I'm just going to add to your example of what people can do with a tablet, using the iPad as my example because I don't know much about the Surface.
Now, let's say I don't have a computer or an Internet connection.
I can go to a store, buy an iPad with Wi-Fi and Mobile, and then go online and diddle with Facebook, et-cetera. I can setup an iCloud account, which is needed for the Store anyway, use it for email, and so on.
If I want to have the Internet on at home I can order an Internet connection hooked up to my house, wait for the modem to arrive, and then set it up wirelessly - plug modem in, wirelessly connect via DHCP and visit 192.168.1.1 in my Browser, set parameters, surf Internet wirelessly.
If I need to print stuff then I just have to make sure I buy a printer with AirPrint OR I could use an app like PrintCentral to print to any wireless printer, or any printer connected via Ethernet or USB to an Airport Express (unfortunately an Airport Express doesn't facilitate printing to a non-AirPrint printer on its own).
Let's say I want to do a lot of typing? I am currently writing this comment using my Logitech-branded Zagg keyboard (aluminium base and nicely responsive "large" Bluetooth keyboard that attaches snugly without clips to the iPad and protects the screen). Unfortunately you can't attach a Bluetooth mouse though, and I do sometimes get "Stylus Hand" after playing Trainz for a few hours.
If I buy the adaptor kit (I believe the Surface has a USB port already) then I can connect my camera and directly transfer photos and videos to my iPad for storage, editing, and sharing.
If you have a tablet with a keyboard then it's pretty much like having a small laptop. There are times when it's lacking, such as I can do some web design but I don't think I can run a web server for testing (haven't looked too closely) or I can write a book with any one of a myriad of writing programs but I can't do some low level editing of ePub files, but still I can make music, take and edit photos, record and edit films, do 2D/3D modelling for fun or architecture, record and publish Podcasts (audio or video), write a newsletter, create a presentation for the office, organise my finances, and then of course there's all the social apps that help people communicate and find each other (Find My Friends is nifty).
Some people may never really use their tablet's full potential, but that's okay. Most people will never use their personal computer's full potential either, not even if they have Word installed (New Page Break, what's that? I'll just \n \n \n \n \n down to the next page, and make some other poor bugger deal with it when they edit this later.)
Also if you have a personal computer and are willing to experiment you can also attach an external HDD to your iPad after jailbreaking it.
There's a small connection kit for the iPad which allows the plugging in of SD Cards and USB devices. True, it would be nice if there'd simply been a USB port, but the functionality *is* there, and there's a couple of different file explorer programs that let you muck about with your storage space directly.
You can even use an external HDD, although a jailbreak is required.
And where did the reviewer buy his keyboard and cover, and why separately? I bought a Logitech Keyboard Case for AUD$70. It's effectively a "full size" keyboard, considering the size of the iPad, and it covers the screen with an aluminium shell when the iPad is tucked away - it doesn't latch on to the iPad but "holds" it with rubberised grip around the edges, so some people may want to use a different case.
There's a few leather ones with keyboards, but one I find most interesting is The Brydge. It attachs to the iPad like the lower half of a laptop and effectively turns the iPad into a 9" "MacBook".
The thought that OS X, an OS with ZERO viruses, must somehow be viral swiss cheese waiting to happen is about the biggest leap of BS logic I've ever heard.
Now, now, don't be so smug. Last time I looked I believe there were five (5) viruses in the wild for Mac OS X.
You can buy Snow Leopard (or any version of Mac OS X when they were released) on either the Apple site, at an Apple store, or from a registered retailer.
It is the full version - current price for Snow Leopard is US$29 I believe.
There is no such thing as "upgrade" versions of Mac OS X, i.e. you don't need an older disc to install the new OS. You can upgrade, OR you can simply use the new DVD/Memory Stick to wipe the HDD of your Mac and reinstall the new OS completely clean.
Re:There is only one number they can be sure of
on
Piracy Stats Don't Add Up
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· Score: 3, Informative
Hmmmm, wonder if that has anything to do with Australia starting life as a British penal colony? Sorry, couldn't restist./don't have anything against Down Under
No offence taken, mate. According to the state records of New South Wales, our first policemen were convicts.:)
In August 1789, Arthur Phillip established a night-watch which came under civil control. It consisted of eight of the best-behaved convicts in the Colony. This was the first Police force in the country.
Here in Queensland there used to be a theme park called Amazons that had a water chute "ride" that was two tubes, one shorter than the other, that you dropped through at a steep angle into a pool of water. It was called "Shotgun".
The last time I went to Seaworld on the Gold Coast I went to the water park there and went down the "Free Fall!", about four stories of a straight down drop, laughingly "inside" an open air waterslide (my little skinny arse was drifting away from the slide as I fell), into a curve at the bottom and a long horizontal into a shallow pool, where many a patron lost their togs up their butts.
The only thing that annoyed me about the Free Fall! was I was wearing board shorts (knee length shorts) and they'd mysteriously turned into dt's (speedo's for you yanks).
