The photos were presented in a slideshow, with one of them showing Lipton holding a can of Red Bull in one hand, and an arm draped around a girl bearing sorority letters.
Whilst Red Bull may not count as alcoholic, it is commonly accepted that sorority girls do.
Much like those famous toads, lick one and you can usually get a pretty decent contact high just from the alcohol and roofies that secrete through their skin.
I'd consider the undeserved stereotype argument but these are the same people who protested that SDSU's new sorority houses weren't being built close enough to the new frat houses and, in the state the girls intended to regularly get themselves in to, who knew what would happen to them as they staggered from one to another.
Here's how the genius program worked with regard to university places to study medicine in the UK...
University recruitment was non gender biased. It was simply a case of less women had the grades in hard sciences and the interest to apply than men did.
The universities got quotas.
With admissions largely based on grades, the only way to get the number of women up was to lower the requirements for women. Typically an A average for men became a B average for women.
Except then they had less able female students failing out of their courses at a much higher rate than more able men.
So they lowered the grade requirements through the whole course. If 90% was an A for a male student, 80% was good enough for a female to get an A.
Universities achieved their directive of educating as many females as males.
And then no one wanted to hire female doctors because they knew an "A" was much easier for women to achieve and thus they were less likely to be as well qualified as a male with a slightly lower grade.
This ended up screwing the bright female doctors. The ones who could get that same A grade entry, who kept getting 90%+, now had the same "A" that was considered worthless as the ones who got in on Bs and kept making 80%. Thus the bright female doctors got tarred by the same denial based system.
If you want to fix a problem, you have to fix it from the ground up. Don't ever lower entry and passing requirements for any subset. If you're finding out a subset don't apply as much and don't do as well, figure out what the root of that is and fix it.
Don't let women slack their way through science degrees and give them a meaningless certificate. Find out why science doesn't appeal to girls much earlier in their academic lives and challenge that.
Don't give half price admission to universities to someone because of their skin color. Look at what the roots of that skin color not getting to university really are. If a disproportionate number are failing because they're disproportionately coming from lower income areas and schools in those areas don't turn them out at the same levels as schools in good areas... address those schools. If the root cause goes deeper, look deeper. If their community doesn't value education, look at how to change that perception, rather than making a blanket racial based change way down the line.
As an aside, why do these programs always seem to only go one way? No one suggests nursing should have quotas to force the schools to lower entry requirements for males... it's accepted that more men aren't interested for reasons that kick in far earlier in life. Yet, if women aren't interested in a science degree... that's something that has to be forced on schools.
If you're really stupid enough to slap a quota based bandaid on a problem, rather than addressing underlying causes, at least be consistent enough to apply it to all course types. That's at least more consistent than just picking one minority (though, technically, there are slightly more women than men) that you feel is underserved and making the situation even more discriminatory, just in new ways.
Paying when you receive a message, makes no fucking sense.
It's even worse than that...
The basic account comes with precisely zero text messages included. Every one of them costs you 20c.
You activate your phone, they already start sending you texts. "Hey, here's a notification from us. By the way, we just paid ourselves 20c from your wallet to tell you this. Thanks. We'll be sure to send another in a few minutes."
Having spent quite a bit of time searching on line, as far as I can tell, there's absolutely no way to say, "That's cool, your system's a rip off. I don't want it."
They do have a relatively hidden url at mymessages.wireless.att.com but it crashes on your iPhone and, surprise, surprise, sends you a nice 20c text message to allow you to sign up. Even then though, it'll only disable certain types of texting.
At least, if you got charged for incoming calls, you could choose whether to pick up or not. With texts, you automatically receive them and have the 20c deducted whether you want the message or not.
So, you get a system that costs more per byte than it costs NASA to communicate with Mars, that you have to pay to receive as well as send, you can't selectively ignore messages from and not pay, and you can't even disable entirely.
When, like me, you have asshat friends who you've yelled at countless times to stop texting you and yet they can't wrap their idiotic heads around the idea, your only option is to keep changing your number... end, even then, AT&T's own systems will keep texting you and billing you for those texts.
And all this on a device that can handle far better messaging formats with its bundled, unlimited net access anyway? It's sickening.
Clearly, some aspects of games could be improved by having a better knowledge of average PC specs
PopCap's tracking of casual gamers says the average system has a fourteen year old Intel integrated graphic chipset and runs Windows 3.1. This completely confirm's PopCap's choice to go after low end systems.
Crytek's tracking of Crysis players says the average system has eleventy billion GeForce 14000s in SLi mode and eight quad core processors, running 64bit Vista. This completely confirm's Crytek's choice to only worry about high end systems.
Alternatively, when you're testing something that your product already has a barrier of entry for (or targets people who can't make any other barrier of entry), you're going to get people who match the choice you made as opposed to any legitimate indicator of average specs.
Much as I appreciate their doing it, w3schools have the same issue with their browser specs... If you target the dev community, your logs are generally going to show a significant swaying towards newer, more interesting browsers. That you find there aren't many sheep still on whatever Microsoft gives them tells you more about your own users than the "average" web user.
In other news, the Republicans asked everone attending their national conference if global warming mattered and discovered the average American really didn't care that much if it interfered with business. This was a shock to the Green Party who sampled their audience attendees and discovered there was nothing more important to the average American.
Yes, there are almighty drawbacks. Things aren't nearly as simple as management tend to believe.
However...
That doesn't mean the reverse isn't often true as well.
