First, I'll say that there's no one solution here. Autism is a tough thing to put into a single box and find a prescribed set of steps for. People with autism are still people, and we're all different in our approaches to the world around us.
That said, I totally get where you're coming from. My daughter is autstic, and we've spent an enormous amount of time and money on various therapies to help her interact more easily with the world around her. Notice that I didn't say, "change her," or, "cure her," or, "make her fit in." She's a wonderful person who just has a really hard time communicating with others and dealing with the sensory load that people live with all the time. I just want to help her develop the ability to compensate for that so she can have the opportunities to interact with others that she deserves.
But as you've found, it doesn't take long before you're a much better SLP, OT, PT, etc. than the people you're paying for that expertise and help. We've gone through countless therapists of various disciplines because while they had the credentials they had absolutely no practical experience or approach to dealing with autstic people. It's incredibly frustrating for me as a parent, and for my daughter, who really needs to build some long-term relationships with people but can't count on ever seeing the same providers because they either suck, are far too heavily booked because they don't suck, or burn out and go find something easier that pays better.
There are still further questions about whether any of the therapies are effective, since we've only got the one kid and there's no control group to measure against. She's smart and makes progress on her own, and we know how to effectively help her develop because we spend so much time with her. But is she getting any value out of a 45-minute OT session with somebody who's used to helping people learn to eat after a car accident? I have no idea.
But the one thing I do believe is important is to provide opportunities for social interaction. My daughter tends to ave more successful interactions with adults because they're patient and polite and understand that they're not dealing with a standard-issue kid. But it really breaks my heart to take her to a playground. She's cute and happy and wants to meet other kids, so she goes up to them and says, "Hi!" Then the other kid says hi. And then it all falls apart. She doesn't know how to get past that, and the other kids figure out that something weird is going on. They might say one or two more things, but then they give up and wander off. It's too big a barrier to overcome in a casual encounter, and they have better things to do.
Opportunities for mediated playdates are probably the best thing, and we're trying to do more of that. But at least for my girl, equipping her with a basic set of social skills to get past the introduction and on to some further interaction is the thing we struggle with most, and the one thing she needs more than anything else right now. Some of that is communication, but most of it is ritual and nonverbal queues. I think it can be taught - scripted at first, then more natural over time - and should be a priority.
In the end, as a parent, I want my daughter to be happy in life. She's destined to be weird/quirky/odd, and I think that's OK. Like many people here, I work in a field that has a large portion of people who fit that description and I appreciate that. If she chooses to be alone, that's one thing. But I'm going to do everything I can to help her get to the point where she can choose how and when to socialize and to find the people who make her happy and comfortable. Like the OP, I'm interested in hearing from those on the spectrum who are now adults, and their path to where they are now. But please remember that not all autistic people have that choice or capability. There's a selection bias that can't be avoided in soliciting that information, so interpret the responses accordingly.
Fairly high up the food chain in IT, actually. And while it's too late in this case, I'd say that any bank telling you that they don't have a secure method for exchanging sensitive data is not a bank you ought to be doing business with.
There's a whole raft of regulatory compliance and audit requirements that US financial institutions are subject to, and the one in question here is GLBA (Graham-Leach-Bliley Act), which governs how sensitive information must be handled. I'd place a call to the FFIEC and either the FDIC (if it's a bank) or the NCUA (if it's a credit union) and file a complaint. Trust me, regulators don't mess around when applying the smackdown to a bank for something like this.
The CFPB doesn't really have much to do with a bank until it's bigger than $10 Billion in assets, and anybody that big isn't making these mistakes. This is bush-league stuff and the bank in question could use a wake-up call in the form of a fine of MOU so they don't screw other people.
Seriously, fuck him. Having been on the receiving end of this kind of crap before, I'm fine with this clown going to jail. A public beating wouldn't disappoint me either.
People who set things up so they're the only ones who can make it work need to face the same kinds of penalties for malpractice in other fields. There is nothing that will make me get rid of an employee faster than job security shenanigans.
Good points. The thing is that the KS isn't asking for seed money, although that's another part that's kind of shady-looking. What they're saying is that they'll build the game for $1.1M, but if they get more then they'll make more content. But realistically, I'd expect them to need to add a digit before they had something they could ship. I know there's some economy by using UE4, but they still need to license it and pay for development, QA, etc.