Despite the various problems I can imagine with the escape tube idea, I like it. The only problem you might have is keeping one guy sitting at the top blowing his whistle to let people know when to slide while his arse is getting cooked by a fire, or shaken by an earthquake.:)
This probably won't get read now with all the comments already posted on this story but I've got the urge to say it anyway.
A lot of people in here are arguing about either Religion Can't Have Science or Science Can't Have Religion, but I think there's another way, call it a simpler way, and I'll grab an example straight from my childhood.
I remember when I was barely fourteen reading somewhere in the new testament that Jesus told people not to go to church, not to go out and preach to others, and not to gather together in vast groups singing praise in a public spectacle (someone else can look up the details, my bible is packed away at the moment with my books on wicca and zen). Jesus said to be quiet in your beliefs, pray privately, and bring others to him through the power of your good actions and good creations.
Be humble in your faith.
Now, nowhere do I see Christians being humble when I turn on the television or read opinions on public forums like Slashdot, and that is a dual-natured comment - if you're being humble you're not advertising it and I won't know, otherwise you're "shouting it from the rooftops" and not being humble.
I've studied, and forgotten so please forgive my mistakes, a lot of science and a lot of religions over the years. I've also read some good satire by authors called Terry Pratchett and Grant Naylor (two people), and some thought provoking stuff that focused not on Religion itself but how we came to have aspects of a religion today.
My point is that we as human beings have something that is an intangible, like our intelligence and emotions, but is more important than religion or science because it drives us to poke, prod, and stick a fork in the power socket of the universe and see what will happen. We have our own spirit, the sum of our emotions and memories.
Our will and compassion is part of our spirit, so we see great acts of humanity whenever disasters occur. Our love and our hate is part of our spirit, so we have friends, loved ones, and enemies.
Our intelligence is also part of our spirit, and this is where Science and Religion deviate. The human spirit is within the scientist who finds a new amoeba, and he feels it empowered at the revelation. The human spirit is within the born-again christian who devotes himself to god and feels god's love.
It has been said that God made Man, but Man made God first. This is an interesting idea because it implies that God, as labeled as omnipotent, is timeless. God is everywhere and everywhen.
I also like Pratchett's idea that Gods did not create anything because they are too lazy. His Discworld was made by a Creator who then went on to create something else, and something else, and so on, like an Intergalactic Hobbiest Engineer always striving to make a world that's Just Right.
I wonder, if in a universal time frame, if that is a more realistic view of how our world happened. The Creator knocked together the Earth, and then pissed off to build something else once Earth was sitting in a stable orbit around Sol. That would explain where the Moon came from anyway - it was intended to be a simple counterweight to keep this big ball balanced.
Our human spirit is the engine that drives us, and with it We empower Gods and Science alike.
Sure, you can argue that life is miraculous and wonderful if you want, but it doesn't change the fact that we are made from the same stuff that a desk, chair, car, and Sol are all made of. There is no such thing as living atoms which make up animals and vegetables or dead atoms that make up minerals. We are animal, We are vegetable, and We are mineral.
Science has already explained how that works, so I'm not going to say it's wrong. Hell, you can do the experiments yourself and create the basic amino acids that build life from "dead" material, and Religion never said anyt
If aqua is ever opensourced you can bet within 24 hours there would be 5 projects on sourceforge to port the gui to Linux and OpenDarwin. Then you would no longer need to have a mac to run macosx or a macosx like environment.
Have a look at the screenshots - mouse hover over the paw for the full menu.
It's a theme for KDE that allows you to make KDE look exactly like the Mac OS X desktop, including tips on how to use KDE's features to "rename" Konqueror as Safari, have the same sorts of drop shadows and alpha-channel transparency on windows, links to dock-like devices, change the window focus behaviour to that of OS X, and so on.
We're getting closer to a free lunch as far as internetworking goes though. All that's needed is a protocol that's designed to allow easy communication between peers that have never previously connected to each other so that people who are setting up Wireless Mesh networks don't have namespace or IP address conflict issues.
I don't understand why you thought about that... What the hell does it have to do with this article??
I thought perhaps for a moment I should have read the whole article, but after reading it just a moment ago and seeing what the "test drive" is, I'm still on-topic as far as I can see.
It's pretty simple really. Microsoft has been thinking about using micropayments for Microsoft Live and the XBox - lots of links on google with "microsoft micropayments" (minus the quotes) showing that they're thinking a lot about it.
Now lets say, purely for example, that you're running a software business that is well known for releasing software that is late, has more than it's share of bugs considering how much the company hypes it, and has a bad reputation in the IT industry for lapse security and frequently generating problems for your customers.
Ordinarily you'd expect that software company to go belly up rather quickly, but due to carefully drafted contracts and well-handled deals with hardware manufacturers, most of the market is using your software. They're bitching about it, but they're still using it.
What's a way of improving your image without actually losing anything? Give-aways would help, but you're already in trouble for monopoly actions, and give-aways would just get you into more trouble. Charge less for the software? Maybe, but the stockholders wouldn't like that.
This is where the micropayments come in, and this is where this $1.50 download/cd charge comes from.