Just like 95% of drivers know they're in the top 50% of all drivers, I know this'll piss off a lot of indignant engineers who know they're far too smart to fall prey to this...
But, the truth is, a lot of engineers are absolutely terrible at picking the right tool for the job too.
The right tool is not "anything other than the tool I used last time because I know that one has lots of flaws now." Every tool has flaws. There being a devil you know doesn't mean the other option is a blessed saint. It just means you don't know its flaws yet.
I've watched countless engineers choose tool A, decide they hate A and want to use B because it solves X that they didn't like about A... Then decide B does Y badly so they move to C... Then discover C screws Z up but A has a new version that's supposedly much better. And then they repeat... Every time, writing lousy code because a decent tool that's poorly understood is often worse than a bad tool that you understand deeply enough to avoid most of the pitfalls of.
Conversely, the right tool is also not the one that you know and won't put down because you're scared of the learning curve and don't want to look bad compared to other engineers when you're safe and secure in your existing kingdom.
The right tool is also not the one that'll make your resume look really cool and cutting edge. Yes, it's often exciting to learn new skills and they make you look really advanced. Learning tends to have a diminishing rate of return. Say you can learn the first 50% of a language in a month. You can probably learn the next 25% in the next month. Two or three years in, you're hopefully smart enough to still be learning but you're only improving by fractions of a percent of what's out there each month. It's tempting to pick something new and learn 50% of a whole new language... but that doesn't actually make it the right tool.
Engineers also tend to be very bad at understanding what makes the business actually work. Yes, I know there's deep moral righteousness but, here's the interesting thing... if the business can't find anyone in the area to help you ship a product on time because you chose too obscure a tool... if the business goes bust because they're paying too much for trendy skillsets... it's still the wrong tool. If the business isn't in business anymore because the tool ignored financial realities, it's the wrong tool.
In short, there are a lot of ways that engineers tend to make very, very bad decisions about what a good tool is.
Yes, I know you're not one of those engineers. I know bean counters make even worse decisions. I know I need to go to hell for suggesting this.
But the right tool is often a combination of factors. Some engineers tend to get, some engineers tend to be very bad at getting, some managers tend to get, some managers tend to be very bad at getting.
Being open to identifying the flaws in decision making processes and finding ways to make better decisions is how we really get to the point of picking good tools. In some companies, for certain processes, that may mean standardized tools, in others it won't. Smart people are open to all ideas and pick the best from them for each situation.
The RFS may be used to read, delete, and alter data.
So, getting this straight... They have the right to modify data in ways that can't be [reasonably] detected... and then they can use this data to press charges?
"Of course not your honor! It was different data we changed. The incredibly convenient file that says, 'I am guilty, it's a fair cop, guv! Oh yeah, it was me!' was there all along."
You're on incredibly shaky ground when you allow the police to manufacture information where they may subsequently use information to support charges. As soon as one dirty cop gets caught manufacturing evidence, you've devalued the entire method for gaining it. How long before the standard defense becomes, "My client has never seen that file before. Given the police routinely add and modify files on people's computers, prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they didn't put it there themselves and then change the logs to simply make it look like my client did it."
I'm no biologist but, casting my mind back to riveting documentaries on the BBC...
Your body comes in contact with a new strain of a virus that it has no defense against. The virus moves in. The virus multiplies. Your body figures out how to fight it. Much of your feeling like crap is the process of your body fighting it.
If you get re-exposed in any kind of a short time frame, your body already knows how to produce the antibodies and doesn't get reinfected.
The reason you'll pick up multiple colds during a winter is because you're getting hit by multiple strains.
If re-exposure to the exact same strain was an issue, you'd have to burn your house down every time you got sick. Instead, the things you've come in to contact with are no risk to you, just to others who may not have immunity to that strain yet.
That being the case... Get over yourself, stop being a germophobe, use your laptop just fine.
If other people are using your laptop, they may have something to worry about. You're totally fine.
As for you using other people's stuff and being a raging germophobe, you can use sterilizing hand lotions after every usage... and you too can become one of the idiotic generation that try so hard to avoid any exposure that all they really achieve is having no built up immunity when things do get through.
Man up, get over your phobia, accept that getting sick is a normal part of building a tougher immune system, and get on with living.
Given that the idiot in Toronto was half naked in public and surfing kiddie porn yet got arrested for the stealing WiFi, this should be a perfectly watertight defense.
Its incredible a university would let this kind of equipment go to waste. You're not from the education world, are you.
Let me see if I can help explain...
Money comes in to education through grants. Grants are usually awarded to whoever can make the best case. You'll notice I didn't say "deserving" or "beneficial to mankind" case. The best case is often the one that's written by someone who knows how to game the system be it through politics or releasing sensationalist research that may not prove anything much to anyone.
Publishing articles are kinda nice. Publishing books is usefull for a little extra income from screwing your students who have to buy the latest version you update each year. Having the media pick up your research because you just claimed women are smarter than men and the secret to cold fusion powered cars that also run on water is far, far better.
Once you have this money, it's yours to do with as you wish. Just one thing. Don't ever, ever let it be seen that you didn't really need it. If that happens, how much budget do you think the university is going to give you on the years where your grant applications fail? How about those you beg for money from, next time? If you got money to buy a supercomputer, you need it, 24/7, until you declare it's obsolete. If you don't, they might ask why a pretty-nifty-computer wouldn't have worked just as well. And so, for that reason, no one else gets time on it. Hell, you might only need it because it turns out it's the perfect sized doorstop for a door you had... but let anyone think you don't need it and you're screwed in the magical world of academia.
