Comment 1992, Toys (Score 2) 84
Are we just trying to make reference to Robin Williams all week?
This is just yet another sign that the military saw the movie 'Toys'
Are we just trying to make reference to Robin Williams all week?
This is just yet another sign that the military saw the movie 'Toys'
disclaimer : I was an admin for fark.com.
The problem as I see it is that news sites started adding the ability for user comments to try to make their websites more 'sticky'. They wanted people to keep coming back
Unless you've modeled your whole site around people commenting, and build up a community, you don't tend to get useful comments -- you either get trolls, people advertising 'work at home', or someone with a follow question about the article that no one every responds to. Once in a while you might get some actually useful information from the general public, the 'I was there' accounts and such
(note, I'm not commenting on how Fark handles things
Allowing anonymous posting that immediately gets shown to the public is just plain stupid. It's begging for trolls. At least with accounts you can monitor the new users, as in most cases you either have the throw-away account (which might have been registered months ago, specifically for use later), or the person who's just constantly obnoxious.
If I ever set up another website, I'm going to the model of 'invitations' where you have to know someone already in the community to get an invite -- because then if we get someone being an ass, we can suspend their friends' accounts, too (giving them some external pressure to not be a dick), or prune the whole tree of accounts if that doesn't help.
So, anyway, my basic categories:
There are some successful hybrids out there
There's actually been a bit of discussion among the library community -- most libraries who offer ebooks get them via Overdrive, which has some major ties (is owned by?) Amazon.
But most libraries have privacy policies, but there's now a third party that can track their citizen's reading habits. There's also complaints about how Amazon sends e-mails to people who have 'checked out' ebooks that tells them to buy the book when it's about to 'expire'.
See, for example, the comments from Librarian Black. (it's in video form, but she raises issues about state laws on keeping lending info private, and most library's policies of not endorsing companies). It's possible that it's changed; I refuse to check out ebooks from my local library, as it's using Overdrive.
The launch of the spacecraft is effectively the start of 'Phase E' (operations) for the instruments
They refer to this whole period as "commissioning". They're not always run in order (eg, for the missions to the outer planets, which might take *years* to get to, they try to check on the health of the instruments before they get to the planet). For some instruments, it might take years to validate the data.
There's also typically a press conference with the "first release" of the data, after the first calibration is done, but that's more to do with scientists on the ground than the spacecraft itself.
disclaimer : I work for a NASA center, but I don't deal with spacecraft directly; I just manage the data after it's downlinked & processed.
There's even a term for this, teergrube.
An ISP that I worked for in the 1990s used to do this (dcr.net, owned by Drew Curtis, of fark.com fame).
We had some code that would look for blatant e-mail harvesters, and would SLOWLY return random bogus e-mail addresses
At first, all of the e-mail addresses were all in our domain (but not our real mail server), but I went and added some code that would look up the connecting IP's network (I think I used whois.ra.net), and would also include '{abuse,postmaster}@(network)' and again for the network's upstream providers.
I can't remember if the bogus mail server was also the box that we had set up so that if *anything* tried touching it, it'd blackhole the connecting IP at our external router, if it was a teergrube itself.
... and I've known some who just didn't want to.
Personally, when I worked at a university, I kept a shirt and tie hanging in my cubicle for when I had meetings. As I never wore jeans in, when given 5 min warning, I was prepared.
Unfortunately, one day, I was dealing with server problems with our team lead, and my (new) manager came in and insisted we had to go to a meeting. I said I needed to grab my shirt & tie, but he insisted we were already late.
It seems that the executive director (3 levels above my boss) had decided that we were going to have an 'introduce the different groups within the IT department to each other', and the chairs were set up as rings of concentric circles
Then they started cracking down on the dress code. Of course, the memo from the executive director on this "interpretation of the dress code" included no logos, so the staff shirts were actually not compliant with his interpretation. It also said "shirt with a collar", without qualifying "dress collar" (so therefore, my crew-necked t-shirt was compliant). They also insisted on 'no large text', without defining a specific letter height. (I hung up my White Zombie "More Human than Human" shirt to show that the "some people..." shirt had medium-sized letters.)
