Your local air traffic control radar can often show traffic, depending on how they are configured. I was fascinated to see moving blips that were local highway traffic.
I and my car were searched [slashdot.org] for parking in front of the wrong house. Two local cops, two FBI agents, and a DEA agent wearing a ski mask (in July in Illinois) came out with guns drawn.
I'm amazed at the crazy things that seem to happen to you, mcgrew. That said, in this particular case, as inconvenient and frustrating as it was for you, I'm not exactly surprised. The police/fbi/dea were watching a crack house, which you happened to park in front of. Your friends went inside, then came out a little later. From their perspective, I hope you can see how that looks a little suspicious -- it's exactly the behavior (externally speaking) they were watching for.
You just seem to have some really bad luck.:-) (The garage thing was very distressing, though, that's for sure.)
And, I'd venture to say that because few developers in open source projects are interested in doing UI design (aside from the amount they NEED to), and fewer still are educated in it, I expect that very few are actually GOOD at it. I know I am not -- I write "functional" UIs that make sense to me, and sometimes not to others.;) I recognize the worth of good design, precisely because it's so hard for most programmers to do well. Just as Blizzard needs artists as well as programmers, large open source projects would likely benefit from encouraging some UI engineers to participate.
I cannot agree more. LEARN TO DANCE, and have fun at it. You don't need a partner to take lessons, but you may enjoy group classes.
1) Many are beginners, just like you. 2) It can be a real challenge, if (like me) you feel like you have no sense of rhythm. 3) As you learn, you will get more confident.
Later on, you will be able to be at ANY party, any formal gathering, any wedding, company dinner, or WHATEVER, and be able to dance. You will hear a waltz, a tango, some swing, or the like, and be able to ask a lady to dance with you -- and KNOW that you know the dance. You will be able to lead, and probably dance better than anyone else at the party (because how many guys takes dance lessons??) Think of it like DDR, but the way you increase your score is by making your partner look awesome.
Having the confidence to know that you rock at something can let you feel much less intimidated. Just as presenting about your awesome code or awesome geeky accomplishment isn't so hard, you can similarly be willing to talk or demonstrate about dance. It's quite cool. I wish I had actually taken more lessons than the ones before my wedding.;)
If you will pick a physical book over WIkipedia, and put your information in book form, and skip putting it on the net, isn't that exactly part of the reason why those online resources are poorer than physical ones? I love a good book (and dislike reading on the web, comparatively) but it seems that you're not doing a lot to help prevent the internet from "turning into television". Did you just give up?
I have weird-ass artifacts on Firefox here at home, and I'm using Vista. It is very jarring to have the site look better in Opera (and MUCH better in IE) than in Firefox.
HIGH SCHOOLS (and some junion high ones) tend to have various levels of math courses. However, in grades 1-6 (and somewhat 7-8), there's really only one math course for everyone. SOME very few kids are allowed to take the next-grade-up's math course (my best friend was one, 'twas how I met him), but for the most part, nearly all third graders (at a school) are studying the same thing, a nearly all sixth graders are studying the same thing.
The trouble comes when, in your fifth or sixth grade class, the teacher is going over (yet again) how to do long division or multiplication with one more digit than the previous year. The students who Don't Get It still don't get it, and are frustrated. The smart kids are bored stiff because it's months of crap that they learned two years ago, and thus they either screw off, are disruptive, or (some few) are lucky enough to have teachers who let them go out in the hall and doodle or read or work on homework while the rest of the class covers Yet More Long Division.
I learned how to multiply and divide in third grade. In fourth, we did it a little bit more, with two and three digit numbers... that might be when we were introduced to long division. We then repeated that for two more years, with the digits increasing. More rote-work, rather than finding interesting ways to USE the math. I realize that practice is important, but there are better ways than "OK, 50 more problems, this time with 4 digit divisors". I was fortunate to have compassionate teachers that let me play Oregon Trail in the hall.;)
Short of somehow convincing a judge to allow her to dismiss this debt by filing Chapter 7, her only option, AFAIK, is to let the RIAA garnish her wages to the maximum extent allowable by law (25% of her income) for the rest of her life, then take all of her assets upon her death. In effect, she would be reduced to near indentured servitude by this verdict. We might as well have debtors' prisons. There's really little difference when faced with a civil judgment of this magnitude.