It's in conflict with the notion of academia being "for the good of mankind" but no more so than the notion of government being "for the people." Both simply serve the people within it... researchers or politicians. The rest is set dressing to ensure others keep paying for it.
People with these personalities risk being shunned by others and shut out of relationships, leaving them without a mate, hungry and vulnerable to predators. It depends entirely on what element of "mate" you focus on.
Long term partner? Sure, they tend to lose those. But, in a darwinian sense, that hardly matters compared with...
To accept your genes and create the next generation with your genetic line rather than someone else's?
The narcisist who wants to pass their genes on doesn't need a loving relationship. Indeed, for the narcisist, what better than a woman who'll find them attractive, take their genes, then let someone else raise the child as their own?
Sure, they may be ostracized from society. Sure, they may have a harder time surviving. Sure, they may die younger. But, if they've already passed their genes on to several different women, they've likely out performed the monogamous men on a darwinian level.
Darwin doesn't care how comfortable your life is. Darwin cares whether, overall, you meet the requirement of passing on your genes. This whole "valued part of society, died at 80" thing is meaningless to Darwin if your competitor has happily bred with your wife at 20 and you've spent the next sixty years raising three generations of someone else's genetic line that are now populating the planet and passing on their traits.
This isn't flamebait, though I know I'm liable to get flamed for daring to think this way...
Any technique that is successful is rewarded and continues to grow.
Any technique that is unsuccessful is not rewarded and slowly dies out.
The sad truth is that spam works. Sure, 99.999% of people are smart enough to ignore your spam. But if you send a million coppies, that's still 100 people who are now giving you business you wouldn't otherwise have had.
IIRC, during the dotcom era, a new customer was considered worth about $100 (part of why people were given so much for free). If your cost of spamming is under $10,000 and you get 100 customers from it, it makes sense.
It's immoral, it's abusive, but it does work.
However, it only works anymore when the spammer is a more transient business. If they sell a thousand bottles of viagra and then disappear, it's a thousand bottles that a store with absolutely no reputation could never have sold. They then set up with a new name and repeat.
If you're a travel agent with an established reputation, the balance shifts. Now you have large numbers of people who treat you with contempt and will never do business with you and, unlike the traditional spammer, you can't just close down and put up a new storefront under a new name because you've spent years building your reputation with other customers and need to keep that identity.
I've always thought it's a massive mistake to tell kids that drugs are bad. They then try them, discover they're pretty fantastic, and ignore everything else you had to say on the subject. Much better to say, "Drugs are awesome in the short term but here are all of their costs and, no matter how clever you think you are, the costs do always creep up on people." That way, when they do experiment and they do discover they feel awesome right now, they're still aware you were telling the truth and the consequences really are coming.
In the same vein, saying spamming is a bad business technique ignores the reality that, morally acceptable, widely hated, or not, it's a very successful one.
You try telling your boss that spam is a "bad" technique and, if he's smart enough to realize the technique's obviously working for a lot of people, all you've done is undermine his value in what you have to say. The same goes if he tries anyway and gets a single new customer he wouldn't have already had and tells himself, "See, I knew he was wrong!"
It's far better to acknowledge all the ways it is successful... but then list the costs. Put it to him in terms of all the years he's invested in that business, building its reputation. Is he willing to destroy that in the local community, where he can't set up a new storefront like the online guys, just to get a few thousand in revenue and several hundred in profits?
Phrased as, "Is all of the work you've done to build this business' reputation worth less than $1,000" may sell it very differently.
Otherwise you're just a pussy waiting to be taken advantage of. Fail for lack of experience with history.
Name one occupying power that has EVER succeeded by fighting geurilla resistance through their entitlement to play just as rough as the other guy.
Now I'll name many that failed: England in the American colonies, France in Vietnam, America in Vietnam, USSR in Afghanistan, England in 70's/80's/early 90's Northern Ireland, America in Iraq.
What happens, every single time, is that the occupying force captures a bunch of bad guys by "not being pussies" and breaking the rules, leveling the playing field, etc. They then turn ten times as many of the population in the country and surrounding areas against them. Catching one doesn't do much for you if your technique makes ten.
Now, to benefit from the wisdom of Mo Mowlam, let's try a different technique. Let's say, "It doesn't matter what they do to us. We will always act with honor and dignity."
Within five years of that policy in Northern Ireland, a Catholic population that offered safe havens to the IRA because they were so outraged by British actions had started to see the IRA for the sick fucks they often were and turned against them. It's easy to turn a blind eye to blowing up kids when "the other guys" are "evil", it's much harder when they're the enemy but still honorable. Yes, the Real IRA has splintered off, yes, there's still minor violence, but compared to what the situation was like during and after internment, where the British tried to stop being pussies and play just as dirty, it's night and day.
If you or I or anyone in the United States went and planted landmines, and there was a videotape of the crime, we would go to jail for a very long time. Fair trial or not. I'll reword that slightly:
If you or I or any [other adult] in the United States...
If a fourteen year old kid was pulled out of school, moved away from all of his friends, put in a back-hills white-power fundamentalist camp by his father who exerted parental pressure on that child to plant landmines on video as part of his father's friends' terrorist campaign against the U.S., and was captured at fifteen... You'd have a bitch of a time a) portraying it as anything other than child abuse and b) getting him tried as an adult.