As for how much money they have, you're right - I don't know how much they've spent on keeping the lights on while they do....well, what have they been doing for the past 10 years? There's probably something more to this than what we see here, considering they still ought to have a little bit of cred with the industry. It makes me go hmmm.
Honestly, that's not a lot of money to spend developing a game. I've run software projects on that much that were nowhere close to as involved as game development. So I'm a little suspicious about their projections there.
The other thing is this: these guys don't have a million dollars to drop on this? And no publisher was willing to give the guys who did Myst $1M to build this? Hoe about half? Something just doesn't sound right here.
But I'm in for $45. I'm loyal that way...they have definitely given me a bar tab's worth of fun over the years. I just hope they don't do another Uru.
About 4 years ago, I took a trip to Ethiopia. One guy I talked to there was the head of an aid organization that helped build infrastructure in the more rural parts of the country. He explained to me that while the Western countries like the US, Germany, the UK, etc donated money to local organizations, the Chinese preferred to come in and do the job themselves. It saves on the corruption and waste, and they get to build a positive impression themselves. So you see lots of Chinese companies there building roads, burying cable, building farms/industry, etc.
He told me they had the right idea. The Chinese are *investing* in Africa as opposed to donating to it. That's going to have a long-term impact on who has more influence in Africa. So yeah, they're going to build surveillance...they're building the infrastructure. If we wanted to stop them, we'd go start building too.
+1 dude. Anybody who thinks they're going to protect themselves, family, friends, or property from the government with their guns is living in a fantasy world. You might take a few cops/soldiers with you, but you're still going down. There's simply no scenario where you fend off govt forces and they go away and leave you alone.
I hear ya. We just had the initial eval for the IEP today, and while the school district people mean well it's pretty clear that we know more about treatment than they do. Based on my discussions with other parents, I'm not optimistic that the school system will do an adequate job. We're going to push for a lot in the IEP and then document actual delivery very closely. If they fail to deliver, NC has a law that says we can put our daughter in a private program at the state's expense. I don't like that option for a lot of reasons, but in the end my goal is to get my daughter the best care and services I can. I've got very few regrets in life, and don't want one of them to be that I didn't do everything I could to give her the best chance at a "normal" life.
I'm not sure what state you're in, but you may have a case if the school says that can't provide care for budget/scheduling reasons. That may be the reality, but the law as I understand it (IANAL, nor do I play one on TV) doesn't permit limitation of services based on availability. In short, if the IEP says your kid needs X speech therapy sessions/week then the school has to provide that or there are steps you can take to get that level of assistance. It's a pain, and it's not going to help you make friends with the people in your school district, but that's not the point. There's a pretty good set of rules and procedures in the IDEA act to make sure the right level of accommodation is being provided.
So I hope it works out for you and your girl. Thanks for doing all of that for her.
My daughter was diagnosed with PDD-NOS a year ago and turns 3 in January. She's adopted, so I don't know if her birth parents were "smart" or "geeky" but I can second everything else here. My wife and I are smart and geeky, respectively.
After talking with a lot of doctors and specialists over the past year, my feeling is not so much that the incidence of ASD is higher as much as it is that we're identifying it better now. But there are two things I know for sure: that early, intensive intervention is extremely important and that dealing with this disorder is just fucking heartbreaking. Our daughter is at the "mild" end of the spectrum, and we are very fortunate that we're able to afford the speech, occupational, and physical therapy as well as the many specialists who have been involved over the past year. My insurance through work is adequate for regular stuff, but totally sucks for getting treatment for Autism. As a result, we're out-of-pocket to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars just for the past 12 months and it's not looking like that's going to change. All we can do is advocate for her and make sure we exhaust every possible legitimate avenue for treatment and hope we can pull her far enough out of the hole she's in to make a difference.
Still, I can't stress strongly enough that early diagnosis and intervention is the best way to mitigate the effects of Autism. A lot of parents don't want to admit that there could be anything wrong with their child, which just makes things worse for everybody. We all want to think that our kids are perfect and all, but denying that there is a problem leads to bad decisions, lack of care, and much worse outcomes.
