As you can probably guess (and people have said, such as on NPR just the other day)... he is a modern Ed Wood, except Wood's movies had a charm about them (sort of like a 2nd grade play) where Boll's are just bad (like a bad play at a real opera company).
Ignoring that they tend to use terrible writers, I can't help but wonder if they are just choosing the wrong games.
Mario doesn't really have a story, so it's not that surprising that it was hard to make a good movie out of that. Games like the Final Fantasy games or Mass Effect have good stories, but they would lose too much if you cut it down to even the length of a long film (2.5 hours).
What you need to do is set it in the universe. The Resident Evil movies got that part right. There is no reason those couldn't have been made into good movies. Get good writers, it could have worked.
Portal would be interesting. It has a great character, interesting special effects, but it's too short. You might be able to make an interesting mini-movie out of it (say a half-hour TV show?). I don't think you'd be able to make a decent length film (1.5 hours) out of what's there.
You could expand it. Start with a little of the back story of Aperture Science (maybe show the introduction as a new employee comes in?) As things go on you could see the guy work on GlaDOS a little and her development and as the tests on previous subjects. You move on to GlaDOS doing what she did and then finally Chell and her attempt to escape. Basically GlaDOS is the main character of the movie. I could see it working, but keeping that great dark humor balance as well as the creepiness balance through the whole movie would be an incredible challenge. I don't know how you'd fit in the description of the portal device ("man-sized ad-hoc quantum tunnel through physical space with possible applications as a shower curtain") without breaking any sense of reality. Since part of the mood of Portal comes from having no idea what is going on, the script would be a real departure in some ways which would make it even more challenging. I think we all know that GlaDOS could be the next HAL easily. HAL didn't have cake.
Set a movie in the world of Ivalice (from FF: Tactics/XII). Maybe something set in the Ratchet & Clank universe. Heck, make one of the Phoenix Wright cases into a comedy/drama. There are options.
Instead, producers find the biggest game they can (let's take GTA), then conceive a movie that fits in (a gangster plot!), then make it fit in more (we'll have him not own a car, he'll just take them when he needs one), then beat it with a bad script stick ("You can't tell me what to do, I've already committed Grand Theft Auto..."), then add some flashy effects (everything blows up, lots of blood) and there is nothing to differentiate the movie from any other bad formulaic summer movie except there is a video game's name on it.
Everywhere I've worked, there have been a few people who, if they started telecommuting, would make my life easier. The people you flat out just don't like, get annoyed by, etc.
But that's always a small minority. There is the person or people I don't want to have to deal with, the people I really like and would really miss, then everyone else. While I would be quite disappointed if some of the people I really liked stopped coming in (and since I'm in IT I think they would be some of the people most likely to use the option). Depending on the size of the group, losing a person or two in the "no strong feelings" category may or may not be noticed. But even if they aren't people that I spend much time with, as there were fewer and fewer of them I'd definitely start to miss them.
There are some ways you could make it work. Let them only have one telecommute day per week, and schedule them so a different group is off each day. But as more and more people go (especially percentage wise in a non-huge office) I could really see it having an effect on me (who isn't telecommuting). Heck, as a fellow telecommuter, I could see it still having an effect on me.
Wow. First, Shawn of the Dead was on this weekend. Then this story comes on. It's good they are building a more advanced way of modeling this, the previous way was rather simple.
Not my program, I found it years ago. There is a port of the 3D version on my site that I updated to run on OS X.
You make good points. On the cable issue, we'll just pay them a ton of money to buy what they already did. Or they can keep ownership and just be forced to let other use it (like phone lines).
Drivers licenses is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. I see so many people doing amazingly stupid things like texting while driving. Some places are passing laws against it, but I just think we should to something to make it more obvious that you can't go around doing stuff like that. There are other things that I would like as well (more restricted licenses for those under 21, for example). When you're 30 or so, there isn't much reason to make the license much tougher than it is now. But the younger you are, the harder it should be. How about mandatory defensive driving? Just an idea.
The marriage thing is another issue of mine. I see so many problems related to that, I think we should do something. I can't mandate you have to date for X years or something like that. But I think many people get married without realizing some of the problems that even a tiny bit of marriage counseling would bring up (like how big a deal your separate religions are, or how your step kid isn't going to mind you and you need to accept that) that I think this kind of stuff is important. The divorce part is because I see many people as being divorced because they don't know what else to do, or that it will get better if they keep struggling. These are here as a way of getting people to think about this decision much more than they might right now. The faith based part? I think that if someone is in their faith even a bit, then that will be more effective than secular counseling. You don't have to go faith based, I think it's just a good idea.
As for the mandatory civil service, you're right. They're not adults. Maybe we should actually move the age of majority back up. The idea behind this one is to fix some of those kids who are in school and don't care. They may not be old enough to choose some things (as you say), but by 10th grade they are more than capable of choosing to be disruptive and that they don't care about what they are being forced into (as they may see it). There isn't a point of forcing them to continue to attend classes when they might spend all their time not doing work and causing problems for teachers and other students who are interested in learning. If the kid is that committed, let's give them another option. Maybe they'll try it, see how tough life is with a blue collar job, and decide maybe they should go back on the track to college to get a better job. Maybe they'll like it. Maybe they'll just be a problem there too. I want to do something to help people like this, this was my best idea.
