This isn't really a tech support story but it happened on a tech support job. I worked for a company similar to Geek Squad, but much smaller. I was on a standard call for removing spyware, viruses, etc. Meanwhile my client and her 13 year old son were screaming at each other the entire time. She finally gets him to calm down for a little bit. After about 15 minutes I hear her yelling "What are you doing out of your room? Wait! What are you doing with that knife?" The kid pulled a butcher knife on his mom!!
Needless to say, once she did get the knife away from the kid. I packed up my gear, gave her the bill and told her not to expect anyone back from my company to finish fixing the computers.
Yesterday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales issued a kiddie porn "wake-up call":
"It is not an exaggeration to say that we are in the midst of an epidemic in the production and trafficking of movies and images depicting the sexual abuse of children," Gonzales said.
"The threat is frighteningly real, it is growing rapidly, and it must be stopped."
The attorney general said one of every five children online is now solicited. He cited a recent estimate that 50,000 predators are online at any given time prowling for children.
Gonzales attributed the one-in-five stat to "one study," which is most likely a 2000 report conducted by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. But way back in 2001, Spiked Online's Sandy Starr actually read that report: The NCMEC's national survey of 1501 American 10- to 17-year-olds found that 'approximately one in five received a sexual solicitation or approach over the internet in the last year'. There is a huge leap from 'sexual solicitation or approach'...to 'approached by a paedophile'.
The report found that almost half of the solicitations reported did not come from an adult, but from other children: 'juveniles made 48 percent of the overall and 48 percent of the aggressive solicitations.' The report also points out that only 'one quarter of young people who reported these incidents were distressed by them'. 'Sexual solicitations' between children in an internet chat room are the online equivalent of adolescent fumbling, a world away from the threat of paedophilia.
Gonzales himself gave the source for the 50,000 prowling predators, citing "the television program Dateline."
Just because someone died from bird flu after taking tammiflu doesn't necessarily mean that it's developing a resistance to the drug.
First off, the "bird flu" doesn't transfer from human to human yet. In order for it to "develop a resistance" it's got to be able to go somewhere once this so called resistance has developed. Well, this can't exactly happen since it can't be transferred from human to human yet.
Secondly, the article reports that the people given tammiflu did get better first. This doesn't necessarily mean the virus is has developed a resistance to the drug. There's also the possibility that they weren't given enough tammiflu. Sure it helped for a little bit, but after 3 days it wore off. Maybe this virus is strong enough to require multiple or higher doses of tammiflu than a normal flu virus.
about 3 years ago I was living in my parents' basement. I went out to a club one night and it rained about 3 inches an hour for 4 hours straight. When I got home, there was about 3 feet of water in the basement, and my computer was sitting on the floor. Somehow, after being completely submerged underwater (while on, mind you) the CPU and Memory still worked.
It stayed working until May of last year. I'd given the CPU & Memory to a friend shorly after. (yay insurance!) Anyhow, in May of last year the CPU & Memory melted when his apartment burned down.
The frequency content of a sound has a lot to do with how comforting or annoying a sound is. Incredible ammounts of money have been spent on this in the auto industry alone. Studies are done on the sounds of a car door closing to find the sound that makes people feel the most secure when the door has closed. What they've found is that the sounds of car doors closing with more energy in the low end of the frequency spectrum makes people feel more secure in the sound of a door closing.
Now lets apply this to trains. Normal freight trains generally produce a lot of low frequency sounds. Generally around 300Hz and below. Now the maglev trains could be a lot quieter, but if they make higher frequency sounds, even at lower dB levels, the sound will seem a lot more annoying than freight trains.
>It's like the lovers of vacuum tubes rather than >transistors. > >"It sounds warmer!"
Yes. Tubes do sound warmer than transistors for a very good reason. Transistors and solid state technology for amplifying and reproducing audio tend to recreate odd numbered harmonics to the fundamental. The odd numbered harmonics are less pleasing to the ear than even numbered harmonics.
And with that in mind, guess which harmonics the tube amplifiers reproduce. Thats right! EVEN harmonics.
A few years back, my boss had us using a programming language for web sites called Power Dynamo from Sybase (never ever EVER use this!). Anyways, the length() method for a string was basically a random number generator. I made a test page one day and had it output the length of the same string over and over again getting results from -100 to 20000 when trying to get the length of "the"
I remember a few years back that the FTC blocked microsoft from aquiring Intuit (those guys that make quicken, etc) because of features that Microsoft is now trying to include in XP. The FTC blocked that move because microsoft would then control a large portion of online money transactions.
Here we are in July 2001, and Microsoft has now written their own version of the Intuit features they wanted when the FTC blocked them from aquiring Intuit. It should go without saying that this move should be blocked again, but who knows what will happen this time around.
