I have heard of some non-competes being tossed out because the basicly left the person without employment opertunities in their profesional market.
Here in Ohio we have a law called The Blue Pencil Rule. If a person can show that a non-compete clause is preventing them from finding employment a judge can rewrite the clause as he sees fit. There's probably something similar in many states.
Most of the non-competes I've been asked to sign have a term of about one year. They usually specify that they only apply to working for a competitor, although on one occasion I had to get the contract amended to specify what the comapny's area of business was because the clause was so sloppily (or possibly intentionally) written that taking almost any other job could run afoul of it.
In my experience that sort of behavior is very rare. Most griefers would much rather cause trouble actively with their rifle than passively. I did see it recently and the admin realized he didn't know how to unban the victim, who had to wait an hour for the automatic ban to be lifted.
A few months ago a server I was playing on had an occasional malfunction in its team kill revenge plugin. Kills of the enemy were erroneously interpreted as team kills. In one case a regular despised for crying "cheater" every time he lost a firefight was the target of the malfunction. Usually people would recognize the team kill as incorrect and forgive, but in this case everyone was slaying him without a second thought.
Day of Defeat: Source allows muting individual players. The original DoD did as well, but it didn't work, so this is nothing new.
I'd like to see automatic punishment for problem players become standard. There are plugins for some games to slay people who shoot teammates in spawn, kick habitual team killers, mirror damage, and so on, but it's up to each server admin to install them and most don't do so. I'd especially love to be able to shoot teammates who block my line of fire while insulting me and screaming at me to give them the sniper class without it being counted as a team kill, but I doubt that's very practical.
All that being said, vigilant admins are usually enough to keep a server relatively free of griefers. A policy of banning problem players reported by trusted regulars seems to do the trick.
The Wing Commander series is one my favorite of all time. The ending of WC: Prophecy was left open so there could be another game surrounding Christopher Blair if demand warranted but, alas, it's been 9 or 10 years since its release. Since Origin has been shut down I doubt we'll see the resurrection of the series.
It's not that you have to know enough to build a radio. On the electronics front it's mainly knowledge about how basic circuits work, like oscillators and amplifiers. Much of the exam is on FCC rules and is simple memorization. Probably the most complicated thing you'd have to do is calculate the resonant frequency of a simple oscillator circuit or the proper length of an antenna for use on a given band, although I'm guessing a little here, since it's been fifteen years since I got my license. The license manuals teach you everything you need to know to pass the exam.
Look here for an amateur radio association in your area. The members are usually happy to help someone get their license. It's been said that every ham is responsible for bringing someone else into the hobby.
Even without the code requirement, getting a license still requires a good deal of work. Every class of license exam includes quite a bit of electronics theory that I think will help to weed out the people who aren't up to the qualifications of having a license and previously would have been turned off by the code requirement. On top of that there's the expense of buying (or building) the equipment and setting up an antenna, so I doubt we'll be flooded by morons any time soon.
In emergencies or during periods of bad signal propogation morse code often offers the best chance for getting a message through. It requires less power than voice transmissions and is easier to understand through the noise that sometimes clogs the bands. That being said, there are enough of us who do know code (and many who use it exclusively) that hams as a group won't lose their utility in those times.
At a job about ten years ago we used both Windows 95 and NT 3.51. Rebooting from NT to 95 worked fine. If we rebooted from 95 into NT the network card wouldn't work. We had to power the system off and do a cold boot.
Not a computer one, but... my high school's music teacher had an ancient stereo amplifier that would make the sound muddy every few minutes. The solution was to knock on the case at a certain spot until the sound cleared up.
Reminds me of the time when I worked at a computer store and we played with the voice recognition card in a PowerMac floor model. Somebody programmed it so that if someone said "Computer, bite me", it would respond with "Can't bite what's not there". Over time the accuracy of the recognition fell. One day as a salesman was talking to a customer about the computer it misinterpreted something he said and said "Can't bite what's not there". Needless to say that system was wiped and we weren't allowed to play with it anymore.