I know exactly how it works. As the president I can request anything I want. It's up to congress to make the actual law and pass it and all that. I said none of it would get past congress. My list is mostly a "if I was emperor" type, but President is as close as I can get to that happening, and that won't happen (since I have no intention of running, ever, at this point).
Here is what I can think of right now. I must say... this would never, ever, make it through congress.
Abolish the IRS. I think Steve Forbes has a great plan for fixing government income
No more sugar subsidies. The rest can be slowly phased out.
Drugs don't go on the market (over the counter) without proof they work in some reasonable fraction of people (say... 25%?)
Drugs (prescription) can't be advertised on TV
Social Security and Medicare stop. You can stay on, but if you are under 40... you can forget ever using them. They are entitlement and bankrupting the government
Vitamins and supplements must prove effectiveness too. No more magic diet pills that don't work.
In fact, there will be a little government office dedicated to slapping fines on obvious false advertising.
Congress now has a term limits. Lets say... 15 years.
All campaign finance reform is lifted. You can raise whatever you want. You can spend on whatever you want. You're free. The catch? Every record, in and out, goes up on the 'net within 24 hours.... and you can't fund raise within 72 hours of the vote
Speaking of elections, we can study other methods (e.g. instant runoffs). But whatever happens... paper ballots now. You put a big X in the box you want.
Cable lines are nationalized. Comcast et al can lease them from the government. Heck, you can use them for free. We need competition.
Net neutrality is mandatory. If you degrade someone else's service because it competes with your own, you get fined BIG.
Drivers licenses get harder to get and keep. Too many morons on cell phones that need to learn it's not a right.
If you get caught in the country illegally, you get thrown out. Today. No questions... you're on the plane. Each time you sneek in, we send you farther away. If you've been here over 5 years and can speak English, you can stay. You're not a citizen. You're on a permanent visa. No voting. If you want citizenship, you can go back to your country and apply like everyone else.
English is the national language. You want a government document in something else? Too bad, go to a country that speaks that language.
Mandatory civil service. We can talk about giving you college tuition, but you serve. It can be military, or it can be civil (be a meter maid, that's fine with me). You will do something to give back to your country for a little while.
Voting districts are now drawn by computer based on population and area. No more rigging that. You can't do it by race. You can't do it by party affiliation. If the seat isn't completive, then we change the district to make it more competitive.
Voting tests. They may have a really bad rap, but that's OK with me. Nothing complex, just some simple stuff. You have to be able to read at a 6th grade level. This discriminated against blacks because it was illegal to teach them to read. These days if you can't read, you can't participate effectively in politics. You also have to pass a ludicrously simple geography test. They will always change so you can't easily be taught to the test. If you can't find Canada on a map, you can't vote in the US.
Roe v. Wade is abolished. I'd like to declare one side as right, maybe you can guess which. But what we will do is leave it up to each state. Let the states fight it out. If, after 50 years, it has been stable at a clear majority we can talk about enshrining that into law.
You can't get divorced without 6 months of good marriage counseling, preferable faith-based (you choose the faith, obviously). The one exception is abuse. If there is abuse, you can leave today. We'll help. But if you accuse abuse and it is proven that you lied, you're locked up.
Also on the marriage front, you can't get married without at least a few sessions of marriage counseling. Talk about kids, values, in-laws, sex, where you want to live, religion, and everything else. The divorce rate is
As much as I want to dislike Ford for doing this, I'm with you. Shortly after reading this and realizing that the headline is sensationalized... I realized that the calendar is just like one Ford might sell only made by a third party who isn't paying Ford anything. No one cares that it's the something-something-car-club, they would be buying it for the images of the Mustang's design.
If I drew my own copies of my favorite Dilbert strips, could I sell a book of them? Seems like basically the same thing.
Now if the calendar has different cars (say it was 12 sports cars and the Mustang was just one) then I could see Ford being in the wrong. But the whole calendar seems to be taking advantage of them.
Really? I'd blame Netflix for using a de facto single platform codec. They could have used Theora, which is open. They could have used QuickTime, which has Windows support. They could have used RealPlayer (as horrid as that would be), because it's at least available on both platforms. There is also Flash which is immensely popular and multi-platform. Instead they chose the one that promised all the lock-in of Windows with all fun of Windows.
Don't blame Apple because their competitor who has been trying to squeeze them out of the market for 20+ years is trying to squeeze them out of the market. What makes you so sure Microsoft would even agree to it with any reasonable terms (you know, under $100 per computer).
Hell, Microsoft had a WMV codec for OS X. As OS X started getting popular they dropped it and farmed it out to a 3rd party who now sells it.
OK. Like I said, it was what I read somewhere and vaguely remembered. One of your sibling posts calls him just as qualified as other talking head endorsers, and that's a big part of my problem. I'd like the drug ads back off the air.
That's good, but I'd like to see them work on fixing advertising. I'm of the opinion that we should go back to the old stance (80s or so?) that drugs shouldn't be able to be advertised on TV. I think that would help quite a bit with healthcare costs. But I'd also like them to investigate the ads we have now. I remember reading something in the last week or so that someone was pushing them to do that over the Lipitor ads with Dr. Robert Jarvik, the inventor of the artificial heart, testifying about how good Lipitor is.