I wonder if someone could set up a corporation, specifically for funding their lifestyle (home, food, car, etc), and consider themself an employee paid with very-low-salary? They would then have very little income to garnish, and no legal assets. I don't know if my company would care (significantly) if I were an employee or a "consultant" with a long-term support contract.
I'm not sure how one would avoid tax snafu and such, of course.
If he told them that they only needed to pay taxes on the face value, the IRS will probably try to pin him with a conspiracy to commit tax shenannigans. (Fraud? Evasion? I don't know.) Ideally, he would have paid them at face value (minimum wage, I sure hope), and then advised them to sell them on the market, and then pay taxes on THAT.
I'd probably rather get a normal salary: I suspect that the capital gains tax is >> the income tax rate.
"Playing God" is NOT merely an expression. The only reason many people are opposed to that is the idea that it is excessive hubris, or even a sin, to try to emulate the creator. "Playing God" has a distinct negative connotation, whereas "Pursuing cutting edge medical research" has much less of a social stigma. The religious undertones of the phrase are very much part of the reason that it has such a bad connotation.
True, it's not an official release yet. That said, I've been using Opera 10 beta for several months now, and it seems more stable than Opera 9 was. It appears to handle scripting on some websites more properly than 9 did, also. (Some sites wouldn't display right in Opera9; I can't think of any off the top of my head, though.) I am certainly a fan.
That said, I REALLY dislike having the tab close button on the tab itself, and dislike the new "locked tab" icon's transparency. I normally have Way Too Many tabs open (38, right now), and the tabs are pretty much exactly as wide as their favicon (normally displayed on the tab). Unfortunately, I am still accustomed to being able to click the active tab to put it in the background -- but now, doing so closes the tab. Phoey.
I still like it better than Firefox, though. I don't think it's even entirely rational: I can't think of features that I like about Opera which Firefox doesn't have (except for its awesome "block content" feature).
I am glad you pointed out legacy code. In some engineering disciplines, there is a LOT of existing code written in Fortran. Understanding it, bug-fixing it, and improving it generally requires both engineering savvy (to know when answers make sense) and knowledge of Fortran. At least being able to READ Fortan helps, too, if you're looking at a reference implementation of something and want to transcode it to something else in a non-verbatim manner.
Even an unmanned probe would work, though, for visiting/exploration purposes. Fit it with electrical propulsion, and/or a solar sail, and it could likely get there. The time scale would be large, but... a thousand (or 500, or less?) years from now, we would have something THERE that we could talk to. If we do nothing now, once we finally DO decide to go looking/traveling, we will still have to launch a probe, and have a long wait.
We may as well launch now, and read the data once it gets there. If in the meantime we develop better technology, so much the better, but at least that's a ceiling on how long until we can have something to get data from another star system with.
Unless you are an avid gamer, or your job/hobby requires esoteric software that only runs on Windows, Linux is ready for the desktop. Your 60 year old mother-in-law could even use it.
... unless you (or your father;)) have a several gig DRM'ed ITunes library. Sadly, that's a big dealbreaker to a lot of people. I'd happily pay for iTunes on Linux, if there were an easy to find, officially supported way to get one's songs usable in linux that does not involve upgrading the entire library to non-DRM'ed tracks. (My dad could just buy a brand new machine for that kind of money.)
Exactly. You could have F(x) defined such that it returns every other bit of x (or even just the lower 1 bit of x) -- a crappy hash, to be sure, but you sure couldn't derive x from F(x). A has function is by definition a function you cannot reverse.
Or, they could simply bring a more heavily armed team with them to ensure the safety of the inspector. And then pass on the extra cost of those teams to us taxpayers.
