Launching from Florida lets them take advantage of the rotational speed of the Earth -- it's closer to the equator, Earth's widest spot, and just like the outer edge of a record moves faster than the inner part, so it is with Earth. The speed boost is enormous.
Launching from Florida also gives them the ability to ditch into the ocean if necessary, instead of into a city.
These birds CAN produce offspring, but behaviorally, don't.
As such, any mutation that propegates through one of those groups will not be seen in the other. After a few times, you will have two wholly seperate branches.
This is no different from how Dawkins proposed that geographic boundaries may induce speciation -- a group of animals gets seperated from the "main" colony, say, by a mountain range or something. That new group then interbreeds for a couple hundred generations, and after a while, are quite distinct from the original group. Whether the original boundary was behavior or geographical seems to make no difference.
Yeah, I know that I'm just itching to read more about "not futon" or "not now". And it's handy to be able to see more articles about "nextweek", too. Perhaps "games", but then, if I wanted that there's an entire section devoted to it.
I have to agree tags are unbelievably useless in general and on Slashdot specifically.
His doctor strongly recommended he pay out of his own pocket and get the treatment immediately. That's what he did. So explain to me again the point of government health care?
Great, he was able to pay for costly medical procedures himself. Many -- perhaps most -- people are not.
Back in 2004 I was in a low-paying job where I had no health insurance. I broke my wrist, which required about twelve grand in surgery to repair properly. Where was someone making barely above minimum wage going to come up with that kind of money? Maybe work out a payment plan, but who is going to want to deal with someone with as horrible credit as I had back then, and who was barely making enough to pay the bills as it was? Or perhaps I should have just splinted it myself and hoped it healed without leaving that hand crippled for life?
I was fortunate enough to have parents with money, and they were able to take care of this for me. Not all are so lucky.
Every time I hear someone whinge about waiting lists, I have to sigh. Waiting a few months for treatment might not be great but it beats the stuffing out of not getting treatment at all, which is what many people are facing today, right here in the US.
And, finally, I don't really see what's so great about our current system. Insurance companies exist to make profit, not to provide healthcare. A system where there is a profit motive in denying claims seems pretty dumb to me.
if you ever support one thing, once, implictly customers will whinge when you break it through no fault of your own.
Oh, they'll do the same thing if they break it. This happened all the time when I was doing support at my company -- a user would show up with some random device, and I'd tell him gee, I've never seen one of these before, and we don't support it, but I'll see if I can at least get it up and running for you. A one-time thing, right?
But no, invariably they'd come back with every little problem they had with that device, despite not having purchased it from us and being explicitly told "I know nothing about it and cannot realistically support problems it has."
Now, that describes the obnoxious users. There are plenty of others who were fine about it -- they'd bring you the random piece of crap, you'd explain "This isn't supported, but I'll try to get it running." And they'd be fine with knowing that if it broke you couldn't help them. If they're willing to go along with that, why not let them try?
This can be enforced with corporate policy. Ours was never very strict but went something like this: "If you have a device not on our supported list, we will make an effort to get it operational with our service. However, we can offer no guarantees, and we cannot assist with ANY problems that device may have in the future."
If you make customers agree to this, either in writing or other recorded means, and give your support staff the authority to JUST SAY NO, regardless of how much the customer whinges or how big an account it is, then there should be no problem. People will be free to use whatever third-party stuff they want, and the company will be free to tell them to take a hike if it doesn't work. But many of them WILL work and it seems silly to turn away potential customers on the basis that you don't want to support things you're under no obligation to support.
"Why are you trying to track your package? Tell us what you really want to accomplish."
You know, that is something I often ask. Don't misunderstand -- since the technology exists for me to track my shipments, I use it, but when I step back to think about it, I'm not accomplishing anything. I place an order, I get confirmation that it's been shipped, and I wait a few days. What difference does it make if I know that it's sitting in Memphis or just got scanned out of Pittsburgh? It'll get here when it gets here, and my knowing about its precise location will not change its eventual arrival time.
I guess it helps in CYA situations on occasion, but mostly package tracking is just a very fancy way to keep customers from calling in every hour demanding a "status update" for information they cannot possibly use in any meaningful way.
