Send or receive data without a trace? So the IT department didn't have any sort of logging going on? That seems more than a little bit stupid to me, but really, stupid and smart are both legitimate reasons to lock down USB ports.
I was diagnosed with ADHD as a child. Most definitely not from being below average as far as learning ability, but from actual chemical imbalances in the brain. Ritalin helped. Placebos didn't, in case you're wondering about whether I just thought I was supposed to be doing better. I'm going to go out on a limb, and assume that in most of the other cases where Ritalin helps, and placebos don't, it's an actual problem. Either that, or Ritalin needs to start being marketed as the drug that will kick your IQ up a couple dozen points so that the slow kids in the fast classes can suddenly start comprehending everything.
If anything, my problem was the opposite. Everything was easy for me all throughout my formative years, things like reading at levels in excess of my teachers by 6th grade, and doing math at a grade level three grades higher than the rest of the class starting in second grade when someone noticed I was using an awful lot of my math time looking around, and still had everything done. Of course, my failure to ever bother learning proper study or work habits came back to bite me in the ass when high school hit and work output was more important than just being the smartest guy in the classroom. I ended up graduating in the lower half of my class due to a blend of laziness, procrastination, and a failure to carry out the tasks that were not interesting.
Now, considering that my personal experience can refute so much of what you have said, why on earth would I believe the rest of your statement?
I have the opposite feelings regarding the time issue. I like to choose how to spend my time in games. I was a big fan of Baldur's Gate. I could wander around doing all the piddly little sidequests if I wanted, or I could just go visit Gorion and get out of Candlekeep. Once out of Candlekeep, I could start by heading South to Nashkel, but I usually went North to the Friendly Arm Inn first. I didn't have to, though. I played BG2 also, but despite the power difference at the beginnings of those two games, I generally started fewer games on BG2. I hated Irenicus's dungeon, there were a bunch of things that could be important, and could never be revisited. Once I got into Athkatala, things were better.
Of course, there is such a thing as 'too much of a good thing'. I played Planescape: Torment, and got frustrated with the abundance of options, and the difficulties involved in actually figuring out what was important as I played. I guess the first Baldur's Gate hit my happy medium spot on.
The thermal property I'd worry about is that, like all other forms of carbon, it burns. As far as electricity goes, most diamonds are excellent insulators, though some blue diamonds are semiconductors. Last I'd heard, attempts to manufacture semiconducting diamonds by doping had been failing.
I'd name mine HAL, but that might cause even worse trouble.
Re:Still only so many paths
on
Game Writing
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· Score: 1
As soon as they give reality save points, I'll be all over that.
Re:Almost certainly a scam...
on
Water From Wind
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· Score: 1
Honest inventors may not work that way, but savvy businessmen do.
He doesn't have a patent yet, and patent pending is not a legal protection of any sort. He could be worried about someone with a massive budget getting this thing running, or worse, something just different enough from this thing to be separately patentable. In this day and age of patent abuse, he may just want to cover all his bases. Skepticism is fine, but it's not the only way to look at this.
So you would advocate removing children from their parents custody based on the beliefs of the parents in question? And you would, of course, allow the government to decide which are 'good beliefs' and which are 'criminal beliefs'? And, being as this is a land where governments can change radically between two four year terms, you would acknowledge that every possible president and congress will not abuse this power over the formative years of all the children of the state of Georgia, and potentially the nation if this kind of thing makes it into federal law?
Now, which part of my statement disagrees with anything you said, or does not logically follow from prior statements?
What's the difference between this and tear gas in this case?
Ability to be used indiscriminately on crowds? Tear gas: Check Heat gun: Check
Lack of long term side effects? Tear gas: Check Heat gun: Check
Still obvious on camera? Tear gas: Check Heat gun: Check
If you've got a video going, waves of people cringing and crying out is going to be just as obvious as a billowing cloud of gas. We will be able to look at the tapes, and say that this is what happened. With no pain when it's not actively in use, if someone's still writhing around, they're still being zapped. This is an obvious thing.
The consequences for the government has not been changed.
Parents can do shit. Many of them choose not to. I hold parents responsible for the continued bad behavior of their children. I also hold parents responsible for the good behavior of their children, and I say so. I'd also suggest that it's probably good to be an approachable parent. If Bad Billy is sending threatening emails to Little Timmy, how you find out about it is a measure of how good of a parent you are. If Little Timmy is comfortable enough with his parents to come tell them about this, that's good. If the email suggests that Timmy would be better off not telling his parents, but said parents can discern that somethings wrong, that's good. If the parents are busy monitoring Timmy's communications, that's a sign that they don't trust their son, which in turn suggests that they have failed somewhere along the way as rolemodels, otherwise Timmy would be trustworthy.
Now, the ball is in the parent's court. Do they choose to find out who sent this email, then have a talk with Billy's parents? Do they take the alarmist approach of going to the police? Some people might call the police one overkill, but that still has the effect of showing Timmy that you're there for him, and it'll be quite the eye-opener for Billy and his parents. Who knows, maybe things will change.
