Awww man, I had a Dreamcast Broadband Adapter in my drawer with my Dreamcast. I think I threw the Dreamcast and all its supporting hardware away two years ago when I moved in with my then-fiancee (now wife) and had to "consolidate" away some of my bachelor-hood. Crap.
In fact, I believe one of this year's Nobel physics laureates, Andre Geim, who won for his work related to graphene (the graphite-sheet-like carbon form that's all the research rage right now) has also previously received an IgNobel award.
Specifically for levitating a frog using magnetic fields.
Research can have some humor in it, and sometimes mixing the trivial with the serious helps get you through an otherwise boring day.
Slashdot briefly seemed to have forced everybody to the "Dynamic Discussion" mode this morning. I went to my account settings, turned it off, and it still showed up as on. Then a half hour later, I went back to Slashdot and everything seems to be working with the classic interface again.
Anyway, it seems to have been a glitch in the matrix and all is back to normal now. An interface that only shows score-5 comments and makes you click 100 times to see more comments is just horrible. I hope that's not what "dynamic discussion" mode is. Ugh.
LOL. A little tidbit of history that may not be widely known or at least not widely remembered - Microsoft has actually developed web-based versions of its Office product on at least 2 previous occasions, perhaps more. These products never saw the light of day, and for various reasons, strategic and political chief among them, the projects were axed, developers reassigned, and code tossed away then restarted some time later when somebody decided that NOW the time was ripe for a web-based office.
Amusingly enough, I believe one of these efforts was part of what was originally termed the ".NET initiative" and was called "Office.NET" at least as a working title - back when.NET meant anything and everything, before they decided that.NET actually was the class library and VM for their C# language. See, for example, this article from back in 2002.
Remember what a confused mess the.NET initiative was? It's truly amazing how much Microsoft has had its head up its ass over the last decade. Windows 7 is the first decent product they've put out in *years*.
A friend of mine from college, a very bright guy, was one of the project managers on the Office.NET project before it got axed. Anyway, he was so frustrated by his experience with this project that I believe it was in part his reason for leaving Microsoft.
So... it seems like they finally followed through on this, but it's not like the idea just occurred to them recently. No, it's more likely they only decided to bring it to market now because of the cloud computing hype and the fact that the traction of OpenOffice.Org and other Office alternatives has them scared shitless (of course, OpenOffice has just fragmented itself and will probably manage to squander the traction they've finally obtained after all these years of effort).
Sure, the stories often suck, but once you filter out the trolls and complete morons, there's actually a great community of bright and interesting people who post comments here. You know, the people who've been around since the earlier era of the internet, the people who know an awful lot about science, technology and computing. That's what keeps me coming back - it's certainly not the brilliant editorial insights of the staff (guffaw).
Dude, this morning has been one troll story after another. Look at the last 3-4 stories - Microsoft is dead, Linux is dead, now we just need a Mac is dead story and we'll complete the troll trifecta.
What, you think there are no pollutants in farm-raised fish? In fact, there tend to be significantly higher PCB levels. I avoid high mercury-level species (swordfish, shark, etc.) with the exception of canned tuna, which I eat fairly frequently, on the order of twice a week.
I mostly don't worry about mercury levels with tuna too much. For starters, I buy canned tuna from companies that catch them off the US coast and publish their average mercury levels. More expensive, but the stuff tastes insanely good. Also, it's not fully understood, but you can find a fair amount of reference out there to the fact that the high selenium content of tuna offsets the toxicity of the high methylmercury content. Not to say I'd sit there and eat tuna all day long every day - might not be a great idea.
I also eat quite a bit of wild-caught salmon, which has rather low mercury levels anyway. Farm-raised salmon tends to have very high PCB levels - the levels are short of the FDA's ridiculously high limits, but are on average something like 8-10 times higher than in wild-caught salmon (see, for example, this blurb from Harvard).
Obviously, this is a statistical game. In my judgment, the risks of not eating any fish outweigh the benefits.
Sure, and the main agents used are relatively safe to humans despite being toxic to insects (much safer than many of the pesticides that have been used in conventional farming over the years), biodegrade quickly, and don't get into water runoff in significant quantities.
Obviously, I'm not claiming there's some magical difference between a synthesized chemical and a chemical extracted from a plant. Rather, it's a difference between using chemicals that have been known to be safe to humans for years rather than chemicals chosen for their maximal toxicity to insects and cheapness of manufacture that have been deemed safe by FDA, one of the most absurdly ineffectual organizations I've ever seen.