And lets face it, IE8's UI isn't terrible. You might not be used to it, or like it as much, but its objectively not all that bad.
"Used to it" is important in interfaces. Why is the refresh button suddenly part of the address bar? There was absolutely no reason for that -- they just DID it, and users find it confusing because it's unexpected.
Why are the controls pushed to the four corners of creation instead of being grouped in a single location? Back and forward are now way over HERE while stop and refresh are way over THERE. It's cumbersome and there was no reason to change it.
Why are the menus now little indecipherable icon: What, pray tell, would be logical to put under the house-looking icon? I can't tell, so I have to click each one to figure it out, and only get back to those options through rote memory instead of contextual clues.
Why are those aforementioned menus taking up such a huge portion of the real estate used by tabs? That's one of the most obnoxious UI decisions they could have made.
No, the UI in IE8 is truly an abomination. Thankfully I never have to use it, but the few times I have, the only thing that impressed me was the speed at which it caused me to want to stop using it.
They aren't perfect. But at least they go out and conduct experiments themselves to find out whether the hypothesis holds up instead of just blindly accepting they're told.
More importantly, they often discuss the results afterwards -- they admit the shortcomings in the experiment, and how that might have affected the results, and how it could have been done better. On several occasions, the Mythbusters team has repeated experiments they did earlier, with better equipment and more accurate measurements, to see if they can reproduce the results.
They may be doing it for the sake of drama but they are teaching important lessons of science: You CAN find out on your own if you want. Expect to have to refine your tests. Be prepared to disclose the flaws in your tests. SHOW YOUR WORK so anyone else can attempt the same experiment. And, perhaps most importantly, be able to admit that you were wrong, or simply don't know.. yet.
The problem isn't the OS, it's every third-party's shitty tray applet/update checker/brand spammer.
Which is precisely what you get when you use an OS that has no centralised package management system: Every vendor has to invent their own retarded little update applet, because there's no other way you'll ever get updates. The entire application installation/management/update "system" is the problem and that is a fault of Windows as an OS.
I expect it's probably both. The users are stubborn and usually totally ignorant when it comes to computers, and god forbid you ask them to learn anything new. The storm of whining when that happens is truly astonishing.
But if the notion of switching to any other platform even comes up in management's discussions with IT, you can also count on at least a few Windows-only twits who will try to talk them out of it. They might do this because they enjoy looking like heroes for bringing the Exchange servers back up, or they might do this because they don't know any other platform and either can't or don't care to learn.
Maybe, but standards do relax as the generations progress. Rock music used to be evil. Elvis wiggling his hips while dancing was deemed too suggestive to show on television.
The boomers may have had their hippies for a brief period, but I think in reality most of them grew up with Ward and June Cleaver as role models for what's "normal" and "acceptable". By contrast, my generation grew up with Peg and Al Bundy.
That's why photoradar installations have to take mug shots for evidence of who was driving.
Except they don't in many (most?) cases. The state is more than happy to send you a snapshot of the back of your car -- in some cases you can't even tell where the photo was taken -- and expect you to mail them money. This happened to me recently: I was driving my stepfather's car while mine was out of commission, and apparently "ran" a red light. They sent him the ticket since he's the registered owner of the car, and now it was up to him to prove that he wasn't the one driving it at the time. (How the hell you're supposed to be able to prove that is beyond me.)
No face picture, nothing -- just a picture of the back of his car at what appeared to be an intersection.
Whether or not you think that's the right way to do it is kind of irrelevent. My point is how the government is generally willing to accept whatever interpretation suits them at that moment. They'll claim your license plate is damning enough evidence that you, personally, did something, but an IP address assigned to you isn't.
Okay, I hadn't considered sexual selection as a driving force. But I'm not sure that's significant, either. You say:
Getting eaten by a jaguar isn't going to stop you from having kids, but the way you interact with society might
I'm just not sure there's a "wallflower" or "total loner" gene that can be bred out, or it seems it would have already, almost by definition. That's a personality trait and gets into a whole nature-versus-nurture thing.