The problem is that he has never had a license to practice medicine in the US. He dropped out of a US medical school because of his grades and got his degree from a school outside this country. It's really questionable that he is qualified to talk about the drug.
I wish they'd work on advertising. So much of it is so blatantly wrong. Just deal with a few of the worst offenders, and the rest will self-correct before they get investigated.
I'm not talking about totalitarianism, and using government to stop people from doing things I don't like. I really hate that philosophy. What I'm saying is that the business should be free to make that policy if they want. Let the market sort it out. If the market stops working on this point, then the government steps in to regulate. The preemptive regulation to stop something that may be a problem, which at the same time reduces by liberty as a (hypothetical) business owner is what annoys me.
As an employer, I think I should be able to choose not to hire/retain people because they are drunks, or because they smoke. I'd say you can't use race as a deciding factor, after all you have no control about that. You shouldn't be able to base it on religion either, we've seen that abused far too many times in history. But if you aren't willing to stop a habit that annoys others, takes away your work time, make you sick more often, etc as smoking does, I think I should be able to use that as a criteria in my hiring decisions.
Allowing corporations to control your lifestyle while away from work is very dangerous.
They shouldn't be able to say "no drinking". That's just a choice. But if you have something more serious going on (like a drinking problem) that's indicative of something more serious and could easily effect them. That's more why I would support this. I'm going to go back to that old swinging pendulum analogy. I see the pendulum as too far to one side (the you-cant-fire-them-oh-lets-get-them-help-even-when-they-don't-care side), and I wouldn't mind things going a little farther. This is also do a degree my less-government attitude. If it gets abused, then we can make it illegal. I'm not a big fan of outlawing things because they might maybe be abused later possibly.
I generally agree with you. Like I said I wouldn't propose or go out of my way to create this system, but I wouldn't vote it down. Frankly I think society is far too permissive of alcoholism and drunk driving, and I'd like to see that changed. I see such a system as something that may help there, and I support this particular instance. We may have many tough laws, but they usually aren't mandatory and we tend to error on the side of caution (it's only their first offense...) despite the incredible danger of a drunk in a car with two little kids running down the highway at 70+ MPH. I think we should be quite a bit tougher on drivers licenses in general, not just with regard to drunks.
Cars are just too dangerous to the public at large for how permissive we seem to be at times. Being a moron with a table saw you can hurt yourself and maybe someone else. Driving a car when you shouldn't it's easy to kill/maim 20+ people. And when some people do that (like the elderly who, in that case, clearly should have lost their license years ago) we often hear all the sorrow about them (poor guy, it was an accident, now he'll have to live with that) when it should be anger (who approved his license the last time?).
I agree with you, I'd like to see politicians stand up. I'd give them points for standing up against this if they did it as you said (that would show character). But I'd also like to see them stand up on the other side (like more frequent license renewals for the elderly, but many politicians won't because that's a big demographic for getting votes despite the public safety issue).
So? What's wrong with that? Why shouldn't a company be able to decide such a thing? Should "Bob's Morman Supply" not be able to say something like that? Would about "Bob's Office Supply"?
It may be illegal now (the ACLU would certainly argue for that), but I don't see why a company shouldn't be able to do that.
This is all fine with me. I can understand why many people wouldn't want this, and I wouldn't push it. But if we keep records to make it easier to convict drunk drivers or people who aren't supposed to be drinking (like perhaps because of some prior conviction where that was made a condition of probation). Those are both fine for me.
Banks test them. They get contracts that probably say that if defects give money away, Diebold has to replace the money lost. Banks are willing to pay for a good ATM, not try to bid it out to the lowest priced person who comes along and cuts corners. If Diebold ATMs had this many problems, they wouldn't be in business long.
My only real question on this story is, how did the precincts differ other than the machines? Are the places that used the machines mostly urban? Is there something else that correlates that could explain the discrepancy, or does it appear to have no other correlating factors?
That's not wireless (RF) like he's talking about, that's inductive. It works on the same principal as a transformer. It only works under VERY short distances. If you lift your toothbrush out of it's charger by a 1/2", it probably won't work anymore.
An RF system would let you use the toothbrush without having it charged in a station. You could hang it from the ceiling with a piece of twine, turn it on, and let it run until something physically wears out.
I agree with the GPP, it's impractical. Inductive coupling (which I think is the same as magnetic being discussed) makes far more sense.
I'd think you'd have problems with RF, it'd be easy to waste power that way. The magnetic people mentioned in the article say they've hit 98.5%, which is great.
I'm not in the field. I'm not officially qualified to decide. But this is/.
Wireless (RF) worries me. You either have to confine it to a little beam (then why not just set the device down somewhere?) or pump a ton of power into it (most wasted). There are a few limited applications where it might make sense (the Wii, since we already know you'll be standing in front of the TV). I'm also worried about health concerns (really high frequencies can solve this, to a good degree) and interference (this is what I see as the biggest problem).
The idea of just setting a device down and having it charge seems good enough for me. It would work easily for keyboards and mice, cell phones, laptops, monitors, and many other thing. It's more efficient, and as the article mentions they can provide different amounts of power (like 5v to a cell phone and 12v to a hard drive). The guy who wrote the article worries about things like it erasing your credit cards or zapping you if you take a piece of metal near. This is easily solved by adding a tiny RF signal (like RFID) to detect devices. If you only supply power in the vicinity of that signal, then when someone sets a spoon down you won't fry them.
