The restriction on award travel preventing or penalizing the booking of one-way and multi-city flights is inappropriate and a violation of customer trust. I should be able to book multi-city and one-way journeys without incurring any additional penalty or restriction. That your company has chosen a policy which so obviously disregards your customer’s needs in lieu of marginal increases profits is both stupefying and inexcusable. Please change this policy to reflect the trust that we as customer’s place in your company when participating in your awards program.
I purchased this unit as a replacement for a faulty Black & Decker PS130 charger which belongs to an older B&D Firestorm unit. The DW9116 specifications and the unit’s form factor appeared compatible with the PS130 and thus far the unit has worked perfectly to charge my older PS130 batteries. I have also used newer PS130 batteries (which are larger and thus have a longer usage time) with success. As specified, charge time is about an hour and also has the added versatility of charging numerous DeWalt batteries.
This unit can be purchased in retail stores at a hefty sum of $50 or more. I highly recommend purchasing it through Amazon Marketplace as a new unit can be acquired for a mere $20 or so.
My only complaint with the unit is that DeWalt literature does not list the PS130 batteries as being compatible with the unit. I assume that this is due to marketing decisions. Please note that although it is reasonable to infer compatibility for the PS130 battery from the technical specs for the DW9116 charger, I have not confirmed this with either DeWalt or B&D so use this knowledge at your own risk!
The timeout period on the Libros website1) is far too short. During a period of searching and adding items to my cart for later export I often find that my session has expired and thus my cart emptied. When this happens I must then use the back button on the browser to manually recall all of the items that were dropped from the cart. This is a very annoying ‘bug’ that is very simple to fix. The user’s session should end when the browser window is closed or the user manually ‘logs-off’. I realize that this setting is likely configured to protect the privacy of each patron, but verbiage on the site in combination with the common understanding that the browser must be closed to clear session information would preclude such an unpleasant solution. Please make this modification for the ease of use and sanity of your patrons. I would gladly discuss this issue further.
I purchased the Vietnamese language Level 1 about a year ago and have some difficulty in getting the interactive audio recording section to work as the CDROM drive in my laptop makes enough noise that it interferes with the recorded audio. With most software that I use I copy the disk as an image to my cdrom drive and run it without use of the CDROM. I have been unable to do this with Rosetta Stone. Reading online I recently discovered that others are suffering the same problem. I find it very upsetting that as a paying customer I am left with a partially functioning product due to the stupid copy protection mechanisms chosen by your company. I realize that there is a need to protect your intellectual property, but copy protection does not prevent pirating of your software. It only prevents paying customers like myself from having the best possible experience with your software.
You are a sucessfull business due to paying customers like myself, not becuase you are trying to prevent pirating, nor becuase you have implemented copy protection mechanisms. Please more carefully consider your customers before implementing copy protection mechanisms that cause more harm to your customer satisfaction than good. Realize that it is what you provide to your customers that makes your business successful, not what you prevent them from doing.
Product feature request
For being the ‘premier’ voice-to-text software I am unhappy to learn that Dragon Naturally Speaking only supports Microsoft Windows. I think that many of your potential customers, including myself, use other platforms such as Apple, Linux, & Unix. I hope that your company has carefully considered its choice to only support MS Windows. I personally feel that such a choice limits the market for your product and seems very short-sighted. So unless your company is somehow owned by Microsoft, please release a version for those of us that use another operating system. Start with Mac OS X.
Posted by sungolem → http://www.atheistparents.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8760&postdays=0&postorder=asc&vote=viewresult
Well, the idea is not ‘the day a child was conceived’. It has nothing to do with reproductive conception. It is not the day your parents decided to procreate.
It is the day that your parents thought of their future child as a real human being. The day that they began planning for how they would raise the child and what might be necessary to make sure that their child is successful.
The Brainchild Day intends to be a celebration of responsible procreation and to foster the idea that we should know exactly what we are getting into. We should know what kind of child we want and how we will raise it long before we even think of sex for the purpose of procreation.
On another note, because most of use were ‘accidents’, we have defined Brainchild Day as also being a day celebrating personal invention. If you had a day in college that you think really defined the way that you think. Or you had a life changing experience that you feel defines you.
My parents never planned responsibly. They just let things happen. But I can still celebrate my own personal days of invention.
Regarding this forum, I was hoping for some well thought out responses. Please don’t take the idea flippantly as I’m quite serious about discussing its merits.
Posted by sungolem → http://www.atheistparents.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=124665#124665
I’ve created a new personal holiday that to me is more philosophically apealing than the standard Birthday. This is a day celebrating the day that your parents conceived of the idea of having you. Or, for those of us who’s parents were not so responsible, that day that makes you quintessentially you. So, the Brainchild Day is a celebration of personal invention.
We’ve posted a website: http://brainchildday.com
I’d really like other’s thoughts on the idea. :D
Poll: I’d celebrate my Brainchild Day!
Post by sungolem → http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=At98fU9uPJmDto1ORZNlDY_sy6IX?qid=1006042632375
| Question:Where is God?? Does He exist? Does He care about anybody? Where is proof outside of the bible??? |
God is an arbitrary human construction. There is no way to prove or disprove the existence of a God. In order to get answers about an arbitrary concept you must un-ask the question. An attempt at proving the existence or anything about an arbitrary concept (such as: There are Fem-Bots on the surface of Venus.) will never be fruitful. The concept was not based on real things or real ideas and therefore cannot be proven or dis-proven using reality or anything that can be experience, read, discussed, or even thought. The concept is arbitrary. If you just made up some random non-sense, this non-sense would be just as valid as the concept of God.