However, I guess you could say that's a meme -- parents who know how to interact well with society will pass that information to their offspring. On the other hand, even some of the most introverted, cynical, or just plain unpleasant people I know usually manage to find someone. And I'm not convinced it's a biological or genetic trait anyway, as I said, which means that it still isn't really evolution, if we consider evolution to be only biological changes in a species (which I do).
Of course, if pollution is affecting our fertility rates then there will be strong selection for people who are pollution resistant.
Again, I think we'll adapt ourselves through medicine or technology well before natural selection can do anything about this, barring some very sudden and global catastrophe.
In fact, we already see this to some extent. In eras past, that infertile woman or that man with low-quality sperm would never have been able to conceive, and their genetic lineage would have stopped. Today this is rarely a concern in any developed nation.
The idea that evolution has some goal or endpoint is a popular but incorrect one, as you point out. But humans have essentially stopped evolving if we consider evolution to be biological changes.
We've largely removed ourselves from the entire process by constructing societies and civilisation, particularly agriculture and industrialisation. We have no meaningful environmental pressures, as we adapt the environment to suit us rather than the other way around. We have no meaningful competition with each other or any other species, in the "survival" sense of the word. We have no biological shortcomings which affect our ability to reproduce virtually at will, and we alter ourselves with technology and medicine when required.
Beyond all that, we are simply too large a population to really evolve, biologically. Evolution tends to take place in small and isolated populations, where a bit of genetric drift becomes important. Humans no longer have such limitations.
The LAW states that the bike has a right to the whole lane from the INSIDE of the white line to the yellow line.
The law also states that a bike on the road is considered a road vehicle and must obey the laws of the road like any car must, but that doesn't seem to stop cyclists from casually going through red lights and stop signs whenever they want, pedalling up ahead of everyone stuck at a light, hopping the curb and going perpendicular to the flow of traffic, and other things, because "it's just a bike". Cyclists just seem very quick to point out the laws that give them rights to the road, but just as quick to ignore laws that they feel shouldn't pertain to them.
The jackasses are on both sides.
The law compels YOU, as a driver of a faster and heavier vehicle, to be aware of slower traffic and conduct yourself accordingly.
Perhaps, but this is also the mentality that pedestrians use as they blindly step out into traffic assuming everyone will stop for them because "it's the law". The laws of man don't override the laws of physics. While the driver may be compelled to be aware of slower traffic, a cyclist relying purely on the law to protect him is ignoring the mechanical realities of the situation.
I'll watch where I'm driving, but please, watch where you're biking. When the light is green for me I don't expect a bike to come hurtling out of the intersection.
Do you honk and swear at tractors, funerals, and Amish buggies too?
tried to explain to them the irony of the situation.
Was this guy trying to make it harder on himself? People like that will rarely have the brains to understand the irony, and if they do, they're going to be even more ticked off for you having made them look silly or stupid.
Doubt it. Looks to me like the reporter gave the kid the Walkman, let him play with it for a week, asked him questions about his experience, and then wrote the article from the viewpoint of the kid. A 13 year old would not say "remeber that?" in reference to things he is seeing for the first time.
This isn't really uncommon practice in the journalism world. My sister was interviewed by an Isreaeli reporter shortly after the rocket attacks a few months back, because of her status as an American and her proximity (she was a few blocks from where the rockets struck). The reporter synthesized all her answers and thoughts during the interview and wrote the article as though it had been written by my sister. It gave the whole article a sense of first-person immediacy, instead of the dry descriptions of a reporter who wasn't there.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that the judges/lawyers leaning towards "fair use" keep pointing out that the girl posted her diatribe on myspace, meaning it was more or less freely available to all. I'm with them up to that point.
What I don't get is how they can interpret that to mean any passing slob has the right to copy most or all of the work wholesale. Just because it was "public"? What does that even mean?
If I write and publish a book, that book is now "in the public eye", is it not? Anyone can presumably go buy it or even check it out of a library for free, Does that give them the right to copy and distribute it themselves? How is my claim to copyright on my hypothetical book any less legitimate than this girl's claim to copyright on whatever she wrote?
To me, "fair use" would mean publishing a brief excerpt, enough to get some point across. Copying the entire work, falsely claiming it was sent to you as a letter, and distributing it seems to go well beyond that.
