WTF? IMHO we had some clueless people and public officials who overreacted. Most of Boston did not think this was a bomb. What did we learn from this a) Thomas Menino is a moron b) Ed Markey is a moron c) Martha Coakley is a moron d) Michael Flaherty is a moron e) All of the above
"It's outrageous, reckless and totally irresponsible," Flaherty said. "What a waste of resources." Yes it was waste of resources but what was outrageous and reckless wasn't the ad company it was the overreaction. We understand that morons run the city and their overreaction led to the shutdown of the city. They did not act reasonably post Sep 11 or anything - if they looked at the device up close it ought to have been obvious that it was not a bomb. They knocked the first device of the Sullivan Sq MBTA with a fucking water cannon. They KNEW it wasn't a bomb by this point (that or this is standard explosive ordinance disposal procedure in which case I'm moving from Cambridge tomorrow). They might have communicated this and ended the chaos early. No they later blew up one of the devices to make sure it wasn't a bomb.
What else did we learn? When is a bomb not a bomb? When the IED has LEDs on it. Now if I'm a terrorist, the best way to bomb any city in the U.S. would be to stick one of the ATHF banners in front of my actual bomb.
This 2 million isn't a fine - its a little bit of money so that Turner can accept responsibility and these public officials can save face instead of being decried for being thundering morons.
But the emergence of Vista and the protection measures it affords to certain forms of content gives us a glimpse of a new world, one we are entering almost without noticing. It is the world of protected content and the secured network. and,
It is not that the features built into Windows are evil, as some of the more hyperbolic bloggers claim, nor even that they are unnecessary. It is that they change the way our computers work and the way they relate to the network, and those changes could be used to take away our freedoms. So I agree that there businesses have an increasing desire to protect their content with DRM and MS is only to happy to oblige to set themselves as the content providers for the next generation. I'm pretty sure this will die because once one person breaks the DRM and puts an unencrypted copy up on the network it will spread. The thing I cannot understand at all is how anything in Vista creates a secure network where you don't have freedom. It doesn't change network protocols so what exactly is this guy ranting about the network for? I'm sure governments and businesses want a secured network but theres nothing in Vista that is going to bring that about. I'd say FUD. There isn't a damn line in that article that has any information on how Vista will somehow change the internet to something where you do not have freedom.
Also really the simpler thing to do is not try and build a secure network but move from the computer as we know it to specialized devices with carefully controlled features ala Xbox 360. This IMHO will also fail because the genie is out of the bottle.
The jury rejected Henson's claim that he was exercising his First Amendment right to criticize a dangerous cult, and convicted him of interfering with a religion, one of three counts against him. his "crime" -
Henson seems undeterred. "After court today, my wife Arel and I picketed outside the court with signs about the women killed out at the cult's place last summer," he said in an e-mail. "We also gave away about 200 flyers about how Scientology is hurting people and breaking the law." 1) Why is interfering with a religion even a crime. What if I chose to not believe in a god, can I argue that door to door evangelists that claim I am going to hell unless I convert are interfering with my religion?
2) Also even if interfering with religion is a crime - how is picketing with signs or giving away flyers interfering with it. He didn't forcibly go yank emeters out of peoples hands did he. He didn't take someones copy of OTIII and burn it or something. He didn't try and sink their stupid boat? He picketed and distributed flyers.
"It was not just the postings themselves," said Deputy District Attorney Robert Schwarz. "He had been engaged in other odd behavior -- chasing down buses, taking down license plate numbers." Since when did odd behavior become illegal??? Seriously how is taking down license plate numbers illegal?
The jury was hung on the other two counts against Henson: 9-3 for conviction on the count of terrorism, 10-2 for conviction on the count of attempted terrorism. HOW THE FUCK WAS HE EVEN CHARGED WITH TERRORISM??? The man said we should aim cruise missles at them. I've heard radio hosts talk about nuking the democratic convention? WTF is going on? And whats up with
The site says that Scientology has a suspiciously close relationship with the prosecutor: "What kind of Alice-in-Wonderland Court is it that allows organized criminals to sit in the prosecutor's chair bringing charges against the honest citizens, in which a heavily-armed cult has Mafia lawyers direct the activities of the District Attorney?" "A dodgy District Attorney, with cult lawyers sitting at the prosecutor's table, set him up for absurd charges of threatening the cult with cruise missiles," says Dave Bird, another Scientology critic. "Virtually all the defense evidence was excluded.... Even when Henson quoted L. Ron Hubbard's violent words, it was presented as his own speech without quotation marks." Man was smart to go to Canada - maybe he should have tried someplace further away.
I remember when I was a wee freshman fresh of the boat, they made us go to a baseball game and they had thing thing go, and it scarred me for life. Get your pitchforks ready. These bastards are going down!
I tried it so I could listen to some of the iTunes shares my housemates have but it kept crashing periodically and in the end I still prefer winamp's look and feel.
I'm not saying he was 100% right at all. I'm saying he *tried* to do his job.
He gave her the standard ToS - the (presumably) standard 20 buck offer - not rude. I have no idea what the mail she sent him looks like. After that all I have to go on are cut and paste snippets on her blog. Even those make her out to be unreasonable. Even his next reply is not rude but a tad brusque. She argues that theres nothing that REQUIRES them to delete mail from inactive accounts. There is also nothing requiring them to keep it of course. Still no sight of mails from her.
Now he stops trying. Up till here he has done everything any reasonable person would require him to. Other than restore the mail. Thats just business. After this if you want to accuse him of being rude you can make a decent case. I'd call it being blunt and telling her to take a hike. It is his job to be professional to customers. He certainly tried. He failed. He will get fired. Its a shame because I sympathize with the guy. He tried to do his job and lost his cool and I can't claim I'd have reacted differently in his place.
Yeah sure, the right business thing to do is to respond exactly as you say. But I'm not sure thats the same thing as the right thing to do. I don't know what is but I feel it involves his fist and her face. I've just no sympathy for her whatsoever.