Slashdot Mirror
But the Creation Museum says the Earth is only 6,000 years old! :-D
$5.00
This isn't really a tech support story but it happened on a tech support job. I worked for a company similar to Geek Squad, but much smaller. I was on a standard call for removing spyware, viruses, etc. Meanwhile my client and her 13 year old son were screaming at each other the entire time. She finally gets him to calm down for a little bit. After about 15 minutes I hear her yelling "What are you doing out of your room? Wait! What are you doing with that knife?" The kid pulled a butcher knife on his mom!!
Needless to say, once she did get the knife away from the kid. I packed up my gear, gave her the bill and told her not to expect anyone back from my company to finish fixing the computers.
We won!
http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/2006/04/the_stone_ phill.shtml#013567This blog post explains where & how this stat probably came from:
Yesterday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales issued a kiddie porn "wake-up call":
"It is not an exaggeration to say that we are in the midst of an epidemic in the production and trafficking of movies and images depicting the sexual abuse of children," Gonzales said.
"The threat is frighteningly real, it is growing rapidly, and it must be stopped."
The attorney general said one of every five children online is now solicited. He cited a recent estimate that 50,000 predators are online at any given time prowling for children.
Gonzales attributed the one-in-five stat to "one study," which is most likely a 2000 report conducted by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. But way back in 2001, Spiked Online's Sandy Starr actually read that report:
The NCMEC's national survey of 1501 American 10- to 17-year-olds found that 'approximately one in five received a sexual solicitation or approach over the internet in the last year'. There is a huge leap from 'sexual solicitation or approach'...to 'approached by a paedophile'.
The report found that almost half of the solicitations reported did not come from an adult, but from other children: 'juveniles made 48 percent of the overall and 48 percent of the aggressive solicitations.' The report also points out that only 'one quarter of young people who reported these incidents were distressed by them'. 'Sexual solicitations' between children in an internet chat room are the online equivalent of adolescent fumbling, a world away from the threat of paedophilia.
Gonzales himself gave the source for the 50,000 prowling predators, citing "the television program Dateline."
Just because someone died from bird flu after taking tammiflu doesn't necessarily mean that it's developing a resistance to the drug.
First off, the "bird flu" doesn't transfer from human to human yet. In order for it to "develop a resistance" it's got to be able to go somewhere once this so called resistance has developed. Well, this can't exactly happen since it can't be transferred from human to human yet.
Secondly, the article reports that the people given tammiflu did get better first. This doesn't necessarily mean the virus is has developed a resistance to the drug. There's also the possibility that they weren't given enough tammiflu. Sure it helped for a little bit, but after 3 days it wore off. Maybe this virus is strong enough to require multiple or higher doses of tammiflu than a normal flu virus.
Call me when there's real news to report.
about 3 years ago I was living in my parents' basement. I went out to a club one night and it rained about 3 inches an hour for 4 hours straight. When I got home, there was about 3 feet of water in the basement, and my computer was sitting on the floor. Somehow, after being completely submerged underwater (while on, mind you) the CPU and Memory still worked.
It stayed working until May of last year. I'd given the CPU & Memory to a friend shorly after. (yay insurance!) Anyhow, in May of last year the CPU & Memory melted when his apartment burned down.
The frequency content of a sound has a lot to do with how comforting or annoying a sound is. Incredible ammounts of money have been spent on this in the auto industry alone. Studies are done on the sounds of a car door closing to find the sound that makes people feel the most secure when the door has closed. What they've found is that the sounds of car doors closing with more energy in the low end of the frequency spectrum makes people feel more secure in the sound of a door closing.
Now lets apply this to trains. Normal freight trains generally produce a lot of low frequency sounds. Generally around 300Hz and below. Now the maglev trains could be a lot quieter, but if they make higher frequency sounds, even at lower dB levels, the sound will seem a lot more annoying than freight trains.
>It's like the lovers of vacuum tubes rather than >transistors.
>
>"It sounds warmer!"
Yes. Tubes do sound warmer than transistors for a very good reason. Transistors and solid state technology for amplifying and reproducing audio tend to recreate odd numbered harmonics to the fundamental. The odd numbered harmonics are less pleasing to the ear than even numbered harmonics.
And with that in mind, guess which harmonics the tube amplifiers reproduce. Thats right! EVEN harmonics.
A few years back, my boss had us using a programming language for web sites called Power Dynamo from Sybase (never ever EVER use this!). Anyways, the length() method for a string was basically a random number generator. I made a test page one day and had it output the length of the same string over and over again getting results from -100 to 20000 when trying to get the length of "the"
I remember a few years back that the FTC blocked microsoft from aquiring Intuit (those guys that make quicken, etc) because of features that Microsoft is now trying to include in XP. The FTC blocked that move because microsoft would then control a large portion of online money transactions.
Here we are in July 2001, and Microsoft has now written their own version of the Intuit features they wanted when the FTC blocked them from aquiring Intuit. It should go without saying that this move should be blocked again, but who knows what will happen this time around.