yozz

I don't think cobblestone streets are easy to navigate regardless of what shoes are worn.

Right on, but sometimes they are a bit easier with heels, if those are shoes with a very hard bottom.

When the bottom is relatively soft, be it male or female shoes, the cobblestones always hurt my

feet. The only exceptions are some 2-3 inch block heels I have with a very hard sole.

Y.

The career I am talking about is that here many members of parliament quit after about 10 years and then get a whole string of fat paying jobs as advisors, members of the board or whatever with big companies. Y.

You are right. Remarks like that are 'below the belt'. They show a total absence of civilization. Talking about witty remarks, I like the one by Disraeli: "Mr Speaker, I withdraw my statement that half the cabinet are asses - half the cabinet are not asses." Y.

Well, the point is that we need to be represented, because not everybody can spend their whole day on issues to deal will governing the country. The problem starts with when these representatives become professional. They study for it and it is the (only?) thing they can do. At thay point they HAVE to be elected and they will do anything to get elected. Hence they behave as if they are very gallant, honest etc. And they promise us paradise. The one who can do so most convincing wins. Looking very elegant is of course essential. Unfortunately the ones who really are gallant do not last long. Once they make a serious error (and who does not once in a while) they are honest and step down. In the past this would still work reasonably well, even though there were bad scandals. But with the current level of investigative reporting and the near impossibility of really censoring things, the imago of politicians, bankers etc. is probably at an all time low. The few honest politicians are usually in the smaller parties that do not have much power. But whether that is because they really are honest, or just because they can afford to be honest, remains an open question. My personal preference would be to have people as representatives at the end of a regular career, when they have picked up much experience and should not look for jobs afterward. Politicians that see membership of parliament or being minister as part of building up a career are always suspect. If they do something that acts against certain interests they may kiss that career goodbye. Y.

It would be nice to hear from Tech, whether the remarks about stealing the ad revenue have had any effect. Y.

hhboots: Please be assured that not only the mods are appreciating your work. I also run a little (technical) forum, but without ads (it is paid for by my employer), but I am interested in how I would recognize this virus or Trojan horse or whatever it should be called. I would not like to pass it on to somebody else. Does it involve someone to break into the message board host? Or is it something you pick up with other software? Y.

If my guess is correct, they are doing this to quietly siphon adsense revenue from little forums such as this one and they take a long time to first discover and then to eradicate. I gathered from a couple of mod comments I found, that say it injects sophisticated code and disguises itself as code for an Invision Power Board Firewall within one of the config.php files

I am not sure I understand it completely.

On which computer does this happen?

On the one of Tech? Our computers? Or at Google?

But no matter what, shouldn't Google do something about this, or at least send warnings around?

This sounds to me like outright stealing and because money transfers are involved, it should be possible to track it

to somewhere.

Y.

My attitude would be not to decide your career on the basis of heel wearing. The proper order is: 1: look for a good job with a friendly and liberal working environment. 2: make people appreciate you. 3: after that, see what you can do w.r.t. clothes. Putting point three at the top is a recipe for finding at best marginal jobs. Either that or you would have to be extremely lucky. OK, just my opinion Y.

It is considered a market strategy to call something mans wear to sell it to women. How much would you sell if you call something woman's wear while you put it in the mans department? Y.

While I would agree with you Yozz about the internet being decimated in cyber-warfare, computers would still have value as stand alone computing machines, as long as they were not connected to the internet at that time.

Right. But the majority of computers is not used that way.

I can be perfectly happy developing my own software and working with it. I do not need the internet for most of the things I do. But that is nowadays not the rule.

The name computer comes from computing, but that is what few computers do.

The cloud is a good example of something that would be out. Takes out a very large fraction of the Apple users.

Knowing our politicians, it will probably take a real disaster before they even think about proper measures.

Y.

I do think that's because they are sitting cross-legged most of the time since childhood (at home working or eating, at the restaurant, in bars "izakaya"...).

Such "abuse" of this position make their knees turn inside, maybe more for the right leg because cross-legged sitting position is not symmetrical : the right foot is more bent when above the left knee, whereas the left foot is less bent under the right knee.

I hope you see what I mean.

This is the first explanation I hear that makes sense.

Y.