You are not a Borg. You do not have to be plugged into the collective hive mind at all times. Come home from work, put the phone on your desk / table / kitchen counter, and leave it there. If it rings while you're away, call the person back if you must.
Or just leave the thing in your pocket. I'm "old school" enough to still have a Razr, which is thin enough to keep in my back pocket at all times without my even noticing it's there.
Yes, I realise that wasn't the solution you were seeking, but you are asking for a solution to a "problem" that seems ridiculous to most people, judging from the commentary. If you want to get serious answers you're probably going to have to give us some context or rationale, because otherwise your question seems, well, let's just say "eccentric".
Right now a huge part of my job involves working on a proof of concept that our service can be moved into "the cloud". (Not my idea.) In the past two weeks while I've been working on this, I've noticed that instances spin up slower and slower as I add more and more, to the point where booting my baseline production environment -- little more than a vanilla CentOS install -- takes a good ten to twelve minutes. I expect it to get worse as we progress.
Scalability is great but when you glance over at your console and say "Oh, hell, we need more capacity RIGHT NOW!" and it takes twenty minutes to get the additional servers, users are going to assume it's "down" as they would anything else.
Maybe it takes practice, but I can rarely tell what someone is typing just by watching their fingers on the keyboard, especially if they're even remotely fast typists. Or if the lighting sucks.
I can, however, glance at some text on a screen and read what's there. If the password is a normal English word or just a slight variation -- which is the case for most English-speaking users -- it would only take a fraction of a second for me to see what's written, and remember it. Shoulder-surfing only goes so far.
Slashdot Mirror
Launching from Florida lets them take advantage of the rotational speed of the Earth -- it's closer to the equator, Earth's widest spot, and just like the outer edge of a record moves faster than the inner part, so it is with Earth. The speed boost is enormous.
Launching from Florida also gives them the ability to ditch into the ocean if necessary, instead of into a city.
These birds CAN produce offspring, but behaviorally, don't.
As such, any mutation that propegates through one of those groups will not be seen in the other. After a few times, you will have two wholly seperate branches.
This is no different from how Dawkins proposed that geographic boundaries may induce speciation -- a group of animals gets seperated from the "main" colony, say, by a mountain range or something. That new group then interbreeds for a couple hundred generations, and after a while, are quite distinct from the original group. Whether the original boundary was behavior or geographical seems to make no difference.
Here are a few random ones culled from the front page right now:
"nextweek", "!now", "!futon", "giveuswarrenspector", "games"
Yeah, I know that I'm just itching to read more about "not futon" or "not now". And it's handy to be able to see more articles about "nextweek", too. Perhaps "games", but then, if I wanted that there's an entire section devoted to it.
I have to agree tags are unbelievably useless in general and on Slashdot specifically.
As used around here, both "queue" and "cue" make semantic sense.
"Cue the complaints about..." means he is signalling for the expected complaints to begin, as the complaints are assumed to be inevitable.
"Queue the complaints about..." means he is expecting the complaints to be numerous, so they stack up and form a queue.
Either way, it works.
His doctor strongly recommended he pay out of his own pocket and get the treatment immediately. That's what he did. So explain to me again the point of government health care?
Great, he was able to pay for costly medical procedures himself. Many -- perhaps most -- people are not.
Back in 2004 I was in a low-paying job where I had no health insurance. I broke my wrist, which required about twelve grand in surgery to repair properly. Where was someone making barely above minimum wage going to come up with that kind of money? Maybe work out a payment plan, but who is going to want to deal with someone with as horrible credit as I had back then, and who was barely making enough to pay the bills as it was? Or perhaps I should have just splinted it myself and hoped it healed without leaving that hand crippled for life?
I was fortunate enough to have parents with money, and they were able to take care of this for me. Not all are so lucky.
Every time I hear someone whinge about waiting lists, I have to sigh. Waiting a few months for treatment might not be great but it beats the stuffing out of not getting treatment at all, which is what many people are facing today, right here in the US.
And, finally, I don't really see what's so great about our current system. Insurance companies exist to make profit, not to provide healthcare. A system where there is a profit motive in denying claims seems pretty dumb to me.
if you ever support one thing, once, implictly customers will whinge when you break it through no fault of your own.