People have been working on this stuff for years. I hope they finally start getting it out there. It would be great to do something like be able to rearrange my desk (2 monitors, mouse, keyboard, laptop, other stuff) without having to bother plugging in or unplugging all those power cables. Add in a wireless version of HDMI or DVI or DisplayPort and all of a sudden things get really easy. But the best part would be being able to just put my phone on the counter (or desk or whatever) at night and have it change without me having to do anything. Very useful. Bigger batteries wouldn't be as important if you could easily charge devices anywhere and everywhere without having to carry and adapter and fumble for a free outlet.
You're right, the photo isn't proof (although it wouldn't surprise me if some people were dumb enough to take videos). That said, this could easily go further. Lets say you have these pictures that show 5 kids that seem to be drinking at a large party, and you can see 10 other students. You don't think that with just those pictures you could get at least one of the kids to admit what was going on there? Someone would, and the more kids involved the more likely it is.
I agree though. I've been trying to think of a way to prove under-age drinking with a photo, and I can't.
But even if no one admits it, that may be against the policy (the one for my high school said I couldn't even be at parties with alcohol, as I remember), and then you could just show it to the parents and let them take care of it however they want to.
My guess would be some teacher caught a student goofing around on that FaceBook page, recognized what was going on in the pictures, and that's where this came from. I agree the administrator has better things to do than search FaceBook for this.
The kids are morons (but what do you expect from a 15 year old with the chance at "fame"). The first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club. The 1/2th rule about Fight Club is don't take pictures and post them on the 'net.
Is this legal? I'd say... yes. Kids have no privacy. They aren't adults. They deserve to be punished if they broke the rules. Now I have two ideas at this point. If they violated a code of conduct that they signed (like for a sport), then they need to face the consequences. They chose to do it. If it's a private school, kick 'em out if you want if they violated the rules. If it's a public school and the kid isn't in any activities, you don't have any authority to punish them, since there isn't anything to bad them from.
Either way, if the pictures clearly show them drinking, those should be turned over to the police/DA. If they want to do something, they will. If they don't, it's over. But there are crimes there (drinking underage, drinking and driving probably, supplying alcohol to a minor, probably others).
But really, they need to learn their lesson. When you do something illegal/wrong... you don't document it and post that on the 'net for everyone to see. That's just plain stupid.
Oooh. It's faster. Wow. Didn't see that happening.
Did they fix the CPU overhead? Did they make a P2P version so that I don't need a computer to connect a camera to a hard drive and have it work? Basically, did they do anything to improve it for high-bandwidth applications (which is obviously what they're targeting) compared to FireWire?
The cable worries me some. I understand the drive for backwards compatibility, but it seems like they should make the cable more obviously different. It just looks like it will be too easy to accidentally use a USB 2 cable, not realize it, and then wonder why the device is running so slow. Just a little nub on the bottom of the connector would do it.
There are some basic things I can tell you. C/C++/ASM are good things to know. If you can understand a pointer, a pointer to a pointer, a list of pointers, references, pointers to references, references to pointers, and such then you will be far above many of your classmates. Even if you end up using Java (like I have) it's still good to know.
That said, I'd say learn SQL. I learned it in school, it was part of my curriculum. I was glad I learned it. It's an interesting way to look at things (since it works quite differently from something like C++). I didn't expect to use it too much. But I was good at it.
So I got my job which defiantly included needing to know SQL. And man I use SQL every day. I never thought I'd use it so much, even in a job that works with web applications that connect to databases. I write reports, queries, insert statements, all sorts of stuff. I end up doing stuff some times (like gathering a little bit of data someone gave me in an Excel spreadsheet) and I can't think of anything but "this would be so much easier in SQL". It's amazingly powerful, and it's cross-platform. If you learn it, it will work on Macs, PCs, Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, MSSQL, and quite a few others. There are some tiny differences (like some function names) but that's pretty easy. It's amazingly powerful.
SQL is a huge skill. If you can prove competency in it, there are a TON of programming jobs out there that will want you. Building e-commerce, inventory management, data analysis, tons. Everybody and their brother has some project that has (or should have) a database back end.
Learn SQL now. In all I read about programming when I was in college or high school, before I had a job, I learned quite a bit. I saw opinions that said I should learn assembly, Java, C++, Lisp, and others. But I don't really remember hearing so much about SQL being important. But it's a fantastic tool and a skill that should come in very handy.
Yes. That's all LILO, GRUB, NTLDR, and such do. They call the BIOS functions to read partition tables and such, load code from a specific place, and execute it.
You could easily install LILO on the last sector of a disk (or anywhere else, just a free sector you can protect from being used). Write a little tiny program that does nothing but read that sector into memory (having known the address ahead of time, finding that code is what makes GRUB and NTLDR slightly more complex than this), and execute it. LILO would then continue having no idea what happened before it.
Amazing little things, boot loaders. Check out the Wikipedia article on Master Boot Records. They talk about NTLDR where until XP/2K (when it got support for non-english error messages), the code was just a scant 139 bytes.
Read about some of them. LILO is simple (and kind of stupid) and fits in 512 bytes. GRUB is smarter, and works by loading more code that it finds using it's first stage (which is under 512 bytes). It's a little tiny OS that only uses BIOS calls to load another OS. That's why you can edit entires, add new ones, etc. That couldn't fit in 512 bytes (and still be useful on most computers).