Office 2007 isn't even a commercial release yet. It's Beta, and given that a lot of MS software is usually regarded as Beta quality when it hits the shelves, this must therefore be less than Beta, perhaps Alpha and a bit.
If you were running Microsoft, and you could get people to actually pay for unfinished software, people who actually suspect that it's going to be broken, imagine how much you could charge people who don't know anything about computers, who don't know how software works?
The "noobs" understand counting, and less money in their pocket is a bad thing, but what if they didn't see it as paying full price?
Windows XP Pro can be had for AU$200 off the shelf. Even if someone who doesn't understand computers sees that, and understands that they've got Windows on their new Dell machine, they think they've got a good deal.
They may only spend $36.00 over two years in monthly micropayments - dressed up as security care or some shit -, and they'll still think they got a good deal - it's not $200 right? It's still $36.00 though.
Let's say the person buys Windows for $49.95, because they already have a computer, and then pays the monthly micropayments for two years, they're paying $85.95. Not bad compared to full price, but what if they keep using XP for 4 years? $121.95.
What if both customers use XP for 4 years? $72.00 + 121.95 = $193.95
Now what would be a good estimated ratio of pre-built machines with Windows already on them to sealed copies of Windows that are sold each month? 3 pre-builts to 1 sealed copy? 4? I don't know, but I doubt that there's an equal ratio of pre-built machines to home builders and new updates bought from the shop.
If you can get people who know how you work to give you money, what's to stop you getting money off those who don't know?
"Yeah but, it's just a $1.50."
Paid by how many people?
"Your making a strawman argument! You have no idea what MS is doing. They're not testing micropayments."
Hey, I could be wrong, most probably am, but I tell you what, I certainly wouldn't pay to download or buy a CD of software from MS that's actually labeled as Beta. I've had enough experience with their products in the past to know not to touch anything that can't be patched with at least two major service packs when you install it.
Microsoft is doing this not to offset bandwidth costs - well, maybe not just to offset bandwidth costs. They're doing this to test a newer method of buying MS software, a method that gets the general public used to the idea of continuously paying for Office, then Windows, then probably MS's entire software line.
Imagine, thirty days down the road from time of purchase of a surprisingly cheap copy of Office you get a little pop-up notice telling you that you need to re-register Office, all for the low cost of $1.50.
Every month you get this little notice, and you re-register. It's just a buck-fifty right?
Hmm. Let's say you use the same copy of Office, purchased for the low, low! price of $49.95, for two years. Every month you pay that meager $1.50.
49.95 + (24 x 1.50) = $85.95
Not much compared to the current cost for Office Retail, but what about Windows, MS Anti-virus/Spyware, Age of Empires IV...
Let's say Windows is the same price as Office - that's another $85.95 - and the Anti-virus is just marginally cheaper - $24 = 24 x $1.
$85.95 x 2 + $24 = $195.90
$195.90, every two years, paid by people who are likely to purchase their computer pre-made with Windows and Office already installed.
I have no official reason to believe this, that's just my take on the situation.
Drivers using cell phones for voice are bad enough, drivers trying to *look* at their cell phones are a truly terrifying thought.
This may be the first time I'm actually *glad* I no longer have a street bike, and it's making me wonder if it's not time to trade in the Miata for a surplus HumVee with armor plating.
Hell no, Dude. Pimp that Miata with an in-dash tactical radar, counter-measures, and an EMP generator for when things get really tough in rush hour.
Where I can find an optical/laser mouse, wired or not, that has a small trackpad instead of a ball or wheel?
I'd have thought that Apple or Logitech would have brought one out by now but I can't find one on either of their sites, and Googling for such search terms as "mouse with trackpad" turns up lots of people talking about using mice with the trackpads on their laptops, but no mice with trackpads built in.
The tracking area doesn't have to be big, just a small area inbetween the left and right click areas (perhaps a 1.5 to 2 centimetres wide and deep) and sensitive to X-Y sliding of the finger and light tapping - for the middle click.
Would certainly help people with sensitive fingers who start to get "scroll finger" after a few hours, and it would be rather easy to keep clean.
"Fewer than 450 people have traveled to space, and the club of spacewalkers is even more exclusive. Just 151 people have stepped outside the relative safety of their craft to greet the void with only a visor to separate life and death. 'Spacewalk is the ultimate experience that we've managed to invent as humans,' said Tom Jones, a former astronaut and spacewalker who is an adviser to Space Adventures. Being outside the craft when 'there's nothing between you and the ground below but empty space,' he said, is 'incomparable.'"
Man, meet Infinity. Infinity, meet Man... Can I get you two something to drink? Perhaps a scotch, or some champagne?
I think we should send our politicians into space, and I don't mean this as some sort of crass joke about death in a vacuum. We should send up these "World Leaders" and let them see just how small, how fragile our Earth is, how little blue-green haze separates us from the infinite donut, or is it a soccer ball?
I've had dreams of space, vivid, lucid dreams of being out in the infinite with nothing separating me from the universe - not even a space suit, cause they're dreams you know. I've filled my head with enough pictures of Earth to imagine the sight of our space-faring home, looping and winging it's way through the Big Black in it's slightly off-centre orbit around Sol, our system of planets and star meandering along with the rest of the third arm.