Amy Fisher was two years older, under significantly less pressure, and there was proof her attack actually injured someone (as opposed to a video of her doing something that could). She got 5-15 years and served seven. By that yardstick, he'd be out by now.
But it's worth looking at another way of describing our wonderful nation which is, of course, completely "right" because it's "us" not some other "bad guys":
Do we really want a country that's... invaded two other nations in the last decade (at times against the UN's will); set off civil wars in other nations; ignores the Geneva Convention when it doesn't suit it; has a long history of providing arms to nations/factions it later fights (Vietnamese during WWII, Taleban against the Russians, F-14s and nuclear plants to pre-revolutionary Iran, "We know they have WMDs, we still have the receipts" for Iraq); best of all, was one half of the nuclear arms race that was the greatest threat to all life on our planet for the last sixty years; and finally a nation that's stated its intent to ignore weapons treaties and start testing a new breed of tactical nukes... to have more nuclear plans?
The digital designs, found in heavily encrypted computer files in Switzerland, are believed to be in the possession of the US authorities Great! They're the last people we need to have even more nuclear weapons.
Intel has a point: releasing documentation on a non finalized standard creates a fluster-cluck of bad implementations that aren't necessarily compatible with each other. IIRC, isn't that what's happened to 802.11n, pre-n, draft-n, n-ready, looks a bit like n in a dress, MIMO, etc. which just confuse the crap out of a consumer already pissed at USB 2.0 HiSpeed and USB 2.0 FullSpeed crap.
nVidia has a point: Intel not telling anyone else until the last moment would, indeed, give Intel an unfair first mover advantage.
Obvious solution: Release the pre and post release specs with an agreement attached that anyone wanting a copy has to sign. An amount of time that gives everyone a fair chance to get product ready is picked after final specs are chosen. Anyone gaining access to the specs agrees not to release until that time period has passed. Now no one releases incompatible hardware and no one gets an unfair first mover advantage.
The worst part is that once they realize the guy they are holding isn't an eviiiiiil terrorist, they don't release them, because they would speak of the treatment they recieved, so they keep 'em, forever, without charges.
Some of these people were kidnapped by warlords, and handed over for a large sum of money. Such as Omar Khadr?
A fifteen year old Canadian boy whose father was a terrorist sympathizer and took him to Afghanistan. Without his father's knowledge, other men took him to where a firefight broke out. The hut was attacked from the air but Khadr survived, wounded and blinded in one eye. Kneeling and unarmed, he was then shot twice in the back.
He was stabilized then tortured before allowed to fully heal.
For those of you who like saying, "He was a terrorist, he deserved it." Take a look at this picture. Be warned. It shows what a fifteen year old Canadian kid who's just been blown up and shot looks like. Now ask yourself how good you feel that your people then tortured him.
By any reasonable standard, he was a child soldier, pushed in to things by his father. Torture is sick. Torturing a wounded child is contemptible beyond any possible standard of humanity.
My guess at the main reason they don't want him free (trial would lead to it due to "fruit of a poisoned branch" meaning all of the torture based evidence would have to be tossed)? Imagine how well that kid, along with that photo, telling how he was tortured when he should have been rehabilitated like any other child soldier, would play when he went on Oprah?
In the future, a hacker collective called SkyNet will create a robot that travels back in time to kill John Conyers mother before he's even born, invalidating the problem. That robot will likely later become a state governor somewhere too.
The problem is America picks heavy and cheap without bothering with the safe.
Take a look at this picture. Same speed. Same impact.
The Mini crumpled its whole engine bay. A total write-off. But the passenger compartment is barely touched.
The F-150 has a beautifully intact engine. It's unfortunately inside the cab where the people-puree would be oozing out.
Add on pickups having a consistently 20% higher fatality rate per million miles driven and you suddenly realize that stupid engineering combined with being in a hulking great target that can't get out of the way really doesn't compete with a small, light, quick to accelerate car that's simply not where the accident happens in the first place.
Case in point: About two weeks ago, my wife was in her Mini Cooper S in a parking lot, looking for a space. A Dodge (oxymoron if ever there was one) Ram (ah, far more accurate) reversed out without looking, straight at her. Had she been in an SUV, the back end of the Dodge would have gone through the side of it before the idiot had time to react and hit the brakes. The Dodge would have been trashed, she'd be dead or in a coma from the injuries. In the Mini, he put her foot down and was somewhere else while her SUV driving friend in the passenger seat asked, "How the hell did you do that?"
So, given the choice, I'd rather be in a well built car that folds the parts I'm not in when it gets hit, light enough to avoid more of the accidents anyway, than the hunk of American steel that deforms that steel in to right where I'm sitting.
Given they're already partnering with the MPAA for "Respect Copyrights" patches, surely they should be their first port of call rather than those evil open source pirates?
When literature for your merit badges contains text like, "There are peer to peer groups who offer legal downloads and those who offer illegal downloads. Make a list of both. Suggest ways to detect peer to peer software like the MPAA Parent File Scan." it would be kind of hypocritical to then advocate software that's liable to be built off the kinds of tools, by the kinds of evil people, another badge already warns about.
A huge part of the BSA is a great and honorable institution. But when it comes to institutionalizing homophobia, forcing religious beliefs and teaming up with corporate entities that demonize whole communities, it's probably not the best time to go asking for those communities for help.
