Posts by David D. Hagood
1110 posts • joined Wednesday 21st May 2008 17:09 GMT
Re: The original text works
"Taken in context, the term "the people" is clearly intended in the collective sense."
So, then, how do you interpret the
1st "[...] or the right of the people peaceably to assemble [....]"
or
4th "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, [....]"
amendments in terms of a "collective" vs. "individual" right? Does that mean any assembly of people must be sanctioned by the state? Does that mean that only the houses, papers, and effects of GROUPS of people (e.g. a city) may be secure?
What is a chav?
A guido driving on the left.
All of you ignoring the "classic greek" bit
Look, if you are going to ignore the requirement for classic Greek, then there is one name that must obviously be there.
Hitler.
For the co-starring role, any of the following would do:
Manson
Rader
Gacy
OK kiddiez, try something new
The whole "haxor dis & make it say OMFG ZOMBIES" is getting old, kiddiez.
Try something new: aliens, super-volcano (especially in Montana!), Mothra, giant robots, something like that.
(I was going to suggest "Constitution suspended" but a) it would be totally believed by the Montana population and b) it is uncomfortably close to the truth.)
I tried to write a filter for Social Networks
I tried to write a filter for Social Networks - I called it "intelligent".
I could never get it to work; for some reason it never output anything.
A watch to make calls through your phone? How i-nnovative
A watch to make calls through your phone? How i-nnovative of Apple.
Just a second, my Pebble is saying I have an incoming call....
(Isn't it funny that everybody said the wristwatch was dead until Pebble had such a successful Kickstarter - and then the Pravda changed.)
Gives a whole new meaning to
Gives a whole new meaning to "butt dialed".
Or perhaps he used to be a telephone linesman and confused his mobile for his butt (a telephone linesman's service handset is called a buttinski or butt for short).
Somebody's been watching 1965 Disney...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059793/
Don't tell Hollywood!
Given the number of horrible remakes of classics (and not-so-classics), DO NOT TELL HOLLYWOOD!
"Hello Chief? It's Maxwell Smart. About this replacement for my shoe phone...."
He should have used a different "ring tone" ...
... of a more flatulent nature.
"What, that? Prison food'll do that to you, y'know...."
Re: Give us the hole story!
"[...]he need to enter colon in the URL..."
There's your problem - colon in the URL, not URL in the colon!
Re: Any Clues
"Ring of fire"
"Knockin' at your back door"
Beethoven's 5th movement
Re: is it just me?
It's just you. You have the algorithm wrong.
The real algorithm, which is the proof of the assertion "there is no largest prime", goes like this:
Assume there is some largest prime P.
Multiply all the primes <=P to create Q. (that's one of the steps you got wrong - it's not all the numbers, it's all the primes, so you cannot just use factoral).
By construction, Q is divisible by any of the primes up to and including P.
Subtract (or add) 1 to Q to yield R. R is NOT divisible by any prime less than or equal to P, by construction.
Therefor, R is either prime itself, or has one or more prime factor >P. (that's the second bit you got wrong. There's no guarantee R is prime.)
Ergo, P cannot be the largest prime.
Re: Obama hack
Man, I hope you were kidding....
I may not like Obama's politics, but this stupid birther crap needs to die. He's elected; that train, if it ever even existed, has left the station.
Re: moving to a system that DOESN'T need it.
In fairness, Sharepoint allows for versioning of the documents, and a slightly better access control model than a normal Windows share.
Not that you couldn't achieve the same sorts of goals with other solutions, but Sharepoint does them, and does integrate with the rest of Microsoft's applications - which is rather the idea: you need Sharepoint if you use Office, and if you use Sharepoint you really should use IE, and if you use IE you may as well use IIS, and if you use IIS....
Re: If there is life out there, they're keeping quiet
Let alone naming an entire nation one of the most rude words in the galaxy!
AND having the worst poetry.
Re: I don't want to seem ungrateful but...
There there... Just look at any US Midwestern city, and your OCD will be soothed. Nice grid of roads, extending out into the country on a nice mile by mile grid of sectional roads.
Re: The horror, the horror
"Power spikes? Is this more than a UPS can smooth out?"
Yes, by quite a bit. The Carrington event induced so much current into telegraph lines that the batteries exploded and caught fire, arcs were jumping out of keys, and some operators were able to disconnect the battery and operate solely on the induced current on the lines.
Were such an event to hit today, it would induce enough current on long distance transmission lines to fry the transformers. Without the transformers, you have NO power. If we had an event of that size today, the power companies would have to do one of:
A) Decide a day in advance to disconnect all the long feed lines, shut down the power plants (since there would be no load for them to feed), wait out the storm, then take days to bring the power plants back on line, re-stabilize the grid, and reconnect. During that time, everybody is blacked out, and $deity help your career if you guessed wrong about the storm's magnitude and shut down when you didn't need to.
