure, where do I find the link light?"
Me: "The NIC has two LEDs - right on top of where the ethernet cable is plugged in, one should flash from time to time and the other should be on permanently - that's the link light."
John: "Ethernet cable? Is that the blue one that was in the box? I didn't know what to do with that, so I haven't done anything with it, it's still in the box."
Me: "... so, just to get this straight... what cables are currently connected to the Di251?"
John: "Just the power cable."
I then explained the 'finer points' of the concept of networking to John, who eventually became enlightened as to the purpose of an ethernet cable, and managed to get everything working about 10 minutes later
Story 2) How to scan.
*Ring ring*, *ring ring*
Me: "Konica Minolta, Ben speaking."
Peter: "Hi Ben, it's Peter from Moderately Sized City Dealership here. I've never set up scanning before, but the customer wants to use the 'Scan to FTP' function. Can you talk me through setting that up?"
Me: [stifling a groan] "Sure Peter. Do you have the details of the customer's FTP server?"
Peter: "Server? They don't have one of those. Do they need that for scanning?"
Me: "If you want to scan to FTP, you need an FTP server. They could install one on a desktop PC if they don't have a dedicated server though. Talk to their admin and ask if they'll install one somewhere for scanning. There's one on the CD that came with the MFP if they don't have a preference, and I can talk you through the setup of that" (The one on the CD was basically a dead simple little "write only" FTP server specifically designed with scanning in min
If I had significantly less money (I know I earn fairly well above average) and had to pay 20c per message I'm sure I'd feel the same. But, as it stands, I make enough money (high 5 figure or low 6 figure in USD terms depending on exchange rate at the time), don't pay for texts anyway, and they're less than half that price here in Germany on most plans anyway even if I did have to pay for them (actually, I think "most plans" tend to include a certain number per month "free" (as in, bundled in to the monthly bill whether you use them or not)).
I'm sure the telcos make a small fortune out of teenagers sitting around texting each other all day and night, but that doesn't make it any less valuable to me and the many others in my situation or similar. Even if I paid for the texts myself, I'd not bat an eyelid as I probably send 5 to 10 a month at most - even at 20c, that'd be $1 to $2 a month, which is truly insignificant.
If I wanted to actively avoid SMS, then sure, a smartphone or netbook would be the way to go... but why NOT use SMS in these circumstances? It's quick, easy and does what it needs to do (and of course there's the point that the other party would have to know to send me an email or vice versa, whereas it's a given that I can receive SMS anywhere, anytime and I make this same assumption about them)
Also note that since I'm talking about work here, cost is pretty much irrelevant - I'm sure it's cheap enough anyway since my phone is on some kind of business plan (no idea to be honest, I don't see the bills), and no matter what the cost is, I'm sure it's negligible compared to whatever the company is paying for me to fly all over Europe (and occasionally around the world) and stay in nice hotels.
I do the same, however most texts I write are in German, so I generally just switch between the 'quick' way for German and the slow way for other languages - I got used to it and it really doesn't bother me to do both. Switching between the 'quick' and 'slow' ways is just a matter of pressing # twice. If I need to write a longer text message in a language other than German (rare, but I do do it from time to time - especially when English speaking friends are visiting me here), I've just memorised the Nokia menu shortcut for language (menu - 4 - 9 - 1 on a Nokia 6230) so changing doesn't take too long.
I noticed a while back my phone does have a "shortcut" function to allow me to assign a menu option to a single press of the rightmost button beside the direction pad, but when I checked it, there's no setting there for language - you can only assign shortcuts to "common" tasks and apparently changing language isn't so common in the minds of the Nokia devs.
For awhile, my phone was set to "Automatic" for the language, but that got annoying when visiting countries where I don't speak the language but my phone does.
If it's sufficiently in advance that we're trading addresses, sure. But if I'm sitting at an airport somewhere, and at that point need to know an address, it's much easier if someone sends me a text rather than an email. A text I am sure to get, whereas an email I'd have to have my laptop on, which I'm not likely to do without specifically knowing someone's sent me something. That especially applies to last minute changes or things that were rushed (which happens a lot in my job)