Really? I've issues with the framebuffer on my laptop (an AV2370 so relatively recent but uses the Go 6150 which is pretty old) - try switching to one of the virtual consoles - No text just some white vertical bars/streaks. They've had issues like this forever (well at least 2003) and just throw up their hands and say they can't do anything about it. Hardly working great. I'd use the nv driver but it seems to hate any widescreen modelines. The price you pay for closed source drivers on Vista or Linux is exactly the same.
Yes actually... as part of their premium $19.95 service. So aparently the ability to backup her mail isn't worth 20 bucks a year. They also have a 6 buck account preservation thing where your account wont get deleted. Also they've had POP access since 2002 http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is _2002_May_14/ai_85911533 i.e. before she got her account. And if her ISP gave her an email address she could have forwarded all incoming mail. Not easy but you'd have a backup.
so... 1) 2002, Company offers free service with additional features like account protection/backup capability at a price. 2) 2005, New customer signs up for free service without additional features that she sees no value to. 3) Two years on she loses all her mail because of the ToS of her free service. 4) She now sees value of additional features. 5) Emails customer support asks for help. 6) Is told please pay 20 bucks to get your mail back. 7) Despite apparent value of offer, she accuses company of extortion and refuses to pay. 8) She loses all her mail. 9) and gets told to FOAD by customer service rep.
...Should you want to restore the previous contents of your account, you will need to upgrade to the Lycos Mail Plus service...Restoration is not available to members who do not upgrade, and our policy will be strictly enforced. To have your account restored, you must upgrade, and pay the $19.95 upgrade fee. This is non-negotiable. Here response -
So let me get this straight: you're holding my emails hostage until you get $19.95 from me? I checked your policies, and didn't see that listed. This hardly seems like a customer-friendly policy, especially toward someone like me, who has been with Lycos for several years. There were many times when Lycos was not in compliance with its own terms of service, and I didn't try to extort $19.95 from you. This is just the snippets she cut and pasted on her blog. Not the full emails. I'd love to see them. She sounds like she has already gone of on him in the first reply. Nothing about his initial email is rude or unprofessional. She on the other hand is rude and whining about their policies and accusing them of not being in compliance with their own terms of service (which they can arbitrarily change of course) and of extortion... over 20 bucks.
Now you might argue that she is a customer that thats hardly justification. A more compelling argument is that its his job to never lose his cool and always be polite. So he'll get fired over this. Which is a shame because in my book he tried to do his job and dealt with an angry customer the right way. People don't like it when your firm and clear with them and want things sugar coated. She wasn't worth it. She hasn't ever paid them a dime herself so her being a customer itself is debatable - user yes. She was eyeballs for advertising. She didn't backup her mail. She didn't feel that two years worth of email was worth logging in to check up on every thirty days. She didn't pay 20 bucks to get it back when she lost it. IMHO her email is rude and accusatory. No sympathy.
Er so you do know that all the versions of Vista ship on exactly the same dvd. The only difference is the license key. And you can upgrade anytime. Presumably they use some form of DRM to lock your Vista Home Basic from accessing the Ultimate edition features and will unlock it when you pony up the upgrade fee. Thats probably what this patent is trying to cover. A lot of it sounds like a patent covering next gen xbox 360/media center combos, in which case yeah the non-certified application install, and the module to add more memory make very good sense (fair is another story).
This entire thing is a bit for FUD and PJ ranting. I agree if MS implemented a lot of what they were talking about it'd be bad - so bad that they'd not get away with it. We're used to how OSes work by now - it'd be impossible to turn them into a subscription service. A lot of PJs piece is yelling about losing the right to tinker with your OS. Well you've a right to tinker - you just won't get very far. This is MS we are talking about - they never claimed to be open source. Might as well complain that a leopard has spots.
Now there is the worry that changes like this in software herald the general purpose PC is dying and all you get are specialized devices ala xbox 360 but I don't think this will happen. The PC is too useful and too many people use it already and know what benefits a programmable machine has. You'd have to get every electronics maker to stop producing it and get any person or CS department to not work on open source projects. Its not going to happen. There is a crowd of people who prefer specialized devices to PCs - they happily sacrifice the freedom to tinker anyway and the phrase "user" is apt for them. Most people shouldn't care about how a computer or an operating system or program works - they just want to do stuff with them. The "I don't want to to do anything - it should just work" crowd. I'd argue they've already bought into modular OS upgrades and are a lost cause.
However there are still a lot of people out there that think that every piece of marketing material whether its legitimate or not should be treated as spam and the person sending it should be hung out on a noose.
On the internet yes. A lot of/.ters go to some lengths to avoid ads with adblock plus, with multiple filtersets, noscript and privoxy, and they do it because even the legitimate advertisements are so invasive. I do not want your blinking banner ad - its distracting - thats the point but maybe I don't want to be distracted. I do not want your flash ad hovering above text I am trying to read. I do not want you ads playing music, because I'm listening to music on my computer and don't want it being interrupted. Websites that resize my browser - what do the bastards not realize that I have other tabs open and don't want my browser being tiny. I can fix this at home on Firefox, unfortunately I can't always use FF. The ones I hate the most are ones that try to disable the back button in a browser.
Spam is evil because email is such a vita tool today for communication, and its one thats already stressed because the File-folder logic of file systems doesn't really work well for email yet thats what we are stuck with. I've tried tagging and archiving things with gmail but I typically use their POP service since I like having all my mail in one place and so whenever I login to gmail my inbox is a bloody disaster. If you take a stressed system and inundate it with marketing then you are right people will hate you. Most legitimate businesses do feel the need to reach out to customers but I'd argue that a lot of us would appreciate your company more if you just left us alone. I don't want the default when I subscribe to something to be sign me up for your monthly newsletter - I don't fucking care about it. You have a good deal - advertise it on your main page. If I'm a frequent enough customer I will see it anyway.