What if someone wrote a super small bootable virus,
Yeah, like something that could fit in a 512 byte MBR...
, then the virus' initial form used Partition Magic-like functionality to write its own partition
Why bother?
and stick the virus on it then tell the computer before restarting to boot from that one.
That's what this does. It modifies the MBR to load the virus as a driver out of a pair of sectors.
Then the virus can do whatever it wants to the MBR or basically anything else on the drive cuz no files or anything would be open.
This already does whatever it wants. And the "files open" comment is non-sensical, the pre-boot environment has no concept of "open files", it's just a little 512 byte loader.
I'm pretty sure Windows can't protect the MBR if it isn't running.
There isn't much Windows (or any) OS can do when it isn't running.
If you read the article (it contains scary things like x86 assembly, I know, but you can skip that) you'd see that the describe this hooks into the load routines used by Windows. By intercepting these calls and redirecting them, it prevents you from overwriting the MBR or even detecting that it's changed (to a degree). To fix this you have to open a clean environment (like the recovery console off the Windows CD) and have it fix the MBR.
Amazing how even with all we've got, things go back to the same kind of viruses that were written back in the days of DOS 2.
I wonder if this would be so easily possible with EFI based booting. OS X uses it. Vista SP1 supports booting using EFI off disks don't partitioned with the old DOS partition format.
PS: Whoever modded the parent as informative either doesn't know what they're talking about, is drunk, or is in cahoots.
PPS: Sorry. I've been looking for an excuse to use the word "cahoots" all day.
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As you can probably guess (and people have said, such as on NPR just the other day)... he is a modern Ed Wood, except Wood's movies had a charm about them (sort of like a 2nd grade play) where Boll's are just bad (like a bad play at a real opera company).
Ignoring that they tend to use terrible writers, I can't help but wonder if they are just choosing the wrong games.
Mario doesn't really have a story, so it's not that surprising that it was hard to make a good movie out of that. Games like the Final Fantasy games or Mass Effect have good stories, but they would lose too much if you cut it down to even the length of a long film (2.5 hours).
What you need to do is set it in the universe. The Resident Evil movies got that part right. There is no reason those couldn't have been made into good movies. Get good writers, it could have worked.
Portal would be interesting. It has a great character, interesting special effects, but it's too short. You might be able to make an interesting mini-movie out of it (say a half-hour TV show?). I don't think you'd be able to make a decent length film (1.5 hours) out of what's there.
You could expand it. Start with a little of the back story of Aperture Science (maybe show the introduction as a new employee comes in?) As things go on you could see the guy work on GlaDOS a little and her development and as the tests on previous subjects. You move on to GlaDOS doing what she did and then finally Chell and her attempt to escape. Basically GlaDOS is the main character of the movie. I could see it working, but keeping that great dark humor balance as well as the creepiness balance through the whole movie would be an incredible challenge. I don't know how you'd fit in the description of the portal device ("man-sized ad-hoc quantum tunnel through physical space with possible applications as a shower curtain") without breaking any sense of reality. Since part of the mood of Portal comes from having no idea what is going on, the script would be a real departure in some ways which would make it even more challenging. I think we all know that GlaDOS could be the next HAL easily. HAL didn't have cake.
Set a movie in the world of Ivalice (from FF: Tactics/XII). Maybe something set in the Ratchet & Clank universe. Heck, make one of the Phoenix Wright cases into a comedy/drama. There are options.
Instead, producers find the biggest game they can (let's take GTA), then conceive a movie that fits in (a gangster plot!), then make it fit in more (we'll have him not own a car, he'll just take them when he needs one), then beat it with a bad script stick ("You can't tell me what to do, I've already committed Grand Theft Auto..."), then add some flashy effects (everything blows up, lots of blood) and there is nothing to differentiate the movie from any other bad formulaic summer movie except there is a video game's name on it.
Everywhere I've worked, there have been a few people who, if they started telecommuting, would make my life easier. The people you flat out just don't like, get annoyed by, etc.
But that's always a small minority. There is the person or people I don't want to have to deal with, the people I really like and would really miss, then everyone else. While I would be quite disappointed if some of the people I really liked stopped coming in (and since I'm in IT I think they would be some of the people most likely to use the option). Depending on the size of the group, losing a person or two in the "no strong feelings" category may or may not be noticed. But even if they aren't people that I spend much time with, as there were fewer and fewer of them I'd definitely start to miss them.
There are some ways you could make it work. Let them only have one telecommute day per week, and schedule them so a different group is off each day. But as more and more people go (especially percentage wise in a non-huge office) I could really see it having an effect on me (who isn't telecommuting). Heck, as a fellow telecommuter, I could see it still having an effect on me.
Wow. First, Shawn of the Dead was on this weekend. Then this story comes on. It's good they are building a more advanced way of modeling this, the previous way was rather simple.
Not my program, I found it years ago. There is a port of the 3D version on my site that I updated to run on OS X.
You make good points. On the cable issue, we'll just pay them a ton of money to buy what they already did. Or they can keep ownership and just be forced to let other use it (like phone lines).