This reminds me of my days as a pizza restaurant shift manager. A customer who thought he was brilliant cut out one of our logos from an ad and taped it onto a competitor's coupon. The delivery driver didn't recognize the coupon, and when he saw the tape he peeled it off in front of the customer who, of course, pleaded ignorance.
I've been using this scanner to scan sheet music for about fifteen months. I get good quality scans, and the transparent top alows me to align the pages well. Being able to see the page in the scanner is important with sheet music, since most is 9x12 and I have yet to find a consumer priced scanner that can handle a page that large. Since the music doesn't occupy the entire page, I just line it up in the window and go. I've tried using it with music recognition software with mixed results. Some music it recognizes perfectly, and some it does horribly on, which is most likely the software's fault and not the scanner's.
I quit my programming job five months ago and left the industry. My former employer hired two people to replace me, so I guess I created a new tech job. Maybe I should have been drawing two salaries...
I was a little annoyed to find Michael Badnarik listed as an "other party candidate" here in Butler County, Ohio. I guess we have to deal with that sort of thing until the government recognizes the Libertarian party. I'm not holding my breath.
Last election cycle we had electronic voting machines here. They're gone now, replaced by punch card machines with detailed instructions on how to use them and how to avoid hanging chads. I don't know who the computers were made by. A poll worker I asked about it seemed glad they were gone.
I called MS developer support a few years ago after exhausting all other options, including the sacrifice of a manager to the programming gods (maybe I should have moved on to VPs?). After ten minutes of me explaining our ActiveX architecture to the tech, he responded with, "Um, nobody's ever tried that with ActiveX".
A more recent fun one was when we were trying to migrate some code to.NET and it wouldn't interface with the legacy ActiveX code the way the documentation said it would. After some serious digging the tech discovered the feature we were trying to use was yanked just before GA but the docs were never updated.
Seal a vacationing manager's door shut with industrial strength plastic wrap and tape 2x4s across it like you'd see nailed across a broken window.
Fill the company president's office with 1300 balloons, some helium and some regular air, for her 40th birthday. She almost had a heart attack when she opened the door the next morning and a wall of balloons fell out.
TP the comapny founder's office on a day when he wasn't in. Housekeeping cleaned it up before he saw it!
There was a roof leak over the development area so we put up a makeshift roof with 2x4s and tarps to protect the computers. My supervisor asked me to help her take them down after the leak was fixed. We were carrying everything back to the warehouse when I noticed the guy in the next cubicle wasn't around, so I dumped everything in there, rather than carry it the additional twenty feet.
We had foam rubber computer mice with the company logo, url, etc. that were supossed to be given out at trade shows. They usually ended up being used as missiles by the founder. The wars never lasted more than a few minutes, because the company president (also his wife) would hear the noise and confiscate our arsenal, and tell him to get back in his cage.
It's not surprising how often pranks were played at that company. My second interview (with every manager at the same time) degenerated to the founder and I insulting each other within ten minutes. He said I'd fit in well.
How long before somebody loads one of these with explosives and turns it into a guided grenade? It could be useful as a weapon against a small target of opportunity that doesn't merit a bomb run or cruise missile strike, as well as keeping the soldiers out of immediate harm's way.
Which isn't to say Microsoft didn't do some good. They did make computers more accessible to the average person. It's just their methods (and software quality) I disagree with.
I think if Microsoft never existed we would have had to deal with some other company doing whatever it can to dominate everything.
Never underestimate the power of greed.
Now that the computer world is more mature (for better or worse...) we might be able to do it right, if we can get rid of Microsoft. It would be much harder for any one company to take over now.
Who defines what is "indecent" or "profane"? As the article hints at, these are highly subjective classifications. Are we going to end up with oversensitive people trying to outlaw every other thing said on television because it offends them personally?
I'd rather try and fail than not try at all (I'm also a musician stuck in an IT job). If you don't go for it you'll always wonder what would have happened if you had. If you do it and end up back at a desk in three months, at least you won't have to ask yourself "what if?" every day for the rest of your life.
The loneliest words you'll ever know, If only, if only it were so. The emptiest words that there'll ever be, It could've been me. It could've been me -- Jim Steinman
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I have heard of some non-competes being tossed out because the basicly left the person without employment opertunities in their profesional market.