Now, Timmy will likely be beaten at school tomorrow, because he tattled. Timmy will come through this time of trial, probably get a few blows in during the fight, and feel the pride of standing up for himself. Or, we could have ignored Timmy's problem from the beginning, and let him 'deal with it'. In my personal experience, this will lead to Timmy deadening every emotion he has, except anger. He is now well on his way to becoming a sociopath in later years, assuming he doesn't kill himself during his period of massive depression. But at least he 'took it like a man.'
Well, there's the consideration that even filtered spam takes up bandwidth. Then there's the question of how much time you actually spend dealing with spam, what with continuous filter tuning and all. Then there's the simple fact that this suggestion, as printed, involves alerting the owners of spambots, some of whom will clean their computers, and possibly learn halfway decent security measures.
I've had the opposite experience. My Hotmail caught approximately 10% of the spam I received. I've had a grand total of 3 spam mails go to my Gmail inbox, and they were all those snippets from literature spams that were trying to desensitize filters.
10 GHz was probably not a real number. It could have been like AMD's Athlon 3100+, where it'd be that much of an increase in power, rather than actual cycles per second. Or, we're looking at calculations on both sides of a cycle, same way the poster further up got 16 GHz for the ALU on this chip. If you only do 5 billion cycles per second, but you can do two things on each cycle, you get 10 billion things. Then they went with an extra core instead.
The point to that is that if it's not our fault, it's likely not an apocalypse. After all, everything nature does is good and right, if you care to do as little thinking as possible. But mass extinctions happened before people. Climate changes happened before industry. The retraction of each Ice Age was a period of global warming similar to the one we face now, just with a different starting point. We do not have enough data points to know that this isn't a cyclical process, and we do know that drastic temperature changes have not killed off the planet, or even our slightly less hairless ancestors. The Sahara is a desert because the Atlas mountains block rain. The Andes, the Rockies, and the Ural mountains do the same thing to other deserts. I'm not here to claim that we didn't do it, it's not our fault, let's just leave it alone. I'm claiming that we don't know, and it's irresponsible to try to cure a disease when you don't know what disease you're curing.
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Send or receive data without a trace? So the IT department didn't have any sort of logging going on? That seems more than a little bit stupid to me, but really, stupid and smart are both legitimate reasons to lock down USB ports.
In this case, sarcasm.
I was diagnosed with ADHD as a child. Most definitely not from being below average as far as learning ability, but from actual chemical imbalances in the brain. Ritalin helped. Placebos didn't, in case you're wondering about whether I just thought I was supposed to be doing better. I'm going to go out on a limb, and assume that in most of the other cases where Ritalin helps, and placebos don't, it's an actual problem. Either that, or Ritalin needs to start being marketed as the drug that will kick your IQ up a couple dozen points so that the slow kids in the fast classes can suddenly start comprehending everything.
If anything, my problem was the opposite. Everything was easy for me all throughout my formative years, things like reading at levels in excess of my teachers by 6th grade, and doing math at a grade level three grades higher than the rest of the class starting in second grade when someone noticed I was using an awful lot of my math time looking around, and still had everything done. Of course, my failure to ever bother learning proper study or work habits came back to bite me in the ass when high school hit and work output was more important than just being the smartest guy in the classroom. I ended up graduating in the lower half of my class due to a blend of laziness, procrastination, and a failure to carry out the tasks that were not interesting.
Now, considering that my personal experience can refute so much of what you have said, why on earth would I believe the rest of your statement?
Hah. Everyone else is busy making Six Million Dollar Man jokes, this guy goes straight to the Riddler in that Batman movie.
I have the opposite feelings regarding the time issue. I like to choose how to spend my time in games. I was a big fan of Baldur's Gate. I could wander around doing all the piddly little sidequests if I wanted, or I could just go visit Gorion and get out of Candlekeep. Once out of Candlekeep, I could start by heading South to Nashkel, but I usually went North to the Friendly Arm Inn first. I didn't have to, though. I played BG2 also, but despite the power difference at the beginnings of those two games, I generally started fewer games on BG2. I hated Irenicus's dungeon, there were a bunch of things that could be important, and could never be revisited. Once I got into Athkatala, things were better.
Of course, there is such a thing as 'too much of a good thing'. I played Planescape: Torment, and got frustrated with the abundance of options, and the difficulties involved in actually figuring out what was important as I played. I guess the first Baldur's Gate hit my happy medium spot on.
Yes, it's known as 'Amish-style' computing. Here, a computer may be used as a boat anchor or paperweight.
You know, this is the first time I've ever seen anyone else reference The Alchemist. Cool.
It's 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses.