Its not just the net - I cant watch TV anymore the ads piss me off so much - they are loud, and too damn frequent and interrupt the show I am trying to watch annoying me. No surprise that people are getting Tivos or Myth TV. I've canceled my subscription to magazines because they had full page ads stuck to their front covers and I couldn't see what was inside - not on ones in the news stand, this was a special for subscribers. So if I think that any advertiser needs a sledgehammer to their face its only because they stick their ads in mine.
I'm not arguing that capitalism doesn't need marketing. Far from it. Small companies, and startups especially do and I recognize this. I'm asking it to not be in my face. Its hard because we've gotten used to websites being free, and channels being free even if your internet connection and cable/satellite costs money, but it still costs to put up content. There needs to be a different balance though. I seriously have ad rage and I admit it - it feels like I am getting yelled at constantly and I do not like it. If its not invasive then chances are your ad will be ignored - it was going to be anyway - most people aren't really going to click it unless they've some passing interest though. If you look at adwords you can make up for the ads being ignored with sheer volume. Its just that no one person is subjected to that barrage.
When I put advertisements in my signature line, I try not to be invasive, fraudulent or deceptive. But yet people treat me like I'm hell incarnate. I think that's wrong.
Your signature line is fine. I've looked at even along with the some of the others here like the guy who has the photoshop alternative with 70+ layer modes for a tenth of the price and a few other hosting companies. Adwords are fine - I typically ignore them but sometimes they are actually useful. I'm sorry you get shit from some/.ters for it but there is a balance and I think you are on the right side of it. ABP hides the banner on top of your website btw - might do something about that. Good luck with your company.
Seagate won't, however, be making consumer drives itself: Dave is for telcos and handset OEMs for sale under their own brands. Furthermore, the package isn't merely Seagate drives and an application framework, as Dave includes proprietary technology: even with WiFi blaring and BlueTooth listening contstantly, a Dave drive offers 10 hours of active use and up to 14 days standby. Thusly-equipped drives will also work with standard computers. (emphasis mine)
RTFA seriously. Both your questions answered in two lines. The carriers won't lock you out of a device that they carry which is about the only way you will get your hands on this since Seagate won't be selling them directly. Of course that means that the retail price will include a big fat carrier markup.
And they probably won't let you use it with your PC because oh noes you could your (illegal) music on it and listen to it with your phone instead of using their overpriced service, and share it over bluetooth or WiFi even. So its usefulness is still limited. So using it as secondary service for an iPhone is straight out.
The really high z Sne were all with ACS from Higher-z Supernova Search and they are very important to a lot of people. C'est la vie. ACS is Dead. Long live ACS.
Yes this is very sad but even without ACS Hubble still has WFP2 and NICMOS so its entirely worth servicing it because it can still do bleeding edge science. I don't think there is much hope for servicing ACS. Most of the large ground based telescopes come equipped with atmospheric dispersion correctors (two fancy counter-rotating prisms) and Shack-Hartmann sensors and these along with the larger primary make up a lot of the difference for some science purposes, though ACS will be sorely missed and soon. HST proposals were due recently so they'll probably extend the call for proposals by a few weeks but there will be a lot of unhappy folks who will have to go back to the drawing board so to speak and start from scratch.
If you still want pretty pictures for your desktop - this is not really the point but its astronomy for the soul which is very important - then theres a fairly large collection of ACS images http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/archive/frees earch/acs/viewall/1 and you can get some pretty stunning images from the ground with relatively small telescopes - some of the bigger names in astrophotography like Robert Gendler, Neil Fleming, Ron Wodawski do some stunning stuff.
It'd have been vastly simpler for all involved if this had been an upgrade license to just have the user enter in the Windows XP license key, or even insert the cd in the drive or something. This is not secure enough for MS because clearly the evil pirates will just use fake keys and circumvent WGA (which shows you how much faith they have in the thing) I still think most lusers should upgrade to Vista if only because the UAC and ASLR will save them from the run of the mill stupidity, but I'm already prefacing it with wait until SP1 in December. I don't think they can actually maintain this for very long because too many people reinstall windows relatively frequently and its going to piss them of. I still haven't seen any evidence that the upgrade to Windows Vista offers with new PCs and laptops will give you this upgrade disk, rather than a full license.
If that is the case (and really I'm resigned to the fact that it is) it sorta pisses me off because the laptop I got in Dec didn't come with the XP disc - just an image in a hidden partition, which you should be able to recover from. SO maybe I will call the lovely folks at averatec after I get my vista upgrade disc and complain that it wiped my HDD and now I can't install it, and demand a XP media center CD. This though is more an Averatec issue than an MS issue. (This isn't an actually an issue at all - I formatted the damn thing and put Zen on it within an hour of buying it - I wanted the Vista disc for the desktop which does have a Windows XP disc but still its the principle of the thing)
I'm not as virulent towards MS as most of/. - I still haven't had to reinstall XP ever, some of their software is actually good, and I've a lot of friends who work there but really why must they be such fucking retards and piss everyone of so. They are seriously pulling a PS3 with Vista and theres enough bad press surrounding it that even if it actually works well no one is going to say anything positive at all. And of course you have the option of not buying a PS3, but if you don't wan't Vista you have to go to some lengths to avoid it in todays world.
Is a 2GHz PC faster... sure. Is a 80 MHz iPod more than fast enough to build an index of a few thousand files in a few seconds... you betcha. You must be new here... kids these days don't remember that there was a time before the Pentium:-P
If the major hardware vendors like Intel, NVidia and ATI take these recommendations seriously and implement them in their products, it may occur that the client will not only get an inferior product (defective by design), but will also have to pay the extra cost of implementing DRM restrictions (the vendors won't be probably willing to spend the extra costs for something that does not give them any profits). And the alternative if they don't is that the content will not play at all. What you can hope for is shoddy implementations - like the Westinghouse TV-Sony PS3 issue that pisses customers off. One can hope that faulty implementations and inconvenienced customers will lead to them not buying these products. Then again people put up with BSOD for eons. No I don't trust the market to vote with their wallets. People are too apathetic.