Slashdot Mirror
The photos were presented in a slideshow, with one of them showing Lipton holding a can of Red Bull in one hand, and an arm draped around a girl bearing sorority letters.
Whilst Red Bull may not count as alcoholic, it is commonly accepted that sorority girls do.
Much like those famous toads, lick one and you can usually get a pretty decent contact high just from the alcohol and roofies that secrete through their skin.
I'd consider the undeserved stereotype argument but these are the same people who protested that SDSU's new sorority houses weren't being built close enough to the new frat houses and, in the state the girls intended to regularly get themselves in to, who knew what would happen to them as they staggered from one to another.
Or was it? Maybe they just want you to think it was your idea?
Here's how the genius program worked with regard to university places to study medicine in the UK...
University recruitment was non gender biased. It was simply a case of less women had the grades in hard sciences and the interest to apply than men did.
The universities got quotas.
With admissions largely based on grades, the only way to get the number of women up was to lower the requirements for women. Typically an A average for men became a B average for women.
Except then they had less able female students failing out of their courses at a much higher rate than more able men.
So they lowered the grade requirements through the whole course. If 90% was an A for a male student, 80% was good enough for a female to get an A.
Universities achieved their directive of educating as many females as males.
And then no one wanted to hire female doctors because they knew an "A" was much easier for women to achieve and thus they were less likely to be as well qualified as a male with a slightly lower grade.
This ended up screwing the bright female doctors. The ones who could get that same A grade entry, who kept getting 90%+, now had the same "A" that was considered worthless as the ones who got in on Bs and kept making 80%. Thus the bright female doctors got tarred by the same denial based system.
If you want to fix a problem, you have to fix it from the ground up. Don't ever lower entry and passing requirements for any subset. If you're finding out a subset don't apply as much and don't do as well, figure out what the root of that is and fix it.
Don't let women slack their way through science degrees and give them a meaningless certificate. Find out why science doesn't appeal to girls much earlier in their academic lives and challenge that.
Don't give half price admission to universities to someone because of their skin color. Look at what the roots of that skin color not getting to university really are. If a disproportionate number are failing because they're disproportionately coming from lower income areas and schools in those areas don't turn them out at the same levels as schools in good areas... address those schools. If the root cause goes deeper, look deeper. If their community doesn't value education, look at how to change that perception, rather than making a blanket racial based change way down the line.
As an aside, why do these programs always seem to only go one way? No one suggests nursing should have quotas to force the schools to lower entry requirements for males... it's accepted that more men aren't interested for reasons that kick in far earlier in life. Yet, if women aren't interested in a science degree... that's something that has to be forced on schools.
If you're really stupid enough to slap a quota based bandaid on a problem, rather than addressing underlying causes, at least be consistent enough to apply it to all course types. That's at least more consistent than just picking one minority (though, technically, there are slightly more women than men) that you feel is underserved and making the situation even more discriminatory, just in new ways.
Paying when you receive a message, makes no fucking sense.
It's even worse than that...
The basic account comes with precisely zero text messages included. Every one of them costs you 20c.
You activate your phone, they already start sending you texts. "Hey, here's a notification from us. By the way, we just paid ourselves 20c from your wallet to tell you this. Thanks. We'll be sure to send another in a few minutes."
Having spent quite a bit of time searching on line, as far as I can tell, there's absolutely no way to say, "That's cool, your system's a rip off. I don't want it."
They do have a relatively hidden url at mymessages.wireless.att.com but it crashes on your iPhone and, surprise, surprise, sends you a nice 20c text message to allow you to sign up. Even then though, it'll only disable certain types of texting.
At least, if you got charged for incoming calls, you could choose whether to pick up or not. With texts, you automatically receive them and have the 20c deducted whether you want the message or not.
So, you get a system that costs more per byte than it costs NASA to communicate with Mars, that you have to pay to receive as well as send, you can't selectively ignore messages from and not pay, and you can't even disable entirely.
When, like me, you have asshat friends who you've yelled at countless times to stop texting you and yet they can't wrap their idiotic heads around the idea, your only option is to keep changing your number... end, even then, AT&T's own systems will keep texting you and billing you for those texts.
And all this on a device that can handle far better messaging formats with its bundled, unlimited net access anyway? It's sickening.
Clearly, some aspects of games could be improved by having a better knowledge of average PC specs
PopCap's tracking of casual gamers says the average system has a fourteen year old Intel integrated graphic chipset and runs Windows 3.1. This completely confirm's PopCap's choice to go after low end systems.
Crytek's tracking of Crysis players says the average system has eleventy billion GeForce 14000s in SLi mode and eight quad core processors, running 64bit Vista. This completely confirm's Crytek's choice to only worry about high end systems.
Alternatively, when you're testing something that your product already has a barrier of entry for (or targets people who can't make any other barrier of entry), you're going to get people who match the choice you made as opposed to any legitimate indicator of average specs.
Much as I appreciate their doing it, w3schools have the same issue with their browser specs... If you target the dev community, your logs are generally going to show a significant swaying towards newer, more interesting browsers. That you find there aren't many sheep still on whatever Microsoft gives them tells you more about your own users than the "average" web user.
In other news, the Republicans asked everone attending their national conference if global warming mattered and discovered the average American really didn't care that much if it interfered with business. This was a shock to the Green Party who sampled their audience attendees and discovered there was nothing more important to the average American.
