They also use these computers to perform automatic "checks" on people and some companies include personality tests in them.
Nothing as complex as a background check, but I worked a shitty job at a retail store for a a couple months after I graduated high school. They used a system that would place people in 3 different categories - red, yellow, and green.
If you have no credit, have lived out of the country for several years, or have moved x numbers of times in the last y years, the system will automatically flag you as "yellow". People with criminal convictions or really bad credit would be flagged as red. The hiring managers would basically never see these resumes unless there were no green resumes and they went into the system manually to pull them. In other words - the green application printed out right away, the yellow and red ones just stayed in the system. BTW, in virtually all of these machines, the source is closed. If someone wanted to discriminate against a certain race or ethnic group, that could easily be done since this information is input by the applicant during the application process. Not saying that it has happened, but saying that it can.
In my mind, the lack of new features in Vista isn't indicative of incompetence or anything like that, but is purely a business decision made by some bean counters. Why release a feature in one release when you can charge extra for it in the future in the next vesion of Vista? Microsoft has been developing (well, apparantly) quite a few things in the last few years and it wouldn't be a good financial move on their part to let all that money spent in development for the ~5 years since XP was released (yes, I know there was SP2, win 2k3 and they do have other software lines, so this isn't an entirely fair comparison) out in one release, but slowly trickle it out to the public in releases that they charge (whether it be single user licenses or agreements with businesses).
Well, to be fair, you can call some "articles" advertisements, but reporters "write" stories by copying down press releases on a fairly common basis, so this isn't anything too new.
If you're so inclined, AnyDVD will rip that shit out and go straight to the movie. I presume this could be combined with their DVD ripper. You could then have a disk for the kids while the original stays somewhere tucked safely away.
Of course, our whore government thinks that is illegal, but hey, it isn't like there aren't hundreds of bullshit laws that millions of people break every day.
HP won't (or wouldn't, when I worked there) sell you a motherboard for a laptop if unless you're authorized service provider. I was under the impression that every manufacturer wouldn't sell non-user replacable parts to non-ASP customers.
So you broke your laptop computer with a screwdriver, voided your warranty and they don't want to deal with you. Wow, how shocking. Do you really think any other laptop manufacturer would act differently?
BTW, if you dented your case when replacing the hard drive and memory, that should of have been enough to tell you that you shouldn't be given tools and expensive equipment at the same time.
Instead of a.22, something like a Kel-Tec P3AT can be carried. 6+1 rounds of.380 in a 7.2 oz package that is less than an inch thick and is very, very easily concealable. Here's a picture of mine beside my cell phone, pda, etc. It also happens to be pretty cheap at ~$200. It isn't a revolver (which is nice because it can shoot out of a pocket without jamming up - something like a SW 342PD would be a good choice for a small revolver) but it is tiny.
If you are going to carry, check out packing.org for information on ccw reciprocity.
Tasers are... well... the cheap ones are crap. Sure they look scary, but some really don't do all that much. Really, hitting someone with one of the cheap ones will just piss them off.
Taser does sell a civilian version, but it costs $300 more than the.380, is bigger, weighs more and shoots only once. It is legal in most places though - although it is becoming illegal in some as local governments start banning it. NJ has a ban on it as well.
Also, a surefire or similar flashlight is a good thing to have. Very bright and you can get their G2 model for cheap ($35ish).
Rubbing alcohol is great for cooling down. Burns if splashed in someone's eyes too;)
Even with number portability - some carriers (sprint was one when I checked) won't give you any incentive to continue with them ($200 rebate or whatever) after your contract has expired. You can get the discount - but you have to get a new number. Not sure why, it is easier and cheaper to go with another provider because of stuff like this, but sprint does what sprint does.
This is the same reason I prefer an 80,000 mile powertrain warranty over a 40,000 mile warranty when buying a car - not because any modern car is likely to last under 80,000 miles
I worked for GM as CAC manager for a couple months, trust me, that assumption is not one that you want to make. For other car companies, it may be advertising, for GM, it is something to strive for.
