Exactly. This is less about Flash + MacBook = Less Life and more about advertisers exploiting the computing resources of others to get their [not-so] important message across. Advertisers and the web site owners that permit such anti-reader advertising on their site.
Recently I went online using a computer belonging to someone else to check something out on a whim and after running ad and script blockers for so long, I'm amazed at how user-hostile the entire web has become.
There were decent Republican candidates in the primary that were rooted out quite quickly. The writing was on the wall: America had enough of the Republicans. Even the Republicans had enough of it considering Bush was rubber-stamping everything the Democrat congress was sailing his way.
People go on and on about how "historic" Obama's election is but, really, a polished river rock could have gotten elected. That was the attitude. The fact that he put a little more effort into his campaign over a river rock is what earned him his golden halo (and the subsequent -- read, today -- palatable performance dissatisfaction).
Why would they ever consider putting out a great candidate when they knew that even if they got the resurrected zombie of Ronald Reagan on the ballot they wouldn't win? The mood in the country was that it's the Democrat's turn.
Which is the huge issue for the two party system... that dissatisfaction just swaps the sides, instead of bringing in new blood that might actually deliver legitimate change.
I remember seeing a sex therapist talk about how he was invited to discuss beastiality on a talk show of some kind, and there was a guest who had "married his horse." One of the points the guest tried to explain is that, if a horse didn't consent, you'd be dead.
(Perhaps more interestingly, the punchline of his story was that he asked the guest if it was a female horse, and the male guest was extremely offended at the suggestion that he might have been gay.)
Hey, it's already pretty good. The lockout inside the console is easily neutered (cut pin 4 on the DIP IC with "CIC" on the silkscreen), the cartridge connector -- while flawed -- is straightforward to repair and you can buy replacements for about $5, and the console can be opened up with regular old Phillips screwdriver.
If it were made today, it would use security screws under rubber feet and labels, have a sticker about voiding the warranty, and disabling any kind of protection device would either brick it, make it impossible to play with more than one player at a time, or get you in trouble under DMCA.
Mine died about 2 months ago.:( Solid red light, blue screen with a "wave" of darkness creeping down screen. I found a schematic online but it's kind of hard to figure out where the problem is without a list of test points. I'm considering replacing the capacitors as a cheap and relatively easy thing to try before I give up and hold the funeral.
Our company is even worse than that - we have shown them the cost savings of switching from Microsoft Office (Standard) to Open Office, demo'd the interoperability and the ease of switching, but because it's not Microsoft they just can't consider it "reliable".
Consider sneaking into the executive offices after hours and replacing the Microsoft Office adverts inside their copy of CIO with ones for Open Office.:)
What is the purpose of making these calculators with color screens rather than just making simpler but still advanced graphing calculators cheaper?
Fractals, putting multiple dataplots on the same graph for easier comparisons, and those two without thinking very hard.
I do agree 100% that existing graphing calculators are absolutely overpriced for the hardware. Even a humble TI-84 costs about $100 for a mere Z80 @ 15 MHz with 48 KB memory and 2 MB flash.
If they're conducting an investigation in secret, why would they engage in a firefight over putting a stealth tracking device instead of just running away? They'd probably want the suspect to think that someone's vandalizing their vehicle instead of a federal investigation.
Not like they couldn't just try again later if the cover remains intact. The FBI can tail cars the old-fashioned way and hit it up at another vulnerable time.
What happened to Final Fantasy is, well, money. The quality you remember and describe is now a "brand."
Aside from a few Japanese directors and producers, the game itself is now almost 100% outsourced from Square. Square-Enix is a publisher and no longer really a developer. The dirty little secret in Japanese game development these days is the top tier names are all outsourcing their stuff to smaller unknown and unproven companies simply to maximize profit. Lousy games that might get released anyway on their own now get a Final Fantasy label slapped onto them to turn a game that ships 500K units into one that ships 5M units. If they spent 4 times the development money for a quality in-house production, sure, they'll ship 10M or more, but it's the law of diminishing returns in action.
