If you are going to spend most of the time over the Mediterranean sea, you could ask your ship's captain to drop his anchor far down enough to make contact with those broken undersea Internet cables which were in the news recently.
Once he does that (which must be easy, since ship captains seem to be doing it all the time these days), just connect a wire from the anchor cable to your laptop and voila! free Internet...
If he is not able to connect to any existing broken cables, just ask him to break one for you. Bribe him with enough rum to last your entire browsing time...
"Apparently new facial recognition software being employed by the state fails to function when the face is distorted by something as innocuous as smiling."
Perhaps they need to use facial anti-distortion software before using facial recognition software ?
Boy: Do not try and search for the code, instead realize the truth.
Geek: What truth ?
Boy: There is no code.
Geek: There is no code !!! ?
Boy: Then you'll see, itt is not the code that produces Monalisa, it is only your mind.
With this invention, the old phrase "Talk is cheap" is out of the window. Shoot whoever came up with that in the first place!
Also, as the technology grows and becomes widely adopted, the phrase "Power-talk" will make an entry into the English dictionary.
"The Oxford English Dictionary, 2012 Edition.
Power-talk(1) (n, adv) - The crude, despicable act of shouting into a mobile phone to power it up using piezo electric technology.
Power-talk(2) (n, adv) - The act of talking high and mighty with those less powerful than you to intimidate them or to display an apparent sense of superiority. As in, The power-talk by Barack Obama to Muhammed Ahmedinejad apparently had no effect on the Iranian leader, except to light up his mobile phone's display briefly.
Perhaps this will open up a lucrative new market for vibrators... ?
Girl (coyly): Honey, why are you fooling around with that vibrator thingy ? I am really not in the mood you know...
Dude: Darlin, this ain't for you. Just recharging my phone...
Obama: Hello Dick
RMS: Stallman here, who is this ?
Obama: Dick, this is Obama, your president-elect. Could I have your resume for a very important post in my administration ?
RMS: Perhaps, what is this post ?
Obama: It is the post of the "Copyright Czar". You will be in charge of making important decisions regarding Copyright and I.P regulations in this country.
RMS: It sure sounds interesting, but I will consider the position only after you rename it to "Copyleft Czar" and release the text of this conversation under GNU GPL.
Obama: Er..., maybe not. Bye Dick. Have a nice day...
This gives credence to the theory that aliens are right on Earth, living under water, disguised as giant elbowed squids. SETI is wasting time scanning the skies.
Now, we only need to find the MIBs...
Isacc Asimov treats this problem of rearing and caring for a Neanderthal boy in his short story "The Ugly Little Boy". In the story, a scientist brings back a Neanderthal boy from the past through time travel to study him.
The nurse who is assigned to care for him develops an emotional attachment with the boy. The scientists treat him just like a guinea pig. In the end he is banished back to where he came from, but the nurse decides to go back with him.
In the story, the boy is pictured as quite intelligent and sensitive, as much as a human offspring, though his feelings are not reciprocated by the "handlers", except the nurse who he grows to treat as his own mother.
Though the technology here is cloning and not time travel, the ethical issues remain the same.
I completely agree with this. Blanket encryption is akin to wearing full body armour because you are afraid of mosquito bites.
Isolate sensitive data and keep them in separate partitions or folders. Linux offers partition encryptions so, you can put all your sensitive data in say/home partition and encrypt it. Software full disk encryption programs are heavy and are not the solution to securing sensitive personal data.
I guess it is not of much use in Bangalore where I live, since here car traffic is often at 5-10 kmph during peak hours. The software may decide that the mobile is not moving at "car speeds" !:)
I think if any Indian telco adopts this software, they will have to put the minimum "car speed" setting from 1 kmph...
Also, Apple is now worth 3 times the value of Dell Computer, despite Dell's founder and CEO declaring over a decade ago that if he ran Apple, he'd 'shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.
Clearly Mr.Dell is not the best man at predicting the fortune of tech companies. Best example of this - Dell itself.
If I ran Dell, I would shut it down right now and give the money back to the shareholders, so that they can buy more Apple shares with it.
Remember Murphy's law which is most applicable to tech jobs ?
"Work expands to fill the time available for its completion".
So, for workers complaining about not getting paid for overtime, shut up and go back to your cubicle and continue listening to those iPods and posting inane comments to/....
I make it a point to back up my important data to a zip drive, my 30 GB IPod, my 2 redundant flash drives, my old dusty desktop (which is good only for backup and trying out Linux distros), my website. Hell, I even tried to put it in a partition on my mother-in-law's laptop, but she told to back off....
I also take print-outs of my important documents, laminate them and have a special locker for these linked to my savings bank account. The locker is insured for a few hundred thousand rupees...
