Yeah I think your right actually. Its nearly 30 years ago, so in my defence my memory is somewhat hazy on the exact details of how the "poke of doom" worked.

Damn! There goes my new article about about "Emacs or Vi? Which do wild Muslims prefer?"

Isn't there some self-incrimiation thingy that makes this impractical? Like, the court cannot ask you to incriminate yourself.

I'm not American, so I forgot the details.

It's pretty much the idea, which is terrible in my view. But then again, how else are you going to prevent bruteforce?

Except Netflix offers to deliver an entire bakery to the the table.

Yes, one bite at a time. You're not allowed get your second bite of cake onto your fork until you have swallowed your first bite, and you're sure as hell not allowed to have your cannoli on the table until after you have finished your tiramisu.

Say you have a waiter who isn't delivering your individual bites fast enough. Maybe he's legitimately crippled, or maybe he's just a spiteful asshole, but you're stuck with that waiter. What would you do about it? I'd tell the chef wearing the Netflix apron in the kitchen, to send me a whole slice of cake, and let's forget this whole bite, ack, bite, ack, bite nonsense. I'm hungry (and this baking analogy isn't helping!) and intend to minimize the waiter's impact upon my meal.

I suppose I see how using timeshifting to make speed less relevant, has a downside: it removes our incentive to increase performance. Ok, then go ahead and remain vulnerable to networking problems (whether it's due to your ISP being assholes, or because someone else in the house is using the Internet for something else, or whatever) for political reasons, both as a protest and to keep your own passion inflamed (so that you'll stay activist). But when AT&T starts suggesting that bulk video get special QoS, the bluff is starting to get a little too real. There are people taking this idea seriously. That is bad.

It's going to increase your Netflix bills and it's going to increase your AT&T bills. So here is what I suggest instead: take the monthly amount of money that they're taling about increasing your bills by, and spend it once on SSD or spinning rust instead, and stick that storage into your player computer (since apparently it doesn't already have any?!?). Have a download process that writes to files, and a player process that reads from files. Then don't start playing a video until you're pretty sure you're not going to "catch up" to however much has downloaded so far (or if that sounds complicated, then just don't play things until you're finishing downloading them).

You just saved a shitload of money, made it so that your internet speed doesn't really have an effect on whatever video bitrate you use (if you want to use a huge high-res TV at a house with a slow connection, that'll be fine), and now you're more resistant to "weather" (kid in other room's torrents, ISP-ISP and ISP-video_provider contract disputes, etc: all that stuff fades in significance).

What's not to like? Everyone wins except the spiteful waiter, except that even he just got an easier job, even if it's instead of the raise that he wanted.

Flikr has CC licensing. IIRC, you have to opt in to the Getty thing.

Beware the Doom floppies you found "left behind" at school. GET U PWND LLAMA!

There used to be a series of commands you could send to a C64 to get the motor to do some fairly unnatural moves(such as slam down the write head and then eject, if I remember rightly. Its been a *long* time).

We used to leave "game" floppies around the classroom (This was back in the 80s) and then wait for the high pitch whine , and if we where lucky , even a whiff of blue smoke.

Kids are little terrorists, and I wasn't much better lol.

While having Asperger's can bring some problems it can also bring strengths and pleasures (e.g. Aspie "special interests" can be great fun, almost like being in love, but with a topic rather than a person). I wouldn't refer to Asperger's simplistically as a "problem". It is a condition with problems and advantages - and also some differences that are just plain neutral.

Referring to the autism spectrum as unqualified "problems" is part of the problem. Asperger's isn't a defect, it is a difference with positives and negatives.

PS: quite a few people on the spectrum think Sheldon is great. At least we get a vaguely recognisable Aspie character who has some strengths (genius, can be very generous with money) and obvious weaknesses (not all of which are core Aspie weaknesses - e.g. his narcissism is more Sheldon than Aspie).

I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed just how unlike the real Caliphate this is.

Incidentally, QNX has an interesting design in this respect, in that it maps the the source buffer (a page at a time, IIRC) into the address space of the receiving process, and does the copy directly. Or it might map the destination buffer into the address space of the sending process; not sure about that. This allows messages to be arbitrary-length.

Because face time is important. Interacting with coworkers is important. Being able to go over a design at a whiteboard together rather than reading the same powerpoint slide separately is important. THe best ideas I've had in my career have been created as a result of talking to my coworkers over lunch/coffee break/tangent from another discussion. Telecommuting is a loss to productivity even if they are perfect about actually working (which having done it for a year- its not an easy thing to do, there's a lot of temptations). Its not only easily worth 15-30k, its worth 2-3 times that to have then onsite. That's ignoring the fact that a large number of people won't be on point when working from home- many without even meaning to cheat the system.

I doubt you paid much attention to this. I do, I've been developing keyboards for 5 years now. Some of those at Swype, some at a second startup (I left Swype a few months after the buyout and have had neither residuals nor stock in the company or its new owner since May 2012), and now well its still on keyboards but I'm under NDA preventing me from stating where. Do all Android users use continuous path input? Of course not. Not even a majority. But a very solid percentage do, and a majority of those wouldn't use a device without it for a phone sized device (answers differ on large tablets where swyping isn't as efficient). So no, I don't think I oversold the importance of the technology- its a blocking issue for millions of people moving to iOS. Would they have moved had it been available when they were making their OS choice? Some large percentage of them would have. Will they now? Who knows- now they're locked in by various apps and expected behavior. We'll see.

THe shift key changes state slightly- colors in blue when manually capped, outlines blue when in autocaps mode. But no, it doesn't show on the keys.

That'd be a much better rant if Netflix actually, y'know, HAD a dedicated Tivo-like box to store things in. They don't.

I can't figure out if you totally missed my point, or totally got it.

Me: "This dog smells awful!" You: "Your rant would be better, if the dog weren't covered in shit."