Messrs. Smith and Wesson should be prepared to hear counter arguments from the partners Heckler and Koch.
In plain english: If the FCC's search ability is used as leverage by another agency, chances are they will have armed people there. If you go attacking (or threatening) them with your weapons, you have some good chances of ending up dead. In principle, you (usually? in most states?) have the right to defend youself from home invasion... but what good is that if you are dead, and your vindication is posthumous? I think your family would prefer a father to a martyr.
So if you are stuck with certain Wifi cards it may suffer the same pain in the ass that linux generally does: having to track down a damned driver.
With backing from Intel, I'd be surprised if we didn't see an open source driver (or even a binary closed-source one?) that was available "out of the box" for the Centrino chipset's wireless hardware. Since so many vendors are likely to use such a bundled package, that covers a lot of the spectrum already -- just like if the intel graphics driver is available. (It is, right? I forget, as I don't have one.)
you are assuming that physical separation suddenly turns people into sociopaths. It's the same reasoning that makes the asinine argument that video games desensitize kids and turn them all into violent killers. It's just not the case. You're basically saying soldiers in the drones can't tell that those are real people they are killing. That's just stupid.
People far away, when told to fire on a target, are much more likely to hit the little red Kill Button on their drone control and light up a building of "insurgents" than they are to be willing to walk up to an enemy and gut them with a large knife. I'm certain I could do the former, given the right "intelligence", but the latter I think I would not. Distance makes it less personal -- the people they see on camera are not "real" people, but just pictures of them, merely statistics. Sure, there is training to counter that, but I think that desensitizing drone pilots is a very real thing.
- That denying Mexicans immigration due to race is wrong? No contest there. but, I don't think actually we do that, nor do I think that anyone here is claiming otherwise. - That punishing illegal immigrants from Mexico (or elsewhere) is inherently racist? I disagree.
My ancestors came here via the legal immigration channels. People from Mexico can come in the same way everyone else does: Through legal channels. I'm sorry to hear that their country sucks enough that they want to emigrate -- that's a true tragedy. However, other immigrants also want to come here, and there's no reason to give our southern neighbors special treatment. I don't care if a person immigrates illegally from Mexico, Russia, China, Botswana, or Ireland, they have broken the law and should be sent away -- or kept out forcibly.
So, waiting legally on the entrance list takes a generation. Tough shit, everyone else is waiting roughly as long too, I expect.
Slashdot Mirror
Your local air traffic control radar can often show traffic, depending on how they are configured. I was fascinated to see moving blips that were local highway traffic.
I'm amazed at the crazy things that seem to happen to you, mcgrew. That said, in this particular case, as inconvenient and frustrating as it was for you, I'm not exactly surprised. The police/fbi/dea were watching a crack house, which you happened to park in front of. Your friends went inside, then came out a little later. From their perspective, I hope you can see how that looks a little suspicious -- it's exactly the behavior (externally speaking) they were watching for.
You just seem to have some really bad luck. :-) (The garage thing was very distressing, though, that's for sure.)
And, I'd venture to say that because few developers in open source projects are interested in doing UI design (aside from the amount they NEED to), and fewer still are educated in it, I expect that very few are actually GOOD at it. I know I am not -- I write "functional" UIs that make sense to me, and sometimes not to others. ;) I recognize the worth of good design, precisely because it's so hard for most programmers to do well. Just as Blizzard needs artists as well as programmers, large open source projects would likely benefit from encouraging some UI engineers to participate.
I cannot agree more. LEARN TO DANCE, and have fun at it. You don't need a partner to take lessons, but you may enjoy group classes.
1) Many are beginners, just like you.
2) It can be a real challenge, if (like me) you feel like you have no sense of rhythm.
3) As you learn, you will get more confident.
Later on, you will be able to be at ANY party, any formal gathering, any wedding, company dinner, or WHATEVER, and be able to dance. You will hear a waltz, a tango, some swing, or the like, and be able to ask a lady to dance with you -- and KNOW that you know the dance. You will be able to lead, and probably dance better than anyone else at the party (because how many guys takes dance lessons??) Think of it like DDR, but the way you increase your score is by making your partner look awesome.