You are painting with an excessively broad brush here.
You don't need mystical mumbo jumbo to not want pesticides all over your fruits and vegetables.
You don't need mystical mumbo jumbo to not want your chicken and cows raised in factory farming conditions, fed hormones, antibiotics, and the cheapest foodstuff imaginable to fatten them up as quickly as possible.
Why do you need mystical mumbo jumbo to be aware of the major nutritional differences between wild-caught fish and farmed fish, that are principally due to their different feeding habits.
So yeah, some of the stuff labeled "organic" that's basically identical to conventional stuff may be a rip-off, but there is plenty for a purely scientific, rational-minded person to critique in our industrial food system and plenty of reasons to avoid certain food produced by them.
Their webpage hasn't been touched in 2 years, with most of it static for around 4+ years now. Their last release was in 2008, which was XFree 4.8.0 which apparently mostly just replicated some features from Xorg and fixed some bugs. I can guarantee you the support for any modern hardware is missing.
Most importantly - no Linux distributions that I'm aware of have used the XFree server in quite a few years now. FreeBSD doesn't use it anymore and I don't think the other BSDs do either.
Their CVS commit mailing list shows only two code committers in the last 3 and a half years. No code commits since February of 2009. Their general mailing list has only been used by one person since 2008.
So yeah, it's dead Jim. Everybody moved to the Xorg server, including OSes and distributions and development community.
You should try out D. It's the power of C or C++ with the readability of something like Java or Python, sans Java's forced verbosity (or virtual machine considerations).
It supports templates and operator overloading, but it's got garbage collection (which you can control in a fairly fine-grained way if you want).
You can use C libraries fairly easily, and apparently link with C++ code if you want. You can also export stuff via extern C {} that can be called from standard C code.
I don't have tons of experience with the standard library stuff in D and have just done some toy work in it, but it seems really nice to me.
I learned C++ ages ago when it was relatively new, and I didn't know any better at the time. These days I just hate it. Mostly reading code that other people wrote in it - my own code I can handle.
Not even check, honestly. More like a limp attack on the queen with a pawn. What Google uses from the Harmony project is a bunch of the core java.* classes. This stuff changes, sure, but not particularly heavily or rapidly these days. This is not where Android is innovating, nor is it a huge area of rapid development, assuming Harmony is at or approaching stability. This might require Google to shift a couple of their Java developers around, but the legal issues are far more significant than any costs associated with this.
The Dalvik VM itself is already developed internally at Google. The Android apps and framework and the rest of the stack is already developed internally at Google.
This might very well mean that Harmony won't see ongoing development toward being a fully featured JDK replacement, but Google doesn't need that anyway.
I'm not an expert on Android internals or anything, but I think this story is being significantly overblown.
NVidia's PureVideo product was in development in 2003. See the GeForce 6-series page for some information. I don't know if it was doing encoding on the GPU, but it was definitely doing post-processing and I believe video decoding on the GPU. This line was released in mid-2004, and features of PureVideo were released throughout that year so must have been in development since sometime in 2003.
Yeah, I don't know whether it has a sense of skepticism or irony built in, but it might need those. Along with an awareness of bullying and lunacy. There's a lot of useful facts and knowledge in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and so on that are at least somewhat vetted for factual truth, versus the wide open internet, which is just rotgut for the mind.
However, if your goal is just to get a very wide sample of plausible linguistic constructs in a widely used language like English, the Internet is probably a good source. It's just a very noisy source.
I don't think that's the correct cause and effect. China gets better treatment because of our economic dependence on them. Before that, they got better treatment because we wanted to sell products to them as a market. For about 30 years now we've seen China and their huge numbers of people as first a source of a market, then as a source of cheap labor that we needed to fuel our next wave of economic growth. Now we've created a bit of a monster - an economic powerhouse without the kind of moral and ethical framework that other technologically and economically developed countries are.
We no longer have the ability to take the moral high ground with China because of our huge economic ties to them. Not because we don't have the desire to at all.
It is also entirely plausible that our need for economic growth and security have led us to give up valuing concepts like individual freedom quite as much.
But I wouldn't causally link these things the way you seem to. We didn't give up on trying to take a moral high ground after we gave up on our individual liberties, we'd given up on taking the moral high ground with China and many other countries long before September 11th.