I was later fired
But
If I had it to do all over again
So instead, I work at NASA
Always use command-click when submitting a form, or whatever the key combination is to create a new window or tab. (might be shift-click, or control-click
I admit, this won't always work in the 'one page' applications built exclusively in JavaScript, but when it does, it means that the failure page is in a new window, and you can go back to copy & paste the content after you re-authenticate.
Some of the nastier JavaScript 'enhanced' forms will try to make callbacks as you're typing, and when THOSE time out, they redraw the screen and you lose everything
Everyone knows you use an old cruise ship for that, so you have bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, etc:
Most elections rely on citizens who run the election who aren't government employees. I say 'volunteer', but most municipaliies will pay you for your time (including any training time).
I was a 'Chief Judge' for 4 years of my town, and actually had a lot of say in how the election was run -- based on complaints about previous elections, I ended up designing the ballots, having them printed, considered if it was worth getting mechanical voting machines as hand-me-down from the county (would've done it, if we had the storage space
There are laws about how the election must be run, but the chief judge may have some latitute around how they actually run the election. If you're an election judge, and you find something in the laws that doesn't mesh with electronic voting, you might be able to get the whole thing halted.
As another option, volunteer to be a poll sitter for a candidate; if your area allows them, they're someone who sits in the polling area to observe that the election is being run correctly by the election judges. (and it's important to look into what your rights are as one; if they give you the right to examine the cast ballots, you can likely complain that there's no way to examine the electronic ballots, and get the whole election thrown out).
I've already met him.
He's one of the founders of the Lexington Perl Mongers group. (aka bluegrass.pm).
Of course, he moved in the late 1990s or so to work for some web server group.
I think the lawsuit is stupid, as they'd have to prove that the 'primary' reason for this device is to be able to rip music.
But your claim that they're the owner of the CD isn't necessarily true. You could borrow a CD from the library, or a friend. How's the device to know if you actually own it?
And what happens if you *did* own the CD, but you then sold or gave it away? Do you still have the right to have the music in your car?
What if you haven't sold the CD, but it's now scratched or melted, and therefore unplayable? Do you still have to keep the physical copy to have the continued right to listen to it from your ripped backup, or can you dispose of the physical item?
Personally, I hope this goes to trial, and that the car manufacturers refuse to settle. I'd like a judge to finally weigh in on what is or isn't legal, so that these groups can't threaten legal action just to try to get settlements.
Phone Scoop's Phone Finder allows you to search for cell phones by feature (eg, hours of standby, hours of talk, OS, display resolution).
Set 'U.S. Carrier Availability' to 'Available' and 'Form Factor' to 'Slide', and you get:
Took me less than a minute, and I didn't even had to visit any stores. And if you turn off the 'US Carrier Availability' but require 'World Roaming', you can find other phones that you might be able to get. (as HP never released the Palm Pre3 in the US, so I had to get mine from other sources)
So I used to be a DBA + sysadmin at an Oracle shop ~10 years ago.
Someone even managed to talk Oracle into selling us a site license for *everything* for $1mil/year. (a steep education discount; this was a university).
Unfortunately, they couldn't get the various schools and departments to agree to pool their money to buy the site license, so instead we paid more for restrictive licenses and were prone to auditing. The only reason I saw for not buying into the site license was if departments were planning on jumping ship entirely. (and as we were using Oracle Financials, and the system for class registration was tightly bound to Oracle, I have no idea why it was such an issue
There are places that will rent the rack space, but you provide the hardware to go in it. It's useful as you can more easily move the hardware to a new location, should they give you bad service.
When I used to work for a university (mid-1990s), our department's sysdmin had gotten in trouble at the engineering school because he had written a script that would log into every machine multiple times until all ttys were exhausted
They told him not to do it, but instead of banning him, they put him to work
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire