Why is this news? Microsoft have been doing this since the days of the original Xbox. This is the reason my original Xbox with its 40 quid Xecutor chip running XBMC, serving films and music (I guess I should say "choons") and still playing Halo one and two, has never ever logged in to the games network. The Xecutor chip is switchable and can be turned off to do all that complicated online stuff however... as long as you never feed it after midnight.
But the banking system here, requires the use of single use numbers for each online banking transaction. Your bank provides you with a unique sheet of them and if you lose it, you have to request a new one. Nor are credit cards popular with German consumers. Sites such as Amazon.de allow payment by bank transfer (Uberweisung). You can manually complete the transactions slip and give to your bank or do the same thing with your online banking. Any issue and the transfer has to be reversed. There are an awful lot more banks too - one just around the corner from me and at least three within a few minutes walk with real people working there and very, very friendly managers - if you're liquid!
This is a story about the law as it applies in England and Wales. Scotland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotland (that famous non-sovereign state -slashdot anon) has an entirely separate and distinctly different, Roman based system of law and no real equivalent of the infamous Carter Ruck (billed as a "British Law Firm" whatever that is) and subsequently no really litigious use of libel laws on the magnitude of those in England. Scottish Judges are renowned for making anyone guilty of contempt spend at least one night in the cells - famous editors and briefs included. Much to the amusement to the mainly retired and unemployed audience in the public gallery.
It was almost a cliche in the socialist movement in the UK in the early eighties for some of the most unreconstructed men to champion women's rights while living a private life that was not quite as pure as the driven snow with regard to women. Since I don't know the author, I can't comment on that aspect of his life. However, he is guilty of grandstanding on the issues of group he is not actually part of. Laudable as this may be, I would suggest that in order to clarify the issue, the victims should come forward and bear witness. You don't really see a great number of women down the pub knocking back 16 pints of lager every Friday night commenting on how Chelsea are doing and whether or not money will buy a team success but is that an example of sex based exclusion or is it because they have better things to do?
I have a grudging respect for XP professional edition that grew on me as I managed to turn off all of the rubbish and secure the system. I have not used it on since the Zone Alarm screw up, by which time I had migrated all my systems to Ubuntu. I just got completely fed up with the obscure methods of networking or anything to do with servers, apache and mysql - all much easier in the big U. I still use XP in a VM for my employers access database which really can't be migrated and since they are using Vista (comes with the new PCs) conversations about what to click on over the phone rapidly descend into farce.. (with apologies to Vista professionals, which I imagine, there must be.)
"Ok click on Tools"
"Where's that?"
"It's in the menu bar,oh wait a minute you don't have that. Can you see it on the left hand panel?"
"I can see the list of tables..."
"No that's the wrong view. Is it in the blobby display along the top of the screen?"
"What's the blobby display?"
"All those sort of chunky yellow icons at the top of the access window."
"Are they yellow?"
"I'm not sure, I thought they were sort of yellow the last time I looked at your GUI."
"My gooey? Where's that?"
"It's okay, it's your screen, along the top of the window, they're about a centimetre tall and chunky."
"No, I can't see anything called tools."
"Try clicking on the big MS circle in the top left-hand corner of the screen."
"A circle? I don't have a circle."
"It's a 3D ball, in blue with the Microsoft logo."
"What's a logo?"
"Hello, are you from the past?"
journalism was invented when print technology was the opportunity to arbitage information. The channel for this information was expensive - lots of postage, horses, carrier pigeons and sailing ships. Newspapers consolidated this information into neat bundles filtered according to readership. The source of almost all this information were letters from all over the known world. The authors of these letters were in the main ordinary people writing to friends. Thus was born the correspondent. Most of them wrote long rambling tracts about stuff few people had any interest in. So the similarity to bloggers is obvious. They were not paid for their material which newspaper ran often verbatim. Competition soon created professionals who wrote stuff worth reading that was entertaining. But now the channel is free, almost everyone has camera in their phone and we only really need professionals to shepherd the information. Apparently 17 year old kids can do that (in Europe,just read the news opt outs from Sky News that run during Fox News' almost ad free commercial break, to check the veracity of this statement). Ruperts Rants are just the anguished growl of a dinosaur trapped in tar pit of technological change that a half-dead wombat could have predicted (and were - people, not wombats) more than twenty years ago. The decline in print media publishing especially magazines and newspapers has been easily observed over the past fifty years.
