Posts by Petrea Mitchell

But wait...

...there's been a stay of execution!

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090603/tc_nm/us_tivo_1

Salmon, part 2

Further greetings from Oregon, where much jingoistic amusement has been garnered from reading quotes and opinion pieces from concerned British people who believe that rampaging gangs of beavers will need only a few years to fell the forests and murder all the salmon in the country. Especially good was this suggestion that it's all a vile Anglo-European plot against the Scots:

http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/spectrum/Eager-for-beavers.5271704.jp

Well, *this* adjudicator says...

...that the overriding Nerd Law principle here should be whether the programs were doing what the creators alleged they were intended to do. AdBlock Plus: the point is to block ads, and so disabling the ones on the NoScript site was well within its purpose. NoScript: the point is to control JavaScript, and changing your ad filters is definitely not part of that. NoScript is in the wrong here.

And I say this as someone who uses NoScript, and finds it blocks enough ads (after cleaning out the default whitelist) to not bother with AdBlock.

The court further finds that the term "Nerd Law" is useful and plans to use it in the future.

Enterprise...

...had a better claim, from already being a traditional ship name in the US Navy (which is why it got used on Star Trek).

Is it the definition of "at"?

So is the issue here that some law defines "at such-and-such location" by where the TV is plugged in?

If you're visiting a friend in a different part of the country, does that fall under the "travelling" exception or do they not count because their house is not a public or commercial space of some sort? (Suppose you visit a hotel owned by your friend near where you live?)

Paris because I feel like I understand this about as well as she does.

Re: other factors - admissions preferences

My best guess for another factor, at least within the US, is gender balancing at the top-tier universities. They're faced with an applicant pool which is now majority-female, and, just as they do for other minority groups, give preferential treatment to male applicants so as to get a more balanced set of students. This probably works wonders for gender equality in traditionally female subjects, but is one more thing that will shrink the number of women in these traditionally male subjects. (You could get around this with gender balancing by field of study, sure, but most US universities don't require incoming freshmen to have already decided what they're going for a degree in.)

A reliable news breaker

Because when El Reg breaks news, by golly it stays broken.

An update

http://www.wkowtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=9682258&nav=menu1362_2

It appears the main lesson learned, from the reporter's point of view, is that Ubuntu is used by jerks.

So... rich ancestors tend to make you rich?

"... other groups of people than Europeans have set out to colonise places in the modern era and done very well: whereas being moved across the oceans as slaves doesn't seem to help people at all."

So, basically, if your ancestors were first to grab a piece of the globalized pie and hang on to it, you're more likely to be rich.

But they made up

See part 2 of the story here:

http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/12/character-assasinations-aint-us.html

Who's "Ninendo"?

And why do I feel complelled to point this out, when clearly the only problem is it's Friday and your caption proofreader probably just snuck out of the office a bit early?

Or perhaps...

...the fault lies with whoever put crappy security on the allocation system?

Re: Standards?

In the US, medical claims are the territory of the Food & Drug Administration, but the FDA's current rules say that it does not regulate vitamins and supplements. So you'll notice all those claims come with disclaimers in tiny print that say this is merely a nutritional supplement and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or prevent any disease.

Thank you

This article and the one that preceded it were gripping reading. Good luck with the writing career!

Dead people voting

"Contrary to the article Obama's dead grandmother's advance vote will count."

Nothing wrong with the article-- the author's in Iowa, and the grandmother's in Hawaii, where the laws are different.

What's wrong with a paper and pencil

New York State has a unique law regarding how the ballot is presented. It's worded in such a way that only the lever-operated voting machines are legal there.

Paper and pencil would probably be an improvement. The only time lever voting machines don't come out as the most unreliable way to vote in the US is when a study doesn't bother to include them.

@Why the Royal Society of Chemistry ?

Yes, clearly this should be handled by the Royal Society for Self-Preservation.

UK readers are free to suggest which agency comes closest to being that...

I wonder...

...is the PRS license applicable only to specific playback devices? (The way the linked report is phrased, it sounds like it is.) If they were listening to streaming radio off a PC in the canteen, would they still have to pay the license, or would that be illegal downloading?

Choices, choices...

"In the meantime, those who want to protect themselves against this vulnerability will have to disable scripting and all browser plugins."

Suppose you disable scripting with a plugin, like NoScript?

One bonus to fixed width

I recoiled at first, but then I noticed that by adjusting my window width just so, I can see all the stories and no ads. The comment form has text leaking out past the nice line boxes, though. (Firefox 3.01 + NoScript, on XP).

Phooey on the change of comment icons! I especially miss the dead vulture.

Alternate rationalization

Perhaps this is all part of a clever experiment, to be revealed in an upcoming episode, demonstrating how urban legends spread. Will fans accept Adam's explanation, or will deeply held beliefs about evil companies conspiring to hold back the truth prevail? Tune in next week!

So you say the armed forces are rampant with...

D-VD?

The green heuristic

Green may not be a more inherently damaging color, but having the higher-powered lasers be green does make a good heuristic for knowing how carefully to treat them.

There are green lasers in use at my workplace (a heavy manufacturer) for measurement purposes. When they were installed, we were warned that if you stuck your hand in the beam, the resulting injury would be "like a bad sunburn". I can only imagine what they would do to an eye.

(I wonder if you could get an extra-powerful red pointer through Australian security, though, on the grounds that "only the green ones are dangerous".)

Only 30 years of data???

Um, so the multiple well-correlated lines of evidence on past climate from tree rings, ice cores, mud cores, etc. have been thrown out? Could someone please tell me when that happened?

It's Roderick!

From John Sladek's _Roderick_ and _Roderick at Random_, for those of you who didn't have a similar reaction...

Pesky truck drivers

Lest you think a sampling error has caught an unusually high amount of truck-related power loss, I work in an industrial area and we get about one power outage per year, with trucks driving into power poles being by far the most common cause.

Re: And this is a bad thing?

You have to check out the referenced Orlando Sentinel article, too:

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/community/news/ucf/orl-popescope2107dec21,0,3216163.story?coll=orl-news-headlines

"The Vatican has several telescopes that could use Lust's touch, astronomers said."

I accuse the copyeditor

From the Times article: "But a listing on the Megan's Law website could have left Oliver with the impression that he had abused children because of the way it was written."

Time to stop saying that bad writing never killed anyone.

They're kidding - and Chávez's off, sorry

The 4th Avenue renaming was recently abandoned. It was the second time in two years that the city decided to rename a street on an apparent whim, over the objections of just about everyone on it. This site appears to be a joke inspired by it.

Re: California Architects

Mr. Gehry is perfectly capable of creating buildings that don't work in California as well. He's also responsible for the Walt Disney Concert Hall, whose curvy, shiny aluminum roof had to undergo an emergency lowering of albedo after it was discovered to be creating hotspots in the buildings next door.

Paging Spike Milligan

I believe this alleged transcript is actually a lost Goon Show script. Just imagine Milligan, Sellers, et al doing the voices, and doesn't it all seem to fit now?