Rather I'd rely on the muslix64s of the world, and the pirate bays. Circumvent the DRM thanks to a shoddy implementation and pirate away and these companies will wither. Sure its illegal, but the only people who decide what is legal is the government and they gave you life + 70 years copyright terms to save Mickey fucking Mouse. The fingerprinting is a better idea but it does realistically cost you the resale market, and isn't really addressing on of the bigger causes of piracy which is perceived unfair pricing. Frankly media fingerprinting is probably the most reasonable solution out there, though implementing it is a bitch.
In the longer term, we need a legislative solution that enshrines our fair use rights and actually considers things like format/time/place shifting and prevents anti-customer measures like this to begin with, but thats not going to happen anytime soon.
Still do skyflats:-) but it does depends on what passband you care about for imaging - twilight sky flats work pretty well in B. These are sort of bothersome on larger telescopes because you don't want to saturate but you do want good statistics but you don't want to cut into observing time, and you have to slew between each one to reject any bright early rising stars. A lot of big telescopes use quartz lamps to illuminate a screen and image that. Dome flats are pretty common these days, especially in spectroscopy, but for photometry its nice to still get a set of sky flats. I take a bunch of flats for each instrument setup and median them before flat fielding. There are more sophisticated methods around the corner that will vastly improve calibration for projects like Pan-STARRS and later LSST - http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0609260 (Disclosure: I work with some of the people on said paper but not on this project)
Dark frames aren't actually as useful anymore for instruments on larger telescopes that use LN2 or a cryotiger for cooling.
1) upload episodes of 24 and simpsons or any already heavily viewed video really 2) profit
or
1) upload some clip to youtube 2) have friendly neigborhood botnet controller set up fake views for share 3) profit
Seriously where is the revenue going to come from? They are already paying to license media content from the studios, now they are going to pay users who upload content. So how are they planning on making an actual profit? A five second ad before each clip? That will annoy most of us, and lead to some fun videos like anti-GM videos following GM commercial. Also I imagine a nasty suit from anyone who uploaded any popular video in the past because they helped build YouTube's popularity.
Not really an issue. Frequently they contain a copy that is effectively the same as the final published copy and often better because you stick in colour figures, and don't have a page limit. Take a look at the comment field and you'll see most have been submitted/resubmitted/accepted for publication or link to a better version. http://xxx.lanl.gov/list/astro-ph/new. In fact I only count 3/38 that aren't (and one of those is too long for a journal).
Disclaimer: I got a Ti-89 after college and absolutely love it and highly recommend it but don't actually need it. I got through college with a cheapo Casio scientific calculator for most things and it fits in a pant pocket. (...shut up) For eveything else there was Mathematica and Matlab.
I did high school in India and we weren't allowed calculators at all. This doesn't make us hardcore - I'd have used one happily if I'd been allowed to. It did force us to get comfortable with math. My math teacher was superb and emphasized thinking about a problem before you started it. He'd make us write down what we expected as an answer before we started a problem - order of magnitude, functional form, maybe a sketch of what we'd expect the function to look like. I think this has helped us immensely.
I've a slight issue with graphing calculators. I think most people who have them don't actually need them, or know how to use them fully. I had to tutor a lot of undergrad physics classes. My very first semester tutoring, I saw people relying on their graphing calculators even in Intro Physics for non-majors which is no calculus whatsoever. A lot of them would keep getting the wrong answer even after we sat and explained the process of what to do in review sessions. This was confusing - they were using a calculator after all, and worse they'd get upset and on occasion break down into the "Physics is hard" rant.
Taking a closer look, the people who had trouble were trying to "plug and chug" - trying to do every operation in one line as you'd write it down and get the answer. They frequently mucked up order of operations and got the wrong answer. They knew about bodmas but didn't want to actually think about what they were doing and just wanted an = something. I spent ages trying to get people to think about the problem and come up with an order of magnitude answer before starting the problem, or heck even think about what sign your answer should be. The solution was quite literally simpler. We tried getting people to use scientific calculators and the problem went away. On the smaller screen, they had to break their operations up and it took longer but it actually worked. Of course, they went straight back to use graphing calculators outside tutoring anyways... I'm also faster with the scientific than my Ti. Thats partly just practice but theres less hunting for functions because there are less functions period.
Even for majors in the sciences I'd argue that they aren't really useful (engg is probably a very different story) - if you are in the sciences your typically subject to at least a semester or two of calculus (usually in addition to AP Calc anyway) and will know the properties of common elementary functions, and thats a good chunk of what you have to deal with. Symbolic manipulation programs are way more useful in Physics, and no graphing calculator really does that well if at all. The Ti89 does (thats why I got it) but its more of a PITA to actually enter anything in it. The graphing on the 89 is also a PITA. Now I can understand using a graphing calculator to graph a really messy function, or do some numerical integration or some such. Several colleges have a Mathematica/Matlab/Maple or some other symbolic manipulation program license and they do it easier. A Mathematica student license costs less than a new Ti-89 and if you go to any professional meetings where there is a Wolfram stall they throw copies and free t-shirts at you.
What I'd love to see is a portable dedicated symbolic and tensor manipulation device. Something like Mathematica and Ricci or a UX-180p. Doesn't really have to be color - just long battery life. I tried the Ti-92 but absolutely hated it. Something like that size, except actually useful. That'd be sweet.