So it shouldn't be too long before bloggers and the interweb get to ask the question:
"Would the last person to leave The Sun offices in Wapping switch off the lights?"
Well we can chalk this up alongside: The termite colony in England that will soon devour the East Coast, the English Wallaby colony, The devouring rhododendron of Wales, the German Racoon Colony, and lets not forget all those other weeds busy clogging up the waterways of Europe nor the somewhat rampant (and delicious baked in a pie) American Grey Squirrel locked in a Star Wars type war with the Rebel Alliance of Red Squirrels - also in the UK.
Then there's the Florida Pythons (not a new comedy team), South American Fire ants and First Amongst Equals the Cane Toad in Oz.
However I do believe the English landed Gentry managed to finish off the last member of the Coypu Colony (sort of giant hamster) but have had no success with the now wild and thoroughly naturalised Mink which is doing an "Alien" along the clogged up waterways ripping everything with a heartbeat to shreds as it advances further and further North.
Thanks in most part to: Stupidity, Cack Science, well-meaning Animal Libbers, Globalisation and the simple fellow who thought it would be a great idea to have those charming racoons climbing in and out of German wheelie bins (a sort of Euro-dumpster)
Remove credit card(s) from wallet.
Cut in half.
Never buy anything you cannot pay for.
Open a savings account. Set aside at least 30% (40% is better) of your income.
Never work for a company that does credit checks.
Also the solution to the global economic financial crisis as oppossed to: Give Death Star levels of funding to organisations that already proved how adept at economics they are not.
...end of the world predicted for umpteenth time. In other news Flintoff is declared fit for the Ashes. Quick, Homer. Change it! Now where did I put my End Of Days Bag?
brands with a solid base of customers who care nothing about the underlying mechanics of their products. Both can make any changes they wish in the blink of an eye and it would make no difference to the majority of the customers at all. Just like Apple did. As Bill Thompson has observed with the financial resources of either it take about a year to produce for example... Micrixhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4727267.stm
Fools and their money being parted? "Please help me, I just engaged in an act which even the lowest member of the primates would know was illegal and now I am upset because I was ripped off?" The fundamentals of the law is that you must limit your own liabilities. The mythology of the 419 scammer is similar to the street corner drug dealer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freakonomics. Most of them barely earn enough money to get by since they have to pay tributes to all of the criminal elements above them and most of them live with their moms. Certain slashdotters may experience some affinity with the last sentence.
When you buy the Sun (Scottish Edition) for your 10 to 30pence (depends on their promotion at the time) you get for your money a paper of almost utter hilarity and sarcastic bile that included one of the longest headlines ever (supercaleygoballisticcelticareatrocious) and Deirde's Problem Page. The international news was contained in a single column on the 2nd page. It was the kind of newspaper you read on the bus, train or during your coffee break. It was uncompromising infotainment then (when I was resident in the UK) and I should imagine it still is.
I can see from the Sun's website that their interweb model is not the same - just a lot of chavtastic tv crap.
The problem for the Murdoch empire is that they forgot where newspapers came from.
Newspaper originated from the owners of printing presses who started to print lists of vessels arriving at ports with details of their cargoes. This was indeed news for anyone who wanted to make money from arbritage. Soon traders paid for ads in these papers and then letters (correspondence) from various parts of the world were printed to inform the readers of events that might affect trade. Those newspapers companies were vertically integrated, they owned the printing presses and the newspapers, soon they owned or had command of the logistics systems to deliver them from door to door staff to trucks boats and planes. This created the era of the Press Baron.