Gods above, please no Like button. I come to Slashdot more than ever exactly *because* it's a refuge from things like the ubiquitous Like buttons of the web. I don't think Slashdot's moderation system is next-to-useless at all. It's imperfect, sure, it misses some rather good comments, and mods up some serious bullshit on occasion, and of course there are some groupthink effects going on, but the aggregate intelligence of the community moderating here is quite high and I love reading the high rated comments in a story when I don't have time to read every comment, which is fairly often.
Insanity. There should be taxes collected at the county or state level that fund this fee then. If people don't pay the taxes, the county can file liens on their houses with penalties, just like they do in my city.
I'm all for the free market, but making a public good like firefighting or police service an opt-in fee is stupid and results in dumb, avoidable tragic circumstances.
Come on, that's outright dishonest. They have outright threatened to cripple devices that were unlocked in the past (see, for example, here), AND they have refused to replace or service obviously broken hardware simply because the software was jailbroken or the phone unlocked and running on an unapproved carrier. Go to some of the iPhone forums, you'll read plenty of threads of users restoring their software to stock state so that they can bring a broken piece of hardware to the store to get serviced without being thrown out the door.
Admittedly, not all Apple employees are like this, and enforcement has been highly inconsistent. Plenty of reports out there of people who've had broken hardware replaced regardless of jailbreak or unlock status. But you can't deny the generally user-hostile attitude of Apple toward anybody who wants to modify, customize or change in any way their iPhone device they shelled out cold hard cash for.
But the general attitude completely unacceptable. I have walked away from iPhone as a platform after being an iPhone 2G and 3G owner, and would never touch it again. I am so much happier with my Nexus One, a phone that lets me do what I want and doesn't treat me like a criminal.
Companies that treat their users like criminals or slaves under the pretense of "sustainable business practices" (i.e. driving absurd amounts of profit - I don't think Apple has to worry about sustaining their business at this point) won't be getting my business. And their OCD insistence on uniformity of everything and insistence that their way is always the right way drives me nuts (remember how long they insisted that nobody needed a real API for applications on the iPhone? And how now apps are the primary draw of the platform? Idiots.).
Have you tried Roksbox yet? See also the link from the Roku forums.
It's a bit limited in terms of media formats relative to your average PC, but should handle well-formed MP4, MOV, M4V, or WMV files. So you may need to convert some of your existing video files to get everything working properly.
Based on the description of her claimed "commercial" interest in her name, I'd say it's because she's idle and rich, or a dabbling housewife. In either case, it seems true that she had no real commercial interest in her name. Would definitely have been more interesting had this been a professional actively seeking a job who had filed this lawsuit.
Actually, apparently those are all generated from higher resolution source images (which were previously JPEGs, yes, but at a higher resolution, so that presumably their prior JPEG compression is roughly irrelevant to the current round of compression).
Diaspora is still a real word with some meaning. It's not a fantastic name, not as simple and memorable as Facebook, but I don't think the name is the thing preventing Diaspora from competing - they have no working code, horrid architectural issues, and bad security problems. In fact, the one thing they have going for them is lots of good press, so I would argue the name isn't hurting them at all. Facebook was driven by early adopters at certain university communities - in addition to lacking functionality, Diaspora doesn't have a community it appeals to strongly yet.
LibreOffice, on the other hand, is a decent, well-known and respected product that has taken a good name "OpenOffice" (well, officially, "OpenOffice.org", but nobody called it anything other than OpenOffice since calling a product by a website name is stupid) and made it horrible. Unless they fix the situation soon, they will rapidly lose market share to somebody else who forks the codebase with a better name.
No, there's been others, at least that one that was reported in Las Vegas in 2004 (several other references to it around the web, so it sounds legit). I haven't found any other reported fatalities with a quick spin through Google, but plenty of stories of injuries.
To be fair, this incident sounds like it involved a prototype, ruggedized, off-road version of a Segway, not the production versions meant for use on sidewalks and roads. I can see how this is significantly more risky than the usual use case.
Swear words are something that change quite quickly.
There is some truth to that, in the sense that perception of vulgarity in certain words can seem to increase or decrease relatively rapidly with time, but on the other hand, most of the actual curse words we use are incredibly old from a linguistic perspective.
