I have a windows mobile phone from the generation before. I tell everyone I'm able: it really is the worst product that I've ever seen actually released. I have NO idea how it was put on the market, because it is so fundamentally nonfunctional in so many primary features... I mean that statement says it alone.
I will never touch another MS mobile product again. It enrages me that they get away with multiple shit-products. DO NOT BUY!
Same here. My first smartphone was windows mobile, and I missed by dumbphone before the first week was over. Never. Ever. Again.
I pay for 5gb at full speed, and then anything over that at reduced speeds. Then I pay another $15 to purchase tethering, and use my HTC Magic as my home internet connection, which I believe gives me more data as well. With 500 minutes, unlimited text, unlimited data (with the first 5 gigs at full speed) and unlimited tethering and wifi sharing, fees, etc... my bill is $95 per month. I'm happy. I hope this never goes away.
Not to poop on your party, but $95 per month is at least 2 to 3 times more than you pay for a similar service in most European countries. For instance in Austria you can get 19GB (with no restrictions on tethering) per month for 15 euros from Drei. Add voice and sms and you will spend maybe 30 euros a month.
The correlation between marijuana use and psychosis seems to be true, but whether it constitutes a causal relationship (marijuana->psychosis) has been subject to much controversy.
It could also be that people with higher risk of psychosis are attracted to marijuana because of it's anti-anxiety effects. After all, (some types of) psychotics can be just a more extreme version of your everyday neurotic. And neurotics are more subject to anxiety (in fact, some interpretations of neurosis see anxiety as the central disruptive force in a neurotic personality.. I'm thinking of Karen Horney and her "basic anxiety").
Baloney. Pot is addictive. That is why there are detox programs.
We once had a guy come over to our high school and give a surprisingly bullshit-free talk on drugs, with actual data on the effects, addictiveness etc of various types of drugs. I remember looking at the figures for how much THC you needed to use on a daily basis to become addicted, and thinking that the biggest potheads I knew did not smoke that much in a month.
Of course, this is for physical addiction, with actual physical withdrawal symptoms. Psychological addiction is a different matter altoghether (and even with highly addictive drugs like heroin, psychological addiction is often the hardest one to defeat in the long term).
Does anyone remember it? Even real companies were spending money to build their spaces there. How long ago was that? And now? Just tumbleweed...
I remember it! sometimes I type "sl" into the firefox address bar and fail at using the awesome bar to get to slashdot, and end up at the second life website....
Why let other bands cover individual songs from your albums?
Newsflash: I do not need your permission to cover your song. But if I sell a record with your cover you will get some of the money from the sales, based on some standard rule.
So they create the first movie depiction of an alien world, making every part of that alien world at as plausible as possible by obeying the physical laws (...)
I think the only part that I got interested in was Quorra becoming human. They could make a WHOLE movie about that, did you know? What does it mean to be human? Why is pain so awful? What are these things called emotions? Et cetera.
They already have, several times.. it's called pinocchio.
It's not that type of password. You are already logged in to your banking site using username and password. Then you decide to send money to someone, and one of the ways of doing 2-factor authentication available to you is to have the bank send you a 1-time password by SMS, which you then type into the computer. The one-time password is bound to the specific transaction you were requesting, and the sms contains some information about the transaction (like the destination account number and amount), so if the account number or amount is not what you wanted you know something is wrong.
So unless the bad guys have malware on your phone AND on your pc, they can't steal your money.
Of course, this is in europe. In the US two-factor authentication means password+"what is your mother's maiden name". And no, this is not a random anti-american rant. Most US banks still do not have 2-factor authentication, while all that I know of in europe do, in some form or another. Also, a security guy from a US bank I spoke to at a conference told me they don't do two factor authentication because users don't want to remember more passwords (thus proving he does not understand what is 2-factor authentication). Also, he said that when you want to do something "suspicious" like sending money to a new destination, they start to ask you security questions (like "what is your mother's maiden name").
Most people weren't going to Open Office - they simply put up with the nagging - because in the end the nagging was less annoying than using Open Office.