So good luck, anonymous dude. Make sure your kid gets a good IEP and starts in the school system at age 3. And keep up the work on all the therapies. Try to get as much ABA therapy as you can afford and stay away from the snake oil "amazing cure" crap. Like you, I have no idea what the future holds but I'm determined to do everything I can to help my daughter be happy and healthy.
They can't do that because they still need access to the LECs. If they were a pure VOIP service, that would be a possibility but because they have to interface with the voice carriers it's just not possible. This requires physical collocation and connections to the voice network at various points around the country.
As a result, they're physically tied to the USA. That is, unless they can convince all of their customers to change their local numbers to another country.
It was relative...the ThinkPads we were issuing were A20's, which IMHO were not good machines. I got more actual computing power and an extra-high resolution screen on the Dell so it was better for me and the work I was doing.
But you're right: ThinkPads are the shizznit. I own a couple of T-series (T23 and T43) and there's not another Windows laptop I'd own. I would buy a Macbook, but I really don't like touchpads. The IBM trackpoint is the way to go...at least for me. Besides, I can beat the hell out of my ThinkPad and it keeps on working. Dells (and most other brands I've had the displeasure of using) are flimsy or poorly constructed.
Look, I was in charge of IT at this company. My job was to keep people running and give them the tools they needed to do their jobs. The user in question could not have cared less if I had given her a ThinkPad, an exact-same replacement Dell, or an OLPC. Really...it was used for email and looking at pr0n. At least that's what the majority of the people in her department did all day.
So she got a brand new laptop and I got to use one that was somewhat more powerful and useful than the ones most people there had at the time. So freakin' what? I didn't defraud anybody. I didn't put it on eBay. The only (admittedly misplaced) trust violated here was that I trusted the readers of this post to understand WTF I was talking about.
I know it must be hard to live in a world where everybody wants to give you a wedgie and makes fun of your lack of personal hygiene. But rather than just lash out randomly at people as a way to vent your frustration, maybe you need to look in a mirror and see if you can figure out what's wrong with you and try to do something about it.
See that? I just called you a goober and don't even know if you are. I just inferred it from your post. I expect I'm probably right, but it's still not an exact science.
So go back under your bridge or wherever trolls live these days and STFU until you have something constructive to say.
About 5 years ago, I was doing IT work, and had to support a bunch of Dell laptops my employed had purchased prior to my starting there. the one in question was an Inspiron, don't remember the model number, but it was probably a P3-800 or so.
Anyway, the user was complaining about power issues with the laptop - things like it sudenly shutting down, starting up by itself and running the battery down, etc. Then out of the blue, she said, "and it's shocked me a couple of times." Like that's expected behavior.
I was somewhat skeptical about this, and figured it was a static problem or something unrelated but found out the harsh truth while I was on the support call with Dell. They had me do the usual bonehead stuff like do a hard reset, update the BIOS, remove/replace the battery, etc. I was typing on it and got zapped on the thumb with a serious shock. That's when I noticed the little scorch mark next to the right trackpad button. Looking down through the gap between the button and the case, I could see a little bit of metal from whatever was underneath. Enough charge was building up in there to arc to my hand, which can't be good.
The Dell support guy heard me yelp when I got shocked and asked me if everything was OK. I told him I just got a nasty shock from the laptop and he said, "can you hold for a minute please?"
I waited for about 2 minutes, and then some other guy came on the phone and said that they were sending out a replacement overnight and that I should return the other one right away. The replacement was a top-of-the-line Inspiron for the time, quite a step up from the one that zapped me. I figured it was a pretty good response.
So I issued the user a new Thinkpad from our closet and kept the nice Dell for myself. It worked out for everybody.
I would love to see a sequel to Jet Set Radio Future on a next-gen console. I really love JSRF and its earlier Jet Grind Radio sibling...good music, cool graphic style, and just a lot of fun. Apparently, I'm somewhat alone in this.
Also, how about a new Donkey Kong game? I guess we're not getting a good one, since Rare got absorbed, but I can dream can't I?
I think the filter must have broken after the upgrade...I still saw that.
Actually, I kind of miss the guy. It was so nice to see so many comments that agreed with each other. Say what you will about Katz, he united many of us Slashdotters in our distaste for his writing. Never have I seen so many ways to say STFU as in the comments for a JonKatz post.