I'd love to see it for real. I know I probably won't in this life-time, so reincarnation is a nifty thing to wish upon for now.
The politicians have the money and the resources though. They should go up, climb out of our gravity well and look upon the Earth, see just for themselves what it's like to stare down at their countries and feel the wonder of covering the United States of America, or Australia, with their palm, to blot out the United Kingdom with their thumb.
They need to feel that wonder, that awe of seeing where we all live and realising that it's a tiny place in the universe, and we should really be focusing our war efforts on peaceful resolutions, scientific colaboration, and a joint effort to get out into our own galaxy, at least, and see if we can really make something of ourselves, rather than squabbling like children in the school yard.
After I myself was the "would-be" victim of a mugging.
If you have the opportunity, you knock that mugger to the ground - throw a trashcan, use a chair, jump on him/her, kick them in the gonads (men - upwards strike, women - straight kick to the lower gut) - and then you proceed to kick and claw on that arsehole while hollering,
"I'm being attacked and mugged! Help! Police! I'm being assaulted!"
Can't knock'em to the ground? Jump on them. You have teeth, and nails. Bite and grab and rip like they're paper.
They have a weapon? Most violent criminals with weapons will freak out and lose it as soon as their intended victim turns "psycho", i.e. bites and scratches like a wolverine.
Not in a public place? I don't like to say it, but you may have to kill the motherfucker. If you're unarmed, then just tear out a major artery, and if you're armed then throw away your weapon then tear out a major artery.
I'm sorry if this stuff offends, but when it comes to criminal behavior, there is no law.
Let me repeat that for the few people in the back who didn't hear me,
When you're defending yourself againt criminal behavior, there is no law.
The law comes afterwards, when you've called the police and reported an "attempted mugging".
I know. I've been under assault twice now for just my wallet, and I've damn near taken a poor stupid bastard's head off.
When it comes to crime that effects you personally, you are the law until the police arrive. The bleeding body of the would-be assailant is just another report to file for the police.
I haven't read the article, I didn't even read the summary all the way through - and I have no excuse other than I am, at this moment, correct spelling and all, very, very drunk - but I'll tell you this about search engines.
I wil put into a search engine an innocuose (sp?) phrase like "toilet ball and cock", and get back all number of results, most of which I have absolutely no interest in what so ever, but because ten thousand, or ten million, people linked to them, I get some really fucked up results when all I was looking for was information on how exactly toilets work.
Search engines, regardless of whether they're Google or some third party engine which does purely semantic correlating, are, for the most part, utterly useless, because they rely on human beings to somehow provide the correct input, and yet, we as human beings, rarely think the same, or put the same data into the same storage style (You say RSS, I say Atom).
The best trick to using search engines is not to rely on what they output, but what they output and how it relates to the next three or four results.
I often search for things using Google, and I generally find what I'm looking for, after much gradual filtering - "Damn, must add -{snarf} to that" - but that is about as far as they're going to get.
Creating search engines which only catalogue blogs, or tech specs, is a handy tool, but we still have to do a lot of the thinking on our end, and I'm glad of this because I don't want some no-nothings to suddenly up and tell me stuff that I already know because they just happened to find it - sometimes two months, at least, after me.
... at least now my monthly bandwidth statistics will look a little more legit to my ISP.
"Sir, you are using a crap ton of bandwidth, and we think it might be due to illegal downloading."
Nope, I use cinemanow.
Does that happen? I know that I can go up to 170 (one hundred and seventy) gigabytes, on my best month - generally uploading to downloading at 2 to 1 so my bittorrent stats are nice and positively uneven - on my 512/512 connection and the ISP hasn't said jack shit.
I asked when I joined, and got it in writing, that there is no download limit imposed on my truely unlimited connection, and uploads are not metered other than for my own personal perusal.
...The site mentioned is at http://www.cinemanow.com/ 101 titles, but I don't know how much they cost because...
"You must use Internet Explorer Version 6 or higher on a PC running Windows 2000 or later in order to use the CinemaNow service."
Well that's great. Guess we can rule out smart windows users and linux users. Apparently/. readers need not apply.
And that makes their web designer's choice of the front page image, a stock photo of a woman using what looks like a powerbook with the Apple logo removed, pretty stupid.
Can any really picky bastard lawyer who might be reading this tell us/.'ers whether or not the stock photo is creating an implied warranty for those who may manage to sign up and then try to use the service on a Mac?
I'm not saying that there are many who are silly enough to try this, but let's say someone does, and then turns around and tries to get their money back when the movies don't work in Quicktime or burn to DVDs - how would the Better Business Bureau (or whatever their name is) view the image with regards to CinemaNow's Windows Only usage?
Given that there's generally at least a tiny bit of truth in legends, and knowing that the bombardier beetle can emit a kind of hot chemical spray from its butt to defend itself, I wonder if the ancient reptile looked anything like the little guy in this picture (sorry it's not a better image).