Here in Ohio we have a law called The Blue Pencil Rule. If a person can show that a non-compete clause is preventing them from finding employment a judge can rewrite the clause as he sees fit. There's probably something similar in many states.
Most of the non-competes I've been asked to sign have a term of about one year. They usually specify that they only apply to working for a competitor, although on one occasion I had to get the contract amended to specify what the comapny's area of business was because the clause was so sloppily (or possibly intentionally) written that taking almost any other job could run afoul of it.
In my experience that sort of behavior is very rare. Most griefers would much rather cause trouble actively with their rifle than passively. I did see it recently and the admin realized he didn't know how to unban the victim, who had to wait an hour for the automatic ban to be lifted. A few months ago a server I was playing on had an occasional malfunction in its team kill revenge plugin. Kills of the enemy were erroneously interpreted as team kills. In one case a regular despised for crying "cheater" every time he lost a firefight was the target of the malfunction. Usually people would recognize the team kill as incorrect and forgive, but in this case everyone was slaying him without a second thought.
It's in the Player List menu (press ~).
Day of Defeat: Source allows muting individual players. The original DoD did as well, but it didn't work, so this is nothing new.
I'd like to see automatic punishment for problem players become standard. There are plugins for some games to slay people who shoot teammates in spawn, kick habitual team killers, mirror damage, and so on, but it's up to each server admin to install them and most don't do so. I'd especially love to be able to shoot teammates who block my line of fire while insulting me and screaming at me to give them the sniper class without it being counted as a team kill, but I doubt that's very practical.
All that being said, vigilant admins are usually enough to keep a server relatively free of griefers. A policy of banning problem players reported by trusted regulars seems to do the trick.
The Wing Commander series is one my favorite of all time. The ending of WC: Prophecy was left open so there could be another game surrounding Christopher Blair if demand warranted but, alas, it's been 9 or 10 years since its release. Since Origin has been shut down I doubt we'll see the resurrection of the series.
It's not that you have to know enough to build a radio. On the electronics front it's mainly knowledge about how basic circuits work, like oscillators and amplifiers. Much of the exam is on FCC rules and is simple memorization. Probably the most complicated thing you'd have to do is calculate the resonant frequency of a simple oscillator circuit or the proper length of an antenna for use on a given band, although I'm guessing a little here, since it's been fifteen years since I got my license. The license manuals teach you everything you need to know to pass the exam.
Look here for an amateur radio association in your area. The members are usually happy to help someone get their license. It's been said that every ham is responsible for bringing someone else into the hobby.
Even without the code requirement, getting a license still requires a good deal of work. Every class of license exam includes quite a bit of electronics theory that I think will help to weed out the people who aren't up to the qualifications of having a license and previously would have been turned off by the code requirement. On top of that there's the expense of buying (or building) the equipment and setting up an antenna, so I doubt we'll be flooded by morons any time soon.
In emergencies or during periods of bad signal propogation morse code often offers the best chance for getting a message through. It requires less power than voice transmissions and is easier to understand through the noise that sometimes clogs the bands. That being said, there are enough of us who do know code (and many who use it exclusively) that hams as a group won't lose their utility in those times.
For all those who don't know Morse Code, it says "Interesting".
You're forgetting that the translator feeds on the brain wave energy of the speaker. In the case of the president it would starve.
At a job about ten years ago we used both Windows 95 and NT 3.51. Rebooting from NT to 95 worked fine. If we rebooted from 95 into NT the network card wouldn't work. We had to power the system off and do a cold boot.
Not a computer one, but... my high school's music teacher had an ancient stereo amplifier that would make the sound muddy every few minutes. The solution was to knock on the case at a certain spot until the sound cleared up.
Reminds me of the time when I worked at a computer store and we played with the voice recognition card in a PowerMac floor model. Somebody programmed it so that if someone said "Computer, bite me", it would respond with "Can't bite what's not there". Over time the accuracy of the recognition fell. One day as a salesman was talking to a customer about the computer it misinterpreted something he said and said "Can't bite what's not there". Needless to say that system was wiped and we weren't allowed to play with it anymore.