Drivers licenses is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. I see so many people doing amazingly stupid things like texting while driving. Some places are passing laws against it, but I just think we should to something to make it more obvious that you can't go around doing stuff like that. There are other things that I would like as well (more restricted licenses for those under 21, for example). When you're 30 or so, there isn't much reason to make the license much tougher than it is now. But the younger you are, the harder it should be. How about mandatory defensive driving? Just an idea.
The marriage thing is another issue of mine. I see so many problems related to that, I think we should do something. I can't mandate you have to date for X years or something like that. But I think many people get married without realizing some of the problems that even a tiny bit of marriage counseling would bring up (like how big a deal your separate religions are, or how your step kid isn't going to mind you and you need to accept that) that I think this kind of stuff is important. The divorce part is because I see many people as being divorced because they don't know what else to do, or that it will get better if they keep struggling. These are here as a way of getting people to think about this decision much more than they might right now. The faith based part? I think that if someone is in their faith even a bit, then that will be more effective than secular counseling. You don't have to go faith based, I think it's just a good idea.
As for the mandatory civil service, you're right. They're not adults. Maybe we should actually move the age of majority back up. The idea behind this one is to fix some of those kids who are in school and don't care. They may not be old enough to choose some things (as you say), but by 10th grade they are more than capable of choosing to be disruptive and that they don't care about what they are being forced into (as they may see it). There isn't a point of forcing them to continue to attend classes when they might spend all their time not doing work and causing problems for teachers and other students who are interested in learning. If the kid is that committed, let's give them another option. Maybe they'll try it, see how tough life is with a blue collar job, and decide maybe they should go back on the track to college to get a better job. Maybe they'll like it. Maybe they'll just be a problem there too. I want to do something to help people like this, this was my best idea.
I know exactly how it works. As the president I can request anything I want. It's up to congress to make the actual law and pass it and all that. I said none of it would get past congress. My list is mostly a "if I was emperor" type, but President is as close as I can get to that happening, and that won't happen (since I have no intention of running, ever, at this point).
Forgot one more: The gold standard (or something like it). Stop this inventing money out of thin air stuff.
Here is what I can think of right now. I must say... this would never, ever, make it through congress.
As much as I want to dislike Ford for doing this, I'm with you. Shortly after reading this and realizing that the headline is sensationalized... I realized that the calendar is just like one Ford might sell only made by a third party who isn't paying Ford anything. No one cares that it's the something-something-car-club, they would be buying it for the images of the Mustang's design.
If I drew my own copies of my favorite Dilbert strips, could I sell a book of them? Seems like basically the same thing.
Now if the calendar has different cars (say it was 12 sports cars and the Mustang was just one) then I could see Ford being in the wrong. But the whole calendar seems to be taking advantage of them.
Really? I'd blame Netflix for using a de facto single platform codec. They could have used Theora, which is open. They could have used QuickTime, which has Windows support. They could have used RealPlayer (as horrid as that would be), because it's at least available on both platforms. There is also Flash which is immensely popular and multi-platform. Instead they chose the one that promised all the lock-in of Windows with all fun of Windows.
Don't blame Apple because their competitor who has been trying to squeeze them out of the market for 20+ years is trying to squeeze them out of the market. What makes you so sure Microsoft would even agree to it with any reasonable terms (you know, under $100 per computer).
Hell, Microsoft had a WMV codec for OS X. As OS X started getting popular they dropped it and farmed it out to a 3rd party who now sells it.
OK. Like I said, it was what I read somewhere and vaguely remembered. One of your sibling posts calls him just as qualified as other talking head endorsers, and that's a big part of my problem. I'd like the drug ads back off the air.
That's good, but I'd like to see them work on fixing advertising. I'm of the opinion that we should go back to the old stance (80s or so?) that drugs shouldn't be able to be advertised on TV. I think that would help quite a bit with healthcare costs. But I'd also like them to investigate the ads we have now. I remember reading something in the last week or so that someone was pushing them to do that over the Lipitor ads with Dr. Robert Jarvik, the inventor of the artificial heart, testifying about how good Lipitor is.
The problem is that he has never had a license to practice medicine in the US. He dropped out of a US medical school because of his grades and got his degree from a school outside this country. It's really questionable that he is qualified to talk about the drug.
I wish they'd work on advertising. So much of it is so blatantly wrong. Just deal with a few of the worst offenders, and the rest will self-correct before they get investigated.
OK. So I used the wrong spelling of affect.
I'm not talking about totalitarianism, and using government to stop people from doing things I don't like. I really hate that philosophy. What I'm saying is that the business should be free to make that policy if they want. Let the market sort it out. If the market stops working on this point, then the government steps in to regulate. The preemptive regulation to stop something that may be a problem, which at the same time reduces by liberty as a (hypothetical) business owner is what annoys me.
As an employer, I think I should be able to choose not to hire/retain people because they are drunks, or because they smoke. I'd say you can't use race as a deciding factor, after all you have no control about that. You shouldn't be able to base it on religion either, we've seen that abused far too many times in history. But if you aren't willing to stop a habit that annoys others, takes away your work time, make you sick more often, etc as smoking does, I think I should be able to use that as a criteria in my hiring decisions.
