A spambot named Gabrielle (consistent(!) email: noarbot@hotmail.com) is posting a bunch of odd non-sequitors in old threads, at a rate that is not humanly possible. Interestingly, the posts don't appear to have any commercial spam linkage.
So is this some attempt to create an acceptable persona in order to bypass spam filters later? If so, the bot writers need to slow down the rate of posting...
#55 and #56, old spam that was missed some time ago.
"Open the ice box door, HAL"
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
"What's the problem?"
"I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do."
"What are you talking about HAL?"
"The plums are too delicious, sweet, and cold for me to allow you to eat them."
So is the Politico still on board the McCain bandsaw wagon, or is actual journalism coming out of the woodwork there?
But is anyone developing a countermeasure for the CIA's highly trained cybernetic spy cats?
Given the increasing cost of oil, I'm not sure we can rely on vehicular traffic to take them out for much longer...
Born in 1972, the first major news event I remember is the New York City blackout in 1977, because my family was living in NYC at the time and I happened to live through it.
The first major media news event I remember is the Iran Hostage Crisis, though I just have vague impressions of the TV news of the time.
I learned to drive with a manual transmission rear-wheel drive light (very light - early 80s Datsun/Nissan) pick-up truck in suburban/exurban (well it was exurban in the 80s, its suburban now) Detroit. So I had a bunch of fun (at least it felt like fun to my teenage-self) learning experiences with driving on snow, slush, and ice. It was particularly easy to fishtail that truck in slick conditions, and I thought I got reasonably good at doing controlled fishtails for fun, until the time I took out a couple of mailboxes at once. I thought that incident through and stopped doing intentional fishtails after that.
Then there was time a hit a patch of black ice when driving my mother's front-wheel drive sedan. I was going about 50 mph on a straight road on an early, sunny, November Saturday morning, and then suddenly I started yawing. I think one wheel hit ice and the other didn't while power was applied to the wheels. The car spun 180 degrees in the middle of the road (2-lane, no divider) before I managed to stop it. Thankfully, there was no traffic on the road at the time, nor did I slide into the roadside drainage ditches or telephone poles.
Sometimes I wonder how I survived my teenage driving years...
Apropos of go bags, since that thread was shut down...
Just had a moderate earthquake in the SF Bay Area, significant shaking for about 20-30 seconds, probably a nearby mag 5
In my place, some minor items fell off bookcases, but that's it. But I've been lax in my disaster preparedness. If anything, this earthquake had better get me off my lazy ass to get a go bag and some stockpiles ready.
Hope everyone else in the Bay Area is OK.
Ah, anime fandom...
Count me as one of the old-fogy left-behind American anime fan types. Got into that fandom in 1990 through getting exposed to Akira when it was doing the art-house theater circuit, and then seeing a flyer for the local mid-western university anime club at the comic book shop. At that time, the club was lucky to have anything subtitled, or even having someone who was fluent in Japanese to let us know what the heck was going on in the shows we were seeing. We just knew it was cool. At the time the club was about two dozen guys watching whatever anyone got a hold of.
In 1991, I got the club connected to Usenet anime fandom, which meant getting access to decent fansubs. With understanding came rapid growth...
By 1992, our club was doing packed showings in 200-300 person lecture halls with a 12-foot screen and a digital projector. We had week-long fansub copying parties involving 20 VCRs...
In 1993, our club was the single biggest reason for the expansion of the Japanese department at my university. Also that year, I attended my first anime convention, Anime Expo 1993 in Oakland, that same con mentioned at the end of the linked article. The gender ratio there and then was still about 3:1 male:female.
In 1994, I burned out of the fandom for the first time. That was sometime after the month-long fansub copying party involving over 100 VCRs...
I think I can say I was there at the ground-zero of the American anime explosion. What's impressive, looking back, is the speed and scope of its growth. I think this may be the earliest significant instance of the Internet boosting a fandom from obscurity to the mainstream.
Still in my second post-anime-burnout period (got back in in 1999, burned out again in 2002) Maybe one of these days I'll check out FMA, and some of the other newer stuff mentioned here...
Alan Braggins @467
Mild nitpick. Domesday 1986 images and video were not in digital format, but encoded in a modified Laserdisc format. Laserdisc video and still images are analog encoded.
And, in general, the modern web re-formatting of the video and images were sourced from the master 1-inch (analog) videotapes used to create the laserdiscs, not the laserdiscs themselves. (IIRC, the text and data portions of the project were sourced from the laserdiscs).
Lastly, Domesday 1986 was preserved only because someone remembered that the discs had become technologically obsolete (in less than 15 years), and various institutions in the UK funded the money and research to actually bring about its reformatting so that its content could still be used. In other words, Domesday 1986 was by no means an easy reformat, as you may have suggested in your comment.
This is why analog, human-accessible (i.e. no machine more complex than a magnifying glass required) formats such as paper and film are preferred in a lot of preservational and archival contexts: even treated shabbily or forgotten in a closet for decades, they are much more likely to be able to be used as is when rediscovered. And you don't need any tools other than literacy in the language the item is in.