Fuck has cognates all over the Germanic languages, and seems very close to the word futuere in Latin, so at the very least it dates to proto-Germanic with borrowing throughout Europe (hey, it's a good word!) and seems to relate to similar words in other Indo-European languages.
Cunt similarly shows up throughout Latin (cunnus, meaning vulva, as in cunnilingus) and in various Germanic languages.
Shit goes all the way back to proto-Indo-European and has clear Germanic cognates (Scheisse in German, etc.).
The word "dick" is actually surprisingly modern according to Wikipedia only dating to 1890, and is one of the few ubiquitous vulgarities for human anatomy in English that seems to be so recent.
Pussy is quite old too, from Old Saxon puse for vulva (and cognates in Old English, and Old Norse etc.).
So historically, though humans clearly have a limitless amount of creativity when it comes to cursing, some of the basic vulgar words, especial those that refer to parts of the human body and bodily functions, have been around for quite a long time, though perceptions on which words are "proper" and which are "vulgar" for these things have undoubtedly changed.
For the most part, in modern English we seem more likely to consider Latinate words for these things to be proper and Germanic words vulgar.
For example, "vulva" and "vagina" are words not considered particularly vulgar or offensive, "pussy" and "cunt" are vulgar. "Feces" and "defecate" are proper terms, "shit" is vulgar. So some of these divisions likely date to 1066 and the Norman conquest of England, when the Norman invaders brought their French and Latin speaking ways to the Anglo-Saxon people of England.
I think the distinction between "private" and "public" language has decreased. It used to be that vulgar words weren't used in common discourse with strangers, or in public forums, or in mixed company. These words were reserved for use with your buddies, a "men's language" if you will, and were used only rarely, or for strong effect, by women.
A lot of these distinctions have decreased with the spread of mass-market media that depicts these words used commonly. I think this was initially a way to make movies and television shows feel more authentic and real, closer to the common language of people, with the result being that the spoken language of the US as a whole has become more common.
I think as the words have become more common and less laden with shock value, adults concern about their children hearing or using them has diminished. So I suspect adults are just less shocked to hear others use these words in public and realize the futility of trying to prevent their children from hearing them when they are likely to hear them in movies or on television anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Awww man, I had a Dreamcast Broadband Adapter in my drawer with my Dreamcast. I think I threw the Dreamcast and all its supporting hardware away two years ago when I moved in with my then-fiancee (now wife) and had to "consolidate" away some of my bachelor-hood. Crap.
In fact, I believe one of this year's Nobel physics laureates, Andre Geim, who won for his work related to graphene (the graphite-sheet-like carbon form that's all the research rage right now) has also previously received an IgNobel award.
Specifically for levitating a frog using magnetic fields.
Research can have some humor in it, and sometimes mixing the trivial with the serious helps get you through an otherwise boring day.
Slashdot briefly seemed to have forced everybody to the "Dynamic Discussion" mode this morning. I went to my account settings, turned it off, and it still showed up as on. Then a half hour later, I went back to Slashdot and everything seems to be working with the classic interface again.
Anyway, it seems to have been a glitch in the matrix and all is back to normal now. An interface that only shows score-5 comments and makes you click 100 times to see more comments is just horrible. I hope that's not what "dynamic discussion" mode is. Ugh.
LOL. A little tidbit of history that may not be widely known or at least not widely remembered - Microsoft has actually developed web-based versions of its Office product on at least 2 previous occasions, perhaps more. These products never saw the light of day, and for various reasons, strategic and political chief among them, the projects were axed, developers reassigned, and code tossed away then restarted some time later when somebody decided that NOW the time was ripe for a web-based office.
Amusingly enough, I believe one of these efforts was part of what was originally termed the ".NET initiative" and was called "Office.NET" at least as a working title - back when .NET meant anything and everything, before they decided that .NET actually was the class library and VM for their C# language. See, for example, this article from back in 2002.
Remember what a confused mess the .NET initiative was? It's truly amazing how much Microsoft has had its head up its ass over the last decade. Windows 7 is the first decent product they've put out in *years*.
A friend of mine from college, a very bright guy, was one of the project managers on the Office.NET project before it got axed. Anyway, he was so frustrated by his experience with this project that I believe it was in part his reason for leaving Microsoft.
So... it seems like they finally followed through on this, but it's not like the idea just occurred to them recently. No, it's more likely they only decided to bring it to market now because of the cloud computing hype and the fact that the traction of OpenOffice.Org and other Office alternatives has them scared shitless (of course, OpenOffice has just fragmented itself and will probably manage to squander the traction they've finally obtained after all these years of effort).
