This is what I keep trying to tell people (given that I'm running some commodity trading systems I have a bit of understanding of this issue). The traders ("speculators") have NO pricing power. NONE AT ALL. The day that contract matures they MUST sell it, or as you pointed out even PAY someone to take it off their hands.
The price of oil has ZIPPO GRANDE to do with the futures markets. All the futures people are doing is betting that oil will be higher the day they sell the contract than the day they bought it. The truth is 99.9% of all oil bought and sold is not traded on the futures market. Some relatively minute fraction is traded there and all it provides is a bit of slack in the system so if say you needed oil TODAY you can get some extra beyond what you already had showing up in your own tankers. It just evens out the supply a bit.
Notice it is the oil companies and OPEC that are blaming speculators for current prices. Meanwhile they pocket 100% percent of the excess profits from today's high prices. Blaming it on the futures market is just a smokescreen. The futures market is going up BECAUSE the price is going up, not the other way around.
Well, I think the idea was to create a PHB that is friendly to new players. It certainly seems to be written with them in mind in terms of explaining the general concepts of RPG and giving a lot of role playing advice, etc. I'll give the PHB very good marks for that.
I just don't think it explains game mechanics very well. In fact it seems to deliberately avoid all but the most superficial discussion of game mechanics. I think that was a deliberate 'lets not make the player's brains melt' decision. I just disagree with it. I think they would have done better to have had a full example of a couple rounds of combat. That would have put the various skills and whatnot into perspective for the players.
The real beef I have with it though is that I think the class sections are really unclear about powers. The whole power/feat/feature/skill system is pretty complex. Again a couple of examples would have been nice. This is a general theme with the PHB. In a few places they have nice examples, such as in the sections on using skills, but there is no example of say determining what powers a character has. Given the way you can swap around things and some racial or class features allow substitutions etc it would have been good to have that.
Overall I would say the game mechanics are far more consistent and better cover the majority of situations than in 2e for sure. So it isn't that it is a bad game system at all, just complex and not so easy for newbies to understand.
Yeah, I'm coming at it from the opposite side, reading but not having played. I don't think 4e is TERRIBLE, and I think it could be pretty good, but the PHB at least needs a serious rewrite already.
Truthfully the clarity issue would have been addressed by a few tables. As an exercise check the 1e PHB ranger class and the 4e PHB ranger class sections. In the 1e version there may be a BIT less variety of 'powers' to use the term loosely, but it is ENTIRELY clear what you have, just look at the level chart!
In the 4e version even a careful reading of the text left me fairly uncertain what ability choices a new 1st level character would have and exactly what subtype of ability some of them would count as. A chart would have cleared that right up, and it could have replaced some of the text that wasn't so clear.
2 pages of introduction to the game mechanics (what is a turn, what is an action, example of a round or two of combat) before character generation would also vastly clarify things for new players. As it I'm 200+ pages into the PHB and I still would have no idea what most stuff means if I hadn't been playing RPGs for 30+ years.
See, I don't find the new rules intuitive at all. It may actually be as you say that it isn't too hard to play IF you have a 4e guru for a GM. But after a read through of the manuals I found the explanations of how to determine what powers your character has to be quite muddled. It also seemed like most of them are endlessly minute variations of just 2 or 3 abilities with the only differences being which save you use or something like that.
I cannot see any inexperienced players being able to pick this game up and play it. It seems to me it will cater only to experienced players that enjoy figuring out if a +2 save and +1 damage is a better option than a +2 save and +1 AC. I don't think that fosters good roleplay, just slows down the game and adds little. I expected better.
In fact... What IMHO might be one way to address several of the issues would be a '0 level' type of option, which could be provided as a part of an introductory level product.
Characters could start out as slightly hopped up normal humans (elves, etc) with just some basic non class abilities and maybe 1 or 2 powers. It could be designed to extend through say 3 gaming sessions with the result at the end being a 1st level character.
That would kill several birds with one stone:
1) It provides a framework for NPCs that bridges the gap between normal human and 1st level PC.
2) It would be an environment inexperienced players could deal with, giving them a bit of gameplay without an inordinate amount of complexity.
3) It would be useful in a few other situations, like handling unique nonclass NPCs that might get involved in an adventure. For example the budding apprentice whom you might take on as a henchman, but which would be hopeless by the existing mechanics.
Granted a GM can always 'wing it' and create intermediate strength non-class NPCs on their own, but why not have a decent framework for that?
Being one of the seriously way back original D&Ders and having run conservatively 1000's of RPG gaming sessions of all types and participated in the early playtest/development of GURPS etc. I have some real issues with the 4e PHB. Now I never played 3/3.5e, so I am really looking at this in comparison to 1e/2e "old style" AD&D.
