Well if the posts themselves were stored in an encrypted form, how would they be displayed? The blog software would need a decryption key, and in that case an intruder would still be able to decrypt the messages. So I'm guessing most blog software authors don't bother with this level of privacy.

Obviously it would be possible to do this, you would probably want to use public key encryption, though, rather then a symmetric cipher where everyone would... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 8:04 AM on July 23, 2008

(oh, and as far as HTTPS rather then HTTP, you should be able to use any blog software and configure Apache to use https exclusively)
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 8:05 AM on July 23, 2008

I doubt they would be 'irate' that you filed unemployment. It's usually expected that people who lose their jobs will file for unemployment, unless they made so much before that the payments won't matter.

In order to fight unemployment, at least in Iowa you need to be fired for gross misconduct, not just because they didn't like you anymore. And if you got fired/laid off because they didn't like you any more then I would assume they wouldn't give you a good reference anyway.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 9:44 PM on July 21, 2008

I don't think asking is that big of a deal, after all, if you do ask it shows that you're concerned about that sort of thing and therefore lower-risk yourself.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 9:39 PM on July 21, 2008

Have you tried booting into safe mode and deleting the DLL? If you still have your windows CD, you can boot off of that into 'repair' mode and delete the file that way, or even take the hard drive out, put it in a new machine, and delete the DLL that way.

Trying to delete the DLL while the program is still running is kind of a waste, because the program running can check to see if it's been deleted, and reinstall itself.

"Nuking for... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 1:03 PM on July 20, 2008

You could say "the sans serif portion of the character", since 'sans serif' means literally 'without the serifs'
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 12:46 PM on July 20, 2008

Well, that's just it. That's the only thing I feel confident in doing. Describing my damn problems in long, drawn-out paragraphs.

Why don't you become a novelist? Lots of people like reading books about hopeless depressed characters.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 9:00 PM on July 19, 2008

We went over greek/roman mythology in my English class in 8th grade, spent a lot of time on it too. We probably spent a little time on other religions in some history/ 'world studies' classes, but never was any time spent on Christianity.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 5:42 PM on July 19, 2008

Yeah, looks photoshoped to me. I mean, obviously how could you get the entire object in focus even though it's at an angle to the camera, and none of the cloth? And the shadow looks pretty fake as well.

The only other possibility is the cloth itself was blurred, which seems unlikely.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 10:14 AM on July 19, 2008

Alchohol?
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 12:19 PM on July 13, 2008

The guy isn't Casey Serin is he? One thing I learned about from reading his blog (before his entire life collapsed) is that you can do a 'wrap mortgage' where you just take over someone's payments. But you shouldn't get into any deals with this guy without going through a lawyer.

Seriously, for a $10k with a shady, desperate guy getting a lawyer to sign off on everything is really a no brainier.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 9:17 PM on July 12, 2008

Detecting whether the link is down is very easy. Run a continuous "ping" job in a DOS box

Just type "ping www.google.com /t" in the windows "run" box.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 9:10 PM on July 12, 2008

I'm assuming that the 'unsecured' part of this is not clear... This means that everything your friend submits from his/her laptop to the internet can be viewed by any 12 year-old within wireless range that spends 10 minutes finding the right software.

Not 'everything', just things which are not encrypted using SSL or other encryption methods.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 6:54 PM on July 12, 2008

Well, if this is their website then they don't seem very legit. Their "members login" page doesn't even have an text entry boxes. Seems super-fake.

Would you really trust a company that can't even afford a real website to negotiate your loan? I wouldn't.

What state is she in? Some states, IIRC, let you keep your house in the event of a bankruptcy.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 6:41 PM on July 12, 2008

Ooops, I see you said she was in CA.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 6:41 PM on July 12, 2008

According to this somewhat sketchy website bankruptcy can stop a foreclosure in CA.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 6:44 PM on July 12, 2008

You might want to try switching to diet coke or coke zero to start. Those won't be as bad for your teeth (no sugar) won't be fattening, etc. They'll still have caffeine, which is probably what you're actually 'addicted' too (caffeine is actually addictive)

Think of it like switching from cigarettes too nicotine patches. Still bad, but not nearly as bad.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 8:34 AM on July 12, 2008

Do your credit cards issue convince checks? Would you still get points for using them? Might want to call and find out.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 8:31 AM on July 12, 2008

The PS3 will never be faster or better than the PS2 at playing PS2 games. PS2 games are coded to use the PS2 hardware exactly as it is, they don't benefit from faster or better hardware.