I always figured he finally got the hint and got a job that didn't encourage his delusions of grandeur. Now he's got a movie about how he got a dog smarter than he is. Or crazier - ol' Jon's a zany dude. I'm just disappointed in the casting. I would have picked this guy instead. (sorry Bubbles!)
The MRI machines use super-conducting material cooled with liquid nitrogenUmm...no. MRI's are cooled with liquid helium. Much colder, and much more expensive. I used to work for an industrial gas company and we serviced several MRI centers. It was always a time-critical thing: as long as you kept liquid HE in them, they would stay cold. If an MRI runs out (delivery truck late or some such thing) it takes a lot more to bring the magnet back down to the right temp.
Helium is freakin' expensive too. We would go to extraordinary measures in order to keep a magnet from quenching because we were on the hook for the cost of cooling it back down again if we missed a delivery.
"On the way back down?" What's that supposed to mean? I can't stay there?
I'll just take my water and my covered wagon and settle up there...you guys can cook on the return trip if you like. I'll be busy testing zero-G alcohol abuse.
So encrypt the answers using a 1-way hash. If the intent here is to help you prove your identity on the site or recover from a forgotten password, why does any human need to know the answers?
Instead, these questions should be scrambled and compared against scrambled answers you provde later. That way, nobody can retreieve the answer. It's up to the web site operator to take this simple additional step, but it's a lot more secure.
About 5 years ago, I worked for a trucking company that was very heavily invested in token ring and would not consider switching to ethernet, no matter how compelling the argument was at that time. I can only imagine it's harder to justify staying on TR now, but it can't be cheap.
Its only advantage was that it could run at much higher utilization than ethernet without your network choking - we would see times where a ring would be running at 75% and that was no problem.
However, it was a real problem from a financial and operational standpoint. When we bought new PC's, we would rip out the ethernet cards and install Olicom TR cards we paid $180 each for - we got a good deal because we bought hundreds of them. Server-class cards were more - a lot more.
And we did get the 100Mb token ring switches, which was truly one of the more absurd things I have ever seen IT money spent on. I still don't have a clear idea how this was a good thing: you got a 100Mb token ring switch, which would create a ring on each port. Then you could plug exactly one device into each port, as long as it had a 100Mb token ring adapter. This was 5 years ago, and I remember that per port, it was price-competitive with Gig-E fiber.
Then there are the usual entertaining issues with drivers and growing the network. Need an extra PC at your desk? You can't just plug a hub in and go - you have to pull another cable from the wiring closet. You need certified drivers for your Windows cluster? How about a touch-screen network device for your truck terminals? A firewall? A NAS? No, you can't have any of those.
I know there are plenty of people who will swear by TR. You'll find the evolved version of this technology in FDDI rings - and it makes a lot of sense and works very well in that application. But as a LAN for your company, it sucks ass...technically, the concept is sound but nobody is developing it further and it takes a lot more specialized knowledge and maintenance overhead than ethernet. And every year that goes by makes it much more expensive to keep it than to switch to ethernet.
I turned down a job 3 years ago at a place that was still running TR - a mid-sized retail chain. They said they were starting to look in to ethernet, but were happy with their token rings. That was the deciding factor for me to keep looking...At this point, a company that isn't actively working to replace TR with something else has some serious management issues and I would wonder what else was lying inder the surface.
So if you can find a few cards and a MAU somewhere, experiment with it at home. But avoid it like the plague in a business setting. That's just my $.02 anyway.
So my score was 27ms. I guess that ain't a bad speed for a 37-year-old.
So does this mean that I am smart, or that I'm just dumb faster? Really, I think I would rather take a little longer to be more correct. It seems that there's plenty of historical evidence to show that the smart people aren't always the first to come up with an answer to a problem.
I guess if I was interested in buying whatevr it is that this guy is selling the I could figure it out. But according to the results of his test, I already have a faster brain than just about everybody. All I need is sharks with freakin' laser beams and I could take over the world!
Take a look at Corillian Intelligent Authenication. It performs 2-factor authentication without the need for a token. While it won't help you keep track of your existing key fobs, it's a good alternative to using those when you have a choice.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like that...always interested in learning. Thanks.
First, I'll say that there's no one solution here. Autism is a tough thing to put into a single box and find a prescribed set of steps for. People with autism are still people, and we're all different in our approaches to the world around us.
