Agreed. My paycheck doesn't make me feel valued and now my morale is low enough that I spend my time reading slashdot instead of actually working.
Since my boss reads slashdot too, maybe he'll see this comment and do something constructive about it. Or he might just fire me, but thats ok too, recession or no recession, there are other jobs I can take.
Course, he might not see this comment (or do nothing about it), in which case I won't be here all that much longer.

So? Shouldn't they have taken that into account before taking the risks? Lots of people have problems, lots of people with kids have problems, lots of people don't have the benefits these people had before they made a stupid decision.

I agree. What I hate is if I search for "foo bar baz" it seems to ignore that I put quotes around it.. If I put quotes, I'm looking for EXACT matches.. but Google seems to still treat it as foo OR bar OR baz... :'(

I have a 10" eee PC 1000HE and I love it. The small size and super-long battery life makes the low resolution worth it for me. I often forget that I dont have it plugged in, remember 7 hours later and still have a reasonable amount of battery left!
I did replace Windows XP with Arch Linux and run a tiling window manager without any toolbars or other things that take up vertical space on the screen, so I guess that makes it more usable than out of the box. It would be really nice to have a good resolution though... some day!

Errrrm, thats what I meant: theres no point to MY post (by this I meant mine).

Yes, some bottled water IS just tap water, but I tell you, I can taste the difference. You can tell the difference in price usually too (0.40 per 2L bottle vs 1.xx per bottle, though obviously its not fool proof).

My friends used to laugh at me for buying bottled water, but heres the thing: I DO taste the difference and buy bottled water over tap water BECAUSE of the TASTE, not because I think its cleaner or anything. I grew up in the country and when I was young, our tap water came from a stream on the hill behind the house. It was clean and uncontaminated and you could instantly taste the difference. Most people don't believe that water can taste different, but try it sometime - find pure, fresh, clean mountain water and tell me theres no difference.
I used to hate tap water in towns and hated bottled water because it just doesn't taste the same as fresh mountain water. (For years, I'd only drink sparkling bottled water, because it masked the taste of the water a bit). Then I moved to the City and suddenly bottled water was much nicer than the tap water and I adapted. Yes, its still horrible compared to the fresh mountain water (which has since been cut off, because some idiot let their farm animals into the stream and it got contaminated :'( so now even that water is connected to mains water - though being in the country, its still better than my own tap water), but its a whole lot better than city tap water.


So, I buy bottled water for the taste. I immediately taste if the water is not nice (and assume its bottled tap water) and won't buy that brand again. Theres really only 3 or 4 brands I buy regularly now.
There was no real point to this post :-D

As part of our degrees, myself and my housemate worked on an audio based augmented reality system. We had a bunch of sensors to track position (we used ubisense at the time, it now uses gps or something), orientation (digital compass, gyroscope, accelerometer) and distance from solid objects (ultrasonic) to track the wearers movements and then provided 3D audio feedback through a pair of high quality wireless headphones.

Applications for this were both entertainment and guidance (though you could come up with more elaborate applications if you try hard enough, we didn't since time was limited). For entertainment, we had a few ideas: a virtual zoo (or anything else that can be represented through sound) where you can walk around and hear different animals and, more interesting, a virtual band where each instrument is playing at a different location in the room and the wearer can walk around the soundscape.

For guidance, we built two simple applications: we position a row of sounds to guide the wearer to some location. Only the next "waypoint" is audible and when you walk "into" it, it stops playing and the next one in the sequence starts. The other one was that a sound would play when it detected a wall (and the sound changed so you could effectively "scan" along a wall and get a rough idea as to its shape). Got some great feedback off a blind guy too.

My housemate is loosely continuing this project as part of his phd. The sensors, for example, have been replaced by "military" grade ones, so the accuracy is phenomenally good now. Also, the whole thing is packaged better (and smaller) than our tape-and-wires prototype was. Its interesting to "see" what else people can use audio for, it seems to still be relatively untapped as an output device for computers/augmented reality.

You're probably right. In a few days they'll publish the results haha. I gave up during the second one anyway. Since I didn't know the rules, I felt like I had no real chance and I gave up. I don't enjoy mindlessly clicking in order to figure out why.

I'm just randomly clicking. A computer can do that better than I can. A genetic algorithm should be unbeatably fast vs a human and even brute force probably would be too. If they explained the rules a little bit maybe.. I was greatly disappointed and thought it was a stupid and unfun game. Clicking randomly is not fun.

I couldn't care less about /b/tards, I just meant that these are people who have money and blocking sites the like to visit shouldn't be something a telco company does to its customers. Obviously the people I know aren't on AT&T, since I'm in Ireland, but I assume that similarly aged and employed people exist in affected areas too. If not, ignore my comment.

Ok, so I can't type. Whatever. I of course meant 18-23.

Besides what the other replies to parent have already stated, the only thing left unsaid is that a large portion of /b/ users are not actually 15 year olds at all. I know a good few /b/tards myself and most are in the 19-13 age range, and most of them are NOT in fact unemployed either. Personally, I don't give a crap if /b/ is taken down, but plenty of other people seem to, so best not annoy them TOO much.

I'm in favour to transitioning away from TCP/IP towards SCTP/IP personally. Any future network code I write will be based on SCTP instead of TCP, if I can get away with it. :-P Not only is it more resilient to SYN flooding than TCP is, but it gives me other nice possibilities like multiple streams per connection, multi-homing, the choice of ordered or unordered and the choice of reliable or unreliable. The disadvantage being that its not as widely used, so there may be some associated issues, though Linux, at least, does have SCTP support out of the box :-)

Bleh. Its all just terminology. What do you define as AI? The definition of AI (going by what is popularly counted as AI by the computer science community and NOT by what the media likes to call AI) counts most control systems as AI: state machines, expert systems, Deep Blue style minmaxing by searching all possible solutions, google page rank, amazons recommendation system, matchmaking algorithms, pattern matching, classification, bayesian filters - all of these are in the "AI" category.

Thats what he meant. The negative change won't happen until 2083.