While the Murdoch Empire was busy focussing on satellite television they missed the opportunity to accumulate possesions in the web, they failed to buy communications companies or felt it was too low a return for the investment. Yet they knew that print media was in a terminal decline and has been for the past fifty years where newspapers have folded or combined and magazines (especially news magazines) have seen readership dwindle.
One can only guess that these executives are so removed from the physical transaction of buying a newspaper and the somewhat more intangible concept of connecting to the interweb. Ownership of the means of delivery and ad return from cost free added value must have given them sleepless nights, or more likely they decided to ignore what they did not understand. Now when the paradigm shift is about to render them extinct, they thrash around grasping at straws. What News International are about to create here if they go ahead with this idea, is the Great Murdoch Firewall. Now if we could only manage to get Associated Newspapers to do the same...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail
(but I will anyway.) No crying.
No getting in touch with your feminine side.
The man's job (geek or otherwise) is the three F's. Fixing
Freighting
Frickin
The man makes the complex political decisions about whether or not the nation should deploy cruise missiles, bomb anything from orbit, or bail out the banks.
The woman gets to decide what you spend the money on, where you live, how many children to have, where they will be educated, where to go on holiday and anything else not included in the previous sentence.
The hard part: When the woman makes a remark about something that upsets her you must always resist the temptation to offer a solution. Sympathise.
But most important of all Be excellent to each other.
I use open office for almost all my regular documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Then I use emacs for scripts and interesting text documents. Then I use Latex for layout (it is just so beautiful). For less aesthetic concepts Indesign is great. To comply with my work I use (makes the sign of the cross) Publisher. To cope with our website I use Dreamweaver - especially to hash out some database form and the re-write it. Then I use php for more leisurely times to produces database forms I can understand. To search and replace all the crap out of of text documents their is no easier alternative to MS Word's search and replace. Doing the same in OO requires the brain of a theoretical physicist. Doing it in vi or emacs requires the memory of an elephant. So I would miss dear old word if it went. But since I seriously doubt the chances of that ever happening are close to zero, I am not worrying too much. So I guess it's a case of nothing to see here, eject the warp coil and move on.
In Miami City, when I lived there, I went down to the deli/supermarket/minimarket that sells everything and had the following conversation:
VORLICH:[In his best Scottish Grammar School English] "and can I have four AA batteries, please?"
SALESGUY: "Y'Wot?"
VORLICH: [speaking slower and pointing directly to them] "Four AA Batteries, please."
SALESGUY: "Y'Wot?"
VORLICH: "Four AA badderees, please."
SALESGUY: "Aw, why'd y'not say that?
If you are reading Slashdot from outside Germany in English, then don't come to live here. Well, okay you can live in Berlin but you are forbidden to travel any further south and stay off of my snowboard turf!
Existed in prehistory and takes the form of the Harry Potter Wizards hat, where the markings are used to calculate the position of the moon and to predict the seasons. You can see a magnificent example of this in the Staatliche Museen Berlin http://www.smb.museum/smb/sammlungen/details.php?lang=en&objID=15&p=24&typeId=1&img_id=2.
a 3,000-year-old 30in high Bronze Age cone of beaten gold that was discovered in Switzerland in 1995 and purchased by the museum the following year.
The majority of all organic food production comes from the billion dollar operations of the Albrecht brothers, owners of, among other things Trader Joe's and Aldi. They produce their organic (or bio brands) in prairie sized farms where the yields are significantly lower than their regular fifty per cent smaller prairie sized farms producing similar foods grown using more traditional farming methods. However organic foods are significantly more expensive than those from agri-business production, and the ticket price of these foods is even greater. It makes no difference to me whether someone wishes to eat organic or agri-biz products, that is their free choice, but the organic methods are sufficiently inefficient to significantly damage the net world production of food and lead to starvation in those countries unable to afford the higher prices and greater consumption of farmlands for lower yields. The use of "organic" fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides (such as pyrethrum) are also far more damaging to consumers than the rigorously tested and approved "chemicals" of the agri-business. This is one of the reasons for the increase in the incidence of food poisoning from leaf crops in the US.