Yes, there are almighty drawbacks. Things aren't nearly as simple as management tend to believe.
However...
That doesn't mean the reverse isn't often true as well.
Just like 95% of drivers know they're in the top 50% of all drivers, I know this'll piss off a lot of indignant engineers who know they're far too smart to fall prey to this...
But, the truth is, a lot of engineers are absolutely terrible at picking the right tool for the job too.
The right tool is not "anything other than the tool I used last time because I know that one has lots of flaws now." Every tool has flaws. There being a devil you know doesn't mean the other option is a blessed saint. It just means you don't know its flaws yet.
I've watched countless engineers choose tool A, decide they hate A and want to use B because it solves X that they didn't like about A... Then decide B does Y badly so they move to C... Then discover C screws Z up but A has a new version that's supposedly much better. And then they repeat... Every time, writing lousy code because a decent tool that's poorly understood is often worse than a bad tool that you understand deeply enough to avoid most of the pitfalls of.
Conversely, the right tool is also not the one that you know and won't put down because you're scared of the learning curve and don't want to look bad compared to other engineers when you're safe and secure in your existing kingdom.
The right tool is also not the one that'll make your resume look really cool and cutting edge. Yes, it's often exciting to learn new skills and they make you look really advanced. Learning tends to have a diminishing rate of return. Say you can learn the first 50% of a language in a month. You can probably learn the next 25% in the next month. Two or three years in, you're hopefully smart enough to still be learning but you're only improving by fractions of a percent of what's out there each month. It's tempting to pick something new and learn 50% of a whole new language... but that doesn't actually make it the right tool.
Engineers also tend to be very bad at understanding what makes the business actually work. Yes, I know there's deep moral righteousness but, here's the interesting thing... if the business can't find anyone in the area to help you ship a product on time because you chose too obscure a tool... if the business goes bust because they're paying too much for trendy skillsets... it's still the wrong tool. If the business isn't in business anymore because the tool ignored financial realities, it's the wrong tool.
In short, there are a lot of ways that engineers tend to make very, very bad decisions about what a good tool is.
Yes, I know you're not one of those engineers. I know bean counters make even worse decisions. I know I need to go to hell for suggesting this.
But the right tool is often a combination of factors. Some engineers tend to get, some engineers tend to be very bad at getting, some managers tend to get, some managers tend to be very bad at getting.
Being open to identifying the flaws in decision making processes and finding ways to make better decisions is how we really get to the point of picking good tools. In some companies, for certain processes, that may mean standardized tools, in others it won't. Smart people are open to all ideas and pick the best from them for each situation.
The RFS may be used to read, delete, and alter data.
So, getting this straight... They have the right to modify data in ways that can't be [reasonably] detected... and then they can use this data to press charges?
"Of course not your honor! It was different data we changed. The incredibly convenient file that says, 'I am guilty, it's a fair cop, guv! Oh yeah, it was me!' was there all along."
You're on incredibly shaky ground when you allow the police to manufacture information where they may subsequently use information to support charges. As soon as one dirty cop gets caught manufacturing evidence, you've devalued the entire method for gaining it. How long before the standard defense becomes, "My client has never seen that file before. Given the police routinely add and modify files on people's computers, prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they didn't put it there themselves and then change the logs to simply make it look like my client did it."
(or worse, "Apple-user flu")
Apple-user viruses don't exist. Something to do with them not having enough friends for a critical mass of viruses to form. ;)
But they do generally have awesome haircuts.
the icky influenza virus
How can you say that about this cute little guy?!
I'm no biologist but, casting my mind back to riveting documentaries on the BBC...
Your body comes in contact with a new strain of a virus that it has no defense against. The virus moves in. The virus multiplies. Your body figures out how to fight it. Much of your feeling like crap is the process of your body fighting it.
If you get re-exposed in any kind of a short time frame, your body already knows how to produce the antibodies and doesn't get reinfected.
The reason you'll pick up multiple colds during a winter is because you're getting hit by multiple strains.
If re-exposure to the exact same strain was an issue, you'd have to burn your house down every time you got sick. Instead, the things you've come in to contact with are no risk to you, just to others who may not have immunity to that strain yet.
That being the case... Get over yourself, stop being a germophobe, use your laptop just fine.
If other people are using your laptop, they may have something to worry about. You're totally fine.
As for you using other people's stuff and being a raging germophobe, you can use sterilizing hand lotions after every usage... and you too can become one of the idiotic generation that try so hard to avoid any exposure that all they really achieve is having no built up immunity when things do get through.
Man up, get over your phobia, accept that getting sick is a normal part of building a tougher immune system, and get on with living.
"No officer, I'm not stealing WiFi while sitting in my car with my pants off. I just bought a Chrysler."
Given that the idiot in Toronto was half naked in public and surfing kiddie porn yet got arrested for the stealing WiFi, this should be a perfectly watertight defense.
You may notice: I am not a lawyer.
Let me see if I can help explain...
Money comes in to education through grants. Grants are usually awarded to whoever can make the best case. You'll notice I didn't say "deserving" or "beneficial to mankind" case. The best case is often the one that's written by someone who knows how to game the system be it through politics or releasing sensationalist research that may not prove anything much to anyone.
Publishing articles are kinda nice. Publishing books is usefull for a little extra income from screwing your students who have to buy the latest version you update each year. Having the media pick up your research because you just claimed women are smarter than men and the secret to cold fusion powered cars that also run on water is far, far better.