So you should think about if you actually need one. I really like my Ti-89 but I don't really use it very much. Last time was on a two day take home for quantum and our prof didn't allow us to use a symbolic manipulation program and that was a semester ago. But
Complete rubbish. Physics has had preprint servers like arxiv for 15 years now, and the American Physical Society (APS) found NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER that subscriptions were drying up because of arxiv. APS publishes a large number of journals at that. I can find things much easier through arxiv but if I'm going to cite something then its going to be peer reviewed. APS actually felt that preprint servers helped so setup one with Brookhaven, and link to a number of their own webpage. Their attrition rate has remained very constant over the same time period and probably has more to do with shrinking funds. The preprint servers help us. Our group put out a couple of papers recently and we got some constructive feedback from people reading the preprints of astro-ph - and some of the points mentioned the referee didn't catch. Its a stronger paper as a result. The preprint servers are also frequently much easier to search for current literature than the journals sites. They have their problems - theres a good number of completely crazy papers on them and its sort of annoying to sift through them - look for submitted to/accepted for publication in the comment field. In short they are great for easy information access and the journals are great for enforcing quality control. The public access to information is an added bonus. Yes, open access to scientific journals AND data should be mandatory. The journals won't die because they do still provide a valuable service in peer-review.
Hybrid players are a nice idea but the format war will continue until one dominates in the long term because it will be cheaper for all involved, and there are pretty significant differences in the two formats, unlike the DVD +/- R/W fight. The unasked question is whether the end of the format war will boost sales? No. A lot of my friends got dvd playback for free when they both their PS2s. The PS2 cost 200 bucks a year after launch. That won't be happening anytime soon with any next gen player. The dvd worked with existing TVs. Based on price alone, I cannot buy a PS3 even, let alone a HDTV - especially since the cheapo Westinghouse ones I could have afforded on my grad student stipend apparently don't work so well with the PS3 as it is. Then theres getting a HDCP compliant audio system next (something that people seem to forget about). Then there is the total dislike of HDCP to begin with. And my feeling that DVDs are good enough after I saw this comparison http://www.cornbread.org/FOTRCompare/index.html and figured I'd not really notice any difference without a good HDTV. Oh and then there is entire piracy thing, which IMHO will only get worse as we start to have PCs connected to the internet as "Media Centers."
Slashdot Mirror
a) Thomas Menino is a moron
b) Ed Markey is a moron
c) Martha Coakley is a moron
d) Michael Flaherty is a moron
e) All of the above "It's outrageous, reckless and totally irresponsible," Flaherty said. "What a waste of resources." Yes it was waste of resources but what was outrageous and reckless wasn't the ad company it was the overreaction. We understand that morons run the city and their overreaction led to the shutdown of the city. They did not act reasonably post Sep 11 or anything - if they looked at the device up close it ought to have been obvious that it was not a bomb. They knocked the first device of the Sullivan Sq MBTA with a fucking water cannon. They KNEW it wasn't a bomb by this point (that or this is standard explosive ordinance disposal procedure in which case I'm moving from Cambridge tomorrow). They might have communicated this and ended the chaos early. No they later blew up one of the devices to make sure it wasn't a bomb.
What else did we learn? When is a bomb not a bomb? When the IED has LEDs on it. Now if I'm a terrorist, the best way to bomb any city in the U.S. would be to stick one of the ATHF banners in front of my actual bomb.
This 2 million isn't a fine - its a little bit of money so that Turner can accept responsibility and these public officials can save face instead of being decried for being thundering morons.
7) Guest star as killable target NPC in every computer game made hereafter.
Also really the simpler thing to do is not try and build a secure network but move from the computer as we know it to specialized devices with carefully controlled features ala Xbox 360. This IMHO will also fail because the genie is out of the bottle.
2) Also even if interfering with religion is a crime - how is picketing with signs or giving away flyers interfering with it. He didn't forcibly go yank emeters out of peoples hands did he. He didn't take someones copy of OTIII and burn it or something. He didn't try and sink their stupid boat? He picketed and distributed flyers. "It was not just the postings themselves," said Deputy District Attorney Robert Schwarz. "He had been engaged in other odd behavior -- chasing down buses, taking down license plate numbers." Since when did odd behavior become illegal??? Seriously how is taking down license plate numbers illegal? The jury was hung on the other two counts against Henson: 9-3 for conviction on the count of terrorism, 10-2 for conviction on the count of attempted terrorism. HOW THE FUCK WAS HE EVEN CHARGED WITH TERRORISM??? The man said we should aim cruise missles at them. I've heard radio hosts talk about nuking the democratic convention? WTF is going on? And whats up with The site says that Scientology has a suspiciously close relationship with the prosecutor: "What kind of Alice-in-Wonderland Court is it that allows organized criminals to sit in the prosecutor's chair bringing charges against the honest citizens, in which a heavily-armed cult has Mafia lawyers direct the activities of the District Attorney?" "A dodgy District Attorney, with cult lawyers sitting at the prosecutor's table, set him up for absurd charges of threatening the cult with cruise missiles," says Dave Bird, another Scientology critic. "Virtually all the defense evidence was excluded.... Even when Henson quoted L. Ron Hubbard's violent words, it was presented as his own speech without quotation marks." Man was smart to go to Canada - maybe he should have tried someplace further away.
In the USA, Stanley Mills, NY. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Dance
I remember when I was a wee freshman fresh of the boat, they made us go to a baseball game and they had thing thing go, and it scarred me for life. Get your pitchforks ready. These bastards are going down!
Well
it
might
be
because
iTunes
sucks
I tried it so I could listen to some of the iTunes shares my housemates have but it kept crashing periodically and in the end I still prefer winamp's look and feel.
I'm not saying he was 100% right at all. I'm saying he *tried* to do his job.
He gave her the standard ToS - the (presumably) standard 20 buck offer - not rude. I have no idea what the mail she sent him looks like. After that all I have to go on are cut and paste snippets on her blog. Even those make her out to be unreasonable. Even his next reply is not rude but a tad brusque. She argues that theres nothing that REQUIRES them to delete mail from inactive accounts. There is also nothing requiring them to keep it of course. Still no sight of mails from her.
Now he stops trying. Up till here he has done everything any reasonable person would require him to. Other than restore the mail. Thats just business. After this if you want to accuse him of being rude you can make a decent case. I'd call it being blunt and telling her to take a hike. It is his job to be professional to customers. He certainly tried. He failed. He will get fired. Its a shame because I sympathize with the guy. He tried to do his job and lost his cool and I can't claim I'd have reacted differently in his place.