The game mechanics in the PHB are as clear as mud. This is a book only a rules lawyer who enjoys puzzling out the exact meaning of obscure paragraphs of rules text could love. It obviously never got run past anyone outside the design team and highly experienced players. I could never give this book to anyone who doesn't fall into that category and hope to end up with anything but a hopelessly confused player.
I appreciate the thrust of what they were attempting to do with the game mechanics. They may well BE very good game mechanics, though I have a few thoughts about that as well (but not having played they are obviously only first thoughts). Obviously there was a concerted effort to do away with certain confusing and awkward terms and provide more consistent game mechanics. Unfortunately I believe what replaced them is no better and perhaps worse overall. There are other serious flaws as well.
The 1st problem is that the game mechanics and terminology should have been explained in a much clearer and more thorough manner right from the start. Much of what you read is essentially unintelligible at first read due to that lack. A one page description of combat mechanics near the beginning of the PHB that explained turn structure, actions, and movement would have done wonders for clarity. Sadly this is lacking.
Secondly the descriptions of classes leave a LOT to be desired. They are OK from an 'atmosphere' point of view. The text gives a pretty clear idea of what each class is intended to do and what sort of characters would be based on that class. The problem is trying to figure out the abilities your character has is a nightmare. The system for determining what the combination of race/class/build gives you for abilities is terribly disorganized. This aspect would have been 1000% better if only a few charts had been provided.
The selection of powers for the various classes also leaves me feeling quite disappointed. Everything is purely combat-centric. Not only that but 90% of the powers read like infinitesimally minute variations of each other. Clerics have 18 different variations of basically the same thing 'smite the enemy and do extra damage'. Only the most extreme armchair game technicians are going to enjoy attempting to decide between them all. It feels like someone generated a lot of filler by a rather unimaginative process of slightly changing dice rolls, types of saves, etc between what are all essentially the same thing.
Wizards seem to have a slightly better time in this department, though the spell selections are still pretty anemic. It feels to me like the goal was to leave you needing to buy supplements to get some variety.
The whole endlessly detailed subdividing of powers down into various subcategories also seems quite tedious. I can anticipate what will happen if I try to run this. 50% of game time will be burned just trying to explain to the players what choices they have to make and can they use this or that power now or is it used up or etc...
This was compounded by the class descriptions where a class/build abilities choices are described in a fairly muddled fashion. A chart like those in the 1e PHB would have worked a lot better. Often it is not clear at all which powers are 'free', which ones take up slots, and exactly which type of slot they might take up. 1 chart is worth 1000 words...
Overall this feels like a 'dice optimizer' style of game. The player type which will dig it is going to be the one that likes to spend 3 hours figuring out if the power that does +5 damage and gives you an extra saving throw is better than the one that does double damage and 'marks your enemy'. Blech! That sort of gaming i
There is essentially nothing you can do. There is a 'black box' (voting machine). Nobody except the guy that last tampered with it knows what it does. Voters push buttons on the box, and the box makes some entries in a database. There is no way to correlate the two.
If you ACTUALLY want to insure there is no (electronic) tampering. Disable the machines and have everyone cast paper ballots. Otherwise forget it. Personally I would resign since I wouldn't be capable of doing my job under the circumstances, and frankly maybe this charade would end if all the poll workers stood up and did that.
Thank you for asking though, it is really nice to know someone is concerned. Sorry we can't be more helpful, but the above is literally (and sadly) the truth...
QoS on people's cable/DSL gateways sounds like it would work pretty well. I'd think the gateway could prioritize VOIP traffic and/or deprioritize P2P traffic.
The nice thing is it rather does away with all the issues around the ISP trying to do it. Also if you relied on the p2p client apps to do anything there will always be those which are not well implemented etc. Client network apps should not have to get involved in that kind of issue, just from an overall network design perspective.
The beauty of it is, 99.9% of the world can simply live with whatever default QoS setup the router manufacturers provide. In the few cases where some tweaking is required it shouldn't be too hard to do. ISPs can even provide updates which are tuned to the needs of their networks.
Suppose I follow that link to get that named.cache file. Who's serving me the DNS when I get that link? Once the squatters GET control, it is going to require non-DNS reliant methods for update. Certainly people will have to validate the sig on the file against the legitimate author's key.
I find it quite odd that you can have NO requirement for even a basic software development course. Heck, it was a requirement where I went in 1980!!! Every A&S student had to take a 3 credit programming course (which was FORTRAN back then).