Oh, they'll do the same thing if they break it. This happened all the time when I was doing support at my company -- a user would show up with some random device, and I'd tell him gee, I've never seen one of these before, and we don't support it, but I'll see if I can at least get it up and running for you. A one-time thing, right?
But no, invariably they'd come back with every little problem they had with that device, despite not having purchased it from us and being explicitly told "I know nothing about it and cannot realistically support problems it has."
Now, that describes the obnoxious users. There are plenty of others who were fine about it -- they'd bring you the random piece of crap, you'd explain "This isn't supported, but I'll try to get it running." And they'd be fine with knowing that if it broke you couldn't help them. If they're willing to go along with that, why not let them try?
This can be enforced with corporate policy. Ours was never very strict but went something like this: "If you have a device not on our supported list, we will make an effort to get it operational with our service. However, we can offer no guarantees, and we cannot assist with ANY problems that device may have in the future."
If you make customers agree to this, either in writing or other recorded means, and give your support staff the authority to JUST SAY NO, regardless of how much the customer whinges or how big an account it is, then there should be no problem. People will be free to use whatever third-party stuff they want, and the company will be free to tell them to take a hike if it doesn't work. But many of them WILL work and it seems silly to turn away potential customers on the basis that you don't want to support things you're under no obligation to support.
"Why are you trying to track your package? Tell us what you really want to accomplish."
You know, that is something I often ask. Don't misunderstand -- since the technology exists for me to track my shipments, I use it, but when I step back to think about it, I'm not accomplishing anything. I place an order, I get confirmation that it's been shipped, and I wait a few days. What difference does it make if I know that it's sitting in Memphis or just got scanned out of Pittsburgh? It'll get here when it gets here, and my knowing about its precise location will not change its eventual arrival time.
I guess it helps in CYA situations on occasion, but mostly package tracking is just a very fancy way to keep customers from calling in every hour demanding a "status update" for information they cannot possibly use in any meaningful way.
And lets face it, IE8's UI isn't terrible. You might not be used to it, or like it as much, but its objectively not all that bad.
"Used to it" is important in interfaces. Why is the refresh button suddenly part of the address bar? There was absolutely no reason for that -- they just DID it, and users find it confusing because it's unexpected.
Why are the controls pushed to the four corners of creation instead of being grouped in a single location? Back and forward are now way over HERE while stop and refresh are way over THERE. It's cumbersome and there was no reason to change it.
Why are the menus now little indecipherable icon: What, pray tell, would be logical to put under the house-looking icon? I can't tell, so I have to click each one to figure it out, and only get back to those options through rote memory instead of contextual clues.
Why are those aforementioned menus taking up such a huge portion of the real estate used by tabs? That's one of the most obnoxious UI decisions they could have made.
No, the UI in IE8 is truly an abomination. Thankfully I never have to use it, but the few times I have, the only thing that impressed me was the speed at which it caused me to want to stop using it.
They aren't perfect. But at least they go out and conduct experiments themselves to find out whether the hypothesis holds up instead of just blindly accepting they're told.
More importantly, they often discuss the results afterwards -- they admit the shortcomings in the experiment, and how that might have affected the results, and how it could have been done better. On several occasions, the Mythbusters team has repeated experiments they did earlier, with better equipment and more accurate measurements, to see if they can reproduce the results.
They may be doing it for the sake of drama but they are teaching important lessons of science: You CAN find out on your own if you want. Expect to have to refine your tests. Be prepared to disclose the flaws in your tests. SHOW YOUR WORK so anyone else can attempt the same experiment. And, perhaps most importantly, be able to admit that you were wrong, or simply don't know.. yet.
The problem isn't the OS, it's every third-party's shitty tray applet/update checker/brand spammer.
Which is precisely what you get when you use an OS that has no centralised package management system: Every vendor has to invent their own retarded little update applet, because there's no other way you'll ever get updates. The entire application installation/management/update "system" is the problem and that is a fault of Windows as an OS.
I expect it's probably both. The users are stubborn and usually totally ignorant when it comes to computers, and god forbid you ask them to learn anything new. The storm of whining when that happens is truly astonishing.