Yeah sure, the right business thing to do is to respond exactly as you say. But I'm not sure thats the same thing as the right thing to do. I don't know what is but I feel it involves his fist and her face. I've just no sympathy for her whatsoever.
Really? I've issues with the framebuffer on my laptop (an AV2370 so relatively recent but uses the Go 6150 which is pretty old) - try switching to one of the virtual consoles - No text just some white vertical bars/streaks. They've had issues like this forever (well at least 2003) and just throw up their hands and say they can't do anything about it. Hardly working great. I'd use the nv driver but it seems to hate any widescreen modelines. The price you pay for closed source drivers on Vista or Linux is exactly the same.
Yes actually... as part of their premium $19.95 service. So aparently the ability to backup her mail isn't worth 20 bucks a year. They also have a 6 buck account preservation thing where your account wont get deleted. Also they've had POP access since 2002 http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is _2002_May_14/ai_85911533 i.e. before she got her account. And if her ISP gave her an email address she could have forwarded all incoming mail. Not easy but you'd have a backup.
so...
1) 2002, Company offers free service with additional features like account protection/backup capability at a price.
2) 2005, New customer signs up for free service without additional features that she sees no value to.
3) Two years on she loses all her mail because of the ToS of her free service.
4) She now sees value of additional features.
5) Emails customer support asks for help.
6) Is told please pay 20 bucks to get your mail back.
7) Despite apparent value of offer, she accuses company of extortion and refuses to pay.
8) She loses all her mail.
9) and gets told to FOAD by customer service rep.
Am I missing something?
...Should you want to restore the previous contents of your account, you will need to upgrade to the Lycos Mail Plus service...Restoration is not available to members who do not upgrade, and our policy will be strictly enforced. To have your account restored, you must upgrade, and pay the $19.95 upgrade fee. This is non-negotiable. Here response - So let me get this straight: you're holding my emails hostage until you get $19.95 from me? I checked your policies, and didn't see that listed. This hardly seems like a customer-friendly policy, especially toward someone like me, who has been with Lycos for several years. There were many times when Lycos was not in compliance with its own terms of service, and I didn't try to extort $19.95 from you. This is just the snippets she cut and pasted on her blog. Not the full emails. I'd love to see them. She sounds like she has already gone of on him in the first reply. Nothing about his initial email is rude or unprofessional. She on the other hand is rude and whining about their policies and accusing them of not being in compliance with their own terms of service (which they can arbitrarily change of course) and of extortion... over 20 bucks.Now you might argue that she is a customer that thats hardly justification. A more compelling argument is that its his job to never lose his cool and always be polite. So he'll get fired over this. Which is a shame because in my book he tried to do his job and dealt with an angry customer the right way. People don't like it when your firm and clear with them and want things sugar coated. She wasn't worth it. She hasn't ever paid them a dime herself so her being a customer itself is debatable - user yes. She was eyeballs for advertising. She didn't backup her mail. She didn't feel that two years worth of email was worth logging in to check up on every thirty days. She didn't pay 20 bucks to get it back when she lost it. IMHO her email is rude and accusatory. No sympathy.
This is why I love /.
:-)
Nerds
That was entertaining and educational guys, thanks.
Er so you do know that all the versions of Vista ship on exactly the same dvd. The only difference is the license key. And you can upgrade anytime. Presumably they use some form of DRM to lock your Vista Home Basic from accessing the Ultimate edition features and will unlock it when you pony up the upgrade fee. Thats probably what this patent is trying to cover. A lot of it sounds like a patent covering next gen xbox 360/media center combos, in which case yeah the non-certified application install, and the module to add more memory make very good sense (fair is another story).
This entire thing is a bit for FUD and PJ ranting. I agree if MS implemented a lot of what they were talking about it'd be bad - so bad that they'd not get away with it. We're used to how OSes work by now - it'd be impossible to turn them into a subscription service. A lot of PJs piece is yelling about losing the right to tinker with your OS. Well you've a right to tinker - you just won't get very far. This is MS we are talking about - they never claimed to be open source. Might as well complain that a leopard has spots.
Now there is the worry that changes like this in software herald the general purpose PC is dying and all you get are specialized devices ala xbox 360 but I don't think this will happen. The PC is too useful and too many people use it already and know what benefits a programmable machine has. You'd have to get every electronics maker to stop producing it and get any person or CS department to not work on open source projects. Its not going to happen. There is a crowd of people who prefer specialized devices to PCs - they happily sacrifice the freedom to tinker anyway and the phrase "user" is apt for them. Most people shouldn't care about how a computer or an operating system or program works - they just want to do stuff with them. The "I don't want to to do anything - it should just work" crowd. I'd argue they've already bought into modular OS upgrades and are a lost cause.
Spam is evil because email is such a vita tool today for communication, and its one thats already stressed because the File-folder logic of file systems doesn't really work well for email yet thats what we are stuck with. I've tried tagging and archiving things with gmail but I typically use their POP service since I like having all my mail in one place and so whenever I login to gmail my inbox is a bloody disaster. If you take a stressed system and inundate it with marketing then you are right people will hate you. Most legitimate businesses do feel the need to reach out to customers but I'd argue that a lot of us would appreciate your company more if you just left us alone. I don't want the default when I subscribe to something to be sign me up for your monthly newsletter - I don't fucking care about it. You have a good deal - advertise it on your main page. If I'm a frequent enough customer I will see it anyway.
Its not just the net - I cant watch TV anymore the ads piss me off so much - they are loud, and too damn frequent and interrupt the show I am trying to watch annoying me. No surprise that people are getting Tivos or Myth TV. I've canceled my subscription to magazines because they had full page ads stuck to their front covers and I couldn't see what was inside - not on ones in the news stand, this was a special for subscribers. So if I think that any advertiser needs a sledgehammer to their face its only because they stick their ads in mine.