I agree openoffice is annoying, but so is microsoft office. Personally, I think powerpoint is much better than impress, but I also find word is much more annoying than openoffice writer. So the question is, what is more annoying, microsoft office + nagging, or openoffice with no nagging?
People do not just stand up and leave their homes and entire possessions, unless you convincingly demonstrate to them that you are willing to slaughter them if they don't leave.
And that is exactly what the Jews forced the Palestinians to do. Having been a victim does not constitute a licence to victimize someone else.
There is no such thing as "the jews". The people who live in Israel today are mostly not the same ones who initially moved into the new state when it was founded. You cannot blame them for anything that happened in 1948 any more than you can blame germans today for what the nazis did just a few years earlier: I would think that not having been born yet should count as an absolute defense against any accusation... Unless you are the wolf from Aesop's fable, who just wants an excuse to eat the lamb.
2. It is against Iran's interests to have a nuclear weapons program, as that would provide Israel and the USA with a classic casus belli for an aggressive war against it. (Exactly as happened in Iraq).
Who is "iran"? It is definitely against the country's interests to have nuclear weapons while being considered dangerous by the rest of the world (because it might yet get them invaded). But the whole nuclear controversy serves a political/propaganda purpose for the country's rulers.
6. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that the state of Israel should be removed from the map. That would be achieved if, for instance, all the immigrant Jews were to go back to Europe, North America, and wherever else they came from, and the Palestinians were given back their homes. He did not call for the killing of anyone, let alone the genocide often falsely attributed to him.
Many of those "immigrant" jews were born in israel, and the homes they live in did not exist yet at the time israel was founded. Mass deportation is a war crime closely related to genocide, largely because you cannot achieve it without some carnage. People do not just stand up and leave their homes and entire possessions, unless you convincingly demonstrate to them that you are willing to slaughter them if they don't leave. That's what the whole debate is about armenia and turkey... the turks do not want it to be called genocide, but a lot of people were killed to force the rest of them to leave (and many more died along the way). Anyone who advocates removing an entire country off the map is a dangerous fascist in my opinion, and a wannabe war criminal.
Oh and they also didn't slaughter anyone living there in order to create their artificial country. Not to mention anything in Lebanon (e.g. slaughtering refugees in Sabra and Shatila),
The sabra and shatila massacre was conducted by lebanese christian militias, as retaliation for gemayel's death. Of course, this is a nitpick, since the israeli army allowed, and even assisted the massacre.
..for a few months on one installation where I needed partitioning. Did not have any crashes/trouble with the beta, but I was running only like 10 different queries in total on this server so it's by no means a comprehensive beta test. Good to see a real release.
and I had way too many points in secondary stuff compared to the optimal highly-focused strategy
Because of the way Oblivion works, that actually made the game easier for you - the more points you have outside your major skills, the easier the game is. That is because the enemies scale with your major skills but not your other skills.
Actually, I think not: I think enemies scale with your level. And at a given level you will be much stronger by concentrating on a few core skills. As I said, I didn't do any deep analysis of oblivion character building strategy, but I recall picking up an official guide to the game at somebody's house that recommended specialization in the very first pages.
amazon is a private company and has the right to refuse business to anyone it wants. of course, it may be controlling 60-80-whatever % of online sales, but, it is well within their right to do so.
in the meantime, the citizens of united states, who do not want censorship, can wait for another company to come and challenge them and grab enough market share from them to be accessible and well priced with the same selection. it may take 5-10 years, but hey ! at least, you are free ! even if you may not have the means to practice your freedom until the 'free market' adjusts itself with the act of 'invisible hand' in 10 years !!
Invisible hand? Please don't assume everyone reading believes in your same religion. Next you'll be telling me jesus walks on water and zeus hurls lightning from mount olympus while santa flies around delivering presents.
(c) Classified information shall not be declassified automatically as a result of any unauthorized disclosure of identical or similar information.
This is the key part of the order. Just because a document is leaked into the public domain does not automatically declassify it. Any viewing of leaked material on DoD (department of defense owned) computers would constitute a security incident causing many man-hours to be spent containing the classified information on the network.