Once you have this money, it's yours to do with as you wish. Just one thing. Don't ever, ever let it be seen that you didn't really need it. If that happens, how much budget do you think the university is going to give you on the years where your grant applications fail? How about those you beg for money from, next time? If you got money to buy a supercomputer, you need it, 24/7, until you declare it's obsolete. If you don't, they might ask why a pretty-nifty-computer wouldn't have worked just as well. And so, for that reason, no one else gets time on it. Hell, you might only need it because it turns out it's the perfect sized doorstop for a door you had... but let anyone think you don't need it and you're screwed in the magical world of academia.
It's in conflict with the notion of academia being "for the good of mankind" but no more so than the notion of government being "for the people." Both simply serve the people within it... researchers or politicians. The rest is set dressing to ensure others keep paying for it.
1. Announce a Google bomb to the world.
2. Hit the Google blacklist in 3, 2, 1...
3. Links conveniently "gone" from Google.
He's either the most moronic SEO manipulator known to man or his goal is to get the links hidden entirely from Google.
Long term partner? Sure, they tend to lose those. But, in a darwinian sense, that hardly matters compared with...
To accept your genes and create the next generation with your genetic line rather than someone else's?
The narcisist who wants to pass their genes on doesn't need a loving relationship. Indeed, for the narcisist, what better than a woman who'll find them attractive, take their genes, then let someone else raise the child as their own?
Sure, they may be ostracized from society. Sure, they may have a harder time surviving. Sure, they may die younger. But, if they've already passed their genes on to several different women, they've likely out performed the monogamous men on a darwinian level.
Darwin doesn't care how comfortable your life is. Darwin cares whether, overall, you meet the requirement of passing on your genes. This whole "valued part of society, died at 80" thing is meaningless to Darwin if your competitor has happily bred with your wife at 20 and you've spent the next sixty years raising three generations of someone else's genetic line that are now populating the planet and passing on their traits.
I would higher a Apple Engineer...
Now you're just putting them on a pedestal!
This isn't flamebait, though I know I'm liable to get flamed for daring to think this way...
Any technique that is successful is rewarded and continues to grow.
Any technique that is unsuccessful is not rewarded and slowly dies out.
The sad truth is that spam works. Sure, 99.999% of people are smart enough to ignore your spam. But if you send a million coppies, that's still 100 people who are now giving you business you wouldn't otherwise have had.
IIRC, during the dotcom era, a new customer was considered worth about $100 (part of why people were given so much for free). If your cost of spamming is under $10,000 and you get 100 customers from it, it makes sense.
It's immoral, it's abusive, but it does work.
However, it only works anymore when the spammer is a more transient business. If they sell a thousand bottles of viagra and then disappear, it's a thousand bottles that a store with absolutely no reputation could never have sold. They then set up with a new name and repeat.
If you're a travel agent with an established reputation, the balance shifts. Now you have large numbers of people who treat you with contempt and will never do business with you and, unlike the traditional spammer, you can't just close down and put up a new storefront under a new name because you've spent years building your reputation with other customers and need to keep that identity.
I've always thought it's a massive mistake to tell kids that drugs are bad. They then try them, discover they're pretty fantastic, and ignore everything else you had to say on the subject. Much better to say, "Drugs are awesome in the short term but here are all of their costs and, no matter how clever you think you are, the costs do always creep up on people." That way, when they do experiment and they do discover they feel awesome right now, they're still aware you were telling the truth and the consequences really are coming.
In the same vein, saying spamming is a bad business technique ignores the reality that, morally acceptable, widely hated, or not, it's a very successful one.
You try telling your boss that spam is a "bad" technique and, if he's smart enough to realize the technique's obviously working for a lot of people, all you've done is undermine his value in what you have to say. The same goes if he tries anyway and gets a single new customer he wouldn't have already had and tells himself, "See, I knew he was wrong!"
It's far better to acknowledge all the ways it is successful... but then list the costs. Put it to him in terms of all the years he's invested in that business, building its reputation. Is he willing to destroy that in the local community, where he can't set up a new storefront like the online guys, just to get a few thousand in revenue and several hundred in profits?
Phrased as, "Is all of the work you've done to build this business' reputation worth less than $1,000" may sell it very differently.
Name one occupying power that has EVER succeeded by fighting geurilla resistance through their entitlement to play just as rough as the other guy.
Now I'll name many that failed: England in the American colonies, France in Vietnam, America in Vietnam, USSR in Afghanistan, England in 70's/80's/early 90's Northern Ireland, America in Iraq.
What happens, every single time, is that the occupying force captures a bunch of bad guys by "not being pussies" and breaking the rules, leveling the playing field, etc. They then turn ten times as many of the population in the country and surrounding areas against them. Catching one doesn't do much for you if your technique makes ten.
Now, to benefit from the wisdom of Mo Mowlam, let's try a different technique. Let's say, "It doesn't matter what they do to us. We will always act with honor and dignity."
Within five years of that policy in Northern Ireland, a Catholic population that offered safe havens to the IRA because they were so outraged by British actions had started to see the IRA for the sick fucks they often were and turned against them. It's easy to turn a blind eye to blowing up kids when "the other guys" are "evil", it's much harder when they're the enemy but still honorable. Yes, the Real IRA has splintered off, yes, there's still minor violence, but compared to what the situation was like during and after internment, where the British tried to stop being pussies and play just as dirty, it's night and day.