They shouldn't be able to say "no drinking". That's just a choice. But if you have something more serious going on (like a drinking problem) that's indicative of something more serious and could easily effect them. That's more why I would support this. I'm going to go back to that old swinging pendulum analogy. I see the pendulum as too far to one side (the you-cant-fire-them-oh-lets-get-them-help-even-when-they-don't-care side), and I wouldn't mind things going a little farther. This is also do a degree my less-government attitude. If it gets abused, then we can make it illegal. I'm not a big fan of outlawing things because they might maybe be abused later possibly.
I generally agree with you. Like I said I wouldn't propose or go out of my way to create this system, but I wouldn't vote it down. Frankly I think society is far too permissive of alcoholism and drunk driving, and I'd like to see that changed. I see such a system as something that may help there, and I support this particular instance. We may have many tough laws, but they usually aren't mandatory and we tend to error on the side of caution (it's only their first offense...) despite the incredible danger of a drunk in a car with two little kids running down the highway at 70+ MPH. I think we should be quite a bit tougher on drivers licenses in general, not just with regard to drunks.
Cars are just too dangerous to the public at large for how permissive we seem to be at times. Being a moron with a table saw you can hurt yourself and maybe someone else. Driving a car when you shouldn't it's easy to kill/maim 20+ people. And when some people do that (like the elderly who, in that case, clearly should have lost their license years ago) we often hear all the sorrow about them (poor guy, it was an accident, now he'll have to live with that) when it should be anger (who approved his license the last time?).
I agree with you, I'd like to see politicians stand up. I'd give them points for standing up against this if they did it as you said (that would show character). But I'd also like to see them stand up on the other side (like more frequent license renewals for the elderly, but many politicians won't because that's a big demographic for getting votes despite the public safety issue).
So? What's wrong with that? Why shouldn't a company be able to decide such a thing? Should "Bob's Morman Supply" not be able to say something like that? Would about "Bob's Office Supply"?
It may be illegal now (the ACLU would certainly argue for that), but I don't see why a company shouldn't be able to do that.
This is all fine with me. I can understand why many people wouldn't want this, and I wouldn't push it. But if we keep records to make it easier to convict drunk drivers or people who aren't supposed to be drinking (like perhaps because of some prior conviction where that was made a condition of probation). Those are both fine for me.
Banks care about money.
Banks care a lot about money.
Banks test them. They get contracts that probably say that if defects give money away, Diebold has to replace the money lost. Banks are willing to pay for a good ATM, not try to bid it out to the lowest priced person who comes along and cuts corners. If Diebold ATMs had this many problems, they wouldn't be in business long.
My only real question on this story is, how did the precincts differ other than the machines? Are the places that used the machines mostly urban? Is there something else that correlates that could explain the discrepancy, or does it appear to have no other correlating factors?
That's not wireless (RF) like he's talking about, that's inductive. It works on the same principal as a transformer. It only works under VERY short distances. If you lift your toothbrush out of it's charger by a 1/2", it probably won't work anymore.
An RF system would let you use the toothbrush without having it charged in a station. You could hang it from the ceiling with a piece of twine, turn it on, and let it run until something physically wears out.
I agree with the GPP, it's impractical. Inductive coupling (which I think is the same as magnetic being discussed) makes far more sense.
I'd think you'd have problems with RF, it'd be easy to waste power that way. The magnetic people mentioned in the article say they've hit 98.5%, which is great.
I'm not in the field. I'm not officially qualified to decide. But this is /.
Wireless (RF) worries me. You either have to confine it to a little beam (then why not just set the device down somewhere?) or pump a ton of power into it (most wasted). There are a few limited applications where it might make sense (the Wii, since we already know you'll be standing in front of the TV). I'm also worried about health concerns (really high frequencies can solve this, to a good degree) and interference (this is what I see as the biggest problem).
The idea of just setting a device down and having it charge seems good enough for me. It would work easily for keyboards and mice, cell phones, laptops, monitors, and many other thing. It's more efficient, and as the article mentions they can provide different amounts of power (like 5v to a cell phone and 12v to a hard drive). The guy who wrote the article worries about things like it erasing your credit cards or zapping you if you take a piece of metal near. This is easily solved by adding a tiny RF signal (like RFID) to detect devices. If you only supply power in the vicinity of that signal, then when someone sets a spoon down you won't fry them.
People have been working on this stuff for years. I hope they finally start getting it out there. It would be great to do something like be able to rearrange my desk (2 monitors, mouse, keyboard, laptop, other stuff) without having to bother plugging in or unplugging all those power cables. Add in a wireless version of HDMI or DVI or DisplayPort and all of a sudden things get really easy. But the best part would be being able to just put my phone on the counter (or desk or whatever) at night and have it change without me having to do anything. Very useful. Bigger batteries wouldn't be as important if you could easily charge devices anywhere and everywhere without having to carry and adapter and fumble for a free outlet.
You're right, the photo isn't proof (although it wouldn't surprise me if some people were dumb enough to take videos). That said, this could easily go further. Lets say you have these pictures that show 5 kids that seem to be drinking at a large party, and you can see 10 other students. You don't think that with just those pictures you could get at least one of the kids to admit what was going on there? Someone would, and the more kids involved the more likely it is.
I agree though. I've been trying to think of a way to prove under-age drinking with a photo, and I can't.
But even if no one admits it, that may be against the policy (the one for my high school said I couldn't even be at parties with alcohol, as I remember), and then you could just show it to the parents and let them take care of it however they want to.