The DB doesn't know or care about the source. If you use concatenation and improperly escaped strings, something like
foo'; DROP TABLE users; --
will have the same effect no matter whether it's in the comment field or some other field. You should *always* use paramaterized queries. If your language doesn't have those, use the string escape function. If it doesn't have *that*, then you're fucked.
Thanks, I'll keep this stuff in mind cause it will most likely come in handy one day - I dabble in things, some I probably shouldn't.:)
Didn't think of that, but your question and the person above who pointed out foreign languages has made me think a little more.
Okay, so we've got a form, here for example, and I have a foreign name, like René, and I wish to mention it during my post.
Well, I suppose the database isn't using the fields of name, subject, and comment as something to be executed, like a program, so wouldn't that make entering the following string perfectly safe and innocuous?
??S="?*112+¼õ"
Apologies to anyone who has sudden issues with their browser. The above string is just a few characters pulled from the special character palette.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just going to add to your example of what people can do with a tablet, using the iPad as my example because I don't know much about the Surface.
Now, let's say I don't have a computer or an Internet connection.
I can go to a store, buy an iPad with Wi-Fi and Mobile, and then go online and diddle with Facebook, et-cetera. I can setup an iCloud account, which is needed for the Store anyway, use it for email, and so on.
If I want to have the Internet on at home I can order an Internet connection hooked up to my house, wait for the modem to arrive, and then set it up wirelessly - plug modem in, wirelessly connect via DHCP and visit 192.168.1.1 in my Browser, set parameters, surf Internet wirelessly.
If I need to print stuff then I just have to make sure I buy a printer with AirPrint OR I could use an app like PrintCentral to print to any wireless printer, or any printer connected via Ethernet or USB to an Airport Express (unfortunately an Airport Express doesn't facilitate printing to a non-AirPrint printer on its own).
Let's say I want to do a lot of typing? I am currently writing this comment using my Logitech-branded Zagg keyboard (aluminium base and nicely responsive "large" Bluetooth keyboard that attaches snugly without clips to the iPad and protects the screen). Unfortunately you can't attach a Bluetooth mouse though, and I do sometimes get "Stylus Hand" after playing Trainz for a few hours.
If I buy the adaptor kit (I believe the Surface has a USB port already) then I can connect my camera and directly transfer photos and videos to my iPad for storage, editing, and sharing.
If you have a tablet with a keyboard then it's pretty much like having a small laptop. There are times when it's lacking, such as I can do some web design but I don't think I can run a web server for testing (haven't looked too closely) or I can write a book with any one of a myriad of writing programs but I can't do some low level editing of ePub files, but still I can make music, take and edit photos, record and edit films, do 2D/3D modelling for fun or architecture, record and publish Podcasts (audio or video), write a newsletter, create a presentation for the office, organise my finances, and then of course there's all the social apps that help people communicate and find each other (Find My Friends is nifty).
Some people may never really use their tablet's full potential, but that's okay. Most people will never use their personal computer's full potential either, not even if they have Word installed (New Page Break, what's that? I'll just \n \n \n \n \n down to the next page, and make some other poor bugger deal with it when they edit this later.)
Also if you have a personal computer and are willing to experiment you can also attach an external HDD to your iPad after jailbreaking it.
There's a small connection kit for the iPad which allows the plugging in of SD Cards and USB devices. True, it would be nice if there'd simply been a USB port, but the functionality *is* there, and there's a couple of different file explorer programs that let you muck about with your storage space directly.
You can even use an external HDD, although a jailbreak is required.
And where did the reviewer buy his keyboard and cover, and why separately? I bought a Logitech Keyboard Case for AUD$70. It's effectively a "full size" keyboard, considering the size of the iPad, and it covers the screen with an aluminium shell when the iPad is tucked away - it doesn't latch on to the iPad but "holds" it with rubberised grip around the edges, so some people may want to use a different case.
There's a few leather ones with keyboards, but one I find most interesting is The Brydge. It attachs to the iPad like the lower half of a laptop and effectively turns the iPad into a 9" "MacBook".
You are aware that there's a connector which plugs SD Cards into an iPad?
Who'd like a delicious bowl of "Brown"?
The thought that OS X, an OS with ZERO viruses, must somehow be viral swiss cheese waiting to happen is about the biggest leap of BS logic I've ever heard.
Now, now, don't be so smug. Last time I looked I believe there were five (5) viruses in the wild for Mac OS X.
He he.
You missed a full stop at the end of your comment.
You can buy Snow Leopard (or any version of Mac OS X when they were released) on either the Apple site, at an Apple store, or from a registered retailer.
It is the full version - current price for Snow Leopard is US$29 I believe.
There is no such thing as "upgrade" versions of Mac OS X, i.e. you don't need an older disc to install the new OS. You can upgrade, OR you can simply use the new DVD/Memory Stick to wipe the HDD of your Mac and reinstall the new OS completely clean.
No offence taken, mate. According to the state records of New South Wales, our first policemen were convicts. :)
The following is from The NSW State Government Archives:
Here in Queensland there used to be a theme park called Amazons that had a water chute "ride" that was two tubes, one shorter than the other, that you dropped through at a steep angle into a pool of water. It was called "Shotgun".