This subject was covered by Brian Dunning more than two years ago, something that regular listeners to Skeptoid http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4019# will be familiar with.
Since I consider it unethical to eat organic foods (unless I grow them myself), I never purchase them where I have a choice. But don't mistake me for an axe-grinder, I am just a pragmatist.
During the Chernobyl disaster,when I lived in Scotland, I did not allow my children to drink contaminated British Milk and during the Great British BSE epidemic we dined for almost a year on delicious Scottish steak which at the time supermarkets could barely give away despite the fact that it came from (agri biz!) non-dairy certified herds. When the yuppie owner of Iceland (British Frozen Foods store) declared they would no longer sell genetically modified products, I voted with my feet and bought all the (cheaper, mostly lard and sugar) GM stuff in other supermarkets since I had eaten GM all my life (sheep with shorter legs, cows with more muscle tissue and hens with higher egg production) before then I experienced no significant loss. If something or someone could create a scare over Ben & Jerry's and Peanut Butter M&M's my diet would be so much richer in delicious combinations of fat and sugar at lower prices.
Brian Dunning makes the rather obvious observation: that people who want their food produced according to positively medieval methods would be the least likely to apply the same criteria to their medical treatment - with the natural exceptions of the herbalists, homeopaths and general moon-children.
I was going to make fun of this and suggest a Suffering From a Psychiatric Illness tag, but I see that I have been crushed in the stampede of the 552 others who beat me to it. Oh well, I guess Pampalona will have to be Plan B, for next year.
O'Reilly editors are reading slashdot - Cool!
on
The Geek Atlas
·
· Score: 1
I would not normally respond to comments but since your claim to be the editor introduces the Voice Of Authority, let me expand on my observation as a prospective customer.
Perhaps a casual observer, finding this title in a museum shop, might expect that a "Geek Atlas" would refer to real locations that you would find in an atlas. A giant list of German museums and one cemetery full of dead Nobel Prize winners an atlas does not make. This is more of a "Geek Museum Guide", where non-UK parts of Europe are concerned and not too far removed from the pages of say "Rough Guide" or "Lonely Planet"
A list of museums and other European locations of geek interest and pilgrimage would be something that lived up to the title. It probably won't surprise you to hear that I have actually been in the Deutsches Museum, since it is only a wee bit along the road from where I live and it is an absolutely stunning collection of artefacts, including a Van de Graaff Generator (with 3 shows per day) and a couple of meteorites but in terms of being a "location" on an "atlas" it is not significant apart from the opportunity it presents to touch a genuine V2 rocket or buy a copy of the Geek Atlas in the museum shop (or just read it for half an hour to discover that Europe is a bit of an afterthought).
My point was that I would be interested in a book that was a geek atlas that continued to appreciate that a visit to the (listed) Trinity Site (which remains "awesome" despite the fact that it was bulldozed flat) is a tad more connected than a visit to a museum, even after you leave the English speaking world, and consequently contained a richer source of material on Europe as opposed to just Britain and America.
My observations were to express dissappointment that while I am unlikely to visit the Trinity Site which you do mention, I could easily visit so many other sites, such as the reactor at Haigerloch which you don't mention,
So rather than "Hello,sequel", perhaps you might consider "Hello, European Edition".
Possibly 128 museums to visit
on
The Geek Atlas
·
· Score: 1
The majority of sites are museums, certainly Germany seemed to be mostly museums and only Peenemünde was a location although also a museum. No mention of the Nördlinger Ries crater or the crater a Steinheim - which you can visit nor any mention of Neandertal outside Dusseldorf or even Einstein's birthplace in Ulm to name but a tiny number of places you would expect to appear in this "list"
And I have no problem understanding the copyright laws, certainly those relevant to Europe. I possess about 250,000 negatives which are my copyright (although not all of them are worth a dime). I know that Wikipedia is a community resource where we are neither intended to make money or achieve fame or infamy. So the NYT article is just dumb. If celebs want images in wikipedia then they should upload a completely copyright free image and stop whining.