To me it looks all like practicing for world war 3, which will be fought in Cyberspace. Probably the majority of state sponsored 'viruses' will only become active when the **** hits the fan. Anyway, the first thing to go down will be the whole of internet, so most computers will become utterly useless. On topic: I was already feeling that I was becoming overdue with a donation. I like the place to the extend that I do not mind paying some real money. I actually did once when that was still possible. I prefer an occasional donation over the ad's. As I become older, I dislike things that distract my attention more and more. I hope this is some incentive for Tech...... Y.

Although none have ever been caught to my knowledge I would think that the likelihood of the viruses and cures both coming from the same source are quite high. Profitable deception is my name for it.

This may have been the case in the beginning. Nowadays, with people banking/buying and whatever by internet there are enough honesty-challenged people that try to get into your computer.

I was told that at one of the Chinese universities they have a whole department for breaking into western computers.

Then there are the people who try to enslave enough computers to mount Ddos attacks at companies to extort money from them. These have nothing to do with companies making anti-virus stuff.

And then there are always those who want to show they are the smartest person in the world by making a virus that gets through everything. There are many of those.

Y.

I have had big problems in the past with adds messing up my viewer, and lots of popup windows. I did unblock hhplace just now. Let us see what comes up. Y.

Hi would say: "take the ones that your feet are most comfortable with". Just imagine that after three hours your feet start hurting and still so many hours to go..... Taking off boots at security is not as big a hassle as you might think unless they are riding boots and have no zipper. The security people have seen more. Just don't give them any other reasons to pick on you. Nowadays I always wear boots when travelling, because they would add most weight to my luggage. Never had any problem. Of course the heels are not very high, because having to walk a lot in airports and so on, makes me prefer the comfort and in anything over 3 inches I am not very comfortable for a whole day. A few hours, fine... 3 inches I can handle the whole day. Y.

I get my information from my colleagues in Japan. They live 60 km North East of Tokyo. They absolutely do not recognize your doomsday scenario. Better yet: they work at an institute where worrying about radiation (and measuring it) is daily business. And it is taken extremely serious. The fact that something is an alternative news source on the internet does not make it more reliable. Y.

Yes, in Japan the women dress well. The men only when for work. I have been in a temple at new year and seen couples of which the man was in jeans and the wife in a beautiful kimono. In Tokyo it depends in which part you are, how many women wear high heels. In the fancier parts the percentage is quite high. Did you also notice, when looking from behind, that many women do not really walk properly with those heels in the sense that their right foot is not straight, but instead of 90 degrees, the heel makes an angle that is more like 70 degrees or less? It is always the right foot. Nobody could explain this to me. Y.

If you can trademark a color, the first question that arises would be "how many colors are there?" Of course there are very many, but `a color' would be a color range and hence there is only a finite number. If all the colors would be taken, nobody else could make any shoes any longer. This cannot possibly be right. In my eyes this whole stuff of trademarks and patents etc needs to be revised. In the past IBM did a lot of research in superconducting computers. Not to make them, but to have the patents and thereby preventing others from making them. Also people take patents on things that are rather obvious, and then threaten to sue people who think this stuff up themselves. Even if the patent would not hold up in court, it would take you of the order of $100000 in legal fees to get that far. Hence many companies just pay a fee to these people. I consider this gross abuse of both the patent and the legal system. And then we have not yet talked about software patents. With those active you would need a lawyer, each time you produce some code. Great. Fortunately I have published my software, so nobody can patent all those tricks.... (I hope). Y.

My wife knows about hhp. I show here occasionally posts that might interest her. She has great pity on the guys with partners that do not allow them to wear heels. To her that "not allowing" is unnatural. She does not look at hhp by herself. She is involved in too many other things already. But she does wear heels up to 3 inches and enjoys them. Y.

It's kind of funny, by percentage, the topics in the girls forums are far more fetish orientated. I would have hoped that there were many more posts which included pictures of new styles of heels, or trends and shops, etc... Personally, I'd love to find a site which focuses on that sort of stuff, without excessive inane chatter about celebrities and catty participants.

I must say, that I always thought many of the topics there rather 'uncharacteristic'.

With 20-20 hindsight one may have to conclude that quite a few of those topics were started by people with a rather strange idea of what occupies the mind of women.

I agree that we are very fortunate having Amanda and Megan still here.

Y.

