Emergency shoot?
I guess that's what the air marshal is for?
6338 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Mar 2007
I'll take Lewis any day. He's got at least a glimmer of the situation and the ability to apply a little intelligent skepticism to the Chicken Little situation out there.
Even if he's a little over the top the other direction, he's nothing compared to the "OMG BAYBEEEZ ARE DYINGGG!!! THREE HEADED GOATS GLOWING IN THE DARK!!!" garbage passing for journalism right now.
But I think the API is only available on 2.3, and most phones are barely 2.2. So unless you root your phone and install a later OS yourself...
ObOffTopic: got to play with the XOOM today, in the Verizon store. In the 3-4 minutes I had, I couldn't figure out the GUI... hmmm... that doesn't bode well.
My original Motorola Droid has tons more functionality & hackability (despite Verizon/Motorola) and a better keyboard than my N810, and is a better phone than my friend's N900.
I coded apps on the N810 for 2 years, and it was a drag, compared to the first couple weeks with Android. Maemo was a horribly documented schizophrenic mess.
So I think Nokia's ship sailed about the time of Christopher Columbus.
T-Mobile had customer service so bad, I avoided cell phones for 3 years afterward. They charged me for an in-warranty replacement phone and there was nothing I could do about it. My friends hate AT&T customer service, and their poor coverage.
At least T-Mobile is dead now. Thank god.
That's what getting tied to the desk for 9hrs a day does to you. Then I have no idea how to cook, so I eat out, and it's not just that it's greasy fatty stuff, the portions are large enough to feed half of Ethiopia.
There's a burger joint (5 guys) where a small helping of fries fills most of a shoebox. I'm not kidding. Most Italian places, you can't get just a slice of pizza, it's the whole pie or nothing.
And as we see from Yahoo & Bing, nothing keeps you from making your own crappy search engine.
Anyway, because people are trying to game Google, they have to keep some of this stuff under wraps. I don't like it, but then I also don't like it when expert-sexchange is the top 10 results, either.
In my opinion... SEO should be a hanging offense.
So when they shout "shown in their complete uncut glory" then I can nail 'em for false advertising?
What do you expect where the country is completely run by drug lords and all the cops are on the take? I guess all the ones with a sense of humor were shot.
"ability to spot speed signs and present them on the dashboard display"
"Edge over on a straight and the new Focus will turn the wheel to get you back"
Are you shitting me? I'd have that thing back in the dealer lot in 30 seconds if it did either of those to me. *I* am driving the car, TYVM.
And reviewing cars? Seriously?
Man, our new Top Gear season doesn't even start until Monday. At least they now show the entire episodes no matter how stuffed full of fat American commercials it is... (yes, even our commercials are fat and boring)
I can't wait to see this episode, and see if it's shown or altered.
I just rsync everything to an identical HD every weekend. Takes 5 minutes and has the extra advantage that if my system takes a crap, I just slot the backup drive in, and it boots. I don't have to install an OS somewhere to get to my backups on the net.
I'd think *this* crew would be the last to use cloudy online backups. I guess I'd be wrong.
They completely recycle the scripts. They even made British Agincourt jokes against the French, but being American hosts, it made absolutely no sense.
Syffy is doing "Being Human" and it's a wreck. You can barely tell who's the vampire and who's the werewolf. MTV did "Skins" and got "iddn't dat child porn, Martha?"
American TV is just so totally horrid, except for BBC America and Discovery Channel. We need a "facepalm" icon.
I think that'll be a lot more valuable than you think. Google's crappy search (from Google!!) combined with a ton of just plain garbage apps pretty much makes the app store useless for me.
I haven't trawled through looking for interesting apps in months, now I just look for a specific app when someone else says it's good, or when I get referred via the barcode from some website.
It's no longer an app store, it's more like a large FTP site where you happen to be able to purchase some of the files, and there's no overall file listing available.
For example, my TomTom GPS, my Motorola Droid phone, and a couple other things already charge through the same micro-USB style ports.
My Droid came with a really cool charger that's a small wall-wart with a desktop-style standard USB port on it, meaning it'll take *any* USB cable as a charging cable. It's rather well made too, and puts out more juice than the usual chargers, so I bought a couple more online.
"Nobody wants backups. What everybody wants is a restore."
"How do you convince family members to take periodic backups? Repeated, tragic data loss. Same as everyone else."
"The zen nature of backups: if you are wondering if you can just throw the tapes in the garbage, the answer is no, they have data on them. But if you're wondering if you can restore your crashed disk contents from a tape, the answer is no, they have no data on them."
"If you link /dev/tape to /dev/null, your backups go WAY faster - and only about 20% less likely to fail a restore than if you'd used Exabyte."
I'm wondering why I don't have any of this goodness, so I search the market for "Google Maps". It shows up as "automatic update enabled" but "needs a manual update" - what?
So I update it, and there we go. But... it doesn't show up in my list of downloaded apps. You might say "well, Google/internal apps don't" but I've updated GMail the same way, and it DOES show up in my list of downloaded apps. If I search for it, it says "installed" like any other downloaded app.
Nice. Way to be consistent there, Google...
Actually, it's probably closer to the HL-20 than Dyna-Soar. Anyway, it's yet another in literally hundreds of powerpoint rocketships. I'll believe it when it's on top of a rocket. HL-20 didn't get that far before it was canceled. These consortia of large companies rarely get far.
Including Boeing and LockMart, Musk is the only guy putting his money where his mouth is.
Apparently it's splashed down right on target, and supposedly 100% success, according to SpaceX & NASA-TV.
And what competitors? I don't see anybody else that's flown anything other than some powerpoint slides. Orbital are the only ones I see being anywhere close to bending metal.
Let's hear it for the first successful commercial spacecraft re-entry!
I think the iMac was the first computer where the USB "just worked" - Win95 died if you hotplugged anything, and I remember even Linux had USB issues.
And holy crap... translucent this and translucent that, and everybody wanted to look like an iMac. I remember joking about buying translucent plastic stock.
Nice little trip down memory lane... punchcard avenue... whatever you want to call it.
Pretty much all of the drivers that cut me off, drive slow in the left lane, sit there when the light turns green, go when the light is still red, pull out on me, blow through stopsigns, etc etc
.... have a goddamned cellphone glued to their ear.
I'd vote for Mr. LaHood for president.
The original design had a couple of hedgehogs of microphones, and needed a HMMV to carry it around. This shoulder-mounted kit looks a hell of a lot more practical.
Two days ago, Military channel had a show about counter-sniper ops, and showed the amount of effort this one guy went through to track down one sniper in Afghanistan. He would probably have given major organs to have one of these devices.
They also showed a counter-artillery radar that backtracked incoming rounds and could have 3 rounds in the air toward the shooter before the incoming round hit. The entire thing including automated mortar with 20 rounds was only the size of a refrigerator. I want one of those!
Yeah, that's what happens when hardware becomes standardized & commodity. OTOH, it also becomes relatively cheap. Take a look at the price tag on the GRID and honestly tell me you want to go back to shelling out that much dosh for a computer.
It's not corporate greed, it's consumer greed, bucko. And it's not monopolist, it's standard. You go out there, "whack together a prototype" and make a non-PC-compatible and tell me how much it sells.
Idiot.