My guess would be some teacher caught a student goofing around on that FaceBook page, recognized what was going on in the pictures, and that's where this came from. I agree the administrator has better things to do than search FaceBook for this.
The kids are morons (but what do you expect from a 15 year old with the chance at "fame"). The first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club. The 1/2th rule about Fight Club is don't take pictures and post them on the 'net.
Is this legal? I'd say... yes. Kids have no privacy. They aren't adults. They deserve to be punished if they broke the rules. Now I have two ideas at this point. If they violated a code of conduct that they signed (like for a sport), then they need to face the consequences. They chose to do it. If it's a private school, kick 'em out if you want if they violated the rules. If it's a public school and the kid isn't in any activities, you don't have any authority to punish them, since there isn't anything to bad them from.
Either way, if the pictures clearly show them drinking, those should be turned over to the police/DA. If they want to do something, they will. If they don't, it's over. But there are crimes there (drinking underage, drinking and driving probably, supplying alcohol to a minor, probably others).
But really, they need to learn their lesson. When you do something illegal/wrong... you don't document it and post that on the 'net for everyone to see. That's just plain stupid.
Oooh. It's faster. Wow. Didn't see that happening.
Did they fix the CPU overhead? Did they make a P2P version so that I don't need a computer to connect a camera to a hard drive and have it work? Basically, did they do anything to improve it for high-bandwidth applications (which is obviously what they're targeting) compared to FireWire?
The cable worries me some. I understand the drive for backwards compatibility, but it seems like they should make the cable more obviously different. It just looks like it will be too easy to accidentally use a USB 2 cable, not realize it, and then wonder why the device is running so slow. Just a little nub on the bottom of the connector would do it.
There are some basic things I can tell you. C/C++/ASM are good things to know. If you can understand a pointer, a pointer to a pointer, a list of pointers, references, pointers to references, references to pointers, and such then you will be far above many of your classmates. Even if you end up using Java (like I have) it's still good to know.
That said, I'd say learn SQL. I learned it in school, it was part of my curriculum. I was glad I learned it. It's an interesting way to look at things (since it works quite differently from something like C++). I didn't expect to use it too much. But I was good at it.
So I got my job which defiantly included needing to know SQL. And man I use SQL every day. I never thought I'd use it so much, even in a job that works with web applications that connect to databases. I write reports, queries, insert statements, all sorts of stuff. I end up doing stuff some times (like gathering a little bit of data someone gave me in an Excel spreadsheet) and I can't think of anything but "this would be so much easier in SQL". It's amazingly powerful, and it's cross-platform. If you learn it, it will work on Macs, PCs, Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, MSSQL, and quite a few others. There are some tiny differences (like some function names) but that's pretty easy. It's amazingly powerful.
SQL is a huge skill. If you can prove competency in it, there are a TON of programming jobs out there that will want you. Building e-commerce, inventory management, data analysis, tons. Everybody and their brother has some project that has (or should have) a database back end.
Learn SQL now. In all I read about programming when I was in college or high school, before I had a job, I learned quite a bit. I saw opinions that said I should learn assembly, Java, C++, Lisp, and others. But I don't really remember hearing so much about SQL being important. But it's a fantastic tool and a skill that should come in very handy.
Yes. That's all LILO, GRUB, NTLDR, and such do. They call the BIOS functions to read partition tables and such, load code from a specific place, and execute it.
You could easily install LILO on the last sector of a disk (or anywhere else, just a free sector you can protect from being used). Write a little tiny program that does nothing but read that sector into memory (having known the address ahead of time, finding that code is what makes GRUB and NTLDR slightly more complex than this), and execute it. LILO would then continue having no idea what happened before it.
Amazing little things, boot loaders. Check out the Wikipedia article on Master Boot Records. They talk about NTLDR where until XP/2K (when it got support for non-english error messages), the code was just a scant 139 bytes.
Read about some of them. LILO is simple (and kind of stupid) and fits in 512 bytes. GRUB is smarter, and works by loading more code that it finds using it's first stage (which is under 512 bytes). It's a little tiny OS that only uses BIOS calls to load another OS. That's why you can edit entires, add new ones, etc. That couldn't fit in 512 bytes (and still be useful on most computers).
Yeah, like something that could fit in a 512 byte MBR...
Why bother?
That's what this does. It modifies the MBR to load the virus as a driver out of a pair of sectors.
This already does whatever it wants. And the "files open" comment is non-sensical, the pre-boot environment has no concept of "open files", it's just a little 512 byte loader.
There isn't much Windows (or any) OS can do when it isn't running.
If you read the article (it contains scary things like x86 assembly, I know, but you can skip that) you'd see that the describe this hooks into the load routines used by Windows. By intercepting these calls and redirecting them, it prevents you from overwriting the MBR or even detecting that it's changed (to a degree). To fix this you have to open a clean environment (like the recovery console off the Windows CD) and have it fix the MBR.
Amazing how even with all we've got, things go back to the same kind of viruses that were written back in the days of DOS 2.
I wonder if this would be so easily possible with EFI based booting. OS X uses it. Vista SP1 supports booting using EFI off disks don't partitioned with the old DOS partition format.
PS: Whoever modded the parent as informative either doesn't know what they're talking about, is drunk, or is in cahoots.
PPS: Sorry. I've been looking for an excuse to use the word "cahoots" all day.