The last time I went to Seaworld on the Gold Coast I went to the water park there and went down the "Free Fall!", about four stories of a straight down drop, laughingly "inside" an open air waterslide (my little skinny arse was drifting away from the slide as I fell), into a curve at the bottom and a long horizontal into a shallow pool, where many a patron lost their togs up their butts.
The only thing that annoyed me about the Free Fall! was I was wearing board shorts (knee length shorts) and they'd mysteriously turned into dt's (speedo's for you yanks).
Despite the various problems I can imagine with the escape tube idea, I like it. The only problem you might have is keeping one guy sitting at the top blowing his whistle to let people know when to slide while his arse is getting cooked by a fire, or shaken by an earthquake. :)
This probably won't get read now with all the comments already posted on this story but I've got the urge to say it anyway.
A lot of people in here are arguing about either Religion Can't Have Science or Science Can't Have Religion, but I think there's another way, call it a simpler way, and I'll grab an example straight from my childhood.
I remember when I was barely fourteen reading somewhere in the new testament that Jesus told people not to go to church, not to go out and preach to others, and not to gather together in vast groups singing praise in a public spectacle (someone else can look up the details, my bible is packed away at the moment with my books on wicca and zen). Jesus said to be quiet in your beliefs, pray privately, and bring others to him through the power of your good actions and good creations.
Be humble in your faith.
Now, nowhere do I see Christians being humble when I turn on the television or read opinions on public forums like Slashdot, and that is a dual-natured comment - if you're being humble you're not advertising it and I won't know, otherwise you're "shouting it from the rooftops" and not being humble.
I've studied, and forgotten so please forgive my mistakes, a lot of science and a lot of religions over the years. I've also read some good satire by authors called Terry Pratchett and Grant Naylor (two people), and some thought provoking stuff that focused not on Religion itself but how we came to have aspects of a religion today.
My point is that we as human beings have something that is an intangible, like our intelligence and emotions, but is more important than religion or science because it drives us to poke, prod, and stick a fork in the power socket of the universe and see what will happen. We have our own spirit, the sum of our emotions and memories.
Our will and compassion is part of our spirit, so we see great acts of humanity whenever disasters occur. Our love and our hate is part of our spirit, so we have friends, loved ones, and enemies.
Our intelligence is also part of our spirit, and this is where Science and Religion deviate. The human spirit is within the scientist who finds a new amoeba, and he feels it empowered at the revelation. The human spirit is within the born-again christian who devotes himself to god and feels god's love.
It has been said that God made Man, but Man made God first. This is an interesting idea because it implies that God, as labeled as omnipotent, is timeless. God is everywhere and everywhen.
I also like Pratchett's idea that Gods did not create anything because they are too lazy. His Discworld was made by a Creator who then went on to create something else, and something else, and so on, like an Intergalactic Hobbiest Engineer always striving to make a world that's Just Right.
I wonder, if in a universal time frame, if that is a more realistic view of how our world happened. The Creator knocked together the Earth, and then pissed off to build something else once Earth was sitting in a stable orbit around Sol. That would explain where the Moon came from anyway - it was intended to be a simple counterweight to keep this big ball balanced.
Our human spirit is the engine that drives us, and with it We empower Gods and Science alike.
Sure, you can argue that life is miraculous and wonderful if you want, but it doesn't change the fact that we are made from the same stuff that a desk, chair, car, and Sol are all made of. There is no such thing as living atoms which make up animals and vegetables or dead atoms that make up minerals. We are animal, We are vegetable, and We are mineral.
Science has already explained how that works, so I'm not going to say it's wrong. Hell, you can do the experiments yourself and create the basic amino acids that build life from "dead" material, and Religion never said anyt
And I refer you to Baghira.
Have a look at the screenshots - mouse hover over the paw for the full menu.
It's a theme for KDE that allows you to make KDE look exactly like the Mac OS X desktop, including tips on how to use KDE's features to "rename" Konqueror as Safari, have the same sorts of drop shadows and alpha-channel transparency on windows, links to dock-like devices, change the window focus behaviour to that of OS X, and so on.
We're getting closer to a free lunch as far as internetworking goes though. All that's needed is a protocol that's designed to allow easy communication between peers that have never previously connected to each other so that people who are setting up Wireless Mesh networks don't have namespace or IP address conflict issues.
I thought perhaps for a moment I should have read the whole article, but after reading it just a moment ago and seeing what the "test drive" is, I'm still on-topic as far as I can see.
It's pretty simple really. Microsoft has been thinking about using micropayments for Microsoft Live and the XBox - lots of links on google with "microsoft micropayments" (minus the quotes) showing that they're thinking a lot about it.
Now lets say, purely for example, that you're running a software business that is well known for releasing software that is late, has more than it's share of bugs considering how much the company hypes it, and has a bad reputation in the IT industry for lapse security and frequently generating problems for your customers.
