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Comment Re:won't somebody think of the mornings? (Score 1) 276

by freemywrld (#26097539) Attached to: Waste Coffee Grounds Offer New Source of Biodiesel

I have lived in Seattle for 2.5 years and saw plenty of hybrids when I newly arrived here and I see plenty of them on the road now. Also, gas prices only dropped very recently - too recently for one to really equate the number of hybrids on the road to the the newly lower prices. Those who bought hybrids to spend less on gas did not go and buy a regular gasoline engine the day that gas dropped to under $3.

My point is, the first section of your post doesn't make much sense. 6 months ago the price of gas was higher than it is now, yet you are claiming that there were no hybrids on the road then. Now that the prices have dropped, hybrids on the lot are just sitting there, yet you equate hybrid ownership to price of gas...?

Please let me know if I am misunderstanding what you were trying to say.

Comment Re:I'm quite the opposite... (Score 2, Interesting) 516

by freemywrld (#26083883) Attached to: Esther Dyson Grudgingly Defends Internet Anonymity

Your suggestion doesn't make any sense and has nothing at all to do with abortion and entirely to do with adoption and custody rights.

Men already have this right (as do women). An old roommate of mine got his girlfriend pregnant. When they split up he signed away his rights. He will never owe child support and she can never come after it in exchange for him having no rights or claims on the child. Lone mothers who give their children up for adoption also sign away their rights, such as the case of my younger (adopted) brother.

Comment Re:Try YouMail... (Score 1) 584

by freemywrld (#25727067) Attached to: Where Have All the Pagers Gone?

My landline phone will play a recorded message saying it does not accept calls with blocked callerid, but i can't find a way to make my cellphone do this... Once i have such a facility on my sell i'll be set.

Actually, since this thread started out regarding YouMail, I'll mention that their service actually allows you to configure such a message for blocked or unavailable caller IDs. I use this service (after a recommendation from /. funny enough) and have been very happy with it.

Comment Re:Pagers are great (Score 1) 584

by freemywrld (#25726941) Attached to: Where Have All the Pagers Gone?
Same here. We use Metrocall/USAMobility as our paging provider. Almost everyone who is on-call for any reason (doctors, IS folks, etc.) has a company-provided Metrocall pager. People can choose to also be paged to their personal cell phones but no one in our organization is REQUIRED to personally own a device that can receive messages.

Some people (such as myself) have PDAs instead, but I agree with many above posters that it is very difficult to find a ringtone that is loud enough to effectively wake me up. Everyone I know who has the dame device just picks the longest ringtone and sets the volume as high as it goes.

And for the record, I don't live in some small town. I work for one of the largest hospitals in the Seattle area. So pagers aren't dead, just less common.
User Journal

Submission + - How to be a great dad (greatdad.com)

Submitted by
Greatdad
Greatdad writes: "It seems obvious that everyone sets that standard themselves. Being a great dad isn't achieving one set of measures, or even ensuring that your child confirms you're a great dad whenever prompted.

Being a great dad is an every day climb up the mountain, or a thousand-task test of parenting skills: patience, generosity, creativity, intelligence, wisdom. What works one day is a failure the next. Not all of us can stay at home with our kids, attend every concert and performance, or even make macaroni and cheese. Unlike moms, who seem to have more prescribed roles by society in this area, we blunder about trying to maintain our manhood, while aiming to be good and present parents. But, what does that entail? It's not just making breakfast, but knowing how to make oatmeal like mommy makes it. It's not picking them up at school, but being there five minutes early because you know a five-year old doesn't want to be the last one picked up. It's not just setting out the clothes to wear, but allowing your daughter to wear all pink. It's not just buying the toy, but playing it over and over for hours because you can't let the kid "just win."

Today I failed at being a great dad to my daughter. It was the big Chinese New Year's trip to Chinatown and she had her Chinese dress all set up to wear, but all her tights were in the laundry. I quickly volunteered to wash them and throw them in the dryer. Twenty minutes later with my carpool partner knocking at the door, the tights were still soaking wet and unwearable. Daughter, in tears, left the house, tights-less. The story has a happy ending only because I had the free time to continue drying the tights and race over to the school to beat the field trip departure and hand over the now-dry tights. Crisis averted, daddy restored to hero status. But how fragile that perch!

I'll try in this blog to provide a forum for dads of different types and styles to relate their challenges and solutions. I'll also give some advice on things to do, places to visit, and some things to have in your pocket, both literally and figuratively, as you try to be a great dad, whatever that means to you."
Education

Submission + - Foods For Sex Performance (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
sussane
sussane writes: "Man always seeks out any thing that can improve his sex performing ability.He had tried an endless number of recipes composed of all and every thing that can be eaten, until he found something that made him face the situation of declined ability before the Viagra era. Please read rest for full story on sex performance eating natural foods available."

Feed Senators Worried About Abuses Of Student Loan Personal Info (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
Students who borrow money to pay for school are no strangers to junk mail and telemarketing calls from loan companies. Now, some senators are concerned that the companies are getting their marketing and contact information from a government database of borrowers to which they shouldn't have access. Borrowers' records in the database are only supposed to be accessed by companies that have their permission, or that have a financial relationship with them, but the amount of solicitations and marketing materials many students receive from a wide array of companies makes it fairly obvious that this isn't the case. This story comes amid a wider scandal in the student-loan industry, with officials from several schools accused of receiving kickbacks from loan companies, and allegations of lax oversight from a government department stacked with ex-employees from the companies they're supposed to be watching over. But the security hole is also representative of the government's lack of interest in protecting personal data. If federal and state governments can't be bothered to secure the information, it's probably unreasonable to expect them to do anything to make sure the private sector takes security seriously either.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Conflicted about Contributing to Samba

Submitted by
kripkenstein
kripkenstein writes: "Ben Galbraith reports from a recent talk by Sam Ramji, in charge of Open Source Technical Strategy at Microsoft. Ramji is quoted as saying,

"Would I like to contribute to Samba? You bet. Am I constrained by the fact [Jeremy Allision] testified against us in the EU and the general politics between Steve [Ballmer] and Jeremy [Allison]? Yes. My hands are tied. That sucks.
(Jeremy Allison is part of the Samba project.) Ramji's approach to the connection between Microsoft and FOSS seems to by crystallized by quotes such as these:

If someone upgrades to Vista because they hear that Firefox runs better on Vista than on WinXP, I'm happy with that.
[...]
In 1995, Microsoft was the company that missed the Internet. In 2005, I don't think you could say that. [In 2005 it] was the company that missed open-source. In 2015, I don't think you're going to be able to say that.
So, by 2015, will FOSS have been Embraced and Extended by Microsoft?"

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