With all this redundancy, I sleep well - with another copy of my important data printouts under my pillow....
Media seems to focusing a lot of attention on Powerset. But they seem to forget another startup which started innovating in the area of semantic search much before Powerset even arrived on the scene - Hakia.
Read the following article which does a decent job of comparing the two startups.
http://www.centernetworks.com/powerset-hakia
Perhaps they should have called it MSN Virtual U.S .
Microsoft press release: MSN virtual earth version 1.0 is fully supported only in the U.S . We are doing a market research in the U.S to find if the rest of the world really matters. If more than 40% of the survey respondents report that there are other places in the world that needs to be supported by MSN Virtual Earth, these will be added in MSN Virtual Earth SP1.
Customer to MS tech support: Hey, whenever I open up MSN virtual earth it seems to load the picture of a big software campus. Is this a bug?
MS Tech Support: No this is a feature. MSN VE loads the center of the Earth when it opens up. This happens to be the Microsoft campus at Redmond, Washington.
Bye bye.
Well, making an office suite is not a big deal as you make it out to be. Corel had one of the best office suites (WordPerfect) before MSN kicked its ass from PC desktops with MS Office suite combined with its monopoly. And there is of course the alternative, Openoffice.
Why on earth should Google try to make an office suite anyway?:-) They are not in the desktop business, they are in the search and web information services business. An OS you say? Now that would probably make more sense for Google for trying to beat MS at their game. These guys have one of the biggest server farms running a fault tolerant multi-disk file system (Google FS). So writing a distributed web-based Operating System is no big deal for them. The marketing of that would be, but that is another story.
If you stop to wait and look at the services Google provides now, does not www.google.com actually look like a distributed web-based OS? So, may be they are already there.:-)
Ah, you forgot. They have discovered transparency recently, so the blue screen of death is no longer supported.
I heard the next build will feature screenshots of the 'Milky white screen of death'. Last heard, the PNG team is yet to fix some bugs in the alpha channel, so they have not got around to adding that...
Slashdot Mirror
Or just use Freenet.
You can be sure that just like you, your data is also at sea.
I heard that professor was fired for trading his internet password for sexual favours from his female students.
So, I don't think this option will work anymore...
If you are going to spend most of the time over the Mediterranean sea, you could ask your ship's captain to drop his anchor far down enough to make contact with those broken undersea Internet cables which were in the news recently.
Once he does that (which must be easy, since ship captains seem to be doing it all the time these days), just connect a wire from the anchor cable to your laptop and voila! free Internet...
If he is not able to connect to any existing broken cables, just ask him to break one for you. Bribe him with enough rum to last your entire browsing time...
"Apparently new facial recognition software being employed by the state fails to function when the face is distorted by something as innocuous as smiling."
Perhaps they need to use facial anti-distortion software before using facial recognition software ?
Boy: Do not try and search for the code, instead realize the truth.
Geek: What truth ?
Boy: There is no code.
Geek: There is no code !!! ?
Boy: Then you'll see, itt is not the code that produces Monalisa, it is only your mind.
With this invention, the old phrase "Talk is cheap" is out of the window. Shoot whoever came up with that in the first place!
Also, as the technology grows and becomes widely adopted, the phrase "Power-talk" will make an entry into the English dictionary.
"The Oxford English Dictionary, 2012 Edition.
Power-talk(1) (n, adv) - The crude, despicable act of shouting into a mobile phone to power it up using piezo electric technology.
Power-talk(2) (n, adv) - The act of talking high and mighty with those less powerful than you to intimidate them or to display an apparent sense of superiority. As in, The power-talk by Barack Obama to Muhammed Ahmedinejad apparently had no effect on the Iranian leader, except to light up his mobile phone's display briefly.
Perhaps this will open up a lucrative new market for vibrators... ?
Girl (coyly): Honey, why are you fooling around with that vibrator thingy ? I am really not in the mood you know...
Dude: Darlin, this ain't for you. Just recharging my phone...
The economy must be surely in a recession if it takes a team of economic experts a FULL YEAR to figure this out!
Now go and tell this to John McCain...
Obama, on the phone to RMS...
Obama: Hello Dick
RMS: Stallman here, who is this ?
Obama: Dick, this is Obama, your president-elect. Could I have your resume for a very important post in my administration ?
RMS: Perhaps, what is this post ?
Obama: It is the post of the "Copyright Czar". You will be in charge of making important decisions regarding Copyright and I.P regulations in this country.
RMS: It sure sounds interesting, but I will consider the position only after you rename it to "Copyleft Czar" and release the text of this conversation under GNU GPL.
Obama: Er..., maybe not. Bye Dick. Have a nice day...
In other news, trailers of a new, to-be released Sci-fi movie has hit the theatres in Taiwan.