Ordinarily you'd expect that software company to go belly up rather quickly, but due to carefully drafted contracts and well-handled deals with hardware manufacturers, most of the market is using your software. They're bitching about it, but they're still using it.
What's a way of improving your image without actually losing anything? Give-aways would help, but you're already in trouble for monopoly actions, and give-aways would just get you into more trouble. Charge less for the software? Maybe, but the stockholders wouldn't like that.
This is where the micropayments come in, and this is where this $1.50 download/cd charge comes from.
Office 2007 isn't even a commercial release yet. It's Beta, and given that a lot of MS software is usually regarded as Beta quality when it hits the shelves, this must therefore be less than Beta, perhaps Alpha and a bit.
If you were running Microsoft, and you could get people to actually pay for unfinished software, people who actually suspect that it's going to be broken, imagine how much you could charge people who don't know anything about computers, who don't know how software works?
The "noobs" understand counting, and less money in their pocket is a bad thing, but what if they didn't see it as paying full price?
Windows XP Pro can be had for AU$200 off the shelf. Even if someone who doesn't understand computers sees that, and understands that they've got Windows on their new Dell machine, they think they've got a good deal.
They may only spend $36.00 over two years in monthly micropayments - dressed up as security care or some shit -, and they'll still think they got a good deal - it's not $200 right? It's still $36.00 though.
Let's say the person buys Windows for $49.95, because they already have a computer, and then pays the monthly micropayments for two years, they're paying $85.95. Not bad compared to full price, but what if they keep using XP for 4 years? $121.95.
What if both customers use XP for 4 years? $72.00 + 121.95 = $193.95
Now what would be a good estimated ratio of pre-built machines with Windows already on them to sealed copies of Windows that are sold each month? 3 pre-builts to 1 sealed copy? 4? I don't know, but I doubt that there's an equal ratio of pre-built machines to home builders and new updates bought from the shop.
If you can get people who know how you work to give you money, what's to stop you getting money off those who don't know?
"Yeah but, it's just a $1.50."
Paid by how many people?
"Your making a strawman argument! You have no idea what MS is doing. They're not testing micropayments."
Hey, I could be wrong, most probably am, but I tell you what, I certainly wouldn't pay to download or buy a CD of software from MS that's actually labeled as Beta. I've had enough experience with their products in the past to know not to touch anything that can't be patched with at least two major service packs when you install it.
Microsoft is doing this not to offset bandwidth costs - well, maybe not just to offset bandwidth costs. They're doing this to test a newer method of buying MS software, a method that gets the general public used to the idea of continuously paying for Office, then Windows, then probably MS's entire software line.
Imagine, thirty days down the road from time of purchase of a surprisingly cheap copy of Office you get a little pop-up notice telling you that you need to re-register Office, all for the low cost of $1.50.
Every month you get this little notice, and you re-register. It's just a buck-fifty right?
Hmm. Let's say you use the same copy of Office, purchased for the low, low! price of $49.95, for two years. Every month you pay that meager $1.50.
49.95 + (24 x 1.50) = $85.95
Not much compared to the current cost for Office Retail, but what about Windows, MS Anti-virus/Spyware, Age of Empires IV...
Let's say Windows is the same price as Office - that's another $85.95 - and the Anti-virus is just marginally cheaper - $24 = 24 x $1.
$85.95 x 2 + $24 = $195.90
$195.90, every two years, paid by people who are likely to purchase their computer pre-made with Windows and Office already installed.
I have no official reason to believe this, that's just my take on the situation.
</stainlesssteelcap>
Nail gun, fun for all the family.
Hell no, Dude. Pimp that Miata with an in-dash tactical radar, counter-measures, and an EMP generator for when things get really tough in rush hour.
"My name is R-Us, Roadkills-R-Us."
Where I can find an optical/laser mouse, wired or not, that has a small trackpad instead of a ball or wheel?
I'd have thought that Apple or Logitech would have brought one out by now but I can't find one on either of their sites, and Googling for such search terms as "mouse with trackpad" turns up lots of people talking about using mice with the trackpads on their laptops, but no mice with trackpads built in.
The tracking area doesn't have to be big, just a small area inbetween the left and right click areas (perhaps a 1.5 to 2 centimetres wide and deep) and sensitive to X-Y sliding of the finger and light tapping - for the middle click.
Would certainly help people with sensitive fingers who start to get "scroll finger" after a few hours, and it would be rather easy to keep clean.
From the summary:
Man, meet Infinity. Infinity, meet Man... Can I get you two something to drink? Perhaps a scotch, or some champagne?
I think we should send our politicians into space, and I don't mean this as some sort of crass joke about death in a vacuum. We should send up these "World Leaders" and let them see just how small, how fragile our Earth is, how little blue-green haze separates us from the infinite donut, or is it a soccer ball?
I've had dreams of space, vivid, lucid dreams of being out in the infinite with nothing separating me from the universe - not even a space suit, cause they're dreams you know. I've filled my head with enough pictures of Earth to imagine the sight of our space-faring home, looping and winging it's way through the Big Black in it's slightly off-centre orbit around Sol, our system of planets and star meandering along with the rest of the third arm.
