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Comment Same problem here (Score 2) 619

by falloutboy (#36376660) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Other People's Email?

I too have a very common firstnamelastname@gmail.com. For personal emails, I just reply and let them know they've got the wrong falloutboy. One guy, a screenwriter in LA, gave my address to a lot of his family, so I had to have kind of an awkward exchange with his mother and one of his aunts who CONTINUES to send me photos of her young son. This is weird stuff I don't want in my inbox.

For the DirecTV emails, I submitted like 15 messages to their general customer service inquiry form. That took like four months to get completely cleared up.

Once I got looped in on an email thread where the other three people were high school kids using Facebook, so my only method for actually communicating was that I had to add as a friend a high school girl. I'm a 30 year old man. My wife was less than thrilled.
Education

Texas Schools Board Rewriting US History 1238

Posted by kdawson from the nation-chosen-by-god dept.
suraj.sun picked up a Guardian (UK) piece on the Texas school board and their quest to remake US education in a pro-American, Christian, free enterprise mode. We've been keeping an eye on this story for some time, as it will have an impact far beyond Texas. From the Guardian: "The board is to vote on a sweeping purge of alleged liberal bias in Texas school textbooks in favor of what Dunbar says really matters: a belief in America as a nation chosen by God as a beacon to the world, and free enterprise as the cornerstone of liberty and democracy. ... Those corrections have prompted a blizzard of accusations of rewriting history and indoctrinating children by promoting right-wing views on religion, economics, and guns while diminishing the science of evolution, the civil rights movement, and the horrors of slavery. ... Several changes include sidelining Thomas Jefferson, who favored separation of church and state, while introducing a new focus on the 'significant contributions' of pro-slavery Confederate leaders during the Civil War. ... Study of Sir Isaac Newton is dropped in favor of examining scientific advances through military technology."

Comment Busted up experience with "large fonts" (Score 1) 549

by falloutboy (#30122584) Attached to: Are There Affordable Low-DPI Large-Screen LCD Monitors?

Somewhere in the Windows Vista control panel garbage is a setting for cranking up the size of fonts which includes buttons and dialogue boxes and stuff. I did this on my 40" LCD at home running in whatever-by-1080 resolution so that I can read text from the couch with a wireless keyboard and mouse. It works mostly okay, but because software apps don't scale up with the increased font size, you end up with some really strange looking dialogue boxes and some other unexpected behavior.

The fancy buttons on the top of the Chrome browser window, for example, don't respond to clicking at all. Obviously they're expecting a click at some location on the screen and Windows is drawing the buttons in a totally different place. Its okay if you know keyboard shortcuts (like windows key + m to minimize), but still annoying. Would drive me nuts if it was my work PC.

Comment Am I the only one who thinks this is okay? (Score 1) 282

by jcuervo (#26649451) Attached to: Cox Communications and "Congestion Management"
You have things that need low latency. VoIP, online gaming, and http (especially for audio/video), maybe ssh traffic, etc., and then you have things where it's okay to lag a bit, especially things like email, usenet, etc.

I can go a few seconds or even minutes longer between reloading the newsgroups I'm reading (I forget what the protocol word is, XLIST?) if it means I'm not going to catch a sticky grenade to the face in Call of Duty: World at War. I don't mind if my email shows up a couple minutes late if it means my VoIP calls are intelligible -- and I've been on my cell to a VoIP user where I got maybe 2/3rds of every sentence because they were downloading something.

Honestly, this doesn't bother me. I'd be happier if it were me doing the shaping, but I get where they're coming from.

(Yes, I have a cable ISP, for some reason.)
It's funny. Laugh.

Bill Gates' Plan To Destroy Music, Note By Note 659

Posted by timothy from the too-insane-to-ignore-forever dept.
theodp writes "Remember Mr. Microphone? If you thought music couldn't get worse, think again. Perhaps with the help of R&D tax credits, Microsoft Research has spawned Songsmith, software that automatically creates a tinny, childish background track for your singing. And as bad as the pseudo-infomercial was, the use of the product in the wild is likely to be even scarier, as evidenced by these Songsmith'ed remakes of music by The Beatles, The Police, and The Notorious B.I.G.."

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