Umm... Sorry to break this to you bud, the majority of pirated content (if you're talking about tv shows and movies, you'd probably be right if you factored porn into the equation) is equal or better to the quality of DVD, especially when you're talking about stuff that was aired in HD. A pretty common format is 1080 hd content reduced to half its original size and compressed with xvid. The resulting file is superior to the quality of dvd. Output file size is 700mb, which isn't exactly a problem to transfer nowadays and, in case you're wondering, includes AC3 sound. Your point does hold true about huge file sizes - but even with enormous file sizes, 720p and 1080i (and some 1080p) content in mpeg 2 format is being traded on a fairly common basis. TV episodes are about 5.5 gigs each and movies are about double that, depending on runtime, which is a bit excessive, but not if you have something like fios or an oc3;) Quite a bit of stuff is being released in 720p, but encoded as an mpeg 4 stream, not mpeg 2. File size is ~1.5 gigs for a tv episode and the quality is quite acceptable - with some of this content, you can see where the cameraman screwed up and the focus was a bit off, etc, so I don't think increasing the resolution is of any more benefit. Hell, if you can see the pores in someone's face at the same time you see her breasts, do you really need more resolution? Movies encoded this way are about 4.5 gigs, which takes exactly the same amount of time to transfer as a single layer mpeg 2 dvd. Unreasonable? Might be, but people do download that stuff (regular dvds) on a fairly regular basis. I'm sort of sidestepping 1080i content, but I personally (and apparently many others) feel it looks like shit. The 1080p content does look nice and pretty though, but again, sometimes the additional resolution doesn't help. I'd rather not be able to notice out of focus cameras, crap on an actress's nose, an actress that looks like crap in HD because of the 5 pounds of makeup on her face, etc. Ignorance is bliss, I guess. To say nothing of the fact that codecs and encoding is evolving - although it isn't near the quality of a dvd, I've said on a few occasions something like "Holy fucking shit, that can't be the quality of a tv episode that is only 80 megs", and yet it is. Perfectly acceptable for a pocketpc or a standard tv. I fully expect this to keep up and keep file sizes down to a reasonable level.
Thanks for posting this. As someone whose [censored by NDA clause of settlement] PDA burst into flames while it was in my shirt pocket and scared the shit out of me, it surprises me that so many people are oblivious to the fact that LiIon cells can erupt in flames. Then again, I guess it doesn't happen that much anymore, although I learned that it used to be a serious problem.
Like you said, toner isn't exactly the most friendly substance either, when I was younger a couple of friends and I got a couple bottles of the stuff and had lots of fun making it explode and using it for mischief. Karma perhaps...
Trust me, two minutes with a scalpel and it would be in my frying pan, simmering with some fava beans while I drank a nice Chianti. Or I could do the Ed Gein thing.
What is the point? He'll have to pay court fees and spend hours, if not days, on this and when he gets them, the police won't do a damn thing. If, by some small miracle, the police catch the perp, there is virtually no chance of getting any money from the perp and the bank has more lawyers than he does (and $2000 isn't much when you're talking legal fees).
A call to a congressman or your local "news crew that deals with fraud" might help, but I'm guessing both will stay away from a situation like this.
Citibank is handling this just like you'd expect a credit card company would, with horrid customer service. If you're out of the country? Tough shit. Virtually all usage outside the USA will result in your card being automatically killed and the only way (apparantly) for to continue using your card is to have a new card shipped to your home address, activate the card from your home phone, and even then, their CSRs say that if you use it outside the usa, it may get automatically killed again. See one such story here.
You know, if this was bigger, it could be a good thing for everyone. Maybe then people would start taking things seriously. And although I usually don't think that we need new legislation, maybe in this case, it would be a good idea. I'd like to to see criminal penalties applied against the directors of companies for losing customer information in the same way people can go to the pokey for screwing up under SOX.
Then again, this breach isn't the worst we've heard about this week. 17 million records (names, phone numbers, addresses, e-mail addresses, IP addresses, logins, passwords, credit-card types and purchase amounts - everything except credit-card numbers) were discovered floating around the net. See here for details.
Oh, and if your card was used, good luck with trying to fix your credit The credit sytstem could use an overhaul.
every nite i pray on my knees that someone comes in to your offices and beats all you fuckholes to DEATH with blunt objects made of wood in the day tho because there arent that many of you during the night one day i hope god answers my prayers
If it's just a bullshit fee where Shaw is purposefully degrading service when it identifies VoIP protocols or ports only to restore service when the fee is paid, then I have a problem
They have no qualms about using packet filters to cripple many other protocols, so I wouldn't exactly be surprised.
Lies. 1. If you call in and mention VoIP, that will be the very first thing they suggest that you purchase. 2. People had "extreme" speeds in the past (actually, faster than what "extreme" is currently). Shaw crippled people's connections, and then had the gall to ask $10 a month to bring them up a little bit. Speeds were better and prices lower in 1998, and have gotten worse and worse since. 3. Isn't it funny how they offer this right as they unveil their service? We, of course, can't say for sure that they are degrading the QoS on "QoS Extortion Tax Not Paid" accounts, but it does seem like odd timing.
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They also use these computers to perform automatic "checks" on people and some companies include personality tests in them.
Nothing as complex as a background check, but I worked a shitty job at a retail store for a a couple months after I graduated high school. They used a system that would place people in 3 different categories - red, yellow, and green.
If you have no credit, have lived out of the country for several years, or have moved x numbers of times in the last y years, the system will automatically flag you as "yellow".
People with criminal convictions or really bad credit would be flagged as red.