But if the notion of switching to any other platform even comes up in management's discussions with IT, you can also count on at least a few Windows-only twits who will try to talk them out of it. They might do this because they enjoy looking like heroes for bringing the Exchange servers back up, or they might do this because they don't know any other platform and either can't or don't care to learn.
Maybe, but standards do relax as the generations progress. Rock music used to be evil. Elvis wiggling his hips while dancing was deemed too suggestive to show on television.
The boomers may have had their hippies for a brief period, but I think in reality most of them grew up with Ward and June Cleaver as role models for what's "normal" and "acceptable". By contrast, my generation grew up with Peg and Al Bundy.
That's why photoradar installations have to take mug shots for evidence of who was driving.
Except they don't in many (most?) cases. The state is more than happy to send you a snapshot of the back of your car -- in some cases you can't even tell where the photo was taken -- and expect you to mail them money. This happened to me recently: I was driving my stepfather's car while mine was out of commission, and apparently "ran" a red light. They sent him the ticket since he's the registered owner of the car, and now it was up to him to prove that he wasn't the one driving it at the time. (How the hell you're supposed to be able to prove that is beyond me.)
No face picture, nothing -- just a picture of the back of his car at what appeared to be an intersection.
Whether or not you think that's the right way to do it is kind of irrelevent. My point is how the government is generally willing to accept whatever interpretation suits them at that moment. They'll claim your license plate is damning enough evidence that you, personally, did something, but an IP address assigned to you isn't.
5 million is a lot, enough to afford a nice $200K Ferrari, but a $2M Veyron? No.
Jeez, times are tougher than I thought. These days five million dollars can't buy you something worth two million.
I create for my own profit, not your entertainment.
Can't you write for both reasons? If I'm not entertained in some way by whatever you're writing, why the hell would I buy it in the first place?
Okay, I hadn't considered sexual selection as a driving force. But I'm not sure that's significant, either. You say:
Getting eaten by a jaguar isn't going to stop you from having kids, but the way you interact with society might
I'm just not sure there's a "wallflower" or "total loner" gene that can be bred out, or it seems it would have already, almost by definition. That's a personality trait and gets into a whole nature-versus-nurture thing.
However, I guess you could say that's a meme -- parents who know how to interact well with society will pass that information to their offspring. On the other hand, even some of the most introverted, cynical, or just plain unpleasant people I know usually manage to find someone. And I'm not convinced it's a biological or genetic trait anyway, as I said, which means that it still isn't really evolution, if we consider evolution to be only biological changes in a species (which I do).
Of course, if pollution is affecting our fertility rates then there will be strong selection for people who are pollution resistant.
Again, I think we'll adapt ourselves through medicine or technology well before natural selection can do anything about this, barring some very sudden and global catastrophe.
In fact, we already see this to some extent. In eras past, that infertile woman or that man with low-quality sperm would never have been able to conceive, and their genetic lineage would have stopped. Today this is rarely a concern in any developed nation.
The idea that evolution has some goal or endpoint is a popular but incorrect one, as you point out. But humans have essentially stopped evolving if we consider evolution to be biological changes.
We've largely removed ourselves from the entire process by constructing societies and civilisation, particularly agriculture and industrialisation. We have no meaningful environmental pressures, as we adapt the environment to suit us rather than the other way around. We have no meaningful competition with each other or any other species, in the "survival" sense of the word. We have no biological shortcomings which affect our ability to reproduce virtually at will, and we alter ourselves with technology and medicine when required.
Beyond all that, we are simply too large a population to really evolve, biologically. Evolution tends to take place in small and isolated populations, where a bit of genetric drift becomes important. Humans no longer have such limitations.
The LAW states that the bike has a right to the whole lane from the INSIDE of the white line to the yellow line.
:P
The law also states that a bike on the road is considered a road vehicle and must obey the laws of the road like any car must, but that doesn't seem to stop cyclists from casually going through red lights and stop signs whenever they want, pedalling up ahead of everyone stuck at a light, hopping the curb and going perpendicular to the flow of traffic, and other things, because "it's just a bike". Cyclists just seem very quick to point out the laws that give them rights to the road, but just as quick to ignore laws that they feel shouldn't pertain to them.