There are quite a few reasons why Physics majors in particular REALLY need to be exposed to computer science. Maybe they don't need to learn much programming, but there are critical things they DO need to understand. They need to understand computer systems architecture, because it is going to have a significant impact on what they can and can't do computationally. Beyond that virtually all data is processed by computers today and they REALLY have to understand the limitations and pitfalls inherent in data processing. This is a very non-trivial subject in and of itself, and one that you simply cannot grasp without a fairly detailed understanding of what goes on inside a modern digital computer.
Beyond that the logical problem solving skills and general mental discipline required are good. And one can achieve a good bit of insight into some areas of higher math by practical exposure to numerical processing and computer algebra.
Besides, 95% of these people will end up working in industry where they WILL have to work on practical problems and they WILL find that they need coding skills or at least an understanding of what is involved.
There's nothing WRONG with learning Excel. I think you should consider that a handy tool, but just one amongst many. It is not a substitute for understanding software or learning a programming language. Sure, there is some overlap, but tools like Excel are all about HIDING the things that go on behind the scenes inside the machine, and those are exactly the things someone needs to understand if they're going to successfully use computers in science.
So, sure, students can learn Excel, but it shouldn't substitute for a programming class. Personally I think there should be a specific course designed to teach science majors about data processing in general. It can cover Excel as well as Matlab, and provide an introduction to programming as well as system architecture, data reduction and analysis techniques, etc.
Yeah. Fair enough, lol. I agree with you customers often ask for X and really need Y, or would be better served by having Y. You do have to be pretty careful though. It is one thing to project the aura of 'we are super confident and can always get the job done' and another to project the 'we are wise and you know nothing' aura.
Exactly how to deal with an individual customer is a matter of knowing the customer. Some of mine are quite sophisticated and they'll tell you exactly what they need, and amazingly they're right most of the time. Or at least they aren't asking for something idiotic. So you can usually tell them exactly what the score is like 'OK, you want database access, here's why I'd rather do it this way.'
Some are mostly ignorant of technical issues and often ask for random things when they need something. There are a few ways to handle them depending on their personalities. Some you can just give something that works and they don't need to know what they've gotten, it just does what they need. Others you can sell on 'this is a better way for you.' etc. You do have to be careful though. If you don't find out exactly what the client is asking for and why he may not get what he needs. Then he may feel cheated, etc.
Well, at the least you build your counterargument on top of a bunch of assumptions. All we're presented with here by the OP is the technical issue. We know he has a customer, and that the customer has access requirements to a database.
It might well be reasonable for someone to ask "is this the best way to give them what they want", but I can pretty well see you haven't had to deal with the customer side of a business if your response is going to be "you are an idiot and you cannot have what you ask for".
I work directly with my customers. I know what kinds of things piss them off. I can almost guarantee you the right thing to do is figure out a way to get them what they want, or at the very least to convince them you can give them something better.
Truthfully it may not even be necessary to discuss it with the client. Depending on how they're billed or what the business relationship is you might well just give them access to a slave database and they don't even need to know a thing about what the solution was.
SQL server isn't Oracle. Microsoft would like you believe it is in the same league, but not really. There are all sorts of optimizations you can make with Oracle. Personally I don't maintain large Oracle databases, so it is mostly a general observation, but I have been involved with installations that did stuff along these lines. Also generalizing from other RDBMS products that I do work with every day, you can definitely get quite large improvements in performance on a database which you KNOW has one writer and one or more readers which do large slow queries.
I admit, it is not possible to quantify that without getting into the details of how the database is structured, size, record types and access patterns, and what sort of replication technology is being used.
Optimistically though if the data is batched into the replica and you're free to use the most appropriate database for the copy the read performance could be an order of magnitude or more better than querying the master. OTOH it could be you might get fairly minimal speedup in the worst case.
That's customer service! lol. Think about it, the data is probably required for the customer's business process. So saying 'no' is tantamount to 'you can't run your business', and the customer will become an ex-customer just like that.
There are perfectly good technical solutions to the problem. As a DBA I would just point out to management what the issues are and suggest the obvious solution (data replication). If management really wants to tell the customer to take a hike, then that is up to them. But at the very least you the DBA don't end up being the nay sayer.
Mirror the database to a 2nd server and provide them read access to that. It has several advantages.
1) You don't have to worry about them causing problems in the production database.
2) You can optimize the replica for read access. A read only database can generally perform MANY times better than one that has to be optimized to support read/write and especially if it is highly transactional.
Granted, it costs you a bit in hardware and setup time, etc. But if you're really nervous about it, then it should do the trick. Given the limited load on the replica and its read only nature it should be able to live on limited hardware, like maybe an older server that you have hanging around. Plus you don't have to worry about reliability either. If the thing blows up no data is lost.
