westbywest

Spam notwithstanding, what's wrong with the usual methods for sorting email, e.g. catchy wording in title, and filtering based on whether the sender is familiar to you?

Admitted I'm not a celebrity like Arrington, but I really don't find myself especially more likely to absorb email content that I'm apathetic about, even if I get paid. And precisely because I'm no celebrity, I don't see how I could be paid anything more than a pittance by this scheme, meaning someone would be buying my attention span for very cheap.

I'll let the attention span devoted to writing this comment (provided free of change) serve as an example of how I believe this scheme would drastically de-value email readers' time.

It's also worth pointing out unit tests as one of the stated reasons for switching to Django. Drupal's unit testing is essentially voluntary for the current major version (mandatory in the next), meaning it engenders lots of crap, some of which I've written.

My attitude is that such clients perhaps knowingly put you in financial peril with this behavior, possibly because they believe this is effective motivation to get their project done on time and/or to spec.

Since this can have a broader effect of rewarding unscrupulous behavior in particular freelance market, I try to be prepared to absorb the costs of walking away from a nasty client at any time. If this puts the client in jeopardy because it blows their schedule, that's precisely what they earned, and perhaps they shouldn't be contracting freelancers in the first place.

This possibility is made even more likely by the inconvenient fact that pager networks are unencrypted. It basically amounts to a gentleman's agreement between service providers that pages sent by one provider's customer do not accidentally appear on the device of another provider's customer.

Gives new meaning to war-driving.

I'm happy to read the flight simulator easter egg will finally be playable.

I agree, and my opinion is that offering up Saul's behavior as a model worth following achieves some genuine progress towards making the world a crappier place.

By analogy, school bullies are very effective at teaching their fellow students the importance of resolve, self-defense, interpersonal dynamics, strength in character, etc. I don't see anyone congratulating bullies for their service to the community anytime soon, however.

Sorry for fudging may response with a term for angular velocity, instead of linear velocity. I was writing from the assumption that the primary point of a smaller centrifuge would be to safely get higher centrifugal forces at the ends of the rotor, which would require that the ends of the shorter rotor move at greater linear velocity.

Faster RPM also increases velocity of would-be shrapnel. Either you prepare for the risk of a slowly-rotating, large rotor/axis assembly failing catastrophically, or a faster-rotating, smaller assembly shedding poorly-fastened bits from the ends of its rotor.

A proposal: employees will maintain respectable office hours (a la be physically present when senior mgmt is around) if you ditch the cubes and halt the perpetual musical chairs.

By a similar token, it can also be naive to expect the truth to be plain at the outset, or even for a sizable period of time afterwards. This is doubly (trebly) so for political matters (c.f. Gulf of Tonkin). What's sought is honesty.

To quote an old Murakami novel: "Speaking frankly and speaking the truth are two different things entirely. Honesty is to truth as prow is to stern. Honesty appears first and truth appears last. The interval between varies in direct proportion to the size of the ship. With anything of size, truth takes a long time in coming. Sometimes it only manifests itself posthumously."

Could very well be, since the remainder of 'ogicals cited are actual scientific disciplines. Which prompts the question, why not phrenological?

I'm surprised this article makes no mention of CSS3, which has a solution to equal column heights. Besides, didn't the promotion of CSS-only layouts for tabular content only come about after the introduction of CSS2, with predictable results?

These are the options I see in decreasing order of immediate utility: 1. Use tables if that's the most elegant solution. 2. Promote/advocate for adoption of CSS3. 3. Propose another means for layout. 4. Complain about CSS2.

As does my post, although I'm disappointed in the distribution of karma points on both.

Since child porn predates both wifi and the web, wifi encryption is just a band-aid when it's advocated as a solution to distribution of illegal content. People determined to use the broadband connections of others to mask their usage need only google things like 'break wpa encryption' and find adequate means, and they have plenty of incentive to be determined. Which still leaves the unfortunate middle-man with the same scenario of having his computer confiscated, but only now with even less of an idea of how to avoid the same problem in the future.

Besides that, my bias is instilled from seeing coffeeshops and similar small businesses inevitably annoy paying customers because of snafus with wifi ecryption, e.g. an older mac laptop that doesn't understand WPA2. My opinion is that this does greater damage than the boogie-men of unsecured wifi will ever do.

To again invoke the analogy of car theft, where I live it's considered more sensible to leave your vehicle unlocked and nothing valuable in plain sight than to tint the windows.

Attitudes like these greatly inflate the actual incidence rate of outright illegal abuse of internet services, most notably child porn. There is not a pedophile lurking for open wifi on every block, as popular hype would have you believe. (By contrast, there often IS a violent domestic abuser lurking on every block in US cities, yet nowhere the same magnitude of public shame campaign directed against them, despite the magnitude of their damage to society.)

Also, downloading copyrighted material generally amounts to a civil offense in the US, even though it is often conflated with more serious criminal behavior (aka child porn) by the MAFIAA.

The risks of running unsecured wifi can be easily communicated to its users, and likewise contained by promoting use of secondary encryption such as SSL.

To claim these risks are so grave that people running unsecured wifi must be idiots is comparable to saying that people who leave their personal cars parked on city streets are also idiots, since those cars be stolen and used in violent crimes.

Yeah, I don't see how this would be of use for things that are not analog synth, shortwave, or HAM radio, whose enthusiasts usually already have scopes.

Even 10-50MHz could be mildly useful, but not 1MHz.

which is not payable via twitpay.

Agreed. I see many parallels in in article's argument against porn and and arguments against violence in video games. Both, i.e. the porn and video game violence, can do well-acknowledged and serious harm against social mores: degradation of sexual intimacy in one case and simulation/glorification of violent behavior in the other case.