That's all there is to it. Not complicated. No script writer needed.
They do it every other day when they appear on the beach for the paparazzi.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is this news? Microsoft have been doing this since the days of the original Xbox. This is the reason my original Xbox with its 40 quid Xecutor chip running XBMC, serving films and music (I guess I should say "choons") and still playing Halo one and two, has never ever logged in to the games network. The Xecutor chip is switchable and can be turned off to do all that complicated online stuff however ... as long as you never feed it after midnight.
But the banking system here, requires the use of single use numbers for each online banking transaction. Your bank provides you with a unique sheet of them and if you lose it, you have to request a new one. Nor are credit cards popular with German consumers. Sites such as Amazon.de allow payment by bank transfer (Uberweisung). You can manually complete the transactions slip and give to your bank or do the same thing with your online banking. Any issue and the transfer has to be reversed. There are an awful lot more banks too - one just around the corner from me and at least three within a few minutes walk with real people working there and very, very friendly managers - if you're liquid!
This is a story about the law as it applies in England and Wales. Scotland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotland (that famous non-sovereign state -slashdot anon) has an entirely separate and distinctly different, Roman based system of law and no real equivalent of the infamous Carter Ruck (billed as a "British Law Firm" whatever that is) and subsequently no really litigious use of libel laws on the magnitude of those in England.
Scottish Judges are renowned for making anyone guilty of contempt spend at least one night in the cells - famous editors and briefs included. Much to the amusement to the mainly retired and unemployed audience in the public gallery.
Shutdown -p now you're a brick! A thousand thanks!
It was almost a cliche in the socialist movement in the UK in the early eighties for some of the most unreconstructed men to champion women's rights while living a private life that was not quite as pure as the driven snow with regard to women.
Since I don't know the author, I can't comment on that aspect of his life. However, he is guilty of grandstanding on the issues of group he is not actually part of. Laudable as this may be, I would suggest that in order to clarify the issue, the victims should come forward and bear witness.
You don't really see a great number of women down the pub knocking back 16 pints of lager every Friday night commenting on how Chelsea are doing and whether or not money will buy a team success but is that an example of sex based exclusion or is it because they have better things to do?
I have a grudging respect for XP professional edition that grew on me as I managed to turn off all of the rubbish and secure the system. I have not used it on since the Zone Alarm screw up, by which time I had migrated all my systems to Ubuntu. I just got completely fed up with the obscure methods of networking or anything to do with servers, apache and mysql - all much easier in the big U. I still use XP in a VM for my employers access database which really can't be migrated and since they are using Vista (comes with the new PCs) conversations about what to click on over the phone rapidly descend into farce.. (with apologies to Vista professionals, which I imagine, there must be.)
"Ok click on Tools"
"Where's that?"
"It's in the menu bar,oh wait a minute you don't have that. Can you see it on the left hand panel?"
"I can see the list of tables..."
"No that's the wrong view. Is it in the blobby display along the top of the screen?"
"What's the blobby display?"
"All those sort of chunky yellow icons at the top of the access window."
"Are they yellow?"
"I'm not sure, I thought they were sort of yellow the last time I looked at your GUI."
"My gooey? Where's that?"
"It's okay, it's your screen, along the top of the window, they're about a centimetre tall and chunky."
"No, I can't see anything called tools."
"Try clicking on the big MS circle in the top left-hand corner of the screen."
"A circle? I don't have a circle."
"It's a 3D ball, in blue with the Microsoft logo."
"What's a logo?"
"Hello, are you from the past?"
journalism was invented when print technology was the opportunity to arbitage information. The channel for this information was expensive - lots of postage, horses, carrier pigeons and sailing ships. Newspapers consolidated this information into neat bundles filtered according to readership. The source of almost all this information were letters from all over the known world.
The authors of these letters were in the main ordinary people writing to friends. Thus was born the correspondent. Most of them wrote long rambling tracts about stuff few people had any interest in. So the similarity to bloggers is obvious. They were not paid for their material which newspaper ran often verbatim.