The hiring managers would basically never see these resumes unless there were no green resumes and they went into the system manually to pull them. In other words - the green application printed out right away, the yellow and red ones just stayed in the system.
BTW, in virtually all of these machines, the source is closed. If someone wanted to discriminate against a certain race or ethnic group, that could easily be done since this information is input by the applicant during the application process. Not saying that it has happened, but saying that it can.
In my mind, the lack of new features in Vista isn't indicative of incompetence or anything like that, but is purely a business decision made by some bean counters.
Why release a feature in one release when you can charge extra for it in the future in the next vesion of Vista?
Microsoft has been developing (well, apparantly) quite a few things in the last few years and it wouldn't be a good financial move on their part to let all that money spent in development for the ~5 years since XP was released (yes, I know there was SP2, win 2k3 and they do have other software lines, so this isn't an entirely fair comparison) out in one release, but slowly trickle it out to the public in releases that they charge (whether it be single user licenses or agreements with businesses).
Well, to be fair, you can call some "articles" advertisements, but reporters "write" stories by copying down press releases on a fairly common basis, so this isn't anything too new.
If you're so inclined, AnyDVD will rip that shit out and go straight to the movie. I presume this could be combined with their DVD ripper. You could then have a disk for the kids while the original stays somewhere tucked safely away.
Of course, our whore government thinks that is illegal, but hey, it isn't like there aren't hundreds of bullshit laws that millions of people break every day.
$200 is "rather expensive"?
HP won't (or wouldn't, when I worked there) sell you a motherboard for a laptop if unless you're authorized service provider. I was under the impression that every manufacturer wouldn't sell non-user replacable parts to non-ASP customers.
So you broke your laptop computer with a screwdriver, voided your warranty and they don't want to deal with you.
Wow, how shocking.
Do you really think any other laptop manufacturer would act differently?
BTW, if you dented your case when replacing the hard drive and memory, that should of have been enough to tell you that you shouldn't be given tools and expensive equipment at the same time.
I'm pretty sure Lenovo pulled the sensors from the R series.
You'll have a problem bringing any type of pepper spray into Canada. A 12Ga flare pistol, however, is no problem. /go figure.
Haha, indeed. Old picture, I got rid of that randomly turning off and not turning on piece of shit a while ago.
Instead of a .22, something like a Kel-Tec P3AT can be carried. 6+1 rounds of .380 in a 7.2 oz package that is less than an inch thick and is very, very easily concealable.
.380, is bigger, weighs more and shoots only once. It is legal in most places though - although it is becoming illegal in some as local governments start banning it. NJ has a ban on it as well.
;)
Here's a picture of mine beside my cell phone, pda, etc.
It also happens to be pretty cheap at ~$200.
It isn't a revolver (which is nice because it can shoot out of a pocket without jamming up - something like a SW 342PD would be a good choice for a small revolver) but it is tiny.
If you are going to carry, check out packing.org for information on ccw reciprocity.
Tasers are... well... the cheap ones are crap. Sure they look scary, but some really don't do all that much. Really, hitting someone with one of the cheap ones will just piss them off.
Taser does sell a civilian version, but it costs $300 more than the
Also, a surefire or similar flashlight is a good thing to have. Very bright and you can get their G2 model for cheap ($35ish).
Rubbing alcohol is great for cooling down. Burns if splashed in someone's eyes too
Even with number portability - some carriers (sprint was one when I checked) won't give you any incentive to continue with them ($200 rebate or whatever) after your contract has expired. You can get the discount - but you have to get a new number.
Not sure why, it is easier and cheaper to go with another provider because of stuff like this, but sprint does what sprint does.
This is the same reason I prefer an 80,000 mile powertrain warranty over a 40,000 mile warranty when buying a car - not because any modern car is likely to last under 80,000 miles
I worked for GM as CAC manager for a couple months, trust me, that assumption is not one that you want to make.
For other car companies, it may be advertising, for GM, it is something to strive for.
50GB capacity versions of the same discs later in the year for $48 and $60 respectively.
Is is just me that thinks selling media for 2x the cost of a hard drive (if you calculate $/gig) stupid?
vlc is also quite a good player. Control left/right is a coarse way of going through a video, shift left / right is a little more fine tuned.
Umm... Sorry to break this to you bud, the majority of pirated content (if you're talking about tv shows and movies, you'd probably be right if you factored porn into the equation) is equal or better to the quality of DVD, especially when you're talking about stuff that was aired in HD. ;)
A pretty common format is 1080 hd content reduced to half its original size and compressed with xvid. The resulting file is superior to the quality of dvd. Output file size is 700mb, which isn't exactly a problem to transfer nowadays and, in case you're wondering, includes AC3 sound.