Having the confidence to know that you rock at something can let you feel much less intimidated. Just as presenting about your awesome code or awesome geeky accomplishment isn't so hard, you can similarly be willing to talk or demonstrate about dance. It's quite cool. I wish I had actually taken more lessons than the ones before my wedding. ;)
If you will pick a physical book over WIkipedia, and put your information in book form, and skip putting it on the net, isn't that exactly part of the reason why those online resources are poorer than physical ones? I love a good book (and dislike reading on the web, comparatively) but it seems that you're not doing a lot to help prevent the internet from "turning into television". Did you just give up?
(To be fair, I'm not doing anything either.)
I have weird-ass artifacts on Firefox here at home, and I'm using Vista. It is very jarring to have the site look better in Opera (and MUCH better in IE) than in Firefox.
I would be interested in seeing some actual statistics, comparing suicide bomber rates to abortion-related attacks.
HIGH SCHOOLS (and some junion high ones) tend to have various levels of math courses. However, in grades 1-6 (and somewhat 7-8), there's really only one math course for everyone. SOME very few kids are allowed to take the next-grade-up's math course (my best friend was one, 'twas how I met him), but for the most part, nearly all third graders (at a school) are studying the same thing, a nearly all sixth graders are studying the same thing.
The trouble comes when, in your fifth or sixth grade class, the teacher is going over (yet again) how to do long division or multiplication with one more digit than the previous year. The students who Don't Get It still don't get it, and are frustrated. The smart kids are bored stiff because it's months of crap that they learned two years ago, and thus they either screw off, are disruptive, or (some few) are lucky enough to have teachers who let them go out in the hall and doodle or read or work on homework while the rest of the class covers Yet More Long Division.
I learned how to multiply and divide in third grade. In fourth, we did it a little bit more, with two and three digit numbers... that might be when we were introduced to long division. We then repeated that for two more years, with the digits increasing. More rote-work, rather than finding interesting ways to USE the math. I realize that practice is important, but there are better ways than "OK, 50 more problems, this time with 4 digit divisors". I was fortunate to have compassionate teachers that let me play Oregon Trail in the hall. ;)
I wonder if someone could set up a corporation, specifically for funding their lifestyle (home, food, car, etc), and consider themself an employee paid with very-low-salary? They would then have very little income to garnish, and no legal assets. I don't know if my company would care (significantly) if I were an employee or a "consultant" with a long-term support contract.
I'm not sure how one would avoid tax snafu and such, of course.
If the coins are US legal tender, regardless of compositional vaue, wouldn't that make them by very definition "cash"?
If he told them that they only needed to pay taxes on the face value, the IRS will probably try to pin him with a conspiracy to commit tax shenannigans. (Fraud? Evasion? I don't know.) Ideally, he would have paid them at face value (minimum wage, I sure hope), and then advised them to sell them on the market, and then pay taxes on THAT.
I'd probably rather get a normal salary: I suspect that the capital gains tax is >> the income tax rate.
I don't know if it's the color balance, or the seeming age of the film, but I keep expecting to hear the Monty Python theme song.
(Disclaimer: I am really enjoying the Programming Erlang book, and actually do want to use it. :))
"Playing God" is NOT merely an expression. The only reason many people are opposed to that is the idea that it is excessive hubris, or even a sin, to try to emulate the creator. "Playing God" has a distinct negative connotation, whereas "Pursuing cutting edge medical research" has much less of a social stigma. The religious undertones of the phrase are very much part of the reason that it has such a bad connotation.
True, it's not an official release yet. That said, I've been using Opera 10 beta for several months now, and it seems more stable than Opera 9 was. It appears to handle scripting on some websites more properly than 9 did, also. (Some sites wouldn't display right in Opera9; I can't think of any off the top of my head, though.) I am certainly a fan.