What also did not help was the recent unmasking of a male posing as a female. If I were female that would upset me. I would feel cheated and it would demotivate me. If you cannot feel safe in your own corner, a normal reaction would be to leave. And also, maybe a few other imposters were scared away. All I know is that it is always the good that suffer from the bad. Please, let us go back to the heels and put all the other stuff (skirts, hose, dresses, bags etc) in the fashion part and leave it there. Y.

I just read in the Dutch news:

"Schoenenwinkel Van Haren mag geen blauwe of zwarte schoenen met rode zool verkopen. De pumps uit de Halle Berry-collectie van de Nederlandse schoenenverkoper lijken te veel op de schoenen van de Franse ontwerper Christian Louboutin.

Louboutin spande een kort geding aan tegen Van Haren en eiste dat het bedrijf zou stoppen met de verkoop van de hooggehakte schoenen. De rode zolen zijn een belangrijk kenmerk van de Franse ontwerper en daarom liet hij ze als merk registreren.

De rechter geeft Louboutin gelijk. Van Haren mag geen enkel paar zwarte of blauwe pumps met rode zolen meer verkopen.

Als het bedrijf zich niet houdt aan de uitspraak van de rechter, krijgt Van Haren een boete van 20.000 euro per dag of 500 euro per verkocht paar schoenen, afhankelijk van de wens van Louboutin. Een paar echte Louboutins kost honderden euro's en de pumps van Van Haren slechts 40 euro.

De rode variant met rode zool uit de Halle Berry-collectie mag nog wel worden verkocht. Van Haren gaat in hoger beroep tegen de uitspraak."

Translation:

"Shoe shop Van Haren is not allowed to sell more blue or black shoes with red soles. The pumps from the Halle Berry-collection of the Dutch shoe seller look too much like the shoes of the French designer Christian Louboutin.

Louboutin took van Haren to court and demanded that the company would stop the same of high heeled shoes. The red soles are an important property of the French designer and hence he had them trademarked.

The judge agreed with Louboutin. Van Haren is not allowed to sell black or blue pumps with red soles.

If the company does not comply with the judgment, Van Haren faces a fine of 20000 Euros per day or 500 Euros per pair of shoes sold, depending on the wish of Louboutin. A pair of real Louboutins costs hundreds of Euros and the pumps of Van Haren only 40 Euros.

The red variety with red sole from the Halle Berry-collection can still be sold.

Van Haren appeals the decision."

So, how many colors are there to be trademarked?

Y.

I always thought that was the parents responsibility. Not the governments.

Let the children get sick?

Sue all the parents that do not give enough milk to their children?

If the nation can afford it you opt for the practical solution and give the milk in school.

Y.

Yozz: not sure about the CPU, but my graphics card is rated for 2.87 TFLOPS single and 717 GFLOPS double precision. Gpu's are handy little buggers. With the right encoding software I can cut through HD video editing like butter.

The graphics cards are examples of rather simple very-many-core chips. They are for special applications because

they do not have very much memory and it takes time to get information in and out. They also cannot talk directly to

your disk. But for graphics calculations they are super. And they can pack hundreds of them on a single chip.

If you have them in a laptop and you make them work a bit, I would not take the concept laptop literally, or you will

have fried lap. They can get rather hot.

At the moment they are the cheapest way to buy calculational power, provided your problem is suitable for it.

I know of people doing big science calculations with them. Unfortunately they cannot handle my calculations

so I have no personal experience with them.

Y.

Yeah, we hit the clock speed ceiling a few years ago and the only way, other biotechnology, is multiple or multicore (better because they can run faster if on a single die) processors.

Actually there are more potential technologies that would improve things considerably.

First there is superconductivity. That would allow even smaller circuits and much faster ones.

The main problem is that the only way we have to make superconducting material is to

cool things down ***a lot***. Like -200 or worse. That would not make it suitable for home

computers.

Another is quantum computing. Progress is much slower than hoped for, but yet there

is progress. I am not going to try to explain it, because I am not even sure I really

understand it, even though I followed a course on it. As with everything with quantum mechanics:

if you think you understand it, you don't.

I recently read about using carbon (graphene) instead of silicon. This would also increase

the speed of the circuit by a factor. Expectations were that we may see this in a few years.

On the other hand: with the ever improving network connections, you do not need so much

computer power in your home computer unless your graphics needs it (games!). It can

be all 'cloud computing'. You may not even know which computer is doing the work for you.

It is also quieter. Less fan activity.

Making programs that can use 10000 processors simultaneously in an efficient way is another matter....

Y.