I'm saying you really just have not the slightest idea what it is really like until you have been there and you do NOT want to ever be there. No way, no how. I'll take facing people unarmed over being subjected to the consequences of shooting them 1000 times over, and so would you if you had any idea what the reality is like. Take it from me, you don't.
It would be ridiculous to charge the police with being responsible for protecting everyone everywhere all the time from crime. We are adults and we're responsible for ourselves. The police simply cannot, no matter how many of them there were or how good they are at their job be everywhere at all times ready to leap out and apprehend every criminal. It is ludicrous, and to criticize them for that is inane. If you're willing to fork over your money and have your community put a cop on every street corner 24/7 then maybe you would have more room to bitch about it, but I seriously doubt any of us is willing to go that far.
Of course the police would rather there were less guns out there, and they generally are in favor of gun control. Most people are NOT really qualified to go around armed, and if it was your job to go around with a gun all day looking for trouble, you'd probably prefer that the people you're looking out for were not armed. Cops are a lot more likely to get shot by some pissed off drunk dickhead boyfriend than they are some criminal. Of course they'd even MORE like it if criminals didn't have guns either.
Instead of arming ourselves to the teeth and somehow deluding ourselves that it makes us 'safer', maybe it would be wiser if we just put that money and effort into solving the social problems that are at the root of 99% of crime in the 1st place. And maybe if we stopped glorifying violence, we wouldn't live in a violent society.
Actually the statistic I remember reading (admittedly long ago and I can't recall at all where) was that the number of home owners shot in their own homes by criminals USING THE HOME OWNER'S GUN was higher than the number of criminals shot BY the homeowner with the homeowner's gun.
Take it from a person with a bit of personal experience with guns and people getting shot. You have NO idea what that kind of situation is like, or what you will or will not do or how it will turn out. The probability of a criminal harming you if they break into your place is VERY small. Once you introduce lethal weapons into that equation, the chances go up HUGELY. And in a close in situation where you're likely not well prepared for trouble, there is a very good chance your gun is going to end up out of your control.
This is one of the main reasons why law enforcement favors gun control for the most part. Untrained idiots with fire arms are a lot more danger to themselves than to anyone else, and a lot more danger to the innocent people around them than to criminals. Any criminal who is armed and willing to kill is FAR more than a match for anyone in this forum.
Finally, anyone that is stupid enough to believe it is ever worth killing someone hasn't had to scrape the guts off the floor afterwords. You have NO concept.
It has been known for quite a long time. Probably more like there may be a number of areas of the brain that develop 'plans' based on different inputs, goals, etc. Higher level centers may then integrate or redact based on inputs from other areas, and finally the reticular formation in the brain stem acts as a sort of master 'mode selector' (IE will I fight or run). The only things we experience as 'conscious' are the parts of the process available for recall later.
It is all nice and all to make an analogy, but that doesn't mean all analogies are GOOD analogies. In fact in light of where this thread started, that one makes no sense at all to me.
I'd certainly consider myself to be an 'introvert', but I think IM is great. Both email and IM have their uses. If I'm in the middle of something and someone IMs me, I just ignore it. When I get to a stopping point, then I'll go check and see what the message was and get back to them.
So, I think my observation is that one set of words, introvert/extrovert doesn't convey a lot of the variation in people's social interaction habits and preferences.
So, by your argument, if a thief breaks into my house and steals my credit card, I should be on the hook for all the losses, since my house is not as secure as a bank vault. I think that's unreasonable.
Well, one could make that argument, and for many years that was the case. However the way it works now is actually pretty reasonable. The MERCHANT that accepted the charge is on the hook for it. If they want to be off the hook, then they better sufficiently verify charges at the point of sale. In practice the banks work it a bit different, they lower your fees if you use less risky verification methods.
We already have a term for activities like that. Its called "fraud" (and "money laundering" in some cases). If the bank catches you doing that then they already have the right to press charges and send you to jail.
Sure, but that presupposes they can catch you. Removing the temptation and the mechanism is overall a better alternative.
OK, let me rephrase 'faulty equipment'. ANY reason whatsoever by which the information was revealed by YOUR system. I call it 'faulty' in the that obviously you didn't INTEND to reveal the information.
As for them having to prove you acted negligently, why would they have to do that? The material fact of the information breach itself is sufficient proof of that. You tried to keep a secret and you failed. If your gf etc stole from you, then well you need to be going after them, not the bank, unless you can show some way by which the bank should have known better.
And that brings up the NEXT flaw in the 'bank should be responsible' argument. Moral Hazard. If the bank is taking the fall, what exactly is it that stops people from just stealing their own money? Presenting a moral hazard like that is to be avoided.