Why not? The PS2 did better at playing PS1 games.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 10:28 PM on July 11, 2008

erm... which bank do you expect to fail in the short term? I somewhat don't see that happening in the consumer market right now, the risk seems to have been assumed by the investment bank sector.

FAIL.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 10:07 PM on July 11, 2008

I just got an HP laptop that came with vista, and it turned out I actually liked it.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 7:33 PM on July 11, 2008

Maybe. But hue is definitely Y in that it runs perpendicular to BRIGHTNESS.

Hue, saturation, and brightness relate to the way electromagnetic waves interact with your eyes. They don't exist in the sense that space exists as a dimension.

I mean, if you had a black and white camera, then the hue and saturation dimensions wouldn't make any sense. If you had a camera that had more then three types of color sensors, they wouldn't... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 11:44 AM on July 11, 2008

Well, there are about 35⁵⁹ possible domains with the word 'math' in them (assuming 35 valid characters, and 63 letters maximum length), so this dosn't seem like too hard of a problem, but instantdomainsearch is a great way to try out different names.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 7:31 PM on July 10, 2008

At the top of the cylinder is a small piece of string, holding a tennis ball approximately 12” from the ceiling. That piece of string is cut. Would the ball, as it falls towards the floor of the cylinder, travel towards the back of the cylinder as its speed decreases?

No.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 8:10 PM on July 9, 2008

Email influential bloggers and ask for a link. Popular bloggers need content too, and if you write something good they'll be happy to link to you. You might want to start with lower-traffic bloggers who won't be getting deluged with link requests, they might actually be happy to do it.

One thing to keep in mind, ask for links to specific content, rather then just your blog in general. Try to write something really good.

Don't write about... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 10:49 PM on July 7, 2008

I don't really think you can "rip off" an idea like that. I wouldn't worry about that too much. I do think you should spend some more time on your design, though. Just glancing at it earlier, I didn't even notice the responses.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 2:52 PM on July 8, 2008

Yeah, now is not a good time to invest, although we may be very close to the apex. If you had invested this money in an Index fund based on the Dow, last October you would have lost almost 20%. If you had gone with a NASDAQ index, you would have lost 17%.

So yeah, I've always thought the people recommend index funds for every Ill are not too bright.

Btw, if you had invested $100,000 in a dow based index in 2001, it would be worth about... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 10:21 PM on July 7, 2008

Yes, if you buy the one in the retail box vs the OEM model. But you should get some better thermal paste than the thermal pad that comes with it, and probably an a better heatsink. Im not sure what the retail intel heatsink looks like these days, but on my last build it was pretty inferior.

The retail heatsink is designed by the CPU maker to cool of the CPU at it's intended speed and voltage. If you're not going to overclock, it should work fine.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 12:48 PM on July 6, 2008

No.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 12:29 PM on July 6, 2008

Why not mathematics? I have a CS degree and I kind of wish I'd double majored in something not relating directly to computers, but that a CS degree would greatly enhance. For me that would be something like Math, Chemistry, Physics, etc.

You could get a degree in mechanical engineering and work on robots, for example.

You could also do something like philosophy or art history or music, something that would enrich your life... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 10:02 PM on July 5, 2008

If you're interested in AI, you definitely need strong math, in particular statistics.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 1:17 AM on July 6, 2008

Well, if you can get the dollar value, the most valuable keyword is the one with the most dollars made that month. It's not exactly clear what you want to know beyond that. The number offered for sale tells you nothing, except maybe how long it takes to sell something. (so if you have 30k sales a month, and 1k items for sale, it only takes a day to sell an item, unless the sales or items for sale number is changing rapidly, which you don't know)
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 8:47 PM on July 3, 2008

Count calories. Working out without dieting or watching what you eat will just cause you to eat more. It's still good for you, but like everyone else said, you're going to have diet. Personally, I just count calories, and I don't worry at all about what in particular I eat, and I've lost plenty of weight.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 6:20 AM on July 2, 2008

Yeah, they are productions of current TV, at least that was my understanding.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 11:31 PM on July 1, 2008

AFAIK JavaScript's floating point is just as good as any other language's — it's generally using the machine's native IEEE floating point anyway. Floating point numbers are not real numbers and they do not behave like reals

Technically speaking, all floating point numbers are real numbers, but not all real numbers are floating point numbers.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 10:34 PM on June 30, 2008

No, don't mess with it. Computers are very personal, people really don't like other people messing with them, and there is a significant risk that you could screw something up and erase her data.