I'm not arguing that capitalism doesn't need marketing. Far from it. Small companies, and startups especially do and I recognize this. I'm asking it to not be in my face. Its hard because we've gotten used to websites being free, and channels being free even if your internet connection and cable/satellite costs money, but it still costs to put up content. There needs to be a different balance though. I seriously have ad rage and I admit it - it feels like I am getting yelled at constantly and I do not like it. If its not invasive then chances are your ad will be ignored - it was going to be anyway - most people aren't really going to click it unless they've some passing interest though. If you look at adwords you can make up for the ads being ignored with sheer volume. Its just that no one person is subjected to that barrage. Your signature line is fine. I've looked at even along with the some of the others here like the guy who has the photoshop alternative with 70+ layer modes for a tenth of the price and a few other hosting companies. Adwords are fine - I typically ignore them but sometimes they are actually useful. I'm sorry you get shit from some
RTFA seriously. Both your questions answered in two lines. The carriers won't lock you out of a device that they carry which is about the only way you will get your hands on this since Seagate won't be selling them directly. Of course that means that the retail price will include a big fat carrier markup.
And they probably won't let you use it with your PC because oh noes you could your (illegal) music on it and listen to it with your phone instead of using their overpriced service, and share it over bluetooth or WiFi even. So its usefulness is still limited. So using it as secondary service for an iPhone is straight out.
The really high z Sne were all with ACS from Higher-z Supernova Search and they are very important to a lot of people. C'est la vie. ACS is Dead. Long live ACS.
Yes this is very sad but even without ACS Hubble still has WFP2 and NICMOS so its entirely worth servicing it because it can still do bleeding edge science. I don't think there is much hope for servicing ACS. Most of the large ground based telescopes come equipped with atmospheric dispersion correctors (two fancy counter-rotating prisms) and Shack-Hartmann sensors and these along with the larger primary make up a lot of the difference for some science purposes, though ACS will be sorely missed and soon. HST proposals were due recently so they'll probably extend the call for proposals by a few weeks but there will be a lot of unhappy folks who will have to go back to the drawing board so to speak and start from scratch.
s earch/acs/viewall/1 and you can get some pretty stunning images from the ground with relatively small telescopes - some of the bigger names in astrophotography like Robert Gendler, Neil Fleming, Ron Wodawski do some stunning stuff.
If you still want pretty pictures for your desktop - this is not really the point but its astronomy for the soul which is very important - then theres a fairly large collection of ACS images http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/archive/free
It'd have been vastly simpler for all involved if this had been an upgrade license to just have the user enter in the Windows XP license key, or even insert the cd in the drive or something. This is not secure enough for MS because clearly the evil pirates will just use fake keys and circumvent WGA (which shows you how much faith they have in the thing) I still think most lusers should upgrade to Vista if only because the UAC and ASLR will save them from the run of the mill stupidity, but I'm already prefacing it with wait until SP1 in December. I don't think they can actually maintain this for very long because too many people reinstall windows relatively frequently and its going to piss them of. I still haven't seen any evidence that the upgrade to Windows Vista offers with new PCs and laptops will give you this upgrade disk, rather than a full license.
/. - I still haven't had to reinstall XP ever, some of their software is actually good, and I've a lot of friends who work there but really why must they be such fucking retards and piss everyone of so. They are seriously pulling a PS3 with Vista and theres enough bad press surrounding it that even if it actually works well no one is going to say anything positive at all. And of course you have the option of not buying a PS3, but if you don't wan't Vista you have to go to some lengths to avoid it in todays world.
If that is the case (and really I'm resigned to the fact that it is) it sorta pisses me off because the laptop I got in Dec didn't come with the XP disc - just an image in a hidden partition, which you should be able to recover from. SO maybe I will call the lovely folks at averatec after I get my vista upgrade disc and complain that it wiped my HDD and now I can't install it, and demand a XP media center CD. This though is more an Averatec issue than an MS issue. (This isn't an actually an issue at all - I formatted the damn thing and put Zen on it within an hour of buying it - I wanted the Vista disc for the desktop which does have a Windows XP disc but still its the principle of the thing)
I'm not as virulent towards MS as most of
Is a 2GHz PC faster... sure. Is a 80 MHz iPod more than fast enough to build an index of a few thousand files in a few seconds... you betcha. You must be new here... kids these days don't remember that there was a time before the Pentium
Rather I'd rely on the muslix64s of the world, and the pirate bays. Circumvent the DRM thanks to a shoddy implementation and pirate away and these companies will wither. Sure its illegal, but the only people who decide what is legal is the government and they gave you life + 70 years copyright terms to save Mickey fucking Mouse. The fingerprinting is a better idea but it does realistically cost you the resale market, and isn't really addressing on of the bigger causes of piracy which is perceived unfair pricing. Frankly media fingerprinting is probably the most reasonable solution out there, though implementing it is a bitch.
In the longer term, we need a legislative solution that enshrines our fair use rights and actually considers things like format/time/place shifting and prevents anti-customer measures like this to begin with, but thats not going to happen anytime soon.
Still do skyflats :-) but it does depends on what passband you care about for imaging - twilight sky flats work pretty well in B. These are sort of bothersome on larger telescopes because you don't want to saturate but you do want good statistics but you don't want to cut into observing time, and you have to slew between each one to reject any bright early rising stars. A lot of big telescopes use quartz lamps to illuminate a screen and image that. Dome flats are pretty common these days, especially in spectroscopy, but for photometry its nice to still get a set of sky flats. I take a bunch of flats for each instrument setup and median them before flat fielding. There are more sophisticated methods around the corner that will vastly improve calibration for projects like Pan-STARRS and later LSST - http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0609260 (Disclosure: I work with some of the people on said paper but not on this project)
Dark frames aren't actually as useful anymore for instruments on larger telescopes that use LN2 or a cryotiger for cooling.