Slashdot Mirror
This is what I keep trying to tell people (given that I'm running some commodity trading systems I have a bit of understanding of this issue). The traders ("speculators") have NO pricing power. NONE AT ALL. The day that contract matures they MUST sell it, or as you pointed out even PAY someone to take it off their hands.
The price of oil has ZIPPO GRANDE to do with the futures markets. All the futures people are doing is betting that oil will be higher the day they sell the contract than the day they bought it. The truth is 99.9% of all oil bought and sold is not traded on the futures market. Some relatively minute fraction is traded there and all it provides is a bit of slack in the system so if say you needed oil TODAY you can get some extra beyond what you already had showing up in your own tankers. It just evens out the supply a bit.
Notice it is the oil companies and OPEC that are blaming speculators for current prices. Meanwhile they pocket 100% percent of the excess profits from today's high prices. Blaming it on the futures market is just a smokescreen. The futures market is going up BECAUSE the price is going up, not the other way around.
Couldn't have said it better.
Well, I think the idea was to create a PHB that is friendly to new players. It certainly seems to be written with them in mind in terms of explaining the general concepts of RPG and giving a lot of role playing advice, etc. I'll give the PHB very good marks for that.
I just don't think it explains game mechanics very well. In fact it seems to deliberately avoid all but the most superficial discussion of game mechanics. I think that was a deliberate 'lets not make the player's brains melt' decision. I just disagree with it. I think they would have done better to have had a full example of a couple rounds of combat. That would have put the various skills and whatnot into perspective for the players.
The real beef I have with it though is that I think the class sections are really unclear about powers. The whole power/feat/feature/skill system is pretty complex. Again a couple of examples would have been nice. This is a general theme with the PHB. In a few places they have nice examples, such as in the sections on using skills, but there is no example of say determining what powers a character has. Given the way you can swap around things and some racial or class features allow substitutions etc it would have been good to have that.
Overall I would say the game mechanics are far more consistent and better cover the majority of situations than in 2e for sure. So it isn't that it is a bad game system at all, just complex and not so easy for newbies to understand.
Yeah, I'm coming at it from the opposite side, reading but not having played. I don't think 4e is TERRIBLE, and I think it could be pretty good, but the PHB at least needs a serious rewrite already.
Truthfully the clarity issue would have been addressed by a few tables. As an exercise check the 1e PHB ranger class and the 4e PHB ranger class sections. In the 1e version there may be a BIT less variety of 'powers' to use the term loosely, but it is ENTIRELY clear what you have, just look at the level chart!
In the 4e version even a careful reading of the text left me fairly uncertain what ability choices a new 1st level character would have and exactly what subtype of ability some of them would count as. A chart would have cleared that right up, and it could have replaced some of the text that wasn't so clear.
2 pages of introduction to the game mechanics (what is a turn, what is an action, example of a round or two of combat) before character generation would also vastly clarify things for new players. As it I'm 200+ pages into the PHB and I still would have no idea what most stuff means if I hadn't been playing RPGs for 30+ years.
(ouch, that's scary...) lol.
See, I don't find the new rules intuitive at all. It may actually be as you say that it isn't too hard to play IF you have a 4e guru for a GM. But after a read through of the manuals I found the explanations of how to determine what powers your character has to be quite muddled. It also seemed like most of them are endlessly minute variations of just 2 or 3 abilities with the only differences being which save you use or something like that.
I cannot see any inexperienced players being able to pick this game up and play it. It seems to me it will cater only to experienced players that enjoy figuring out if a +2 save and +1 damage is a better option than a +2 save and +1 AC. I don't think that fosters good roleplay, just slows down the game and adds little. I expected better.
In fact... What IMHO might be one way to address several of the issues would be a '0 level' type of option, which could be provided as a part of an introductory level product.
Characters could start out as slightly hopped up normal humans (elves, etc) with just some basic non class abilities and maybe 1 or 2 powers. It could be designed to extend through say 3 gaming sessions with the result at the end being a 1st level character.
That would kill several birds with one stone:
1) It provides a framework for NPCs that bridges the gap between normal human and 1st level PC.
2) It would be an environment inexperienced players could deal with, giving them a bit of gameplay without an inordinate amount of complexity.
3) It would be useful in a few other situations, like handling unique nonclass NPCs that might get involved in an adventure. For example the budding apprentice whom you might take on as a henchman, but which would be hopeless by the existing mechanics.
Granted a GM can always 'wing it' and create intermediate strength non-class NPCs on their own, but why not have a decent framework for that?
Being one of the seriously way back original D&Ders and having run conservatively 1000's of RPG gaming sessions of all types and participated in the early playtest/development of GURPS etc. I have some real issues with the 4e PHB. Now I never played 3/3.5e, so I am really looking at this in comparison to 1e/2e "old style" AD&D.