Sure, the stories often suck, but once you filter out the trolls and complete morons, there's actually a great community of bright and interesting people who post comments here. You know, the people who've been around since the earlier era of the internet, the people who know an awful lot about science, technology and computing. That's what keeps me coming back - it's certainly not the brilliant editorial insights of the staff (guffaw).
Dude, this morning has been one troll story after another. Look at the last 3-4 stories - Microsoft is dead, Linux is dead, now we just need a Mac is dead story and we'll complete the troll trifecta.
What, you think there are no pollutants in farm-raised fish? In fact, there tend to be significantly higher PCB levels. I avoid high mercury-level species (swordfish, shark, etc.) with the exception of canned tuna, which I eat fairly frequently, on the order of twice a week.
I mostly don't worry about mercury levels with tuna too much. For starters, I buy canned tuna from companies that catch them off the US coast and publish their average mercury levels. More expensive, but the stuff tastes insanely good. Also, it's not fully understood, but you can find a fair amount of reference out there to the fact that the high selenium content of tuna offsets the toxicity of the high methylmercury content. Not to say I'd sit there and eat tuna all day long every day - might not be a great idea.
I also eat quite a bit of wild-caught salmon, which has rather low mercury levels anyway. Farm-raised salmon tends to have very high PCB levels - the levels are short of the FDA's ridiculously high limits, but are on average something like 8-10 times higher than in wild-caught salmon (see, for example, this blurb from Harvard).
Obviously, this is a statistical game. In my judgment, the risks of not eating any fish outweigh the benefits.
Sure, and the main agents used are relatively safe to humans despite being toxic to insects (much safer than many of the pesticides that have been used in conventional farming over the years), biodegrade quickly, and don't get into water runoff in significant quantities.
Obviously, I'm not claiming there's some magical difference between a synthesized chemical and a chemical extracted from a plant. Rather, it's a difference between using chemicals that have been known to be safe to humans for years rather than chemicals chosen for their maximal toxicity to insects and cheapness of manufacture that have been deemed safe by FDA, one of the most absurdly ineffectual organizations I've ever seen.
How many drugs have been on the market and later pulled by FDA? How many pesticides are now banned? I don't think it's unreasonable to feel more safe with the constrained, less toxic set of pesticide agents used by organic farmers.
You are painting with an excessively broad brush here.
You don't need mystical mumbo jumbo to not want pesticides all over your fruits and vegetables.
You don't need mystical mumbo jumbo to not want your chicken and cows raised in factory farming conditions, fed hormones, antibiotics, and the cheapest foodstuff imaginable to fatten them up as quickly as possible.
Why do you need mystical mumbo jumbo to be aware of the major nutritional differences between wild-caught fish and farmed fish, that are principally due to their different feeding habits.
So yeah, some of the stuff labeled "organic" that's basically identical to conventional stuff may be a rip-off, but there is plenty for a purely scientific, rational-minded person to critique in our industrial food system and plenty of reasons to avoid certain food produced by them.
Their webpage hasn't been touched in 2 years, with most of it static for around 4+ years now. Their last release was in 2008, which was XFree 4.8.0 which apparently mostly just replicated some features from Xorg and fixed some bugs. I can guarantee you the support for any modern hardware is missing.
Most importantly - no Linux distributions that I'm aware of have used the XFree server in quite a few years now. FreeBSD doesn't use it anymore and I don't think the other BSDs do either.
Their CVS commit mailing list shows only two code committers in the last 3 and a half years. No code commits since February of 2009. Their general mailing list has only been used by one person since 2008.
So yeah, it's dead Jim. Everybody moved to the Xorg server, including OSes and distributions and development community.
You should try out D. It's the power of C or C++ with the readability of something like Java or Python, sans Java's forced verbosity (or virtual machine considerations).
It supports templates and operator overloading, but it's got garbage collection (which you can control in a fairly fine-grained way if you want).
You can use C libraries fairly easily, and apparently link with C++ code if you want. You can also export stuff via extern C {} that can be called from standard C code.
I don't have tons of experience with the standard library stuff in D and have just done some toy work in it, but it seems really nice to me.
I learned C++ ages ago when it was relatively new, and I didn't know any better at the time. These days I just hate it. Mostly reading code that other people wrote in it - my own code I can handle.