God (and gods) is a human concept created to provide explanations for phenomena that had no explanations in early human culture and society. The use of the concept of God as an explanation was never really needed, but it has been used by many different cultures in various ways, mostly to allow people controlling religion to take advantage of the people following a religion.
Other questions regarding God, ‘His’ existence, what ‘He’ cares about, and proof of ‘His’ existence and such are therefore entirely non-sensical. This is exactly similar to possible questions and statements that we could make about the Fem-Bots on the surface of Venus. The Fem-Bots don’t exist, and currently we have no means of determining if they exist, and besides, they would make sure that we couldn’t detect or find them so that we can’t take advantage of them anyway. Similarly, any arbitrary concept can be defended in this same way.
The answer to your question is ‘mu’, unask the question.
Sources:
Post by sungolem → http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Agv9hRzFJkX1NW2cjyD6izDsy6IX?qid=1006042631992
| Question: I want to invest $500 for leasure and fun trading stocks. I’m 18 and do a lot of research on companies online. Which online site would be best for me? |
I would suggest the site providing the lowest cost trades. Scott Trade has trades for as low as $7 and their minimum is only $500. If you are only investing $500 at this time you don’t want to spend any of it on trade costs.
I personally use Ameritrade/TD Waterhouse. The per trade cost is slightly higher ($10), but I think that they have better research info and online tools. They also have a $2000 minimum.
Any way that you go, make sure that the company provides free trades at signup. That way you can buy some stock when you first start without any penalty. It looks like TD-Ameritrade is currently offering 50 free trades for new accounts.
Post by sungolem → http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SubEthaEdit/message/21
I have been using SubEthaEdit for the a couple of years and think that it is a great product, due mostly to its simplicity. Much of the writing that I do is somewhat sensitive in nature (patent documentation and business plan writing) and for these reasons I haven’t been able to use SubEthaEdit for editing over the internet or on a public network.
I know that an SSH tunnel can be used, but setting this up is not simple enough for many people and can be quite complicated to setup for groups. So far the most viable solution has been collaboration via encrypted email.
Are there plans for incorporating TLS into SubEthaEdit? It would make it far more useful as a means of collaborating on things that we don’t want to escape into the ether. I’ve read an interview at http://www.drunkenblog.com/drunkenblog-archives/000292.html that alludes to BEEP allowing for the addition of TLS. I know at least a dozen people that would drop whatever editor they currently use and use SubEthaEdit if it was secure as well as incredible for collaboration.
Comment by Sunny → http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/?p=190 I also feel very strongly about the idea of personal holidays. I think that they can have far more meaning than many of the common holidays that are celebrated.
I had a brainchild several months ago and created a new personal holiday that I felt was philosophically superior to the commonly celebrated Birthday. It is a celebration of the day (or days) that an individual was personally invented; either through the carefull planning of a parent, or (more likely) through the invention of self.
My wife and I coined the name “Brainchild Day” and immediately setup a website to describe the concept and host a forum for comments and sharing Brainchild Day stories.
Comment by sungolem → BetaNews
The possibility of Apple’s operating system running on an Intel processor was accomplished when Apple began using the open source BSD based Darwin. Darwin has been able to run on an Intel x86 for quite some time: OpenSource.apple.com - Darwin
For those not familiar, Darwin is the open-source architecture that Apple’s OSX and Aqua interfaces run on top of.
Any talk of Intel is not going to be a ‘switch’ from the RISC PPC architecture. Heavy development is ongoing by IBM to match the performance/cost of Intel. It is only a matter of time as the performance curves begin an inversion.
A good overview of the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer): FindArticles.com - RISC
The reason for the hype is that Apple’s OSX will soon run on an Intel x86 processor. Most of it already does. This allows Apple to compete directly with the Microsoft monopoly on Intel platforms. There is still significant benefit in running the PowerPC based processors, especially as they get faster and cheaper.
The real problem with doing this commercially (instead of allowing the open source community to take the burden) is hardware compatability. x86 PC‘s are a heterogeous schmogasbord of hardware. LOTS of junk. Apple’s architecture benefits due to absolute control of the hardware, and stable, solid RISC architecture, allowing amazing things to be done in software.
Comments by sungolem → Slashdot
I think that we’ve been arguing from a fallacious standpoint. The purpose of being public domain is to make systems interoperable and to benefit from the intellectual efforts of other open source ventures.
For anyone who has used the Solaris operating systems knows that there are many non-POSIX compliant and fairly obsolete programs packaged with the OS. To speak frankly, I have not used Solaris 9, but find it unlikely that they have been able to reproduce all of the GNU created features and improvements, nor would they want to.
Sure, they have a slew of Sun proprietary applications for such things as security management, their own filesystem with logging/journaling, and gobs of support from other vendors such as Oracle, but they are falling far behind the open source community in the areas of system useability and interoperability. Anyone who has tried to conduct simple administrative tasks and write some shell scripts finds annoying differences in basic commands. Those programs that are ported from the GNU community lag farther behind than needed.
Going open source has benefits. Sun is releasing this as an open source project so that their operating system can benefit by the incorporation of GNU licenced software. They will be able to concentrate development effort on their core technology while reaping the benefits of GNU technology.
All of those great proprietary applications that I mentioned above are going to either be directly available for porting (a la Open Source), or much easier for Sun to port for other systems. This improves the number and potentially the quality of Linux management applications.
Solaris is a Unix. This cannot be bad for Linux. Interoperability is one of the key problems with Unix/Linux. Another Unix system joining the Open Source efforts will provide another choice for consumers and provide collaborative potential with existing Linux projects.
Another significant open source operating system on the market is good for everybody!