That said, I totally get where you're coming from. My daughter is autstic, and we've spent an enormous amount of time and money on various therapies to help her interact more easily with the world around her. Notice that I didn't say, "change her," or, "cure her," or, "make her fit in." She's a wonderful person who just has a really hard time communicating with others and dealing with the sensory load that people live with all the time. I just want to help her develop the ability to compensate for that so she can have the opportunities to interact with others that she deserves.
But as you've found, it doesn't take long before you're a much better SLP, OT, PT, etc. than the people you're paying for that expertise and help. We've gone through countless therapists of various disciplines because while they had the credentials they had absolutely no practical experience or approach to dealing with autstic people. It's incredibly frustrating for me as a parent, and for my daughter, who really needs to build some long-term relationships with people but can't count on ever seeing the same providers because they either suck, are far too heavily booked because they don't suck, or burn out and go find something easier that pays better.
There are still further questions about whether any of the therapies are effective, since we've only got the one kid and there's no control group to measure against. She's smart and makes progress on her own, and we know how to effectively help her develop because we spend so much time with her. But is she getting any value out of a 45-minute OT session with somebody who's used to helping people learn to eat after a car accident? I have no idea.
But the one thing I do believe is important is to provide opportunities for social interaction. My daughter tends to ave more successful interactions with adults because they're patient and polite and understand that they're not dealing with a standard-issue kid. But it really breaks my heart to take her to a playground. She's cute and happy and wants to meet other kids, so she goes up to them and says, "Hi!" Then the other kid says hi. And then it all falls apart. She doesn't know how to get past that, and the other kids figure out that something weird is going on. They might say one or two more things, but then they give up and wander off. It's too big a barrier to overcome in a casual encounter, and they have better things to do.
Opportunities for mediated playdates are probably the best thing, and we're trying to do more of that. But at least for my girl, equipping her with a basic set of social skills to get past the introduction and on to some further interaction is the thing we struggle with most, and the one thing she needs more than anything else right now. Some of that is communication, but most of it is ritual and nonverbal queues. I think it can be taught - scripted at first, then more natural over time - and should be a priority.
In the end, as a parent, I want my daughter to be happy in life. She's destined to be weird/quirky/odd, and I think that's OK. Like many people here, I work in a field that has a large portion of people who fit that description and I appreciate that. If she chooses to be alone, that's one thing. But I'm going to do everything I can to help her get to the point where she can choose how and when to socialize and to find the people who make her happy and comfortable. Like the OP, I'm interested in hearing from those on the spectrum who are now adults, and their path to where they are now. But please remember that not all autistic people have that choice or capability. There's a selection bias that can't be avoided in soliciting that information, so interpret the responses accordingly.
Fairly high up the food chain in IT, actually. And while it's too late in this case, I'd say that any bank telling you that they don't have a secure method for exchanging sensitive data is not a bank you ought to be doing business with.
There's a whole raft of regulatory compliance and audit requirements that US financial institutions are subject to, and the one in question here is GLBA (Graham-Leach-Bliley Act), which governs how sensitive information must be handled. I'd place a call to the FFIEC and either the FDIC (if it's a bank) or the NCUA (if it's a credit union) and file a complaint. Trust me, regulators don't mess around when applying the smackdown to a bank for something like this.
The CFPB doesn't really have much to do with a bank until it's bigger than $10 Billion in assets, and anybody that big isn't making these mistakes. This is bush-league stuff and the bank in question could use a wake-up call in the form of a fine of MOU so they don't screw other people.
Seriously, fuck him. Having been on the receiving end of this kind of crap before, I'm fine with this clown going to jail. A public beating wouldn't disappoint me either.
People who set things up so they're the only ones who can make it work need to face the same kinds of penalties for malpractice in other fields. There is nothing that will make me get rid of an employee faster than job security shenanigans.
Good points. The thing is that the KS isn't asking for seed money, although that's another part that's kind of shady-looking. What they're saying is that they'll build the game for $1.1M, but if they get more then they'll make more content. But realistically, I'd expect them to need to add a digit before they had something they could ship. I know there's some economy by using UE4, but they still need to license it and pay for development, QA, etc.