The jackasses are on both sides.
The law compels YOU, as a driver of a faster and heavier vehicle, to be aware of slower traffic and conduct yourself accordingly.
Perhaps, but this is also the mentality that pedestrians use as they blindly step out into traffic assuming everyone will stop for them because "it's the law". The laws of man don't override the laws of physics. While the driver may be compelled to be aware of slower traffic, a cyclist relying purely on the law to protect him is ignoring the mechanical realities of the situation.
I'll watch where I'm driving, but please, watch where you're biking. When the light is green for me I don't expect a bike to come hurtling out of the intersection.
Do you honk and swear at tractors, funerals, and Amish buggies too?
Yes, but that's just because I'm a jackass.
should people target Linux as much, the figure would likely be the same.
And you base this conclusion on what, exactly?
2001 "MS is insecure" arguements which are no longer true today.
Right. Windows is a bastion of security these days. Sure.
tried to explain to them the irony of the situation.
Was this guy trying to make it harder on himself? People like that will rarely have the brains to understand the irony, and if they do, they're going to be even more ticked off for you having made them look silly or stupid.
Doubt it. Looks to me like the reporter gave the kid the Walkman, let him play with it for a week, asked him questions about his experience, and then wrote the article from the viewpoint of the kid. A 13 year old would not say "remeber that?" in reference to things he is seeing for the first time.
This isn't really uncommon practice in the journalism world. My sister was interviewed by an Isreaeli reporter shortly after the rocket attacks a few months back, because of her status as an American and her proximity (she was a few blocks from where the rockets struck). The reporter synthesized all her answers and thoughts during the interview and wrote the article as though it had been written by my sister. It gave the whole article a sense of first-person immediacy, instead of the dry descriptions of a reporter who wasn't there.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that the judges/lawyers leaning towards "fair use" keep pointing out that the girl posted her diatribe on myspace, meaning it was more or less freely available to all. I'm with them up to that point.
What I don't get is how they can interpret that to mean any passing slob has the right to copy most or all of the work wholesale. Just because it was "public"? What does that even mean?
If I write and publish a book, that book is now "in the public eye", is it not? Anyone can presumably go buy it or even check it out of a library for free, Does that give them the right to copy and distribute it themselves? How is my claim to copyright on my hypothetical book any less legitimate than this girl's claim to copyright on whatever she wrote?
To me, "fair use" would mean publishing a brief excerpt, enough to get some point across. Copying the entire work, falsely claiming it was sent to you as a letter, and distributing it seems to go well beyond that.
Am I missing something?
You are not a Borg. You do not have to be plugged into the collective hive mind at all times. Come home from work, put the phone on your desk / table / kitchen counter, and leave it there. If it rings while you're away, call the person back if you must.
Or just leave the thing in your pocket. I'm "old school" enough to still have a Razr, which is thin enough to keep in my back pocket at all times without my even noticing it's there.
Yes, I realise that wasn't the solution you were seeking, but you are asking for a solution to a "problem" that seems ridiculous to most people, judging from the commentary. If you want to get serious answers you're probably going to have to give us some context or rationale, because otherwise your question seems, well, let's just say "eccentric".
Right now a huge part of my job involves working on a proof of concept that our service can be moved into "the cloud". (Not my idea.) In the past two weeks while I've been working on this, I've noticed that instances spin up slower and slower as I add more and more, to the point where booting my baseline production environment -- little more than a vanilla CentOS install -- takes a good ten to twelve minutes. I expect it to get worse as we progress.
Scalability is great but when you glance over at your console and say "Oh, hell, we need more capacity RIGHT NOW!" and it takes twenty minutes to get the additional servers, users are going to assume it's "down" as they would anything else.
Maybe it takes practice, but I can rarely tell what someone is typing just by watching their fingers on the keyboard, especially if they're even remotely fast typists. Or if the lighting sucks.
I can, however, glance at some text on a screen and read what's there. If the password is a normal English word or just a slight variation -- which is the case for most English-speaking users -- it would only take a fraction of a second for me to see what's written, and remember it. Shoulder-surfing only goes so far.