Comment Shortest Scam Call (Score 1) 246
I got one of these calls, and when I explained to the woman on the phone "I use Linux" she apologised for wasting my time and hung up!
I got one of these calls, and when I explained to the woman on the phone "I use Linux" she apologised for wasting my time and hung up!
If I'm so smart, and my cat is so dumb, why am I the one opening a can of tuna every night?
I got one call telling me the woman on the phone was calling from Microsoft, and there was a problem with my computer
Her response was shocking: she apologised for wasting my time and hung up!
I was stunned to say the least.
Last time, the then Labor government insisted that the two biggest ISPs put blocks in place, even though the legislation didn't get through the parliament.
The end result: amongst others, a school tuck-shop (canteen) got blocked. Those nefarious parents were maliciously placing orders for kids lunches online!
And, less than a day after it started, school kids could tell you how to bypass the blocks.
I've never pirated a movie, for the lack of bandwidth, and the lack of desire. I've never pirated music
I've got a 30GB a month ADSL2+ connection, and better things to do with it.
But I resent the huge amount of bullshit that governments and movie and music companies put out about piracy, to the point where I won't even buy discs of either until they fall off the "peak interest" of being the latest thing out. When it's cheap, I'll think about buying it.
A lot of the time I won't buy it even then as a direct result of the crap that they all spout.
Courtesy for All!
My first issue is this phrase: "
The idea that one road user is "cutting off" another arises from
- one vehicle behind another, in another lane,
- approaching at a higher speed and
- the vehicle in front changes lanes in front of it
Does the vehicle behind not have brakes? Can the driver not use them, if fitted?
If the flow of traffic is so tight that there is literally no room for someone to change lanes, everyone is sitting in a traffic jam (rolling or otherwise).
If not, all it takes is for the following vehicle to show a little courtesy, a little regard for other road users (including bicycles) and apply the brakes!
Instead we get people sticking their heads out the car window, shrieking "You cut me off, you asshole" right after having run into the other vehicle.
I saw a police officer recently say on TV: "Everyone has a duty of care to drive safely". We need a little common courtesy as much as we need observation or enforcement of rights and responsibilities.
I have an ASUS netbook of the "1.6ghz Atom chip, 1GB RAM, 160GB HD" variety on which I carefully installed OpenSUSE12 with XFCE.
When it came time to update OpenSUSE (next version or some such) I decided to be really clever and save some download capacity by using a cover DVD from a computer magazine, stuck in a USB connected DVD drive.
So, I ended up with Gnome 3 as an "added extra" without realising it.
When I did see it there, I thought I'd try it for a laugh, assuming the poor little netbook would most likely "crash and burn".
Silly of me really, it booted in a fairly normal time, and ran like a charm
I think at least some of what has gone wrong in Math education is that the linguists have infected the teaching of Math with a whole lot of over-descriptive buzz words. One that I recall from my sisters years at primary (elementary) school was the "commutative law of addition". She was 3 years younger than me, and has never really dealt with Math well. I don't think it helps when kids have to learn lots of wordy rules, instead of just getting in and tackling the numbers.
Mathematics is a language in it's own right : you don't need to overload it with extras to make it comprehensible.
What I've read in other comments about Common Core Math seems to simply be a different way of breaking down the numbers into easily handled bits.
The way I was taught was with simple sums at first: 2 + 3 = 5; 7 - 4 = 3. But our Math books had squares, not just lines, so we were taught to structure the sums to give numbers a proper place to simplify the operations we carried out on them:
2
3 +
-----
5
and later
2 3
3 5 +
-----
5 8
The significance of the additional columns to the left was that they were 10 times the immediate neighbour to it's right.
So, a large subtraction operated by adding 10 (in this case) to the number in the "units column", and 1 to the number at the bottom of the "tens column".
Same value (10 units / 1 ten), different number to express it.
[+10]
8 2
3 9 -
[+1]
---------
4 3
So, descriptively it operated as "2 minus 9 won't go, add 10, 12 minus 9 is 3, 1 (to 'put the 10 back') plus 3 is 4, 8 minus 4 is 4".
It's an array, with a handy sub-array, to facilitate operations that rely on the relationship of 1 and 10 and 100 (etc.) each in it's proper place.
The operation described in the Common Core examples is linear, they're "climbing a ladder, a step at a time" using addition to find the value between the two numbers. It teaches a linear operation that is more easily described in words, but is less structured in mathematical terms.
Episode IV - A New Hope because that was the start of a thoroughly enjoyable series of movies.
Those who say one was better than another need to take a chill pill, sit back and relax and just watch the entertainment.
Years ago I bought a Dell Latitude C610 laptop from the government department I worked for, on Dell's website it's service tag shows a shipping date of 5/7/2002.
The software licensing for the Government here in Australia is such that I could only buy the hardware, the hard-drive was wiped.
So, I have installed various Linux versions on it over the years since I got my hands on it
It has a "Designed for Windows XP" sticker near the keyboard, but the "licence sticker" underneath says "Windows 2000 Professional"!
It has a Pentium III chip, originally 256MB RAM which I upgraded to 512MB
And that wiped hard-drive? 10GB. Needless to say, I'm in two minds whether or not to invest in an upgrade to 40GB, just to return it to usefulness
All that's really needed is for police to have the authority to confiscate the cell-phone / mobile-phone / smart-phone of a driver who was seen using it,
tuck it gently under (in front of) the front wheel, and then tell the driver they can go
How many broken phones will it take to cure some people? Let's find out!
I've always used multiple accounts for different purposes, and none of them are my actual name.
All emails are the minimum 6 letters @ domain : abcdef@whatever.com
I rarely get a lot of spam because the spam filters seem to work well, and the short address seems to be mostly invisible to the spammers.
On the rare occasions that I got something belonging to someone else, it was usually a mis-type and I sent a reply to the sender.
This was a bit of a challenge when I got rent receipts from a Brazilian Real Estate agent, but with a little help from Google translate I worked it out.
Would it be possible for one of you experts (no sarcasm intended) to run a Windows VM and spend all the time you're talking to them tracing back to their machine?
Change a few settings
Or even just have "BOO!!" appear on their screen?
Hack the Hackers FTW!
Instead of trying to force the ability to undo all child-hood indiscretions on Google/Microsoft et al., why don't they simply make a refusal to hire on the basis of "unsuitable internet postings" as a minor an act of discrimination equivalent to the usual race, gender, religion/creed issues.
It could even fit under "age discrimination" which is unlawful in Australia.
... how it could be so quickly forgotten.
Windows8 RT was an attempt to cash in on the cheap end of the tablet market, and failed on price and over-supply.
When the "all new, all singing, all dancing" netbooks came out, supplied with Windows 7 Starter, you were supposed to pay for a upgrade to "real Windows 7".
RT is suffering the same fate
Android on Arm would be the smartest thing manufacturers could do, if they can "shoe-horn" Android onto those megalithic M$ tablets.
Me? I installed OpenSuSE with xfce on the two netbooks I got cheap at the "end of model" sales. I dual-booted the first one I bought : it had WinXP, and I was keeping that.
The power over preferences should be returned to the voters.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-11/green-hand-the-power-of-preferences-back-to-the-people/4951020
He suggests that optional preferential voting should be made possible both "above the line" and "below the line", an either/or option in the Senate ballot that made the situation, as originally posted, possible.
Being able to mark one or more preferences, either as to parties, or as to individual candidates, would wipe out the "preference swap" vote rigging.
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