As for how much money they have, you're right - I don't know how much they've spent on keeping the lights on while they do....well, what have they been doing for the past 10 years? There's probably something more to this than what we see here, considering they still ought to have a little bit of cred with the industry. It makes me go hmmm.
Honestly, that's not a lot of money to spend developing a game. I've run software projects on that much that were nowhere close to as involved as game development. So I'm a little suspicious about their projections there.
The other thing is this: these guys don't have a million dollars to drop on this? And no publisher was willing to give the guys who did Myst $1M to build this? Hoe about half? Something just doesn't sound right here.
But I'm in for $45. I'm loyal that way...they have definitely given me a bar tab's worth of fun over the years. I just hope they don't do another Uru.
About 4 years ago, I took a trip to Ethiopia. One guy I talked to there was the head of an aid organization that helped build infrastructure in the more rural parts of the country. He explained to me that while the Western countries like the US, Germany, the UK, etc donated money to local organizations, the Chinese preferred to come in and do the job themselves. It saves on the corruption and waste, and they get to build a positive impression themselves. So you see lots of Chinese companies there building roads, burying cable, building farms/industry, etc.
He told me they had the right idea. The Chinese are *investing* in Africa as opposed to donating to it. That's going to have a long-term impact on who has more influence in Africa. So yeah, they're going to build surveillance...they're building the infrastructure. If we wanted to stop them, we'd go start building too.
I find that I feel small in the presence of cold nature.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...
*GASP*
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Thanks for the best laugh of the week. You should take back your meds.
+1 dude. Anybody who thinks they're going to protect themselves, family, friends, or property from the government with their guns is living in a fantasy world. You might take a few cops/soldiers with you, but you're still going down. There's simply no scenario where you fend off govt forces and they go away and leave you alone.
I hear ya. We just had the initial eval for the IEP today, and while the school district people mean well it's pretty clear that we know more about treatment than they do. Based on my discussions with other parents, I'm not optimistic that the school system will do an adequate job. We're going to push for a lot in the IEP and then document actual delivery very closely. If they fail to deliver, NC has a law that says we can put our daughter in a private program at the state's expense. I don't like that option for a lot of reasons, but in the end my goal is to get my daughter the best care and services I can. I've got very few regrets in life, and don't want one of them to be that I didn't do everything I could to give her the best chance at a "normal" life.
I'm not sure what state you're in, but you may have a case if the school says that can't provide care for budget/scheduling reasons. That may be the reality, but the law as I understand it (IANAL, nor do I play one on TV) doesn't permit limitation of services based on availability. In short, if the IEP says your kid needs X speech therapy sessions/week then the school has to provide that or there are steps you can take to get that level of assistance. It's a pain, and it's not going to help you make friends with the people in your school district, but that's not the point. There's a pretty good set of rules and procedures in the IDEA act to make sure the right level of accommodation is being provided.
So I hope it works out for you and your girl. Thanks for doing all of that for her.
My daughter was diagnosed with PDD-NOS a year ago and turns 3 in January. She's adopted, so I don't know if her birth parents were "smart" or "geeky" but I can second everything else here. My wife and I are smart and geeky, respectively.
After talking with a lot of doctors and specialists over the past year, my feeling is not so much that the incidence of ASD is higher as much as it is that we're identifying it better now. But there are two things I know for sure: that early, intensive intervention is extremely important and that dealing with this disorder is just fucking heartbreaking. Our daughter is at the "mild" end of the spectrum, and we are very fortunate that we're able to afford the speech, occupational, and physical therapy as well as the many specialists who have been involved over the past year. My insurance through work is adequate for regular stuff, but totally sucks for getting treatment for Autism. As a result, we're out-of-pocket to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars just for the past 12 months and it's not looking like that's going to change. All we can do is advocate for her and make sure we exhaust every possible legitimate avenue for treatment and hope we can pull her far enough out of the hole she's in to make a difference.
Still, I can't stress strongly enough that early diagnosis and intervention is the best way to mitigate the effects of Autism. A lot of parents don't want to admit that there could be anything wrong with their child, which just makes things worse for everybody. We all want to think that our kids are perfect and all, but denying that there is a problem leads to bad decisions, lack of care, and much worse outcomes.