It's the same reason why Hollywood right now just pinches off turd after turd of "inspired" movies that are basically movie remakes familiar comic book, television, and even old movie properties. In an increasingly crowded marketplace it's cheaper to get noticed with a familiar name that buyers will recognize than have a critically acclaimed game that the average schmo and his gift-giving grandma won't know about.
It looks cruddy because it just reflows to the different dimensions. It really should be a rotation of how it normally looks. But I'm glad it's not:
I've always picked up and placed my taskbar on the side. And somewhat wide. I'm glad I do when I have many many top windows open and I can see the icon and read the first 10 or so characters of the title bars to keep things straight when they pictures start looking random. Now that monitors are all wide anyway, if I had a reason to run a pure 4:3 desktop, I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to make it just the right size to consume the margin. I mean, it's not like I'm losing pixels if they weren't being put to good use anyway, right?:)
OnStar emergency response is one thing. That whole hands free calling, concierge, directions and other services are another.
I don't think it's unreasonable that if you don't pay your fees you don't get luxury services.
But to have deployed technology that can save lives (let's be real here: at some point in the OnStar client code it's getting signaled on a crash and checking a "isPaidUp" flag) then there ought to be a obligation to save the lives.
I mean, even a cell phone with an expired SIM card is still required to allow calls to 911. I don't think anyone will argue that society is worse off that the cell phone carriers are "forced" to be human and let through an emergency call.
That's the point. The social stigma and legal punishments for what amounts to a thought-crime (mere possession of child pornography, not the creation of it) is above crimes that cause real, tangible harm to other people.
Instead of pinning child porn on the caretaker, he could have just outright shot him and suffered a more lenient fate*.
* Assuming, of course, GP is being factual in the list of crimes that have more lenient punishments.
That's the thing, though, all these clever tricks don't really do anything to protect you against Paypal or any other kind of theft over what processes you're already taking.
The person who deletes their card has to understand that, chances are, it's not a hard delete. Yeah, you withdrew payment, that's just peachy. An unauthorized charge is still an unauthorized charge and it makes no difference whether it was Paypal that screwed up or a merchant you freely gave your card number to. If you're generating unique card numbers on the fly, that's great... but I don't see how going through Paypal provides any additional security over just giving that one time number to the merchant. If anything, it's additional exposure of your purchasing history.
Whenever people start talking about their Paypal strategies, I always wonder why "don't use Paypal" isn't one of them. If you're at the point where you're trusting Paypal less than you're trusting your merchant, sounds like Paypal is just adding a extra, unneeded chef into the kitchen that also happens to be a retarded third grader.
The only reason why I could see anyone using Paypal or any other digital payment service is if the merchant doesn't have a valid SSL certificate. If they don't have that, what else are they skimping out on? Besides that, when I briefly spent time in hell-- er, web development for small businesses-- I can't even count how many times I had to say "no" to sending credit card numbers in plaintext in the order notification emails. I'll have to imagine that some dudes are actually doing exactly that because they're lazy or just don't care.
Easy. The hippie/me generations had kids, and they've memories vivid enough to remember the hedonistic excesses they were able to partake in under their parents' noses.
Can't have any of THAT, after all, due to a lovely combination of "precious-little-snowflake" and "think-of-the-children."
They each took on the role of a different part of the machine - CPU, accumulator, RAM and program counter - and simulated the passage of instructions through the hardware.
The five shuffled data around, wrote it to memory, carried out computations and inserted them into the right places in the store.
It was a noisy, confusing and funny simulation and, once everyone knew what they were doing, managed to reach a maximum clock speed of about one instruction per minute.
I wish I had a teacher like this while in [US public] school.
Slashdot Mirror
As in weally wacist.
Exactly. This is less about Flash + MacBook = Less Life and more about advertisers exploiting the computing resources of others to get their [not-so] important message across. Advertisers and the web site owners that permit such anti-reader advertising on their site.
Recently I went online using a computer belonging to someone else to check something out on a whim and after running ad and script blockers for so long, I'm amazed at how user-hostile the entire web has become.
There were decent Republican candidates in the primary that were rooted out quite quickly. The writing was on the wall: America had enough of the Republicans. Even the Republicans had enough of it considering Bush was rubber-stamping everything the Democrat congress was sailing his way.
People go on and on about how "historic" Obama's election is but, really, a polished river rock could have gotten elected. That was the attitude. The fact that he put a little more effort into his campaign over a river rock is what earned him his golden halo (and the subsequent -- read, today -- palatable performance dissatisfaction).
Why would they ever consider putting out a great candidate when they knew that even if they got the resurrected zombie of Ronald Reagan on the ballot they wouldn't win? The mood in the country was that it's the Democrat's turn.
Which is the huge issue for the two party system... that dissatisfaction just swaps the sides, instead of bringing in new blood that might actually deliver legitimate change.
If the universe was primarily made of antimatter instead of matter, would it still be called antimatter?
But at least that shows that 49% of Americans are not only non-idiots, and they're probably good at math, too.
I remember seeing a sex therapist talk about how he was invited to discuss beastiality on a talk show of some kind, and there was a guest who had "married his horse." One of the points the guest tried to explain is that, if a horse didn't consent, you'd be dead.
(Perhaps more interestingly, the punchline of his story was that he asked the guest if it was a female horse, and the male guest was extremely offended at the suggestion that he might have been gay.)
Hey, it's already pretty good. The lockout inside the console is easily neutered (cut pin 4 on the DIP IC with "CIC" on the silkscreen), the cartridge connector -- while flawed -- is straightforward to repair and you can buy replacements for about $5, and the console can be opened up with regular old Phillips screwdriver.
If it were made today, it would use security screws under rubber feet and labels, have a sticker about voiding the warranty, and disabling any kind of protection device would either brick it, make it impossible to play with more than one player at a time, or get you in trouble under DMCA.
Mine died about 2 months ago. :(
Solid red light, blue screen with a "wave" of darkness creeping down screen. I found a schematic online but it's kind of hard to figure out where the problem is without a list of test points. I'm considering replacing the capacitors as a cheap and relatively easy thing to try before I give up and hold the funeral.
I picture them just exploding they're raised above a certain depth.
Also, too soon to predict a future where there are pressurized water aquariums for these interesting fish?
Our company is even worse than that - we have shown them the cost savings of switching from Microsoft Office (Standard) to Open Office, demo'd the interoperability and the ease of switching, but because it's not Microsoft they just can't consider it "reliable".
Consider sneaking into the executive offices after hours and replacing the Microsoft Office adverts inside their copy of CIO with ones for Open Office. :)
(+1, Depressingly Informative)
What is the purpose of making these calculators with color screens rather than just making simpler but still advanced graphing calculators cheaper?
Fractals, putting multiple dataplots on the same graph for easier comparisons, and those two without thinking very hard.
I do agree 100% that existing graphing calculators are absolutely overpriced for the hardware. Even a humble TI-84 costs about $100 for a mere Z80 @ 15 MHz with 48 KB memory and 2 MB flash.
If they're conducting an investigation in secret, why would they engage in a firefight over putting a stealth tracking device instead of just running away? They'd probably want the suspect to think that someone's vandalizing their vehicle instead of a federal investigation.
Not like they couldn't just try again later if the cover remains intact. The FBI can tail cars the old-fashioned way and hit it up at another vulnerable time.
What happened to Final Fantasy is, well, money. The quality you remember and describe is now a "brand."
Aside from a few Japanese directors and producers, the game itself is now almost 100% outsourced from Square. Square-Enix is a publisher and no longer really a developer. The dirty little secret in Japanese game development these days is the top tier names are all outsourcing their stuff to smaller unknown and unproven companies simply to maximize profit. Lousy games that might get released anyway on their own now get a Final Fantasy label slapped onto them to turn a game that ships 500K units into one that ships 5M units. If they spent 4 times the development money for a quality in-house production, sure, they'll ship 10M or more, but it's the law of diminishing returns in action.
It's the same reason why Hollywood right now just pinches off turd after turd of "inspired" movies that are basically movie remakes familiar comic book, television, and even old movie properties. In an increasingly crowded marketplace it's cheaper to get noticed with a familiar name that buyers will recognize than have a critically acclaimed game that the average schmo and his gift-giving grandma won't know about.