The game mechanics in the PHB are as clear as mud. This is a book only a rules lawyer who enjoys puzzling out the exact meaning of obscure paragraphs of rules text could love. It obviously never got run past anyone outside the design team and highly experienced players. I could never give this book to anyone who doesn't fall into that category and hope to end up with anything but a hopelessly confused player.
I appreciate the thrust of what they were attempting to do with the game mechanics. They may well BE very good game mechanics, though I have a few thoughts about that as well (but not having played they are obviously only first thoughts). Obviously there was a concerted effort to do away with certain confusing and awkward terms and provide more consistent game mechanics. Unfortunately I believe what replaced them is no better and perhaps worse overall. There are other serious flaws as well.
The 1st problem is that the game mechanics and terminology should have been explained in a much clearer and more thorough manner right from the start. Much of what you read is essentially unintelligible at first read due to that lack. A one page description of combat mechanics near the beginning of the PHB that explained turn structure, actions, and movement would have done wonders for clarity. Sadly this is lacking.
Secondly the descriptions of classes leave a LOT to be desired. They are OK from an 'atmosphere' point of view. The text gives a pretty clear idea of what each class is intended to do and what sort of characters would be based on that class. The problem is trying to figure out the abilities your character has is a nightmare. The system for determining what the combination of race/class/build gives you for abilities is terribly disorganized. This aspect would have been 1000% better if only a few charts had been provided.
The selection of powers for the various classes also leaves me feeling quite disappointed. Everything is purely combat-centric. Not only that but 90% of the powers read like infinitesimally minute variations of each other. Clerics have 18 different variations of basically the same thing 'smite the enemy and do extra damage'. Only the most extreme armchair game technicians are going to enjoy attempting to decide between them all. It feels like someone generated a lot of filler by a rather unimaginative process of slightly changing dice rolls, types of saves, etc between what are all essentially the same thing.
Wizards seem to have a slightly better time in this department, though the spell selections are still pretty anemic. It feels to me like the goal was to leave you needing to buy supplements to get some variety.
The whole endlessly detailed subdividing of powers down into various subcategories also seems quite tedious. I can anticipate what will happen if I try to run this. 50% of game time will be burned just trying to explain to the players what choices they have to make and can they use this or that power now or is it used up or etc...
This was compounded by the class descriptions where a class/build abilities choices are described in a fairly muddled fashion. A chart like those in the 1e PHB would have worked a lot better. Often it is not clear at all which powers are 'free', which ones take up slots, and exactly which type of slot they might take up. 1 chart is worth 1000 words...
Overall this feels like a 'dice optimizer' style of game. The player type which will dig it is going to be the one that likes to spend 3 hours figuring out if the power that does +5 damage and gives you an extra saving throw is better than the one that does double damage and 'marks your enemy'. Blech! That sort of gaming i
There is essentially nothing you can do. There is a 'black box' (voting machine). Nobody except the guy that last tampered with it knows what it does. Voters push buttons on the box, and the box makes some entries in a database. There is no way to correlate the two.
If you ACTUALLY want to insure there is no (electronic) tampering. Disable the machines and have everyone cast paper ballots. Otherwise forget it. Personally I would resign since I wouldn't be capable of doing my job under the circumstances, and frankly maybe this charade would end if all the poll workers stood up and did that.
Thank you for asking though, it is really nice to know someone is concerned. Sorry we can't be more helpful, but the above is literally (and sadly) the truth...
QoS on people's cable/DSL gateways sounds like it would work pretty well. I'd think the gateway could prioritize VOIP traffic and/or deprioritize P2P traffic.
The nice thing is it rather does away with all the issues around the ISP trying to do it. Also if you relied on the p2p client apps to do anything there will always be those which are not well implemented etc. Client network apps should not have to get involved in that kind of issue, just from an overall network design perspective.
The beauty of it is, 99.9% of the world can simply live with whatever default QoS setup the router manufacturers provide. In the few cases where some tweaking is required it shouldn't be too hard to do. ISPs can even provide updates which are tuned to the needs of their networks.
Suppose I follow that link to get that named.cache file. Who's serving me the DNS when I get that link? Once the squatters GET control, it is going to require non-DNS reliant methods for update. Certainly people will have to validate the sig on the file against the legitimate author's key.
I find it quite odd that you can have NO requirement for even a basic software development course. Heck, it was a requirement where I went in 1980!!! Every A&S student had to take a 3 credit programming course (which was FORTRAN back then).