Your point does hold true about huge file sizes - but even with enormous file sizes, 720p and 1080i (and some 1080p) content in mpeg 2 format is being traded on a fairly common basis. TV episodes are about 5.5 gigs each and movies are about double that, depending on runtime, which is a bit excessive, but not if you have something like fios or an oc3
Quite a bit of stuff is being released in 720p, but encoded as an mpeg 4 stream, not mpeg 2. File size is ~1.5 gigs for a tv episode and the quality is quite acceptable - with some of this content, you can see where the cameraman screwed up and the focus was a bit off, etc, so I don't think increasing the resolution is of any more benefit. Hell, if you can see the pores in someone's face at the same time you see her breasts, do you really need more resolution?
Movies encoded this way are about 4.5 gigs, which takes exactly the same amount of time to transfer as a single layer mpeg 2 dvd. Unreasonable? Might be, but people do download that stuff (regular dvds) on a fairly regular basis.
I'm sort of sidestepping 1080i content, but I personally (and apparently many others) feel it looks like shit. The 1080p content does look nice and pretty though, but again, sometimes the additional resolution doesn't help. I'd rather not be able to notice out of focus cameras, crap on an actress's nose, an actress that looks like crap in HD because of the 5 pounds of makeup on her face, etc. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.
To say nothing of the fact that codecs and encoding is evolving - although it isn't near the quality of a dvd, I've said on a few occasions something like "Holy fucking shit, that can't be the quality of a tv episode that is only 80 megs", and yet it is. Perfectly acceptable for a pocketpc or a standard tv. I fully expect this to keep up and keep file sizes down to a reasonable level.
Yeah, but in my case, it was the original battery in a 3 week old PDA ;) Fun fun!
Thanks for posting this. As someone whose [censored by NDA clause of settlement] PDA burst into flames while it was in my shirt pocket and scared the shit out of me, it surprises me that so many people are oblivious to the fact that LiIon cells can erupt in flames. Then again, I guess it doesn't happen that much anymore, although I learned that it used to be a serious problem.
Like you said, toner isn't exactly the most friendly substance either, when I was younger a couple of friends and I got a couple bottles of the stuff and had lots of fun making it explode and using it for mischief. Karma perhaps...
Its a little more dificult to steal my face.
Trust me, two minutes with a scalpel and it would be in my frying pan, simmering with some fava beans while I drank a nice Chianti. Or I could do the Ed Gein thing.
What is the point? He'll have to pay court fees and spend hours, if not days, on this and when he gets them, the police won't do a damn thing. If, by some small miracle, the police catch the perp, there is virtually no chance of getting any money from the perp and the bank has more lawyers than he does (and $2000 isn't much when you're talking legal fees).
A call to a congressman or your local "news crew that deals with fraud" might help, but I'm guessing both will stay away from a situation like this.
Citibank is handling this just like you'd expect a credit card company would, with horrid customer service.
If you're out of the country? Tough shit. Virtually all usage outside the USA will result in your card being automatically killed and the only way (apparantly) for to continue using your card is to have a new card shipped to your home address, activate the card from your home phone, and even then, their CSRs say that if you use it outside the usa, it may get automatically killed again.
See one such story here.
You know, if this was bigger, it could be a good thing for everyone. Maybe then people would start taking things seriously. And although I usually don't think that we need new legislation, maybe in this case, it would be a good idea.
I'd like to to see criminal penalties applied against the directors of companies for losing customer information in the same way people can go to the pokey for screwing up under SOX.
Then again, this breach isn't the worst we've heard about this week. 17 million records (names, phone numbers, addresses, e-mail addresses, IP addresses, logins, passwords, credit-card types and purchase amounts - everything except credit-card numbers) were discovered floating around the net.
See here for details.
Oh, and if your card was used, good luck with trying to fix your credit
The credit sytstem could use an overhaul.
every nite i pray on my knees that someone comes in to your offices and beats all you fuckholes to DEATH with blunt objects made of wood
in the day tho because there arent that many of you during the night
one day i hope god answers my prayers
If it's just a bullshit fee where Shaw is purposefully degrading service when it identifies VoIP protocols or ports only to restore service when the fee is paid, then I have a problem
They have no qualms about using packet filters to cripple many other protocols, so I wouldn't exactly be surprised.
Shaw Cable = In Canada.
Lies.
1. If you call in and mention VoIP, that will be the very first thing they suggest that you purchase.
2. People had "extreme" speeds in the past (actually, faster than what "extreme" is currently). Shaw crippled people's connections, and then had the gall to ask $10 a month to bring them up a little bit. Speeds were better and prices lower in 1998, and have gotten worse and worse since.
3. Isn't it funny how they offer this right as they unveil their service? We, of course, can't say for sure that they are degrading the QoS on "QoS Extortion Tax Not Paid" accounts, but it does seem like odd timing.