B) Hope that nothing goes wrong, and if it does, watch the pretty sparklies as the grid Roman-Candles and spend months waiting for the factories that build transformers to catch up with the backlog (assuming they can: it takes electricity to make transformers, and if the transformers feeding the plants that make transformers go boom....)
Re: API, not language
The problem is the nature of the Gnome API. The Gnome developers have created their own object model, and deeply embedded it into the design of the API. However, the Gnome developers didn't handle the Platform Independent Model vs. Platform Specific Model very well, so the Gnome API is very much in terms of the PSM of their object-oriented C implementation (the GObject system). This makes programming Gnome needlessly complex, as things the programmer shouldn't worry about (ownership model of objects, lifecycle of objects, polymorphism, interfaces) are NOT handled by the language, and must be handled by the programmer.
They attempted to resolve this by Vala - their home-brew language that was supposed to hide all of that (by generating C code implementing the OOC GObject PSM), but that hasn't taken off: it seems programmers have better things to do with their time than learn another language for a relatively small niche (and that niche is getting smaller every day, especially with decisions like this).
So, rather than take the rather large step of refactoring all the Gnome libraries to move to a language that has a more sensible way of handling objects (e.g. C++11 or native Java (NOT Javascript - see my earlier comment about Java<language> != Javascript)) they decided to move to Javascript, which they could map to the GObject system and that programmers might be willing to learn.
Mind you, using Javascript as a *part* of an application makes a great deal of sense: if you want a Turing-complete scripting language, Javascript is good enough. If you have designed your program as a proper Model-View-Controller pattern, and you keep the UI and the back-end split, having the UI use Javascript to provide "life" to the UI to make the UI code more portable is a good idea (back-end code, if there is no UI, tends to be more portable anyway).
But if the Gnome "architects" are seriously suggesting using Javascript for ALL Gnome development, IMHO it means they are resigning Gnome to only shallow GUI programs, and not complex system level programs.
All of which makes me glad I decided to strip Gnome off my machines - the Gnome team has noticed they are approaching the event horizon, and have decide the best bet is to dive in as fast as possible.
Re: Worst decision after the Gnome 3 pratfall.
"Java, the language, is actually pretty good."
I don't like eggplant.
What, we aren't making random statements that have nothing to do with the article?
Repeat after me: Javascript is NOT Java (the language).
There are some superficial similarities, but then there are superficial similarities between Java and C++ as well.
"Well, it didn't say..."
Mike: Maybe you shouldn't have poured all of that washing-up liquid into it.
Vyvyan: It says here "ensure machine is clean and free from dust"
Mike: Yeah, but it don't say "ensure machine is full of washing-up liquid"
Vyvyan: Yeah, but it doesn't say "ensure machine isn't full of washing-up liquid"
The one with "Very Metal" on the back
Wine not just X86
Wine is not just for X86. Wine will also allow Non-Windows operating systems to run Windows ARM apps (i.e. Windows 8 ARM apps).
Wine can also be used as a porting aid - take a Windows app for which you have source, re-compile for ARM, link against libwine.so, and you have an app running on ARM.
Mandated? You must be kidding!
MANDATED that your car can tattle on you? Because that what putting a cell modem in the car means. It won't just be phoning in when the airbags deploy, it will be constantly telling the towers where it is (because that is how cellular works - it cannot wait until it needs to make a call to check in), and I'll bet a week's salary that it will be able to dump all the ODB-II data over to the cell network on demand as well, so they can check up on how fast you are driving (and likely work out how many people are in the car, based upon engine load and suspension data). Likely they will also require the system to be able to shut the car down remotely, as well.
I don't dispute that having the ability to make a call on a collision is a good thing - but what is wrong with my car using my existing phone, and making the call be a proper emergency call, which will notify me (by my phone playing the "emergency call in progress" tone) that it is happening. That way, if I am *not* sucking air-bag, I can ask "OK car, why for are you making a phone call?"
That is one of the reasons I WILL NOT buy a GM car here in the US - you have to fight like hell to NOT have OnStar installed by default.
PTT
Much of what people are saying in these comments sounds like push-to-talk type conversations, rather than old-school conversations.
Re: I hope they catch all of the perps...
"religion is like a penis...
It's nice to have and can give you a great deal of pleasure, just don't start waving it around in public"
And don't shove it down my kid's throat.
Re: Glass platter
Glass is actually very strong if it is made correctly. "Glass" simply means the atoms of a substance are in a high state of disorder - it's not a crystal where the atoms are very orderly. The highly disordered state means there are no cleavage planes between crystals, so the are no places for a break to start.