Competition soon created professionals who wrote stuff worth reading that was entertaining. But now the channel is free, almost everyone has camera in their phone and we only really need professionals to shepherd the information. Apparently 17 year old kids can do that (in Europe,just read the news opt outs from Sky News that run during Fox News' almost ad free commercial break, to check the veracity of this statement).
Ruperts Rants are just the anguished growl of a dinosaur trapped in tar pit of technological change that a half-dead wombat could have predicted (and were - people, not wombats) more than twenty years ago. The decline in print media publishing especially magazines and newspapers has been easily observed over the past fifty years.
So it shouldn't be too long before bloggers and the interweb get to ask the question:
"Would the last person to leave The Sun offices in Wapping switch off the lights?"
Well we can chalk this up alongside: The termite colony in England that will soon devour the East Coast, the English Wallaby colony, The devouring rhododendron of Wales, the German Racoon Colony, and lets not forget all those other weeds busy clogging up the waterways of Europe nor the somewhat rampant (and delicious baked in a pie) American Grey Squirrel locked in a Star Wars type war with the Rebel Alliance of Red Squirrels - also in the UK.
Then there's the Florida Pythons (not a new comedy team), South American Fire ants and First Amongst Equals the Cane Toad in Oz.
However I do believe the English landed Gentry managed to finish off the last member of the Coypu Colony (sort of giant hamster) but have had no success with the now wild and thoroughly naturalised Mink which is doing an "Alien" along the clogged up waterways ripping everything with a heartbeat to shreds as it advances further and further North.
Thanks in most part to: Stupidity, Cack Science, well-meaning Animal Libbers, Globalisation and the simple fellow who thought it would be a great idea to have those charming racoons climbing in and out of German wheelie bins (a sort of Euro-dumpster)
Remove credit card(s) from wallet.
Cut in half.
Never buy anything you cannot pay for.
Open a savings account.
Set aside at least 30% (40% is better) of your income.
Never work for a company that does credit checks.
Also the solution to the global economic financial crisis as oppossed to:
Give Death Star levels of funding to organisations that already proved how adept at economics they are not.
Have nothing on your pc that you would not happily shout across the main high street.
...end of the world predicted for umpteenth time.
In other news Flintoff is declared fit for the Ashes.
Quick, Homer. Change it!
Now where did I put my End Of Days Bag?
brands with a solid base of customers who care nothing about the underlying mechanics of their products. Both can make any changes they wish in the blink of an eye and it would make no difference to the majority of the customers at all. ... Micrix http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4727267.stm
Just like Apple did.
As Bill Thompson has observed with the financial resources of either it take about a year to produce for example
Fools and their money being parted?
"Please help me, I just engaged in an act which even the lowest member of the primates would know was illegal and now I am upset because I was ripped off?"
The fundamentals of the law is that you must limit your own liabilities.
The mythology of the 419 scammer is similar to the street corner drug dealer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freakonomics. Most of them barely earn enough money to get by since they have to pay tributes to all of the criminal elements above them and most of them live with their moms.
Certain slashdotters may experience some affinity with the last sentence.
Bart will save him again.
When you buy the Sun (Scottish Edition) for your 10 to 30pence (depends on their promotion at the time) you get for your money a paper of almost utter hilarity and sarcastic bile that included one of the longest headlines ever (supercaleygoballisticcelticareatrocious) and Deirde's Problem Page. The international news was contained in a single column on the 2nd page. It was the kind of newspaper you read on the bus, train or during your coffee break. It was uncompromising infotainment then (when I was resident in the UK) and I should imagine it still is.
I can see from the Sun's website that their interweb model is not the same - just a lot of chavtastic tv crap.
The problem for the Murdoch empire is that they forgot where newspapers came from.
Newspaper originated from the owners of printing presses who started to print lists of vessels arriving at ports with details of their cargoes. This was indeed news for anyone who wanted to make money from arbritage. Soon traders paid for ads in these papers and then letters (correspondence) from various parts of the world were printed to inform the readers of events that might affect trade. Those newspapers companies were vertically integrated, they owned the printing presses and the newspapers, soon they owned or had command of the logistics systems to deliver them from door to door staff to trucks boats and planes. This created the era of the Press Baron.