The order this article is talking about makes perfect sense. It is so Air Force personnel do not accidentally view classified material on unclassified machines and causing major problems.
I would appreciate it if people who obviously don't know what they are talking about wouldn't make ignorant jokes.
Stupid rules applied by stupid people lead to stupid consequences. What you say does not add anything to what I understood from TFS. If the rule is to not automatically declassify information after it has been on the NYT front page, the rule is dumb. If the people in charge of applying it were not dumb, they would work around its stupidity by manually declassifying the leaked cables. I don't know what bizarre world you live in where blindly applying the rule to its ridiculous consequences is the logical thing to do, and you can't even see the humor of it.
On the contrary, I thought archery was too powerful. I got through most of the game on the strength of multiplier-bonused damage from sneak attacks with my bow. IMO it's the easiest way to play the game, with magic-focus being a close second and melee combat lagging as a distant third, and a last resort for archers and mages for the rare occasions that they don't destroy their enemies at range.
Triple-effect poisons on the arrows were also fun, if you have high alchemy skills and enjoy gathering herbs...
True. It was also ridiculous that common bandits had daedric armor when you got to a high level. Though there were issues in Morrowind as well. In Morrowind it was advantageous to jump at all times to increase your skills even when just traveling somewhere. In both games you have to keep a careful accounting system outside the game to time your skills-ups in your minor and major skills so as to get maximum stat increases on level up. Morrowind also allowed you to be nearly invincible at level 1 through the use of potions. The systems were a mess in both Morrowind and Oblivion. I can't say how they were like before that, since I don't remember how it worked in Daggerfall.
I had more fun with oblivion than with morrowind, because in morrowind I had to go crazy keeping track of minor skills and improving enough of them so as to get good stat increases at the next level. Oblivion I played much more naturally, mostly ignoring immersion-breaking things like skill and stat scores, and managed to be reasonably successful (though I'm sure people who tweaked every last bit of power our of their characters would have kicked my ass in pvp, but then, this is a single player game, so who
cares?). In oblivion I chose skills based on fun more than strategy (my top skill was the potion-making one that I largely used to poison my arrows, and I had way too many points in secondary stuff compared to the optimal highly-focused strategy).
Also, the world of oblivion was indeed smaller, but much more detailed than morrowind's, with less cookie cutter locations/npcs/dungeons and way more atmosphere.
Then my PC died, and I haven't had a gaming PC since...
Only place I use VGA anymore (and have used in the past 4-5 years) is for overhead projectors in conference rooms.
And only people who can fail at projecting their slides worse than a laptop with a 1999 linux distro, are those with a mac and no vga adapter... i've seen this happen plenty of times...
To claim prior art, it's not enough to have a program that has most of the functionality of the one that is patented: you must have a program that does "everything" that's stated on the patent. If there's a single feature that is stated on the patent, but is not implemented on your prior art example, then it doesn't count. That's why prior art is not the best course of action on litigations.
Actually, you can kill a patent's claims one at a time, if you have prior art that does *everything* that's stated in a single (independent) claim. Also, I think killing a claim automagically kills all of the dependent claims that depend on it. So if you can kill claim 1 you can usually throw out a big part of the patent (but there may be further, more specific independent claims further down, specifically to defend against this.
I was lucky enough to think of using a pseudonym the first time I got online through a 2400 bps modem and I have kept that since then. It was really useful when I got hired as programmer for a defense contractor, I caught my manager goggling me and of course he found nothing. I use fake names in social networks... my friends know who really I am.
do you really think that makes you hard to find? first of all, are you 100% sure you never used your real name and pseudonym in the same place, or in places that are associated in some way?
second: social networks. i just need to know 1 of your friends who happens to use his real name on facebook, and I will be able to find you. did you know that facebook considers certain information public,regardless of your privacy settings, and that this information includes your list of friends?
Slashdot Mirror
Is it that bad? Again?