The thermal property I'd worry about is that, like all other forms of carbon, it burns. As far as electricity goes, most diamonds are excellent insulators, though some blue diamonds are semiconductors. Last I'd heard, attempts to manufacture semiconducting diamonds by doping had been failing.
Jezzball. Using walls to separate the area which had balls from that which did not.
I'd name mine HAL, but that might cause even worse trouble.
As soon as they give reality save points, I'll be all over that.
Honest inventors may not work that way, but savvy businessmen do.
He doesn't have a patent yet, and patent pending is not a legal protection of any sort. He could be worried about someone with a massive budget getting this thing running, or worse, something just different enough from this thing to be separately patentable. In this day and age of patent abuse, he may just want to cover all his bases. Skepticism is fine, but it's not the only way to look at this.
So you would advocate removing children from their parents custody based on the beliefs of the parents in question? And you would, of course, allow the government to decide which are 'good beliefs' and which are 'criminal beliefs'? And, being as this is a land where governments can change radically between two four year terms, you would acknowledge that every possible president and congress will not abuse this power over the formative years of all the children of the state of Georgia, and potentially the nation if this kind of thing makes it into federal law? Now, which part of my statement disagrees with anything you said, or does not logically follow from prior statements?
How dare you suggest people use IE for security, you bastard!
What's the difference between this and tear gas in this case?
Ability to be used indiscriminately on crowds?
Tear gas: Check
Heat gun: Check
Lack of long term side effects?
Tear gas: Check
Heat gun: Check
Still obvious on camera?
Tear gas: Check
Heat gun: Check
If you've got a video going, waves of people cringing and crying out is going to be just as obvious as a billowing cloud of gas. We will be able to look at the tapes, and say that this is what happened. With no pain when it's not actively in use, if someone's still writhing around, they're still being zapped. This is an obvious thing.
The consequences for the government has not been changed.
Parents can do shit. Many of them choose not to. I hold parents responsible for the continued bad behavior of their children. I also hold parents responsible for the good behavior of their children, and I say so. I'd also suggest that it's probably good to be an approachable parent. If Bad Billy is sending threatening emails to Little Timmy, how you find out about it is a measure of how good of a parent you are. If Little Timmy is comfortable enough with his parents to come tell them about this, that's good. If the email suggests that Timmy would be better off not telling his parents, but said parents can discern that somethings wrong, that's good. If the parents are busy monitoring Timmy's communications, that's a sign that they don't trust their son, which in turn suggests that they have failed somewhere along the way as rolemodels, otherwise Timmy would be trustworthy.
Now, the ball is in the parent's court. Do they choose to find out who sent this email, then have a talk with Billy's parents? Do they take the alarmist approach of going to the police? Some people might call the police one overkill, but that still has the effect of showing Timmy that you're there for him, and it'll be quite the eye-opener for Billy and his parents. Who knows, maybe things will change.
Now, Timmy will likely be beaten at school tomorrow, because he tattled. Timmy will come through this time of trial, probably get a few blows in during the fight, and feel the pride of standing up for himself. Or, we could have ignored Timmy's problem from the beginning, and let him 'deal with it'. In my personal experience, this will lead to Timmy deadening every emotion he has, except anger. He is now well on his way to becoming a sociopath in later years, assuming he doesn't kill himself during his period of massive depression. But at least he 'took it like a man.'
Well, there's the consideration that even filtered spam takes up bandwidth. Then there's the question of how much time you actually spend dealing with spam, what with continuous filter tuning and all. Then there's the simple fact that this suggestion, as printed, involves alerting the owners of spambots, some of whom will clean their computers, and possibly learn halfway decent security measures.
I'm all for this.
I've had the opposite experience. My Hotmail caught approximately 10% of the spam I received. I've had a grand total of 3 spam mails go to my Gmail inbox, and they were all those snippets from literature spams that were trying to desensitize filters.
10 GHz was probably not a real number. It could have been like AMD's Athlon 3100+, where it'd be that much of an increase in power, rather than actual cycles per second. Or, we're looking at calculations on both sides of a cycle, same way the poster further up got 16 GHz for the ALU on this chip. If you only do 5 billion cycles per second, but you can do two things on each cycle, you get 10 billion things. Then they went with an extra core instead.
This is Slashdot, after all.
The point to that is that if it's not our fault, it's likely not an apocalypse. After all, everything nature does is good and right, if you care to do as little thinking as possible. But mass extinctions happened before people. Climate changes happened before industry. The retraction of each Ice Age was a period of global warming similar to the one we face now, just with a different starting point. We do not have enough data points to know that this isn't a cyclical process, and we do know that drastic temperature changes have not killed off the planet, or even our slightly less hairless ancestors. The Sahara is a desert because the Atlas mountains block rain. The Andes, the Rockies, and the Ural mountains do the same thing to other deserts. I'm not here to claim that we didn't do it, it's not our fault, let's just leave it alone. I'm claiming that we don't know, and it's irresponsible to try to cure a disease when you don't know what disease you're curing.