I'd love to see it for real. I know I probably won't in this life-time, so reincarnation is a nifty thing to wish upon for now.
The politicians have the money and the resources though. They should go up, climb out of our gravity well and look upon the Earth, see just for themselves what it's like to stare down at their countries and feel the wonder of covering the United States of America, or Australia, with their palm, to blot out the United Kingdom with their thumb.
They need to feel that wonder, that awe of seeing where we all live and realising that it's a tiny place in the universe, and we should really be focusing our war efforts on peaceful resolutions, scientific colaboration, and a joint effort to get out into our own galaxy, at least, and see if we can really make something of ourselves, rather than squabbling like children in the school yard.
I'm sorry, I have no real point, I'm rambling.
After I myself was the "would-be" victim of a mugging.
If you have the opportunity, you knock that mugger to the ground - throw a trashcan, use a chair, jump on him/her, kick them in the gonads (men - upwards strike, women - straight kick to the lower gut) - and then you proceed to kick and claw on that arsehole while hollering,
"I'm being attacked and mugged! Help! Police! I'm being assaulted!"
Can't knock'em to the ground? Jump on them. You have teeth, and nails. Bite and grab and rip like they're paper.
They have a weapon? Most violent criminals with weapons will freak out and lose it as soon as their intended victim turns "psycho", i.e. bites and scratches like a wolverine.
Not in a public place? I don't like to say it, but you may have to kill the motherfucker. If you're unarmed, then just tear out a major artery, and if you're armed then throw away your weapon then tear out a major artery.
I'm sorry if this stuff offends, but when it comes to criminal behavior, there is no law.
Let me repeat that for the few people in the back who didn't hear me,
When you're defending yourself againt criminal behavior, there is no law .
The law comes afterwards, when you've called the police and reported an "attempted mugging".
I know. I've been under assault twice now for just my wallet, and I've damn near taken a poor stupid bastard's head off.
When it comes to crime that effects you personally, you are the law until the police arrive. The bleeding body of the would-be assailant is just another report to file for the police.
I haven't read the article, I didn't even read the summary all the way through - and I have no excuse other than I am, at this moment, correct spelling and all, very, very drunk - but I'll tell you this about search engines.
I wil put into a search engine an innocuose (sp?) phrase like "toilet ball and cock", and get back all number of results, most of which I have absolutely no interest in what so ever, but because ten thousand, or ten million, people linked to them, I get some really fucked up results when all I was looking for was information on how exactly toilets work.
Search engines, regardless of whether they're Google or some third party engine which does purely semantic correlating, are, for the most part, utterly useless, because they rely on human beings to somehow provide the correct input, and yet, we as human beings, rarely think the same, or put the same data into the same storage style (You say RSS, I say Atom).
The best trick to using search engines is not to rely on what they output, but what they output and how it relates to the next three or four results.
I often search for things using Google, and I generally find what I'm looking for, after much gradual filtering - "Damn, must add -{snarf} to that" - but that is about as far as they're going to get.
Creating search engines which only catalogue blogs, or tech specs, is a handy tool, but we still have to do a lot of the thinking on our end, and I'm glad of this because I don't want some no-nothings to suddenly up and tell me stuff that I already know because they just happened to find it - sometimes two months, at least, after me.
Does that happen? I know that I can go up to 170 (one hundred and seventy) gigabytes, on my best month - generally uploading to downloading at 2 to 1 so my bittorrent stats are nice and positively uneven - on my 512/512 connection and the ISP hasn't said jack shit.
I asked when I joined, and got it in writing, that there is no download limit imposed on my truely unlimited connection, and uploads are not metered other than for my own personal perusal.
And that makes their web designer's choice of the front page image, a stock photo of a woman using what looks like a powerbook with the Apple logo removed, pretty stupid.
Can any really picky bastard lawyer who might be reading this tell us /.'ers whether or not the stock photo is creating an implied warranty for those who may manage to sign up and then try to use the service on a Mac?
I'm not saying that there are many who are silly enough to try this, but let's say someone does, and then turns around and tries to get their money back when the movies don't work in Quicktime or burn to DVDs - how would the Better Business Bureau (or whatever their name is) view the image with regards to CinemaNow's Windows Only usage?
Given that there's generally at least a tiny bit of truth in legends, and knowing that the bombardier beetle can emit a kind of hot chemical spray from its butt to defend itself, I wonder if the ancient reptile looked anything like the little guy in this picture (sorry it's not a better image).
Isn't he cute? His name's Errol.
Thanks, I'll keep this stuff in mind cause it will most likely come in handy one day - I dabble in things, some I probably shouldn't. :)
Didn't think of that, but your question and the person above who pointed out foreign languages has made me think a little more.
Okay, so we've got a form, here for example, and I have a foreign name, like René, and I wish to mention it during my post.
Well, I suppose the database isn't using the fields of name, subject, and comment as something to be executed, like a program, so wouldn't that make entering the following string perfectly safe and innocuous?
??S="?*112+¼õ"
Apologies to anyone who has sudden issues with their browser. The above string is just a few characters pulled from the special character palette.