The glass most of us are familiar with - window glass - is actually made weaker by design: tempered glass has a great deal of stress built in, so that if it does break, it breaks into a bazillion small, relatively not-so-sharp pieces, so as to not slice you like a baloney. Were it not for that stress, it would be much stronger, but would break into large, sharp guillotine-like pieces that have a nasty tendency to open veins and remove limbs.
For more information, look up "met-glass" or "amorphous metal" for a description of making metals like steel in this highly disordered state.
That's my problem with UPnP port forwarding
That's my biggest problem with UPnP port forwarding: there simply is no control - you enable it, and any device can punch a Christmas Island-sized hole in your firewall, and there's not much you can do about it.
Had UPnP port forwarding been designed by somebody who understood and cared about systems administration, every UPnP device would have been required to have some shared secret assigned by the administrator, and the firewall would present a list of entities that requested forwarding and allow the administrator to say yeah or nay. You could even have made it more stupid-user friendly by having dedicated firewalls and and devices have a button (like the WiFi paring button) that could allow for this to be done automatically: Press the gizmo's button, press the firewall's button at the same time, done.
But that would have required the makers of UPnP port forwarding to understand the concepts of "security", "administrator", and "responsibility".
Sorry, I can sum up both Star Wars and Star Trek in 3 words
They're dead, Jim.
DNA said it best....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonko_the_Sane#Wonko_the_Sane
When Wonko saw instructions on how to use a toothpick on a packet of toothpicks, he became convinced that the world had gone crazy and so built the house as an asylum for it,
Re: You eat rat poison for two days and not get sick
Actually, I know several people who do, indeed, eat "rat poison" every day. Anybody with a metal heart valve (as opposed to a pig valve) will be taking Cumidin or Warfarin every day to keep their tendency to clot down.
It's not a technical issue
I don't think the issue is a technical one. Consider: One of the main reasons business types like Outlook is that they have their email, contacts, and calendar all integrated. Now, suppose you let that happen on a phone or tablet - now the business type needs his Windows PC a whole lot less; you weaken the Windows monopoly on the desktop.
This Will Not Do.
So Microsoft has a choice, both sides of which are bad: weaken the desktop monopoly to try to create a mobile monopoly to make money in the future, or weaken their monopoly-to-be on the phone market to support the monopoly that is making them money right now. I think what we are seeing is the same sort of divisional infighting that kept Windows 7 from having better tablet support - one division would benefit, one would suffer, who has more pull with Ballmer?
Your fist sucks, man
.-- .... . .-. . ... - .... . .. -. - . .-. .-.. . - - . .-. --. .- .--. - .... . .-. . .. - ... -. --- - .- .--. .-. --- ... .. --. -. ..--..
-. ---
hihi
It's the Cheela SETI project
It's the Cheela SETI project, sending out a signal to anybody listening.
It's a very long-term project - it's been running for hours!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheela
Posted in Shiny, shiny! The window's behind me...
WTF is it with Brits and Open Plan?
The company I work for has US and UK divisions. The US divisions are bad enough with cubical farms, but the UK is open plan - which means all the engineers have little ability to concentrate due to all the disturbances around them. It seems to me that if your boss is being bothered by all the people traipsing through his office, GOOD! SERVES HIM RIGHT for making you work in open plan; if you are going to suffer from no privacy then he should as well!
Re: Video Fail
It worked for me, save that Flash kept asking permission to store local data on my machine - permission that was repeatedly refused. I wish the morons at Youtube (and the BBC, to take a momentary tangent) would realize that if I've said no, I am unlikely to have changed my mind five seconds later.
Re: Can't wait for this to happen!
So, since you literally cannot wait, what then? You die? You spontaneously teleport through time?
Re: 1984
It depends upon who defines the schedule:
A marketing 1984 is 1979.
An engineering 1984 is 2083.
Should have named them
Hazard
Area
Logistical
Forward
Observer
Remotely
Deployable
"Out here in space
Looking down on you
My lasers trace
every thing you do"
And Ford Prefect considers relocating...
[n/t]
Re: Free WiFi?
"Tends to be some cumbersome thing that we need to sign up for and give all sorts of personal data in return. "
I cannot speak for the UK, but here in the US, Simon properties has free WiFi at many of their malls, and it's just the standard "redirect you to a captive page wherein you promise not to hold us responsible for bad stuff and not to do bad stuff with our WiFi, mKay? [x]" and off you go.
But yes, the absence of connectivity isn't what keeps me out of the mall, it's the chavs (or whatever your local slang is), and the lack of having the size/color/type of thing I want.