Not even check, honestly. More like a limp attack on the queen with a pawn. What Google uses from the Harmony project is a bunch of the core java.* classes. This stuff changes, sure, but not particularly heavily or rapidly these days. This is not where Android is innovating, nor is it a huge area of rapid development, assuming Harmony is at or approaching stability. This might require Google to shift a couple of their Java developers around, but the legal issues are far more significant than any costs associated with this.
The Dalvik VM itself is already developed internally at Google. The Android apps and framework and the rest of the stack is already developed internally at Google.
This might very well mean that Harmony won't see ongoing development toward being a fully featured JDK replacement, but Google doesn't need that anyway.
I'm not an expert on Android internals or anything, but I think this story is being significantly overblown.
NVidia's PureVideo product was in development in 2003. See the GeForce 6-series page for some information. I don't know if it was doing encoding on the GPU, but it was definitely doing post-processing and I believe video decoding on the GPU. This line was released in mid-2004, and features of PureVideo were released throughout that year so must have been in development since sometime in 2003.
Yeah, I don't know whether it has a sense of skepticism or irony built in, but it might need those. Along with an awareness of bullying and lunacy. There's a lot of useful facts and knowledge in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and so on that are at least somewhat vetted for factual truth, versus the wide open internet, which is just rotgut for the mind.
However, if your goal is just to get a very wide sample of plausible linguistic constructs in a widely used language like English, the Internet is probably a good source. It's just a very noisy source.
I don't think that's the correct cause and effect. China gets better treatment because of our economic dependence on them. Before that, they got better treatment because we wanted to sell products to them as a market. For about 30 years now we've seen China and their huge numbers of people as first a source of a market, then as a source of cheap labor that we needed to fuel our next wave of economic growth. Now we've created a bit of a monster - an economic powerhouse without the kind of moral and ethical framework that other technologically and economically developed countries are.
We no longer have the ability to take the moral high ground with China because of our huge economic ties to them. Not because we don't have the desire to at all.
It is also entirely plausible that our need for economic growth and security have led us to give up valuing concepts like individual freedom quite as much.
But I wouldn't causally link these things the way you seem to. We didn't give up on trying to take a moral high ground after we gave up on our individual liberties, we'd given up on taking the moral high ground with China and many other countries long before September 11th.
Gods above, please no Like button. I come to Slashdot more than ever exactly *because* it's a refuge from things like the ubiquitous Like buttons of the web. I don't think Slashdot's moderation system is next-to-useless at all. It's imperfect, sure, it misses some rather good comments, and mods up some serious bullshit on occasion, and of course there are some groupthink effects going on, but the aggregate intelligence of the community moderating here is quite high and I love reading the high rated comments in a story when I don't have time to read every comment, which is fairly often.
Insanity. There should be taxes collected at the county or state level that fund this fee then. If people don't pay the taxes, the county can file liens on their houses with penalties, just like they do in my city.
I'm all for the free market, but making a public good like firefighting or police service an opt-in fee is stupid and results in dumb, avoidable tragic circumstances.
Come on, that's outright dishonest. They have outright threatened to cripple devices that were unlocked in the past (see, for example, here), AND they have refused to replace or service obviously broken hardware simply because the software was jailbroken or the phone unlocked and running on an unapproved carrier. Go to some of the iPhone forums, you'll read plenty of threads of users restoring their software to stock state so that they can bring a broken piece of hardware to the store to get serviced without being thrown out the door.
Admittedly, not all Apple employees are like this, and enforcement has been highly inconsistent. Plenty of reports out there of people who've had broken hardware replaced regardless of jailbreak or unlock status. But you can't deny the generally user-hostile attitude of Apple toward anybody who wants to modify, customize or change in any way their iPhone device they shelled out cold hard cash for.
But the general attitude completely unacceptable. I have walked away from iPhone as a platform after being an iPhone 2G and 3G owner, and would never touch it again. I am so much happier with my Nexus One, a phone that lets me do what I want and doesn't treat me like a criminal.
Companies that treat their users like criminals or slaves under the pretense of "sustainable business practices" (i.e. driving absurd amounts of profit - I don't think Apple has to worry about sustaining their business at this point) won't be getting my business. And their OCD insistence on uniformity of everything and insistence that their way is always the right way drives me nuts (remember how long they insisted that nobody needed a real API for applications on the iPhone? And how now apps are the primary draw of the platform? Idiots.).