That said, I REALLY dislike having the tab close button on the tab itself, and dislike the new "locked tab" icon's transparency. I normally have Way Too Many tabs open (38, right now), and the tabs are pretty much exactly as wide as their favicon (normally displayed on the tab). Unfortunately, I am still accustomed to being able to click the active tab to put it in the background -- but now, doing so closes the tab. Phoey.
I still like it better than Firefox, though. I don't think it's even entirely rational: I can't think of features that I like about Opera which Firefox doesn't have (except for its awesome "block content" feature).
I'd mod you up if I could.
The fragmented phone protocols in the US definitely helps keep the populace using the same brand, in general. Well, for those that want GSM, at least.
I am glad you pointed out legacy code. In some engineering disciplines, there is a LOT of existing code written in Fortran. Understanding it, bug-fixing it, and improving it generally requires both engineering savvy (to know when answers make sense) and knowledge of Fortran. At least being able to READ Fortan helps, too, if you're looking at a reference implementation of something and want to transcode it to something else in a non-verbatim manner.
Even an unmanned probe would work, though, for visiting/exploration purposes. Fit it with electrical propulsion, and/or a solar sail, and it could likely get there. The time scale would be large, but ... a thousand (or 500, or less?) years from now, we would have something THERE that we could talk to. If we do nothing now, once we finally DO decide to go looking/traveling, we will still have to launch a probe, and have a long wait.
We may as well launch now, and read the data once it gets there. If in the meantime we develop better technology, so much the better, but at least that's a ceiling on how long until we can have something to get data from another star system with.
Exactly. You could have F(x) defined such that it returns every other bit of x (or even just the lower 1 bit of x) -- a crappy hash, to be sure, but you sure couldn't derive x from F(x). A has function is by definition a function you cannot reverse.
Moreover, there are Men with Guns who will force you to comply with their point of view, until you are (you hope) vindicated.
Or, they could simply bring a more heavily armed team with them to ensure the safety of the inspector. And then pass on the extra cost of those teams to us taxpayers.
Messrs. Smith and Wesson should be prepared to hear counter arguments from the partners Heckler and Koch.
In plain english: If the FCC's search ability is used as leverage by another agency, chances are they will have armed people there. If you go attacking (or threatening) them with your weapons, you have some good chances of ending up dead. In principle, you (usually? in most states?) have the right to defend youself from home invasion ... but what good is that if you are dead, and your vindication is posthumous? I think your family would prefer a father to a martyr.
With backing from Intel, I'd be surprised if we didn't see an open source driver (or even a binary closed-source one?) that was available "out of the box" for the Centrino chipset's wireless hardware. Since so many vendors are likely to use such a bundled package, that covers a lot of the spectrum already -- just like if the intel graphics driver is available. (It is, right? I forget, as I don't have one.)
People far away, when told to fire on a target, are much more likely to hit the little red Kill Button on their drone control and light up a building of "insurgents" than they are to be willing to walk up to an enemy and gut them with a large knife. I'm certain I could do the former, given the right "intelligence", but the latter I think I would not. Distance makes it less personal -- the people they see on camera are not "real" people, but just pictures of them, merely statistics. Sure, there is training to counter that, but I think that desensitizing drone pilots is a very real thing.
What are you trying to argue?
- That denying Mexicans immigration due to race is wrong? No contest there. but, I don't think actually we do that, nor do I think that anyone here is claiming otherwise.
- That punishing illegal immigrants from Mexico (or elsewhere) is inherently racist? I disagree.
My ancestors came here via the legal immigration channels. People from Mexico can come in the same way everyone else does: Through legal channels. I'm sorry to hear that their country sucks enough that they want to emigrate -- that's a true tragedy. However, other immigrants also want to come here, and there's no reason to give our southern neighbors special treatment. I don't care if a person immigrates illegally from Mexico, Russia, China, Botswana, or Ireland, they have broken the law and should be sent away -- or kept out forcibly.
So, waiting legally on the entrance list takes a generation. Tough shit, everyone else is waiting roughly as long too, I expect.