If you or I or any [other adult] in the United States...
If a fourteen year old kid was pulled out of school, moved away from all of his friends, put in a back-hills white-power fundamentalist camp by his father who exerted parental pressure on that child to plant landmines on video as part of his father's friends' terrorist campaign against the U.S., and was captured at fifteen... You'd have a bitch of a time a) portraying it as anything other than child abuse and b) getting him tried as an adult.
Amy Fisher was two years older, under significantly less pressure, and there was proof her attack actually injured someone (as opposed to a video of her doing something that could). She got 5-15 years and served seven. By that yardstick, he'd be out by now.
I joke, of course.
But it's worth looking at another way of describing our wonderful nation which is, of course, completely "right" because it's "us" not some other "bad guys":
Do we really want a country that's... invaded two other nations in the last decade (at times against the UN's will); set off civil wars in other nations; ignores the Geneva Convention when it doesn't suit it; has a long history of providing arms to nations/factions it later fights (Vietnamese during WWII, Taleban against the Russians, F-14s and nuclear plants to pre-revolutionary Iran, "We know they have WMDs, we still have the receipts" for Iraq); best of all, was one half of the nuclear arms race that was the greatest threat to all life on our planet for the last sixty years; and finally a nation that's stated its intent to ignore weapons treaties and start testing a new breed of tactical nukes... to have more nuclear plans?
Intel has a point: releasing documentation on a non finalized standard creates a fluster-cluck of bad implementations that aren't necessarily compatible with each other. IIRC, isn't that what's happened to 802.11n, pre-n, draft-n, n-ready, looks a bit like n in a dress, MIMO, etc. which just confuse the crap out of a consumer already pissed at USB 2.0 HiSpeed and USB 2.0 FullSpeed crap.
nVidia has a point: Intel not telling anyone else until the last moment would, indeed, give Intel an unfair first mover advantage.
Obvious solution: Release the pre and post release specs with an agreement attached that anyone wanting a copy has to sign. An amount of time that gives everyone a fair chance to get product ready is picked after final specs are chosen. Anyone gaining access to the specs agrees not to release until that time period has passed. Now no one releases incompatible hardware and no one gets an unfair first mover advantage.
Some of these people were kidnapped by warlords, and handed over for a large sum of money. Such as Omar Khadr?
A fifteen year old Canadian boy whose father was a terrorist sympathizer and took him to Afghanistan. Without his father's knowledge, other men took him to where a firefight broke out. The hut was attacked from the air but Khadr survived, wounded and blinded in one eye. Kneeling and unarmed, he was then shot twice in the back.
He was stabilized then tortured before allowed to fully heal.
For those of you who like saying, "He was a terrorist, he deserved it." Take a look at this picture. Be warned. It shows what a fifteen year old Canadian kid who's just been blown up and shot looks like. Now ask yourself how good you feel that your people then tortured him.
By any reasonable standard, he was a child soldier, pushed in to things by his father. Torture is sick. Torturing a wounded child is contemptible beyond any possible standard of humanity.
My guess at the main reason they don't want him free (trial would lead to it due to "fruit of a poisoned branch" meaning all of the torture based evidence would have to be tossed)? Imagine how well that kid, along with that photo, telling how he was tortured when he should have been rehabilitated like any other child soldier, would play when he went on Oprah?
In the future, a hacker collective called SkyNet will create a robot that travels back in time to kill John Conyers mother before he's even born, invalidating the problem. That robot will likely later become a state governor somewhere too.
The problem is America picks heavy and cheap without bothering with the safe.
Take a look at this picture. Same speed. Same impact.
The Mini crumpled its whole engine bay. A total write-off. But the passenger compartment is barely touched.
The F-150 has a beautifully intact engine. It's unfortunately inside the cab where the people-puree would be oozing out.
Add on pickups having a consistently 20% higher fatality rate per million miles driven and you suddenly realize that stupid engineering combined with being in a hulking great target that can't get out of the way really doesn't compete with a small, light, quick to accelerate car that's simply not where the accident happens in the first place.
Case in point: About two weeks ago, my wife was in her Mini Cooper S in a parking lot, looking for a space. A Dodge (oxymoron if ever there was one) Ram (ah, far more accurate) reversed out without looking, straight at her. Had she been in an SUV, the back end of the Dodge would have gone through the side of it before the idiot had time to react and hit the brakes. The Dodge would have been trashed, she'd be dead or in a coma from the injuries. In the Mini, he put her foot down and was somewhere else while her SUV driving friend in the passenger seat asked, "How the hell did you do that?"
So, given the choice, I'd rather be in a well built car that folds the parts I'm not in when it gets hit, light enough to avoid more of the accidents anyway, than the hunk of American steel that deforms that steel in to right where I'm sitting.
Given they're already partnering with the MPAA for "Respect Copyrights" patches, surely they should be their first port of call rather than those evil open source pirates?
When literature for your merit badges contains text like, "There are peer to peer groups who offer legal downloads and those who offer illegal downloads. Make a list of both. Suggest ways to detect peer to peer software like the MPAA Parent File Scan." it would be kind of hypocritical to then advocate software that's liable to be built off the kinds of tools, by the kinds of evil people, another badge already warns about.
A huge part of the BSA is a great and honorable institution. But when it comes to institutionalizing homophobia, forcing religious beliefs and teaming up with corporate entities that demonize whole communities, it's probably not the best time to go asking for those communities for help.