Have you tried Roksbox yet? See also the link from the Roku forums.
It's a bit limited in terms of media formats relative to your average PC, but should handle well-formed MP4, MOV, M4V, or WMV files. So you may need to convert some of your existing video files to get everything working properly.
Based on the description of her claimed "commercial" interest in her name, I'd say it's because she's idle and rich, or a dabbling housewife. In either case, it seems true that she had no real commercial interest in her name. Would definitely have been more interesting had this been a professional actively seeking a job who had filed this lawsuit.
Actually, apparently those are all generated from higher resolution source images (which were previously JPEGs, yes, but at a higher resolution, so that presumably their prior JPEG compression is roughly irrelevant to the current round of compression).
Diaspora is still a real word with some meaning. It's not a fantastic name, not as simple and memorable as Facebook, but I don't think the name is the thing preventing Diaspora from competing - they have no working code, horrid architectural issues, and bad security problems. In fact, the one thing they have going for them is lots of good press, so I would argue the name isn't hurting them at all. Facebook was driven by early adopters at certain university communities - in addition to lacking functionality, Diaspora doesn't have a community it appeals to strongly yet.
LibreOffice, on the other hand, is a decent, well-known and respected product that has taken a good name "OpenOffice" (well, officially, "OpenOffice.org", but nobody called it anything other than OpenOffice since calling a product by a website name is stupid) and made it horrible. Unless they fix the situation soon, they will rapidly lose market share to somebody else who forks the codebase with a better name.
No, there's been others, at least that one that was reported in Las Vegas in 2004 (several other references to it around the web, so it sounds legit). I haven't found any other reported fatalities with a quick spin through Google, but plenty of stories of injuries.
To be fair, this incident sounds like it involved a prototype, ruggedized, off-road version of a Segway, not the production versions meant for use on sidewalks and roads. I can see how this is significantly more risky than the usual use case.
Swear words are something that change quite quickly.
There is some truth to that, in the sense that perception of vulgarity in certain words can seem to increase or decrease relatively rapidly with time, but on the other hand, most of the actual curse words we use are incredibly old from a linguistic perspective.
Fuck has cognates all over the Germanic languages, and seems very close to the word futuere in Latin, so at the very least it dates to proto-Germanic with borrowing throughout Europe (hey, it's a good word!) and seems to relate to similar words in other Indo-European languages.
Cunt similarly shows up throughout Latin (cunnus, meaning vulva, as in cunnilingus) and in various Germanic languages.
Shit goes all the way back to proto-Indo-European and has clear Germanic cognates (Scheisse in German, etc.).
The word "dick" is actually surprisingly modern according to Wikipedia only dating to 1890, and is one of the few ubiquitous vulgarities for human anatomy in English that seems to be so recent.
Pussy is quite old too, from Old Saxon puse for vulva (and cognates in Old English, and Old Norse etc.).
So historically, though humans clearly have a limitless amount of creativity when it comes to cursing, some of the basic vulgar words, especial those that refer to parts of the human body and bodily functions, have been around for quite a long time, though perceptions on which words are "proper" and which are "vulgar" for these things have undoubtedly changed.
For the most part, in modern English we seem more likely to consider Latinate words for these things to be proper and Germanic words vulgar.
For example, "vulva" and "vagina" are words not considered particularly vulgar or offensive, "pussy" and "cunt" are vulgar. "Feces" and "defecate" are proper terms, "shit" is vulgar. So some of these divisions likely date to 1066 and the Norman conquest of England, when the Norman invaders brought their French and Latin speaking ways to the Anglo-Saxon people of England.
I think the distinction between "private" and "public" language has decreased. It used to be that vulgar words weren't used in common discourse with strangers, or in public forums, or in mixed company. These words were reserved for use with your buddies, a "men's language" if you will, and were used only rarely, or for strong effect, by women.
A lot of these distinctions have decreased with the spread of mass-market media that depicts these words used commonly. I think this was initially a way to make movies and television shows feel more authentic and real, closer to the common language of people, with the result being that the spoken language of the US as a whole has become more common.
I think as the words have become more common and less laden with shock value, adults concern about their children hearing or using them has diminished. So I suspect adults are just less shocked to hear others use these words in public and realize the futility of trying to prevent their children from hearing them when they are likely to hear them in movies or on television anyway.