There are quite a few reasons why Physics majors in particular REALLY need to be exposed to computer science. Maybe they don't need to learn much programming, but there are critical things they DO need to understand. They need to understand computer systems architecture, because it is going to have a significant impact on what they can and can't do computationally. Beyond that virtually all data is processed by computers today and they REALLY have to understand the limitations and pitfalls inherent in data processing. This is a very non-trivial subject in and of itself, and one that you simply cannot grasp without a fairly detailed understanding of what goes on inside a modern digital computer.
Beyond that the logical problem solving skills and general mental discipline required are good. And one can achieve a good bit of insight into some areas of higher math by practical exposure to numerical processing and computer algebra.
Besides, 95% of these people will end up working in industry where they WILL have to work on practical problems and they WILL find that they need coding skills or at least an understanding of what is involved.
There's nothing WRONG with learning Excel. I think you should consider that a handy tool, but just one amongst many. It is not a substitute for understanding software or learning a programming language. Sure, there is some overlap, but tools like Excel are all about HIDING the things that go on behind the scenes inside the machine, and those are exactly the things someone needs to understand if they're going to successfully use computers in science.
So, sure, students can learn Excel, but it shouldn't substitute for a programming class. Personally I think there should be a specific course designed to teach science majors about data processing in general. It can cover Excel as well as Matlab, and provide an introduction to programming as well as system architecture, data reduction and analysis techniques, etc.
Yeah. Fair enough, lol. I agree with you customers often ask for X and really need Y, or would be better served by having Y. You do have to be pretty careful though. It is one thing to project the aura of 'we are super confident and can always get the job done' and another to project the 'we are wise and you know nothing' aura.
Exactly how to deal with an individual customer is a matter of knowing the customer. Some of mine are quite sophisticated and they'll tell you exactly what they need, and amazingly they're right most of the time. Or at least they aren't asking for something idiotic. So you can usually tell them exactly what the score is like 'OK, you want database access, here's why I'd rather do it this way.'
Some are mostly ignorant of technical issues and often ask for random things when they need something. There are a few ways to handle them depending on their personalities. Some you can just give something that works and they don't need to know what they've gotten, it just does what they need. Others you can sell on 'this is a better way for you.' etc. You do have to be careful though. If you don't find out exactly what the client is asking for and why he may not get what he needs. Then he may feel cheated, etc.
Well, at the least you build your counterargument on top of a bunch of assumptions. All we're presented with here by the OP is the technical issue. We know he has a customer, and that the customer has access requirements to a database.
It might well be reasonable for someone to ask "is this the best way to give them what they want", but I can pretty well see you haven't had to deal with the customer side of a business if your response is going to be "you are an idiot and you cannot have what you ask for".
I work directly with my customers. I know what kinds of things piss them off. I can almost guarantee you the right thing to do is figure out a way to get them what they want, or at the very least to convince them you can give them something better.
Truthfully it may not even be necessary to discuss it with the client. Depending on how they're billed or what the business relationship is you might well just give them access to a slave database and they don't even need to know a thing about what the solution was.
SQL server... yeah.
SQL server isn't Oracle. Microsoft would like you believe it is in the same league, but not really. There are all sorts of optimizations you can make with Oracle. Personally I don't maintain large Oracle databases, so it is mostly a general observation, but I have been involved with installations that did stuff along these lines. Also generalizing from other RDBMS products that I do work with every day, you can definitely get quite large improvements in performance on a database which you KNOW has one writer and one or more readers which do large slow queries.
I admit, it is not possible to quantify that without getting into the details of how the database is structured, size, record types and access patterns, and what sort of replication technology is being used.
Optimistically though if the data is batched into the replica and you're free to use the most appropriate database for the copy the read performance could be an order of magnitude or more better than querying the master. OTOH it could be you might get fairly minimal speedup in the worst case.
That's customer service! lol. Think about it, the data is probably required for the customer's business process. So saying 'no' is tantamount to 'you can't run your business', and the customer will become an ex-customer just like that.
There are perfectly good technical solutions to the problem. As a DBA I would just point out to management what the issues are and suggest the obvious solution (data replication). If management really wants to tell the customer to take a hike, then that is up to them. But at the very least you the DBA don't end up being the nay sayer.
Mirror the database to a 2nd server and provide them read access to that. It has several advantages.
1) You don't have to worry about them causing problems in the production database.
2) You can optimize the replica for read access. A read only database can generally perform MANY times better than one that has to be optimized to support read/write and especially if it is highly transactional.
Granted, it costs you a bit in hardware and setup time, etc. But if you're really nervous about it, then it should do the trick. Given the limited load on the replica and its read only nature it should be able to live on limited hardware, like maybe an older server that you have hanging around. Plus you don't have to worry about reliability either. If the thing blows up no data is lost.
Obey, or be swarmed!