1) upload episodes of 24 and simpsons or any already heavily viewed video really
2) profit
or
1) upload some clip to youtube
2) have friendly neigborhood botnet controller set up fake views for share
3) profit
Seriously where is the revenue going to come from? They are already paying to license media content from the studios, now they are going to pay users who upload content. So how are they planning on making an actual profit? A five second ad before each clip? That will annoy most of us, and lead to some fun videos like anti-GM videos following GM commercial. Also I imagine a nasty suit from anyone who uploaded any popular video in the past because they helped build YouTube's popularity.
Not really an issue. Frequently they contain a copy that is effectively the same as the final published copy and often better because you stick in colour figures, and don't have a page limit. Take a look at the comment field and you'll see most have been submitted/resubmitted/accepted for publication or link to a better version. http://xxx.lanl.gov/list/astro-ph/new. In fact I only count 3/38 that aren't (and one of those is too long for a journal).
Disclaimer: I got a Ti-89 after college and absolutely love it and highly recommend it but don't actually need it. I got through college with a cheapo Casio scientific calculator for most things and it fits in a pant pocket. (...shut up) For eveything else there was Mathematica and Matlab.
I did high school in India and we weren't allowed calculators at all. This doesn't make us hardcore - I'd have used one happily if I'd been allowed to. It did force us to get comfortable with math. My math teacher was superb and emphasized thinking about a problem before you started it. He'd make us write down what we expected as an answer before we started a problem - order of magnitude, functional form, maybe a sketch of what we'd expect the function to look like. I think this has helped us immensely.
I've a slight issue with graphing calculators. I think most people who have them don't actually need them, or know how to use them fully. I had to tutor a lot of undergrad physics classes. My very first semester tutoring, I saw people relying on their graphing calculators even in Intro Physics for non-majors which is no calculus whatsoever. A lot of them would keep getting the wrong answer even after we sat and explained the process of what to do in review sessions. This was confusing - they were using a calculator after all, and worse they'd get upset and on occasion break down into the "Physics is hard" rant.
Taking a closer look, the people who had trouble were trying to "plug and chug" - trying to do every operation in one line as you'd write it down and get the answer. They frequently mucked up order of operations and got the wrong answer. They knew about bodmas but didn't want to actually think about what they were doing and just wanted an = something. I spent ages trying to get people to think about the problem and come up with an order of magnitude answer before starting the problem, or heck even think about what sign your answer should be. The solution was quite literally simpler. We tried getting people to use scientific calculators and the problem went away. On the smaller screen, they had to break their operations up and it took longer but it actually worked. Of course, they went straight back to use graphing calculators outside tutoring anyways... I'm also faster with the scientific than my Ti. Thats partly just practice but theres less hunting for functions because there are less functions period.
Even for majors in the sciences I'd argue that they aren't really useful (engg is probably a very different story) - if you are in the sciences your typically subject to at least a semester or two of calculus (usually in addition to AP Calc anyway) and will know the properties of common elementary functions, and thats a good chunk of what you have to deal with. Symbolic manipulation programs are way more useful in Physics, and no graphing calculator really does that well if at all. The Ti89 does (thats why I got it) but its more of a PITA to actually enter anything in it. The graphing on the 89 is also a PITA. Now I can understand using a graphing calculator to graph a really messy function, or do some numerical integration or some such. Several colleges have a Mathematica/Matlab/Maple or some other symbolic manipulation program license and they do it easier. A Mathematica student license costs less than a new Ti-89 and if you go to any professional meetings where there is a Wolfram stall they throw copies and free t-shirts at you.
What I'd love to see is a portable dedicated symbolic and tensor manipulation device. Something like Mathematica and Ricci or a UX-180p. Doesn't really have to be color - just long battery life. I tried the Ti-92 but absolutely hated it. Something like that size, except actually useful. That'd be sweet.
So you should think about if you actually need one. I really like my Ti-89 but I don't really use it very much. Last time was on a two day take home for quantum and our prof didn't allow us to use a symbolic manipulation program and that was a semester ago. But
Complete rubbish. Physics has had preprint servers like arxiv for 15 years now, and the American Physical Society (APS) found NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER that subscriptions were drying up because of arxiv. APS publishes a large number of journals at that. I can find things much easier through arxiv but if I'm going to cite something then its going to be peer reviewed. APS actually felt that preprint servers helped so setup one with Brookhaven, and link to a number of their own webpage. Their attrition rate has remained very constant over the same time period and probably has more to do with shrinking funds. The preprint servers help us. Our group put out a couple of papers recently and we got some constructive feedback from people reading the preprints of astro-ph - and some of the points mentioned the referee didn't catch. Its a stronger paper as a result. The preprint servers are also frequently much easier to search for current literature than the journals sites. They have their problems - theres a good number of completely crazy papers on them and its sort of annoying to sift through them - look for submitted to/accepted for publication in the comment field. In short they are great for easy information access and the journals are great for enforcing quality control. The public access to information is an added bonus. Yes, open access to scientific journals AND data should be mandatory. The journals won't die because they do still provide a valuable service in peer-review.
Hybrid players are a nice idea but the format war will continue until one dominates in the long term because it will be cheaper for all involved, and there are pretty significant differences in the two formats, unlike the DVD +/- R/W fight. The unasked question is whether the end of the format war will boost sales? No. A lot of my friends got dvd playback for free when they both their PS2s. The PS2 cost 200 bucks a year after launch. That won't be happening anytime soon with any next gen player. The dvd worked with existing TVs. Based on price alone, I cannot buy a PS3 even, let alone a HDTV - especially since the cheapo Westinghouse ones I could have afforded on my grad student stipend apparently don't work so well with the PS3 as it is. Then theres getting a HDCP compliant audio system next (something that people seem to forget about). Then there is the total dislike of HDCP to begin with. And my feeling that DVDs are good enough after I saw this comparison http://www.cornbread.org/FOTRCompare/index.html and figured I'd not really notice any difference without a good HDTV. Oh and then there is entire piracy thing, which IMHO will only get worse as we start to have PCs connected to the internet as "Media Centers."