So good luck, anonymous dude. Make sure your kid gets a good IEP and starts in the school system at age 3. And keep up the work on all the therapies. Try to get as much ABA therapy as you can afford and stay away from the snake oil "amazing cure" crap. Like you, I have no idea what the future holds but I'm determined to do everything I can to help my daughter be happy and healthy.
You might be. The first thing I thought of was vagina, followed closely by toilet seat. Once you get past that, it's just an airport.
They can't do that because they still need access to the LECs. If they were a pure VOIP service, that would be a possibility but because they have to interface with the voice carriers it's just not possible. This requires physical collocation and connections to the voice network at various points around the country.
As a result, they're physically tied to the USA. That is, unless they can convince all of their customers to change their local numbers to another country.
It was relative...the ThinkPads we were issuing were A20's, which IMHO were not good machines. I got more actual computing power and an extra-high resolution screen on the Dell so it was better for me and the work I was doing.
But you're right: ThinkPads are the shizznit. I own a couple of T-series (T23 and T43) and there's not another Windows laptop I'd own. I would buy a Macbook, but I really don't like touchpads. The IBM trackpoint is the way to go...at least for me. Besides, I can beat the hell out of my ThinkPad and it keeps on working. Dells (and most other brands I've had the displeasure of using) are flimsy or poorly constructed.
Ummm....what?
Look, I was in charge of IT at this company. My job was to keep people running and give them the tools they needed to do their jobs. The user in question could not have cared less if I had given her a ThinkPad, an exact-same replacement Dell, or an OLPC. Really...it was used for email and looking at pr0n. At least that's what the majority of the people in her department did all day.
So she got a brand new laptop and I got to use one that was somewhat more powerful and useful than the ones most people there had at the time. So freakin' what? I didn't defraud anybody. I didn't put it on eBay. The only (admittedly misplaced) trust violated here was that I trusted the readers of this post to understand WTF I was talking about.
I know it must be hard to live in a world where everybody wants to give you a wedgie and makes fun of your lack of personal hygiene. But rather than just lash out randomly at people as a way to vent your frustration, maybe you need to look in a mirror and see if you can figure out what's wrong with you and try to do something about it.
See that? I just called you a goober and don't even know if you are. I just inferred it from your post. I expect I'm probably right, but it's still not an exact science.
So go back under your bridge or wherever trolls live these days and STFU until you have something constructive to say.
About 5 years ago, I was doing IT work, and had to support a bunch of Dell laptops my employed had purchased prior to my starting there. the one in question was an Inspiron, don't remember the model number, but it was probably a P3-800 or so.
Anyway, the user was complaining about power issues with the laptop - things like it sudenly shutting down, starting up by itself and running the battery down, etc. Then out of the blue, she said, "and it's shocked me a couple of times." Like that's expected behavior.
I was somewhat skeptical about this, and figured it was a static problem or something unrelated but found out the harsh truth while I was on the support call with Dell. They had me do the usual bonehead stuff like do a hard reset, update the BIOS, remove/replace the battery, etc. I was typing on it and got zapped on the thumb with a serious shock. That's when I noticed the little scorch mark next to the right trackpad button. Looking down through the gap between the button and the case, I could see a little bit of metal from whatever was underneath. Enough charge was building up in there to arc to my hand, which can't be good.
The Dell support guy heard me yelp when I got shocked and asked me if everything was OK. I told him I just got a nasty shock from the laptop and he said, "can you hold for a minute please?"
I waited for about 2 minutes, and then some other guy came on the phone and said that they were sending out a replacement overnight and that I should return the other one right away. The replacement was a top-of-the-line Inspiron for the time, quite a step up from the one that zapped me. I figured it was a pretty good response.
So I issued the user a new Thinkpad from our closet and kept the nice Dell for myself. It worked out for everybody.
I would love to see a sequel to Jet Set Radio Future on a next-gen console. I really love JSRF and its earlier Jet Grind Radio sibling...good music, cool graphic style, and just a lot of fun. Apparently, I'm somewhat alone in this.
Also, how about a new Donkey Kong game? I guess we're not getting a good one, since Rare got absorbed, but I can dream can't I?
I think the filter must have broken after the upgrade...I still saw that.
Actually, I kind of miss the guy. It was so nice to see so many comments that agreed with each other. Say what you will about Katz, he united many of us Slashdotters in our distaste for his writing. Never have I seen so many ways to say STFU as in the comments for a JonKatz post.