It looks cruddy because it just reflows to the different dimensions. It really should be a rotation of how it normally looks. But I'm glad it's not:
I've always picked up and placed my taskbar on the side. And somewhat wide. I'm glad I do when I have many many top windows open and I can see the icon and read the first 10 or so characters of the title bars to keep things straight when they pictures start looking random. Now that monitors are all wide anyway, if I had a reason to run a pure 4:3 desktop, I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to make it just the right size to consume the margin. I mean, it's not like I'm losing pixels if they weren't being put to good use anyway, right? :)
OnStar emergency response is one thing. That whole hands free calling, concierge, directions and other services are another.
I don't think it's unreasonable that if you don't pay your fees you don't get luxury services.
But to have deployed technology that can save lives (let's be real here: at some point in the OnStar client code it's getting signaled on a crash and checking a "isPaidUp" flag) then there ought to be a obligation to save the lives.
I mean, even a cell phone with an expired SIM card is still required to allow calls to 911. I don't think anyone will argue that society is worse off that the cell phone carriers are "forced" to be human and let through an emergency call.
Both of which are far more stringently punished then what happened here.
Oh. Thanks for clearing that up. Point withdrawn.
That's the point. The social stigma and legal punishments for what amounts to a thought-crime (mere possession of child pornography, not the creation of it) is above crimes that cause real, tangible harm to other people.
Instead of pinning child porn on the caretaker, he could have just outright shot him and suffered a more lenient fate*.
* Assuming, of course, GP is being factual in the list of crimes that have more lenient punishments.
That's the thing, though, all these clever tricks don't really do anything to protect you against Paypal or any other kind of theft over what processes you're already taking.
The person who deletes their card has to understand that, chances are, it's not a hard delete. Yeah, you withdrew payment, that's just peachy. An unauthorized charge is still an unauthorized charge and it makes no difference whether it was Paypal that screwed up or a merchant you freely gave your card number to. If you're generating unique card numbers on the fly, that's great... but I don't see how going through Paypal provides any additional security over just giving that one time number to the merchant. If anything, it's additional exposure of your purchasing history.
Whenever people start talking about their Paypal strategies, I always wonder why "don't use Paypal" isn't one of them. If you're at the point where you're trusting Paypal less than you're trusting your merchant, sounds like Paypal is just adding a extra, unneeded chef into the kitchen that also happens to be a retarded third grader.
The only reason why I could see anyone using Paypal or any other digital payment service is if the merchant doesn't have a valid SSL certificate. If they don't have that, what else are they skimping out on? Besides that, when I briefly spent time in hell-- er, web development for small businesses-- I can't even count how many times I had to say "no" to sending credit card numbers in plaintext in the order notification emails. I'll have to imagine that some dudes are actually doing exactly that because they're lazy or just don't care.
The odds that Paypal is actually doing hard deletes of your credit card data is probably pretty slim.
Her comment on the BP disaster was, "Well, at least we are not responsible for the biggest ecological catastrophe any more"
There there, buck up. You'll get them next year.
Easy. The hippie/me generations had kids, and they've memories vivid enough to remember the hedonistic excesses they were able to partake in under their parents' noses.
Can't have any of THAT, after all, due to a lovely combination of "precious-little-snowflake" and "think-of-the-children."
They each took on the role of a different part of the machine - CPU, accumulator, RAM and program counter - and simulated the passage of instructions through the hardware.
The five shuffled data around, wrote it to memory, carried out computations and inserted them into the right places in the store.
It was a noisy, confusing and funny simulation and, once everyone knew what they were doing, managed to reach a maximum clock speed of about one instruction per minute.
I wish I had a teacher like this while in [US public] school.
So, how would one obtain a voting machine that's en route to the landfill?
Anyone with any experience know what sorts of departments to contact?
I would love a huge legal-sized touchscreen to play with.
Either that, or people lie on surveys to sound more chaste than they are.
As the saying goes:
To find out how many partners a woman has been with, ask her and multiply by two.
To find out how many partners a man has been with, ask him and divide by ten.