While the Murdoch Empire was busy focussing on satellite television they missed the opportunity to accumulate possesions in the web, they failed to buy communications companies or felt it was too low a return for the investment. Yet they knew that print media was in a terminal decline and has been for the past fifty years where newspapers have folded or combined and magazines (especially news magazines) have seen readership dwindle.
One can only guess that these executives are so removed from the physical transaction of buying a newspaper and the somewhat more intangible concept of connecting to the interweb. Ownership of the means of delivery and ad return from cost free added value must have given them sleepless nights, or more likely they decided to ignore what they did not understand.
Now when the paradigm shift is about to render them extinct, they thrash around grasping at straws. What News International are about to create here if they go ahead with this idea, is the Great Murdoch Firewall.
Now if we could only manage to get Associated Newspapers to do the same...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail
(but I will anyway.)
No crying.
No getting in touch with your feminine side.
The man's job (geek or otherwise) is the three F's.
Fixing
Freighting
Frickin
The man makes the complex political decisions about whether or not the nation should deploy cruise missiles, bomb anything from orbit, or bail out the banks.
The woman gets to decide what you spend the money on, where you live, how many children to have, where they will be educated, where to go on holiday and anything else not included in the previous sentence.
The hard part:
When the woman makes a remark about something that upsets her you must always resist the temptation to offer a solution. Sympathise.
But most important of all
Be excellent to each other.
I use open office for almost all my regular documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Then I use emacs for scripts and interesting text documents. Then I use Latex for layout (it is just so beautiful). For less aesthetic concepts Indesign is great. To comply with my work I use (makes the sign of the cross) Publisher. To cope with our website I use Dreamweaver - especially to hash out some database form and the re-write it. Then I use php for more leisurely times to produces database forms I can understand. To search and replace all the crap out of of text documents their is no easier alternative to MS Word's search and replace. Doing the same in OO requires the brain of a theoretical physicist. Doing it in vi or emacs requires the memory of an elephant. So I would miss dear old word if it went. But since I seriously doubt the chances of that ever happening are close to zero, I am not worrying too much. So I guess it's a case of nothing to see here, eject the warp coil and move on.
In Miami City, when I lived there, I went down to the deli/supermarket/minimarket that sells everything and had the following conversation:
VORLICH:[In his best Scottish Grammar School English] "and can I have four AA batteries, please?"
SALESGUY: "Y'Wot?"
VORLICH: [speaking slower and pointing directly to them] "Four AA Batteries, please."
SALESGUY: "Y'Wot?"
VORLICH: "Four AA badderees, please."
SALESGUY: "Aw, why'd y'not say that?
If you are reading Slashdot from outside Germany in English, then don't come to live here. Well, okay you can live in Berlin but you are forbidden to travel any further south and stay off of my snowboard turf!
Full story in a Telegraph article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/1388038/Mysterious-gold-cones-hats-of-ancient-wizards.html
And, no it doesn't run linux but it may be possible to imagine a beowulf cluster of them.
The majority of all organic food production comes from the billion dollar operations of the Albrecht brothers, owners of, among other things Trader Joe's and Aldi. They produce their organic (or bio brands) in prairie sized farms where the yields are significantly lower than their regular fifty per cent smaller prairie sized farms producing similar foods grown using more traditional farming methods. However organic foods are significantly more expensive than those from agri-business production, and the ticket price of these foods is even greater. It makes no difference to me whether someone wishes to eat organic or agri-biz products, that is their free choice, but the organic methods are sufficiently inefficient to significantly damage the net world production of food and lead to starvation in those countries unable to afford the higher prices and greater consumption of farmlands for lower yields. The use of "organic" fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides (such as pyrethrum) are also far more damaging to consumers than the rigorously tested and approved "chemicals" of the agri-business. This is one of the reasons for the increase in the incidence of food poisoning from leaf crops in the US.