I always figured he finally got the hint and got a job that didn't encourage his delusions of grandeur. Now he's got a movie about how he got a dog smarter than he is. Or crazier - ol' Jon's a zany dude. I'm just disappointed in the casting. I would have picked this guy instead. (sorry Bubbles!)
The MRI machines use super-conducting material cooled with liquid nitrogenUmm...no. MRI's are cooled with liquid helium. Much colder, and much more expensive. I used to work for an industrial gas company and we serviced several MRI centers. It was always a time-critical thing: as long as you kept liquid HE in them, they would stay cold. If an MRI runs out (delivery truck late or some such thing) it takes a lot more to bring the magnet back down to the right temp.
Helium is freakin' expensive too. We would go to extraordinary measures in order to keep a magnet from quenching because we were on the hook for the cost of cooling it back down again if we missed a delivery.
"On the way back down?" What's that supposed to mean? I can't stay there?
I'll just take my water and my covered wagon and settle up there...you guys can cook on the return trip if you like. I'll be busy testing zero-G alcohol abuse.
So encrypt the answers using a 1-way hash. If the intent here is to help you prove your identity on the site or recover from a forgotten password, why does any human need to know the answers?
Instead, these questions should be scrambled and compared against scrambled answers you provde later. That way, nobody can retreieve the answer. It's up to the web site operator to take this simple additional step, but it's a lot more secure.
About 5 years ago, I worked for a trucking company that was very heavily invested in token ring and would not consider switching to ethernet, no matter how compelling the argument was at that time. I can only imagine it's harder to justify staying on TR now, but it can't be cheap.
Its only advantage was that it could run at much higher utilization than ethernet without your network choking - we would see times where a ring would be running at 75% and that was no problem.
However, it was a real problem from a financial and operational standpoint. When we bought new PC's, we would rip out the ethernet cards and install Olicom TR cards we paid $180 each for - we got a good deal because we bought hundreds of them. Server-class cards were more - a lot more.
And we did get the 100Mb token ring switches, which was truly one of the more absurd things I have ever seen IT money spent on. I still don't have a clear idea how this was a good thing: you got a 100Mb token ring switch, which would create a ring on each port. Then you could plug exactly one device into each port, as long as it had a 100Mb token ring adapter. This was 5 years ago, and I remember that per port, it was price-competitive with Gig-E fiber.
Then there are the usual entertaining issues with drivers and growing the network. Need an extra PC at your desk? You can't just plug a hub in and go - you have to pull another cable from the wiring closet. You need certified drivers for your Windows cluster? How about a touch-screen network device for your truck terminals? A firewall? A NAS? No, you can't have any of those.
I know there are plenty of people who will swear by TR. You'll find the evolved version of this technology in FDDI rings - and it makes a lot of sense and works very well in that application. But as a LAN for your company, it sucks ass...technically, the concept is sound but nobody is developing it further and it takes a lot more specialized knowledge and maintenance overhead than ethernet. And every year that goes by makes it much more expensive to keep it than to switch to ethernet.
I turned down a job 3 years ago at a place that was still running TR - a mid-sized retail chain. They said they were starting to look in to ethernet, but were happy with their token rings. That was the deciding factor for me to keep looking...At this point, a company that isn't actively working to replace TR with something else has some serious management issues and I would wonder what else was lying inder the surface.
So if you can find a few cards and a MAU somewhere, experiment with it at home. But avoid it like the plague in a business setting. That's just my $.02 anyway.
So my score was 27ms. I guess that ain't a bad speed for a 37-year-old.
So does this mean that I am smart, or that I'm just dumb faster? Really, I think I would rather take a little longer to be more correct. It seems that there's plenty of historical evidence to show that the smart people aren't always the first to come up with an answer to a problem.
I guess if I was interested in buying whatevr it is that this guy is selling the I could figure it out. But according to the results of his test, I already have a faster brain than just about everybody. All I need is sharks with freakin' laser beams and I could take over the world!
Then again, maybe I should drink less coffee...
Disclaimer: I work for this company.
Take a look at Corillian Intelligent Authenication. It performs 2-factor authentication without the need for a token. While it won't help you keep track of your existing key fobs, it's a good alternative to using those when you have a choice.