One thing you could consider brining up though is booting the machine into Target Disk Mode and copying the files off. She might want to do that before shipping it to Apple even.

But yeah, don't mess with it without her permission. I mean, how would... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 10:29 PM on June 30, 2008

The general idea there is that if you have to swap, you want your swapfile to be as short a seek as possible away from the data/application you're reading.

That doesn't make any sense at all. Are you talking about the application files themselves? Those are not really used at runtime, rather the memory image of the applications will be in virtual memory anyway.

And windows doesn't even use a swap partition.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 12:50 PM on June 30, 2008

I'm not sure what you're going for leon, your code would just print out:

class="widget "class="widget "class="widget last"class="widget "class="widget "class="widget last"class="widget "class="widget "class="widget last"class="widget "class="widget "class="widget last"

Which doesn't seem very helpful.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 7:17 AM on June 30, 2008

I actually think non-animated comics are more popular then animated, flash-based cartoons. One thing you might want to consider is putting them up on you tube as videos, rather then straight up flash animations.

What version of photoshop do you have? Older versions came with a tool called ImageReady which you could use to make pretty nice animated gifs, but they took that out in the latest versions.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 6:37 AM on June 30, 2008

I think anyone can submit words to urban dictionary although I don't know if they have a screening process.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 12:44 PM on June 28, 2008

If you really wanted to, you could try running Virtual Box (which is a free virtualization product), then connecting the virtual box to your host OS using Samba. That's not something I've ever tried.

I know VMWare supports booting virtual machines off of physical partitions.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 12:41 PM on June 28, 2008

I would imagine you could 'create' the sensation of phantom limbs anywhere if you concentrate hard enough. And anyway, the bones that make up the thumb are used in the foot to make the big toe. So your big toe is actually the 'thumb' of your foot.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 12:36 PM on June 28, 2008

Also, with projectors you'll have to replace the bulbs every once in a while, which can be expensive.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 10:56 PM on June 27, 2008

Well, you could just ask for a raise and see if they give it too you. If the company is growing you could try to make a business case that they should hire at least one assistant for you, and give you a raise. Come up with some projects you think would make the company money over the long haul.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 8:15 PM on June 27, 2008

I seriously doubt these people mean anything by it. It's probably just absent minded flirtation, like someone else said. If you want, just tell them (individually) that it bothers you and they will probably stop.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 8:07 PM on June 27, 2008

A bit tangential, but all of those stations are going to go off the air next year anyway. You can get a free converter box.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 8:10 AM on June 26, 2008

Oh, one thing is that your TV may have lost it's internal settings. My old TV had a 'cable' mode and a 'antenna' mode, and if you were in cable mode the the numbers for UHF stations were different. If you have the remote, try going into the TV's settings and see if you can find that option.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 8:12 AM on June 26, 2008 marked best answer

Mushrooms are no longer legal in the U.K, IIRC. For a long time you could grow mushrooms legally as long as you didn't dry them out, but no longer.

They still haven't banned them in the Netherlands, though. There was some talk about changing this, but I don't think they've done it yet. But cracking down on soft drugs is obviously not a high priority there.

Also, you can legally get mushroom spores in the U.S, because the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 9:52 PM on June 25, 2008

Gotta disagree with you on that last part. Years ago my buddies and I tried to make our own, and it never worked. For best results you need a lot of equipment

Bullshit.

The idea is you have to sterilize everything, and even boiling isn't strong enough. We didn't have access to an autoclave, so we boiled things to sterilize, and multiple tries were no-go's.

Autoclave? Are you kidding?... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 7:48 AM on June 26, 2008

Lots of schools have graduate programs in human computer interaction. I'd say get a standard CS degree and then look into graduate programs.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delmoi at 9:47 PM on June 25, 2008