"Honey, I Flexed my iPhone!"
This gives credence to the theory that aliens are right on Earth, living under water, disguised as giant elbowed squids. SETI is wasting time scanning the skies. Now, we only need to find the MIBs...
Isacc Asimov treats this problem of rearing and caring for a Neanderthal boy in his short story "The Ugly Little Boy". In the story, a scientist brings back a Neanderthal boy from the past through time travel to study him.
The nurse who is assigned to care for him develops an emotional attachment with the boy. The scientists treat him just like a guinea pig. In the end he is banished back to where he came from, but the nurse decides to go back with him.
In the story, the boy is pictured as quite intelligent and sensitive, as much as a human offspring, though his feelings are not reciprocated by the "handlers", except the nurse who he grows to treat as his own mother.
Though the technology here is cloning and not time travel, the ethical issues remain the same.
How come none of them run DOS ?
I completely agree with this. Blanket encryption is akin to wearing full body armour because you are afraid of mosquito bites.
/home partition and encrypt it. Software full disk encryption programs are heavy and are not the solution to securing sensitive personal data.
Isolate sensitive data and keep them in separate partitions or folders. Linux offers partition encryptions so, you can put all your sensitive data in say
I guess it is not of much use in Bangalore where I live, since here car traffic is often at 5-10 kmph during peak hours. The software may decide that the mobile is not moving at "car speeds" ! :)
I think if any Indian telco adopts this software, they will have to put the minimum "car speed" setting from 1 kmph...
Also, Apple is now worth 3 times the value of Dell Computer, despite Dell's founder and CEO declaring over a decade ago that if he ran Apple, he'd 'shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.
Clearly Mr.Dell is not the best man at predicting the fortune of tech companies. Best example of this - Dell itself.
If I ran Dell, I would shut it down right now and give the money back to the shareholders, so that they can buy more Apple shares with it.
That is, if there is any money to give back...
Remember Murphy's law which is most applicable to tech jobs ? "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion". So, for workers complaining about not getting paid for overtime, shut up and go back to your cubicle and continue listening to those iPods and posting inane comments to /. ...
I make it a point to back up my important data to a zip drive, my 30 GB IPod, my 2 redundant flash drives, my old dusty desktop (which is good only for backup and trying out Linux distros), my website. Hell, I even tried to put it in a partition on my mother-in-law's laptop, but she told to back off.... I also take print-outs of my important documents, laminate them and have a special locker for these linked to my savings bank account. The locker is insured for a few hundred thousand rupees... With all this redundancy, I sleep well - with another copy of my important data printouts under my pillow....
Media seems to focusing a lot of attention on Powerset. But they seem to forget another startup which started innovating in the area of semantic search much before Powerset even arrived on the scene - Hakia. Read the following article which does a decent job of comparing the two startups. http://www.centernetworks.com/powerset-hakia
Talk about the true "spirit" of sharing code and ideas...!
With Microsoft money power I think Vista needs to be careful with the law suite.
They might end up being 'Vispire' otherwise.
Perhaps they should have called it MSN Virtual U.S . Microsoft press release: MSN virtual earth version 1.0 is fully supported only in the U.S . We are doing a market research in the U.S to find if the rest of the world really matters. If more than 40% of the survey respondents report that there are other places in the world that needs to be supported by MSN Virtual Earth, these will be added in MSN Virtual Earth SP1. Customer to MS tech support: Hey, whenever I open up MSN virtual earth it seems to load the picture of a big software campus. Is this a bug? MS Tech Support: No this is a feature. MSN VE loads the center of the Earth when it opens up. This happens to be the Microsoft campus at Redmond, Washington. Bye bye.
Well, making an office suite is not a big deal as you make it out to be. Corel had one of the best office suites (WordPerfect) before MSN kicked its ass from PC desktops with MS Office suite combined with its monopoly. And there is of course the alternative, Openoffice. Why on earth should Google try to make an office suite anyway? :-) They are not in the desktop business, they are in the search and web information services business. An OS you say? Now that would probably make more sense for Google for trying to beat MS at their game. These guys have one of the biggest server farms running a fault tolerant multi-disk file system (Google FS). So writing a distributed web-based Operating System is no big deal for them. The marketing of that would be, but that is another story.
If you stop to wait and look at the services Google provides now, does not www.google.com actually look like a distributed web-based OS? So, may be they are already there. :-)
"And what's with MS's maps inability to render curved roads? [msn.com]" I think curved roads will be supported with the MSN earch SP1.
Ah, you forgot. They have discovered transparency recently, so the blue screen of death is no longer supported.
I heard the next build will feature screenshots of the 'Milky white screen of death'. Last heard, the PNG team is yet to fix some bugs in the alpha channel, so they have not got around to adding that...