Both are also frequently made scapegoats and blamed for problems with society at large, be it lack of adequate sex-ed in school, unhealthy gender role models, or deeper, unacknowledged cultural glorifications of violence.

Whether this is just stupid or a convenience arranged for law enforcement (see comment below about bigger punishment), my guess is that the definition of 'subversive activity' in the legislation is impractically broad. The SC legislature doesn't have the mandate to convict people of crimes (excepting impeachment of elected officials). Its members are not judges.

Besides treason, which by necessity has a very low rate of conviction (the last being CIA mole Robert Hanssen last decade), I don't see how wording like "overthrowing the government of the United State" could be upheld when there is no parallel in whatever offense one was actually convicted for.

Otherwise, levying fines like this is pretty blatant extrajudicial punishment.

Doesn't the mere existence of a 'collapse scene' suggest such commentators still enjoy enough idle time (aka sufficient employment, food supply, shelter, leisure time) to make the commentary in the first place, and thus that the prognosticated magnitude of the economic collapse is exaggerated?

People are not dying of exposure or starvation in refugee caravans across the plains, as they did in the 30s. Urban families are not sending their pre-teen daughters to work 14hour factory shifts 6 days a week just to be able to afford semi-rotten food from the nearby grocer, as they did at the turn of the last century.

It seems we would have much further to fall before genuine survival is imperiled.

Simple answer, no.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/06/71022

When the writer asked a vendor of eavesdropping equipment about the legality of his products, the response ...

"Do you think this stuff doesn't happen in the West? Let me tell you something. I sell this equipment all over the world, especially in the Middle East. I deal with buyers from Qatar, and I get more concern about proper legal procedure from them than I get in the USA."

Never been a fan of polyphasic sleep. The consequences, e.g. complete disconnect with diurnal society, not to mention side effects yet to be understood, seem pretty grave. Even Buckminster Fuller gave it up due to his wife's objections (or so the story goes).

In the end, you're not a robot with tunable duty cycle. You do your body a disservice treating it like that.

Perhaps this approach works in an area saturated both with capital for would-be employers to spend, and with the contractors themselves, so that competition allows such negotiation. Indeed, NYC is undoubtedly such an area.

In other parts of the country, especially during these times, an area can truly have enough of a cumulative lack of available capital, that being hired at all is considered an accomplishment.

I can do freelance work that in other cities that fetches $100/hr handily, but my Midwest city shelters few people who can pay that, regardless of my poise or professionalism.

This is a straw man, since the federal gov't is a republic rather than a strict democracy.

And what would you propose as alternative to permitting everyone living in this country long enough to reach adulthood to cast their their own vote?

It's rather unavoidable to venture a bit into self-righteousness or vanity when you voluntarily act on ideals. If wikileaks somehow maneuvered into to being the only repository for whistle-blowers, then certainly, their pride would do their a mission a grave disservice. Still, whistle-blowers find few places of refuge these days, and wikileaks has demonstrated substantial effectiveness in being just that. Actively protecting/encouraging whistle-blowers out of idealism, while also acknowledging the consequences of vigilantes pursuing such ideals (collecting too many eggs in too few baskets), need not be mutually exclusive. It's a zero-sum game, otherwise.

A topic not adequately covered in this topic, IMO, is corner-case testing. E.g. testing across temperature, supply voltage, and especially Si process variation, in the simplest example. EDA tools of ever-increasing sophistication definitely help economize on time-to-market, assuming you understand your tool chain adequately, but it is still actual unit testing, in temp chambers and similar apparatus, that is your most loyal ally in catching flaws before production. Indeed, a large video graphics company I interacted with recently would run their newest cores through corner-case testing across something like 20 different axes. (Imagine a chip with several voltage domains, e.g. core, GPIO, memory, and some sort of GHz-domain serialized interface, now multiply the number of domains by additional factors such as operating temp and Si process variation, and you get a hypercube representing all possible corner cases.)

Testing across corner cases is exhausting, and yes, proper design discipline coupled with EDA proficiency give you a sporting change of avoiding a reduction in performance goals (at best) or even a re-spin (at worst).

But sending a bad chip to market is often a company-ending act for anyone not in the Fortune 500.

Agreed, and I do Drupal development from time to time. Restricting common browsers like IE, Chrome, and Safari entirely is a great way to tell people to go away.

Simply popping up a warning dialog staying your particular browser is not supported would probably be more effective, since then you could more casual visitors, and entice them enough to return with FF3 later.

The next major release of Drupal (7) has a fair number of improvements towards semi-automated maintenance and upgrades. Most of these leverage off a command line interface called drush.

Also, Joomla, Drupal's closest analog, has a comparable number of DB tables per site. The problem is more likely with prevailing conventions in certain open-source CMS design, than with a particular CMS. Drupal at least lets you share strategic tables across multiple sites.

Nevertheless, such a pod would be rendered obsolete by the SurvivaBall. At least the ball travels around with you. http://survivaball.com/

Fair enough, and thx for the reference. Idiom and logic rarely get along together.

My curiosity hovers over how much freedom FB app developers have in the "Request for Special Permissions" dialog.

Will the FB API force them to disclose the fact their app wants to email you directly, as is shown in the screencap, or could this fact be obscured with clever word choice or some other diversion in the dialogs?

If the latter, then this new feature sits somewhere close to sanctioned phishing. Once an untrusted 3rd party has your email address, FB can't revoke it. The recent stories about Farmville don't give me much reason to trust such 3rd parties.

Indeed at that point, FB, along with whatever role FB had hoped to play in data-mining the traffic it sends to your address, become entirely irrelevant.

Which begs the question: why does FB chose to cast itself as the easily expendable middleman?