This subject was covered by Brian Dunning more than two years ago, something that regular listeners to Skeptoid http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4019# will be familiar with.
Since I consider it unethical to eat organic foods (unless I grow them myself), I never purchase them where I have a choice.
But don't mistake me for an axe-grinder, I am just a pragmatist. During the Chernobyl disaster,when I lived in Scotland, I did not allow my children to drink contaminated British Milk and during the Great British BSE epidemic we dined for almost a year on delicious Scottish steak which at the time supermarkets could barely give away despite the fact that it came from (agri biz!) non-dairy certified herds. When the yuppie owner of Iceland (British Frozen Foods store) declared they would no longer sell genetically modified products, I voted with my feet and bought all the (cheaper, mostly lard and sugar) GM stuff in other supermarkets since I had eaten GM all my life (sheep with shorter legs, cows with more muscle tissue and hens with higher egg production) before then I experienced no significant loss. If something or someone could create a scare over Ben & Jerry's and Peanut Butter M&M's my diet would be so much richer in delicious combinations of fat and sugar at lower prices.
Brian Dunning makes the rather obvious observation: that people who want their food produced according to positively medieval methods would be the least likely to apply the same criteria to their medical treatment - with the natural exceptions of the herbalists, homeopaths and general moon-children.
I was going to make fun of this and suggest a Suffering From a Psychiatric Illness tag, but I see that I have been crushed in the stampede of the 552 others who beat me to it. Oh well, I guess Pampalona will have to be Plan B, for next year.
I would not normally respond to comments but since your claim to be the editor introduces the Voice Of Authority, let me expand on my observation as a prospective customer.
Perhaps a casual observer, finding this title in a museum shop, might expect that a "Geek Atlas" would refer to real locations that you would find in an atlas. A giant list of German museums and one cemetery full of dead Nobel Prize winners an atlas does not make. This is more of a "Geek Museum Guide", where non-UK parts of Europe are concerned and not too far removed from the pages of say "Rough Guide" or "Lonely Planet"
A list of museums and other European locations of geek interest and pilgrimage would be something that lived up to the title. It probably won't surprise you to hear that I have actually been in the Deutsches Museum, since it is only a wee bit along the road from where I live and it is an absolutely stunning collection of artefacts, including a Van de Graaff Generator (with 3 shows per day) and a couple of meteorites but in terms of being a "location" on an "atlas" it is not significant apart from the opportunity it presents to touch a genuine V2 rocket or buy a copy of the Geek Atlas in the museum shop (or just read it for half an hour to discover that Europe is a bit of an afterthought).
My point was that I would be interested in a book that was a geek atlas that continued to appreciate that a visit to the (listed) Trinity Site (which remains "awesome" despite the fact that it was bulldozed flat) is a tad more connected than a visit to a museum, even after you leave the English speaking world, and consequently contained a richer source of material on Europe as opposed to just Britain and America.
My observations were to express dissappointment that while I am unlikely to visit the Trinity Site which you do mention, I could easily visit so many other sites, such as the reactor at Haigerloch which you don't mention,
So rather than "Hello,sequel", perhaps you might consider "Hello, European Edition".
The majority of sites are museums, certainly Germany seemed to be mostly museums and only Peenemünde was a location although also a museum. No mention of the Nördlinger Ries crater or the crater a Steinheim - which you can visit nor any mention of Neandertal outside Dusseldorf or even Einstein's birthplace in Ulm to name but a tiny number of places you would expect to appear in this "list"
And I have no problem understanding the copyright laws, certainly those relevant to Europe. I possess about 250,000 negatives which are my copyright (although not all of them are worth a dime). I know that Wikipedia is a community resource where we are neither intended to make money or achieve fame or infamy. So the NYT article is just dumb. If celebs want images in wikipedia then they should upload a completely copyright free image and stop whining. That's all there is to it. Not complicated. No script writer needed. They do it every other day when they appear on the beach for the paparazzi.