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Goodwill Store Receives Marijuana Donation 11

Posted by samzenpus from the time-to-get-merry dept.
Employees at a Marietta, Ohio Goodwill store were surprised to find four bags of marijuana when they opened a donated water jug. According to police the gift that keep on giving had a street value of $1500. "If anybody would like to come in and claim this 'cooler,' which is probably an antique, we would love to have them come in and we'll be more than happy to try and get that cooler returned to them," Marietta Police Capt. Jeff Waite said.

Comment Re:It's finished, dummies (Score 1) 632

by Hurricane78 (#30229790) Attached to: Contributors Leaving Wikipedia In Record Numbers

The problem is, the powers that be over there decided to arbitrarily apply their “noteworthy” filter on everything, and so they’ve collapsed the infinite array of human knowledge down into a decidedly finite set of “relevant” human knowledge. Of course, they alone are the arbiters of what is and isn’t relevant, and wield the delete hammer often. Under these circumstances, yes you’ll eventually come to the end of what is “appropriate” for Wikipedia.

There’s another word for that. Starts with “c”, and ends with “ensorship”. I think they can ask China for it. ^^

Comment Re:Selection bias (again) (Score 1) 183

by geschild (#30229522) Attached to: Senators Ask EC To Let Oracle-Sun Deal Go Through

"PS. The harshest measures so far were against US companies. Does Intel and Microsoft mean anything to you?"

Might this have something to do with the fact that US companies have different strategies and simply do not want to change their ways for the European market but do want the benefits of that same market? Said in a different way: if they don't like the European rules they could choose to not compete in the European market.

Anyway, The good news (to you) is, that ms Kroes is leaving office for another post real soon now. The bad news (to you), is that she's leaving it for the post of foreign trade, which deals with ict, e-commerce en telecom, among other things. I wouldn't count her out just yet. In Europe, things will get better, as far as I'm concerned. I'm quite certain that the wave of ever bigger companies because of 'economies of scale' were bad for society at large and I hope the trend will be reversed.

Comment Re:dark side of the coin (Score 1) 328

by CannonballHead (#30228546) Attached to: Prison Terms For Spammer Ralsky, Scientology DoS Attacker

No... I never said you had the freedom to force me to listen. I can walk away. If you insist on following me, I'll go to my private property (or someone else's private property that I know). If you still follow me after being asked to leave, you're trespassing.

Seems spam filters are basically putting up gates to my private property, in a very vague way.

And either way, I have every right to plug my ears and close my eyes while you try to sell me something. Freedom of speech doesn't imply you are guaranteed and audience :)
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Scientists Say a Dirty Child Is a Healthy Child 331

Posted by samzenpus from the snack-is-going-to-be-on-the-floor-today dept.
Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California have shown that the more germs a child is exposed to, the better their immune system in later life. Their study found that keeping a child's skin too clean impaired the skin's ability to heal itself. From the article: "'These germs are actually good for us,' said Professor Richard Gallo, who led the research. Common bacterial species, known as staphylococci, which can cause inflammation when under the skin, are 'good bacteria' when on the surface, where they can reduce inflammation."
Programming

Haskell 2010 Announced 173

Posted by kdawson from the eddie-and-the-beav dept.
paltemalte writes "Simon Marlow has posted an announcement of Haskell 2010, a new revision of the Haskell purely functional programming language. Good news for everyone interested in SMP and concurrency programming."

Comment Re:"We reserve the right" (Score 1) 643

by Josh Coalson (#30157980) Attached to: Vulgar Comment On Newspaper Site Costs Man His Job
it could just be a hoax. from the comments:

Just a month ago Greenbaum wrote an article and tweeted about hoaxes in the media. What motivates people to do them, etc.

Now, it sounds like all the details come straight from Greenbaum. ...

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/leaving_a_vulgar_comment_online_might_cost_you_your_job.php#comment-169438 http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/leaving_a_vulgar_comment_online_might_cost_you_your_job.php#comment-169602

Comment Re:Who cares? (Score 1) 849

by Josh Coalson (#30143794) Attached to: Can We Really Tell Lossless From MP3?
maybe as a distributor you care about ipod market share. and yet the fact remains: no one is selling alac, only flac.

as a consumer, the market share of players makes no difference. what matters is choice. how many portables do you have to choose from if you want alac? ipod. how many players if you want flac? dozens, probably hundreds now.

anyway lossless makes the least sense in portables. lossless makes the most sense in distribution because encoding to some other format incurs no generation loss.

your advantages/disadvantages just don't match with the reality.

Comment Re:I've been saying this for years. (Score 1) 849

by Josh Coalson (#30139836) Attached to: Can We Really Tell Lossless From MP3?

Nonetheless, I just rip all my music as .wav now for archiving. To me its not even worth the effort to convert that to FLAC or other lossless codecs, because that just means an additional decoding step if I ever want to use the music for purposes besides playing it live in Winamp.

there are a couple of benefits (besides the free space): 1) flac is easier to tag in a way that is seen by all players; 2) if your wavs get corrupt, you might not know until you listen to them (maybe getting full-scale noise screaming out of your speakers), and the damage (rarely) could mess up the remainder of the file. with flac, each frame has a checksum and you can verify the whole thing. any errors damage only the frame, and can be detected and muted.

Comment Re:Who cares? (Score 1) 849

by Josh Coalson (#30139798) Attached to: Can We Really Tell Lossless From MP3?

The biggest problem against FLAC is simple: relatively few portable media players support FLAC "out of the box." In fact, you almost would be better off with selling Apple Lossless encoded music, since just about every iPod classic, nano and touch model since 2004 and all iPhone models support Apple Lossless natively.

a lot more portables (by choice, not market share) support flac (dozens) than apple lossless (ipod)[1]. and pretty much everyone selling lossless is selling flac. as far as I know, nobody is selling apple lossless and the one outfit selling wma lossless (musicgiants) went bankrupt.

[1] http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html (stale and missing a lot of new players and stores from this year)

Comment Re:Only a couple of problems with that. (Score 4, Interesting) 681

by Josh Coalson (#29511909) Attached to: Microsoft Tax Dodge At Issue In Washington State
sales tax is only 'regressive' if you measure the expenditure as a percentage of income, which is totally arbitrary. that phony definition plays on people's classism to sway them one way or the other. sales tax when measured against the actual tax base is not regressive and in the US is actually more 'progressive' in that some goods you need to survive have no sales tax.

Comment Re:No OGG Vorbis support (Score 1) 484

by Josh Coalson (#29222819) Attached to: Nokia Releases Linux Handset

Most media devices with music playback abilities do not have the function to play ogg (or flac for that matter).

nope, there are dozens of devices, including portables, that play vorbis, and dozens that play flac. flac is particularly cheap to decode. a partial list:

http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#hardware
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers

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