I have a windows mobile phone from the generation before. I tell everyone I'm able: it really is the worst product that I've ever seen actually released. I have NO idea how it was put on the market, because it is so fundamentally nonfunctional in so many primary features... I mean that statement says it alone.
I will never touch another MS mobile product again. It enrages me that they get away with multiple shit-products. DO NOT BUY!
Same here. My first smartphone was windows mobile, and I missed by dumbphone before the first week was over. Never. Ever. Again.
I pay for 5gb at full speed, and then anything over that at reduced speeds. Then I pay another $15 to purchase tethering, and use my HTC Magic as my home internet connection, which I believe gives me more data as well. With 500 minutes, unlimited text, unlimited data (with the first 5 gigs at full speed) and unlimited tethering and wifi sharing, fees, etc... my bill is $95 per month. I'm happy. I hope this never goes away.
Not to poop on your party, but $95 per month is at least 2 to 3 times more than you pay for a similar service in most European countries. For instance in Austria you can get 19GB (with no restrictions on tethering) per month for 15 euros from Drei. Add voice and sms and you will spend maybe 30 euros a month.
The danish can:
Amsterdam is NOT in denmark.
The correlation between marijuana use and psychosis seems to be true, but whether it constitutes a causal relationship (marijuana->psychosis) has been subject to much controversy.
It could also be that people with higher risk of psychosis are attracted to marijuana because of it's anti-anxiety effects. After all, (some types of) psychotics can be just a more extreme version of your everyday neurotic. And neurotics are more subject to anxiety (in fact, some interpretations of neurosis see anxiety as the central disruptive force in a neurotic personality.. I'm thinking of Karen Horney and her "basic anxiety").
Baloney. Pot is addictive. That is why there are detox programs.
We once had a guy come over to our high school and give a surprisingly bullshit-free talk on drugs, with actual data on the effects, addictiveness etc of various types of drugs. I remember looking at the figures for how much THC you needed to use on a daily basis to become addicted, and thinking that the biggest potheads I knew did not smoke that much in a month.
Of course, this is for physical addiction, with actual physical withdrawal symptoms. Psychological addiction is a different matter altoghether (and even with highly addictive drugs like heroin, psychological addiction is often the hardest one to defeat in the long term).
Does anyone remember it? Even real companies were spending money to build their spaces there. How long ago was that? And now? Just tumbleweed...
I remember it! sometimes I type "sl" into the firefox address bar and fail at using the awesome bar to get to slashdot, and end up at the second life website....
Why let other bands cover individual songs from your albums?
Newsflash: I do not need your permission to cover your song. But if I sell a record with your cover you will get some of the money from the sales, based on some standard rule.
So they create the first movie depiction of an alien world, making every part of that alien world at as plausible as possible by obeying the physical laws (...)
Flying mountains anyone?
I think the only part that I got interested in was Quorra becoming human. They could make a WHOLE movie about that, did you know? What does it mean to be human? Why is pain so awful? What are these things called emotions? Et cetera.
They already have, several times.. it's called pinocchio.
It doesn't really matter since passwords are already the weakest link in online security.
It's not that type of password. You are already logged in to your banking site using username and password. Then you decide to send money to someone, and one of the ways of doing 2-factor authentication available to you is to have the bank send you a 1-time password by SMS, which you then type into the computer. The one-time password is bound to the specific transaction you were requesting, and the sms contains some information about the transaction (like the destination account number and amount), so if the account number or amount is not what you wanted you know something is wrong.
So unless the bad guys have malware on your phone AND on your pc, they can't steal your money.
Of course, this is in europe. In the US two-factor authentication means password+"what is your mother's maiden name". And no, this is not a random anti-american rant. Most US banks still do not have 2-factor authentication, while all that I know of in europe do, in some form or another. Also, a security guy from a US bank I spoke to at a conference told me they don't do two factor authentication because users don't want to remember more passwords (thus proving he does not understand what is 2-factor authentication). Also, he said that when you want to do something "suspicious" like sending money to a new destination, they start to ask you security questions (like "what is your mother's maiden name").
Most people weren't going to Open Office - they simply put up with the nagging - because in the end the nagging was less annoying than using Open Office.
I agree openoffice is annoying, but so is microsoft office. Personally, I think powerpoint is much better than impress, but I also find word is much more annoying than openoffice writer. So the question is, what is more annoying, microsoft office + nagging, or openoffice with no nagging?
People do not just stand up and leave their homes and entire possessions, unless you convincingly demonstrate to them that you are willing to slaughter them if they don't leave.
And that is exactly what the Jews forced the Palestinians to do. Having been a victim does not constitute a licence to victimize someone else.
There is no such thing as "the jews". The people who live in Israel today are mostly not the same ones who initially moved into the new state when it was founded. You cannot blame them for anything that happened in 1948 any more than you can blame germans today for what the nazis did just a few years earlier: I would think that not having been born yet should count as an absolute defense against any accusation... Unless you are the wolf from Aesop's fable, who just wants an excuse to eat the lamb.
My hat to you, I have been out-trolled...
2. It is against Iran's interests to have a nuclear weapons program, as that would provide Israel and the USA with a classic casus belli for an aggressive war against it. (Exactly as happened in Iraq).
Who is "iran"? It is definitely against the country's interests to have nuclear weapons while being considered dangerous by the rest of the world (because it might yet get them invaded). But the whole nuclear controversy serves a political/propaganda purpose for the country's rulers.
6. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that the state of Israel should be removed from the map. That would be achieved if, for instance, all the immigrant Jews were to go back to Europe, North America, and wherever else they came from, and the Palestinians were given back their homes. He did not call for the killing of anyone, let alone the genocide often falsely attributed to him.
Many of those "immigrant" jews were born in israel, and the homes they live in did not exist yet at the time israel was founded. Mass deportation is a war crime closely related to genocide, largely because you cannot achieve it without some carnage. People do not just stand up and leave their homes and entire possessions, unless you convincingly demonstrate to them that you are willing to slaughter them if they don't leave. That's what the whole debate is about armenia and turkey... the turks do not want it to be called genocide, but a lot of people were killed to force the rest of them to leave (and many more died along the way). Anyone who advocates removing an entire country off the map is a dangerous fascist in my opinion, and a wannabe war criminal.
Oh and they also didn't slaughter anyone living there in order to create their artificial country. Not to mention anything in Lebanon (e.g. slaughtering refugees in Sabra and Shatila),
The sabra and shatila massacre was conducted by lebanese christian militias, as retaliation for gemayel's death. Of course, this is a nitpick, since the israeli army allowed, and even assisted the massacre.
..for a few months on one installation where I needed partitioning. Did not have any crashes/trouble with the beta, but I was running only like 10 different queries in total on this server so it's by no means a comprehensive beta test. Good to see a real release.
and I had way too many points in secondary stuff compared to the optimal highly-focused strategy
Because of the way Oblivion works, that actually made the game easier for you - the more points you have outside your major skills, the easier the game is. That is because the enemies scale with your major skills but not your other skills.
Actually, I think not: I think enemies scale with your level. And at a given level you will be much stronger by concentrating on a few core skills. As I said, I didn't do any deep analysis of oblivion character building strategy, but I recall picking up an official guide to the game at somebody's house that recommended specialization in the very first pages.
amazon is a private company and has the right to refuse business to anyone it wants. of course, it may be controlling 60-80-whatever % of online sales, but, it is well within their right to do so. in the meantime, the citizens of united states, who do not want censorship, can wait for another company to come and challenge them and grab enough market share from them to be accessible and well priced with the same selection. it may take 5-10 years, but hey ! at least, you are free ! even if you may not have the means to practice your freedom until the 'free market' adjusts itself with the act of 'invisible hand' in 10 years !!
Invisible hand? Please don't assume everyone reading believes in your same religion. Next you'll be telling me jesus walks on water and zeus hurls lightning from mount olympus while santa flies around delivering presents.
(c) Classified information shall not be declassified automatically as a result of any unauthorized disclosure of identical or similar information. This is the key part of the order. Just because a document is leaked into the public domain does not automatically declassify it. Any viewing of leaked material on DoD (department of defense owned) computers would constitute a security incident causing many man-hours to be spent containing the classified information on the network. The order this article is talking about makes perfect sense. It is so Air Force personnel do not accidentally view classified material on unclassified machines and causing major problems. I would appreciate it if people who obviously don't know what they are talking about wouldn't make ignorant jokes.
Stupid rules applied by stupid people lead to stupid consequences. What you say does not add anything to what I understood from TFS. If the rule is to not automatically declassify information after it has been on the NYT front page, the rule is dumb. If the people in charge of applying it were not dumb, they would work around its stupidity by manually declassifying the leaked cables. I don't know what bizarre world you live in where blindly applying the rule to its ridiculous consequences is the logical thing to do, and you can't even see the humor of it.
On the contrary, I thought archery was too powerful. I got through most of the game on the strength of multiplier-bonused damage from sneak attacks with my bow. IMO it's the easiest way to play the game, with magic-focus being a close second and melee combat lagging as a distant third, and a last resort for archers and mages for the rare occasions that they don't destroy their enemies at range.
Triple-effect poisons on the arrows were also fun, if you have high alchemy skills and enjoy gathering herbs...
True. It was also ridiculous that common bandits had daedric armor when you got to a high level. Though there were issues in Morrowind as well. In Morrowind it was advantageous to jump at all times to increase your skills even when just traveling somewhere. In both games you have to keep a careful accounting system outside the game to time your skills-ups in your minor and major skills so as to get maximum stat increases on level up. Morrowind also allowed you to be nearly invincible at level 1 through the use of potions. The systems were a mess in both Morrowind and Oblivion. I can't say how they were like before that, since I don't remember how it worked in Daggerfall.
I had more fun with oblivion than with morrowind, because in morrowind I had to go crazy keeping track of minor skills and improving enough of them so as to get good stat increases at the next level. Oblivion I played much more naturally, mostly ignoring immersion-breaking things like skill and stat scores, and managed to be reasonably successful (though I'm sure people who tweaked every last bit of power our of their characters would have kicked my ass in pvp, but then, this is a single player game, so who cares?). In oblivion I chose skills based on fun more than strategy (my top skill was the potion-making one that I largely used to poison my arrows, and I had way too many points in secondary stuff compared to the optimal highly-focused strategy).
Also, the world of oblivion was indeed smaller, but much more detailed than morrowind's, with less cookie cutter locations/npcs/dungeons and way more atmosphere.
Then my PC died, and I haven't had a gaming PC since...
Only place I use VGA anymore (and have used in the past 4-5 years) is for overhead projectors in conference rooms.
And only people who can fail at projecting their slides worse than a laptop with a 1999 linux distro, are those with a mac and no vga adapter... i've seen this happen plenty of times...
In montreal, they are doing this for garbage disposal:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/06/st_trashsucker_canada/
To claim prior art, it's not enough to have a program that has most of the functionality of the one that is patented: you must have a program that does "everything" that's stated on the patent. If there's a single feature that is stated on the patent, but is not implemented on your prior art example, then it doesn't count. That's why prior art is not the best course of action on litigations.
Actually, you can kill a patent's claims one at a time, if you have prior art that does *everything* that's stated in a single (independent) claim. Also, I think killing a claim automagically kills all of the dependent claims that depend on it. So if you can kill claim 1 you can usually throw out a big part of the patent (but there may be further, more specific independent claims further down, specifically to defend against this.
I was lucky enough to think of using a pseudonym the first time I got online through a 2400 bps modem and I have kept that since then. It was really useful when I got hired as programmer for a defense contractor, I caught my manager goggling me and of course he found nothing. I use fake names in social networks... my friends know who really I am.
do you really think that makes you hard to find? first of all, are you 100% sure you never used your real name and pseudonym in the same place, or in places that are associated in some way?
second: social networks. i just need to know 1 of your friends who happens to use his real name on facebook, and I will be able to find you. did you know that facebook considers certain information public,regardless of your privacy settings, and that this information includes your list of friends?