I'm saying you really just have not the slightest idea what it is really like until you have been there and you do NOT want to ever be there. No way, no how. I'll take facing people unarmed over being subjected to the consequences of shooting them 1000 times over, and so would you if you had any idea what the reality is like. Take it from me, you don't.
It would be ridiculous to charge the police with being responsible for protecting everyone everywhere all the time from crime. We are adults and we're responsible for ourselves. The police simply cannot, no matter how many of them there were or how good they are at their job be everywhere at all times ready to leap out and apprehend every criminal. It is ludicrous, and to criticize them for that is inane. If you're willing to fork over your money and have your community put a cop on every street corner 24/7 then maybe you would have more room to bitch about it, but I seriously doubt any of us is willing to go that far.
Of course the police would rather there were less guns out there, and they generally are in favor of gun control. Most people are NOT really qualified to go around armed, and if it was your job to go around with a gun all day looking for trouble, you'd probably prefer that the people you're looking out for were not armed. Cops are a lot more likely to get shot by some pissed off drunk dickhead boyfriend than they are some criminal. Of course they'd even MORE like it if criminals didn't have guns either.
Instead of arming ourselves to the teeth and somehow deluding ourselves that it makes us 'safer', maybe it would be wiser if we just put that money and effort into solving the social problems that are at the root of 99% of crime in the 1st place. And maybe if we stopped glorifying violence, we wouldn't live in a violent society.
Actually the statistic I remember reading (admittedly long ago and I can't recall at all where) was that the number of home owners shot in their own homes by criminals USING THE HOME OWNER'S GUN was higher than the number of criminals shot BY the homeowner with the homeowner's gun.
Take it from a person with a bit of personal experience with guns and people getting shot. You have NO idea what that kind of situation is like, or what you will or will not do or how it will turn out. The probability of a criminal harming you if they break into your place is VERY small. Once you introduce lethal weapons into that equation, the chances go up HUGELY. And in a close in situation where you're likely not well prepared for trouble, there is a very good chance your gun is going to end up out of your control.
This is one of the main reasons why law enforcement favors gun control for the most part. Untrained idiots with fire arms are a lot more danger to themselves than to anyone else, and a lot more danger to the innocent people around them than to criminals. Any criminal who is armed and willing to kill is FAR more than a match for anyone in this forum.
Finally, anyone that is stupid enough to believe it is ever worth killing someone hasn't had to scrape the guts off the floor afterwords. You have NO concept.
It has been known for quite a long time. Probably more like there may be a number of areas of the brain that develop 'plans' based on different inputs, goals, etc. Higher level centers may then integrate or redact based on inputs from other areas, and finally the reticular formation in the brain stem acts as a sort of master 'mode selector' (IE will I fight or run). The only things we experience as 'conscious' are the parts of the process available for recall later.
Really not all that super revolutionary.
It is all nice and all to make an analogy, but that doesn't mean all analogies are GOOD analogies. In fact in light of where this thread started, that one makes no sense at all to me.
Can we have a third choice?
I'd certainly consider myself to be an 'introvert', but I think IM is great. Both email and IM have their uses. If I'm in the middle of something and someone IMs me, I just ignore it. When I get to a stopping point, then I'll go check and see what the message was and get back to them.
So, I think my observation is that one set of words, introvert/extrovert doesn't convey a lot of the variation in people's social interaction habits and preferences.
So, by your argument, if a thief breaks into my house and steals my credit card, I should be on the hook for all the losses, since my house is not as secure as a bank vault. I think that's unreasonable.
Well, one could make that argument, and for many years that was the case. However the way it works now is actually pretty reasonable. The MERCHANT that accepted the charge is on the hook for it. If they want to be off the hook, then they better sufficiently verify charges at the point of sale. In practice the banks work it a bit different, they lower your fees if you use less risky verification methods.
We already have a term for activities like that. Its called "fraud" (and "money laundering" in some cases). If the bank catches you doing that then they already have the right to press charges and send you to jail.
Sure, but that presupposes they can catch you. Removing the temptation and the mechanism is overall a better alternative.
OK, let me rephrase 'faulty equipment'. ANY reason whatsoever by which the information was revealed by YOUR system. I call it 'faulty' in the that obviously you didn't INTEND to reveal the information.
As for them having to prove you acted negligently, why would they have to do that? The material fact of the information breach itself is sufficient proof of that. You tried to keep a secret and you failed. If your gf etc stole from you, then well you need to be going after them, not the bank, unless you can show some way by which the bank should have known better.
And that brings up the NEXT flaw in the 'bank should be responsible' argument. Moral Hazard. If the bank is taking the fall, what exactly is it that stops people from just stealing their own money? Presenting a moral hazard like that is to be avoided.