And it does seem to me that giving free net access will NOT reduce the numbers of annoying carbon units.
Re: Whatever happened to...
"Using genetic algorithms to design better, faster and more efficient chips?"
The designs "worked", but why they worked wasn't clear, and often they "worked" only because of a quirk of the implementation.
There was one case where genetic algorithms designed a chip that had a block of gates in the middle that didn't seem to do anything - it wasn't connected to anything else in the part. However, when it was deleted the part stopped working. MUCH analysis and head-scratching later, they came to the conclusion the gates were introducing noise onto the power bus, and that noise was needed elsewhere in the chip. However, shift just one aspect of the fabrication - use thinner gate material, or do a geometry shrink - and the design no longer worked.
"Designs" like that aren't terribly useful - if a genetic algorithm gives you something where you don't know what aspects you can change without breaking it, it stops being engineering and becomes magic.
Pressing further
When pressed further on the issue, Ortiz said
"I mean come ON - we were able to hound somebody until they KILLED themselves. Not only is that a real example of judicial economy - we don't have to bother with a trial now! - but we can now use that when we lean on anybody else! Think of how many 'confessions' we'll get! Think of how many people we can turn on their friends! 'Are you now, or have you ever been, a computer hacker? Do you know any computer hackers? and if so, why did you not notify authorities?' - it positively gives me goosesteps (or is that goosepimples?)!
And think of all the people who will 'self-censor' - we can cut down on this 'crime' (we really need a new name for it: it takes thinking, maybe thought crime?) just by making everybody fear what happens if we look at them.
And it's not like this guy was clean - after all, if he had nothing to hide, if he had done nothing wrong, then he had nothing to fear, amirite?"
Alas, poor Ophelia, we hardly knew ye....
http://www.infoworld.com/t/thin-clients/meet-ophelia-dells-50-plug-in-cloud-based-pc-challenger-211031
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/01/is-dell-looking-to-kill-pcs-with-project-ophelia/
Alas, poor Ophelia, we hardly knew ye - taken from us before you were even born.
Re: Well blended
Relevant XKCD:
http://what-if.xkcd.com/4/
Re: All very well but
"If they all farted* at once"
It wouldn't BE a vacuum then!
Here's one worthy of Randall Munroe - what would the radiation pressure of the body heat of all those readers be? Express your answer in Norris.
GeoSats - not necessary to refuel
It's not strictly needed that a geosync sat be built to refuel in order to extend its lifespan - a "strap on" booster could be designed to work (yes, you need to be very good about getting the center of thrust to be aligned with the center of mass of the bird).
BUT: getting from Earth surface to the surface of any near Earth object (and remaining intact when you do!) is a great deal of delta-V - and delta-V is what is expensive in space. Just getting a probe to the rock is hard. THEN, you have the extra delta-V of getting whatever was useful on the rock back to geosync orbit is even harder.
I wish them all the success in (and out of) the world, and I would actually kick in on a Kickstarter for this (because my philosophy is to assume a Kickstarter will fail), but you can bet I wouldn't make this my only retirement investment.
(but I would take a flier with some of my investment funds - *if* it paid off, you could be pretty well set.)
Re: Missing the point of 3d printing...
Yours is the only suggestion for a use case for 3D printing that has made any sense whatsoever - congratulations!
As others have said: your typical hobbyist 3D printer won't be able to hold the tolerances needed to make a case work - you need a professional grade printer for that. The cost of printing a case with such a printer exceeds the cost of finding the case you want, ordering it, and having it shipped to you.
But yes, if you are making a clipboard with the phone slotted in to it, or a custom dashboard inlay, or other ideas beyond a simple snap-over case, then this does become brilliant, and I hope other phone makers will see fit to follow suit.
Good news, bad news.
Good news: I have a ring to provide two-factor authentication.
Bad news: It's not on one of my fingers.
I keep getting called into HR when I log in every morning - something about workplace violations....
A thought experiment
A thought experiment, to highlight the "usefulness" of caring.
Which would you rather have as your doctor:
1) a Bill Clinton-esque "I feel your pain" type who is so so hung up on how awful you feel he cannot reason about your illness
or
2) A Gregory House-like character who doesn't give one femto-fsck about how bad you feel if it is not diagnostically relevant, who can focus on reasoning out what is wrong with you and the most probable cure.
Sometimes I truly wonder if The Powers That Be are actively discouraging anybody with a rational, analytical bent due to those people being the most likely to see through the Bravo-Sierra and start proposing solutions to the problems that keep The Power That Be in power.
Added equipment
You forgot the most important added equipment:
Batlabels.
Lots and lots of Batlables.