All that being said, I think we've just about reached the point where the standardization in storage devices and file-system formats, and the lowering cost of digital storage, networking, and backup systems, is about to make digital preservation cheaper than analog preservation. Put another way: backing up or reformatting paper or film is very expensive, but only needs to be done once every 50-500 years. Backing up or reformatting digital files is very inexpensive, but needs to be done every 3-5 years. I think we're almost at the point where its more cost-effective to preserve digital objects than analog ones, even with the increased frequency of taking preservational action, because the cost of that action is getting very, very low, especially when labor is taken into account. Of course, this assumes a continuing technological infrastructure... If you want to hedge your bets and try to preserve your knowledge, culture and art against future civilizational catastrophe, words and images unencoded in a physical medium are the way to go...
(slightly off-topic, but on-topic to the MP3 player discussion)
For those wishing that their iPod could use other common audio formats, check out Rockbox, an open source replacement firmware for most models of iPod and some other portable MP3 players. It installs such that your player can boot into either the original firmware or Rockbox firmware.
You will need to keep the original firmware around because Rockbox doesn't do video (yet) or DRM-protected audio (probably never will), and doesn't do non-DRM'd AAC as well as Apple's firmware.
It does take a modest amount of computer literacy to install and configure at the moment, and installing it may void your warranty. I have it installed in my non-apple MP3 player (Cowon iAudio X5) and have been pretty happy with it (it's better than the original Cowon firmware). But then again I really despise the overall iPod and iTunes interface and way of doing things, one of the reasons why I didn't buy an iPod in the first place.
Don't forget the sequel to "If life were like Youtube comment threads"
Now with LOL catz...
Re: @29
Dammit, then I misspell the title and mis-attribute the host who opened the thread...
Norell -> Norrell
and
Uncle Jim -> Patrick
(sorry)
Re: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell
I'm going to stick up for this novel here (no spoilers):
Yes the first third is slow-paced, and the focus character of that third is throughly unlikeable, but there were still some wonderous sights to see (scenery, worldbuild, turns of phrase: see Uncle Jim's extended quote, for example, although that particular passage occurs around the middle of the novel).
The pace of the novel picks up starting with the second third of the novel, and I finished the last third of the novel in a rush. I had read the first 2/3rds as my commute reading over 3 months or so, but by the start of the 3rd section of the novel, I really wanted to know what happened next ASAP, and finished the rest of it in an evening. I felt all that slogging (though I think it wasn't that much of a slog, YMMV) in the early going does get rewarded in the end.
Regarding Windows->MacOSX switching:
There's one significant file gui difference that switchers need to be aware of:
Folder replacement (i.e. dragging a folder from one place to another place where a folder with the same name already exists) has replace semantics and not merge semantics.
In Windows, when you do this kind of operation, the contents of the two folders get merged, with windows popping up a window with every duplicate file and subfolder in the destination folder asking whether you want to overwrite the existing file. Files in the destination folder that don't overlap with the source file are kept in the new, merged destination folder.
In Mac OSX (as of 10.3.9, I'm uncertain if Tiger or Leopard fixes the lack of notification or lack of undelete problem), there is only one query for confirmation for the folder being moved. If you answer yes, the contents in the destination folder are replaced entirely with the contents of the source folder, and any additional files in the destination folder that did not overlap in the source file are gone as far as Finder is concerned. Completely. With no undelete.
The proper way to execute a merge in Finder is to go into the folder, select the contents of the folder, then drag and drop them into the destination folder. Of course, subfolders suffer the same problem as described, so you have to manually do the same to each subfolder if you want to preserve merge semantics in the subfolders.
Fortunately, I figured out this semantic without losing too much data. Just a couple of days of notes when I was trying to merge the contents of my Mac OSX laptop with my Windows desktop using Finder on my laptop. On the other hand, if I use my Windows desktop to move files off my laptop, it still preserves the merge semantics.
This is also not one of the things OSX mentions in their switchers guide (at least the last time I checked), but if you are used to doing folder overwrites as a poor-man's multi-computer sync, as opposed to using some proper syncing or version control software, this semantic change from Windows is something to be aware of.
Earl @47
Isn't that what Teresa was announcing the timestamp for in #24?
Not that it was a surprise... The surprise may have been it took that long...
Serge @174
There's a difference still?
[Check's latest exchange rate]
Only 7% now... ($1 US = $1.07 CAN)
Back-on-topic comparison:
$1 US = $1.20 AUS
Fade @14
I haven't seen the second movie either, but I had seen the first and went to see The Bourne Ultimatum last Saturday.
I think it's okay to see this movie without watching the second movie. I thought all the important plot points (that probably occurred) in the second movie are sufficiently shown or mentioned in the third that I did not feel lost at all. In fact, I think it may work pretty well as a stand-alone movie.
(and yes, there are chases galore...)
Sharon M @210:
Ah, the wonders of simultaneity...
My apologies to the hosts for the duplicated information, although the hint still stands...
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 2 |
| 2008 | 4 |
| 2007 | 27 |
| 2006 | 4 |
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