Some touchpad manufacturers have software to allow this, track down who made your touchpad and see if they have any goodies on the website. I know on my old Presario there was some software that would allow you to do neat things like use it as a tablet... and it was even pressure sensitive. Of course, a touchpad is a pretty damn small writing surface, so I never really used it for anything.

You jest, but how do we know it isn't so?

I'm too lazy to look around for it at the moment, but I wonder if there are any synchronous comparable samples of both "human" and neanderthal DNA. That is to say, do we have samples of DNA from both humans and neanderthals, from say 15,000 years ago? How do those samples compare in similarity to modern human DNA? Maybe its just a gut feeling, but I strongly suspect that there is a real, even likely possibility that neanderthal descended genes are present in modern-day humans. It would be incredibly interesting to have that proven or disproven.

Yes, it _is_ refurbished Vista... that doesn't make it a bad thing, but there is a reason the version number was not incremented to v7.0.
XP was descended from the NT line, it has nothing to do with the Win9x architecture, no XP is not refurbished Win95.
Vista was a major architecture change from XP, notably in the audio/video path. Again, not a refurbished instance of the previous version.
Contrast that with Vista vs. 7, which are much more closely related. Its easy to see why people have the idea that 7 is more akin to a big service pack to Vista. Or as my buddy so eloquently put it: "Windows 7 is essentially Vista with liposuction and a boob job".

I agree!

This is absolutely true, especially here in the rural midwest. In many cases, its actually _cheaper_ to own a house than to rent the same, by virtue of the fact that your landlord is not only subsidizing his mortgage, but looking to make a small profit on top of it.

The problem comes in where you're denied a mortgage even though the principle/interest/insurance/taxes are less than what you currently pay in rent. If you have less than stellar credit, its not gonna happen without one helluva cosigner.

Part of our national mythos is that we're a meritocracy, but the truth is considerably murkier.

I think that this can be explained in part by the Peter Principle. Or for another Peter's take on it (ala-Office Space): pretty much do just enough not to get fired.

Only on slashdot could this get modded +4 Informative. I'll chalk it up to preaching to the choir.

For one, construction generally pays pretty well, especially if you are proficient at it. Besides, athletics teaches important aspects of life that basement dwelling geeks generally won't get -- socialization and teamwork. Building strong working relationships and possessing good networking skills nearly always trumps specialized skill in a given field. Thats why your boss is an idiot, but still makes more money than you :-)

With all that said, what fuckin high school did you go to? I've yet to meet anyone who pines for the good ol' days of high school -- the cliche Al-Bundy-four-touchdowns-in-one-game crowd or otherwise.

I see your point, but actually I disagree, despite the fact that I would have _loved_ this idea back when I was in school. Its a cultural problem, but not one thats been noted so far. The issue is that _parents_ in the U.S. do not value their children's education as much as in other countries. Its far easier to plop a kid in front of the TV after school all day then keep a child motivated in his studies -- this requires extra effort on the parents' part. We can blame the sucky public school system all we want, but the fact of the matter is that parents who take an active role in their child's education have a profound effect on what the child gets out of it. Those that don't spawn the next generation of the lower class, period.

Of course, there are cultural issues that prevent this parental oversight from happening, and _that_ is what needs to be addressed. Americans on average put in more hours per week of work than nearly any other 1st world country. Couple that with single parent families, parents that work multiple jobs, and the myriad of other issues that (un)reasonably prevent parents from taking that active role in their child's development -- and well, its no wonder we're in this sorry state of affairs.

The solution is _not_ to throw more money into the education system by extending the school year. The solution is forcing parents to be accountable for their childrens' development. But to be real, we'll probably vote to extend the school year to get a few more weeks during the summer where we don't have to pay a _real_ babysitter.

Or, for the tl;dr; crowd -- School alone doesn't make for good students, parental involvement does.

Flash still sucks on ubuntu compared to on Windows. Blame Adobe for that one.

But your complaint is totally valid and I've noticed the same thing on just about every release since Edgy. Part of the problem is video drivers -- laptop ones being particularly crufty. And then somewhere along the way, ubuntu (well, Kubuntu at least) got compositing video by default, which is great if your video chipset is beefy and well supported. Not so much if it isn't. About the best thing you can do is try to find a better video driver, and/or disable desktop effects and compositing.

Yeah, but at that point, its not really the external HD that is failing to work, now is it? That your firewire port on a creative card doesn't work, well thats a lot more believable. I hope you can see the difference and why your bluff was called. I've had mixed luck with getting creative cards to do anything besides generic ALSA sound, so it probably still doesn't work :-)

That said, I can speak from experience that with Ubuntu, modern driver support has gotten a hell of a lot better over the years, and a LOT of stuff does just work out of the box. Stuff that doesn't tends to be the same stuff you need to specifically install a driver for in Windows. This does vary pretty wildly amongst the different distributions, so that does genuinely suck.

I think its because it does something like this during the process:

• Copy C:\Users\* -> C:\temp\
• Delete C:\Users\*
• Copy Installer:\Users\* -> C:\Users\
• Copy C:\temp\* -> C:\Users\

Ditto for Program Files and other stuff. Though, thats a dumb way to do it if thats what is in fact going on. It would seem easier to simply modify the file allocation table to temporarily modify directory structure instead of physically moving bits around on the disk.

Too objectively? No man, this is Slashdot. Consider the audience :-)

I think your parent poster was insinuating that the emotion of love is due largely to a chemical response in the body. If thats the case, would it not be reasonable to expect that other species may exhibit that trait? I'd hypothesize that any species that mate for life probably have very similar distinct chemical response towards their mate. I'm actually curious if there has been any study into this. The results would be interesting either way.

That aside, I am afraid that your explanation only explains part of "love," otherwise people wouldn't still be in love after raising children or not being able to have children.

Not necessarily. If "love" is an evolved survival trait, why would it even turn off? Why can octogenarians still father children? Why does a sterile person still desire sex? Probably because a strong family produces more successful offspring. </talkingoutmyass>

I actually saw a show that featured this technology earlier today. I think it was on the Science Channel or Discovery Channel, wasn't really paying attention. Attention Deficit FTL.

Anyway, I got the impression that the lens would communicate via radio frequency and presumably get its power the same way. They didn't really go into much technical detail on that, so I may be assuming too much. Tech like this would be beyond cool if they get it to work, but honestly I was left with the impression that its not a particularly viable way to get your HUD overlay... Personally I think we'd have a better chance of getting that functionality by interfacing directly with the optic nerve or brain.

Then again, I'm not an engineer nor a neurologist, so I probably don't understand the respective challenges involved :-)

Why even do that? Just give it an incremental ID and make it the primary key a database of whatever it is you want to know about the machine -- eg: location, serial number, IP address (if you use static addressing), whatever else. You shouldn't ever change the unique ID you give a machine. That's bad. IMHO its always better to avoid putting metadata in a unique identifier altogether. It does involve an extra step for the netadmin to get information about the machine, but the bonus is he can find out whatever he wants. Work smarter, not harder :-)

Funniest thing I've read in weeks!