Never underestimate the power of money to overrule common sense. I saw it every day when I worked as a software engineer.
If this was made by somebody selling discount coupons, the work was discount as well. The logo was scotch taped on.
This reminds me of my days as a pizza restaurant shift manager. A customer who thought he was brilliant cut out one of our logos from an ad and taped it onto a competitor's coupon. The delivery driver didn't recognize the coupon, and when he saw the tape he peeled it off in front of the customer who, of course, pleaded ignorance.
I've been using this scanner to scan sheet music for about fifteen months. I get good quality scans, and the transparent top alows me to align the pages well. Being able to see the page in the scanner is important with sheet music, since most is 9x12 and I have yet to find a consumer priced scanner that can handle a page that large. Since the music doesn't occupy the entire page, I just line it up in the window and go. I've tried using it with music recognition software with mixed results. Some music it recognizes perfectly, and some it does horribly on, which is most likely the software's fault and not the scanner's.
I quit my programming job five months ago and left the industry. My former employer hired two people to replace me, so I guess I created a new tech job. Maybe I should have been drawing two salaries...
I was a little annoyed to find Michael Badnarik listed as an "other party candidate" here in Butler County, Ohio. I guess we have to deal with that sort of thing until the government recognizes the Libertarian party. I'm not holding my breath.
Last election cycle we had electronic voting machines here. They're gone now, replaced by punch card machines with detailed instructions on how to use them and how to avoid hanging chads. I don't know who the computers were made by. A poll worker I asked about it seemed glad they were gone.
I called MS developer support a few years ago after exhausting all other options, including the sacrifice of a manager to the programming gods (maybe I should have moved on to VPs?). After ten minutes of me explaining our ActiveX architecture to the tech, he responded with, "Um, nobody's ever tried that with ActiveX".
.NET and it wouldn't interface with the legacy ActiveX code the way the documentation said it would. After some serious digging the tech discovered the feature we were trying to use was yanked just before GA but the docs were never updated.
A more recent fun one was when we were trying to migrate some code to
There is no SS that is going to start breaking into your house and checking to see if you have.
Shh! Don't give the MPAA/RIAA or Congress any ideas!
Some pranks from an old job:
Seal a vacationing manager's door shut with industrial strength plastic wrap and tape 2x4s across it like you'd see nailed across a broken window.
Fill the company president's office with 1300 balloons, some helium and some regular air, for her 40th birthday. She almost had a heart attack when she opened the door the next morning and a wall of balloons fell out.
TP the comapny founder's office on a day when he wasn't in. Housekeeping cleaned it up before he saw it!
There was a roof leak over the development area so we put up a makeshift roof with 2x4s and tarps to protect the computers. My supervisor asked me to help her take them down after the leak was fixed. We were carrying everything back to the warehouse when I noticed the guy in the next cubicle wasn't around, so I dumped everything in there, rather than carry it the additional twenty feet.
We had foam rubber computer mice with the company logo, url, etc. that were supossed to be given out at trade shows. They usually ended up being used as missiles by the founder. The wars never lasted more than a few minutes, because the company president (also his wife) would hear the noise and confiscate our arsenal, and tell him to get back in his cage.
It's not surprising how often pranks were played at that company. My second interview (with every manager at the same time) degenerated to the founder and I insulting each other within ten minutes. He said I'd fit in well.
How long before somebody loads one of these with explosives and turns it into a guided grenade? It could be useful as a weapon against a small target of opportunity that doesn't merit a bomb run or cruise missile strike, as well as keeping the soldiers out of immediate harm's way.
Which isn't to say Microsoft didn't do some good. They did make computers more accessible to the average person. It's just their methods (and software quality) I disagree with.
I think if Microsoft never existed we would have had to deal with some other company doing whatever it can to dominate everything.
Never underestimate the power of greed.
Now that the computer world is more mature (for better or worse...) we might be able to do it right, if we can get rid of Microsoft. It would be much harder for any one company to take over now.
Who defines what is "indecent" or "profane"? As the article hints at, these are highly subjective classifications. Are we going to end up with oversensitive people trying to outlaw every other thing said on television because it offends them personally?
I'd rather try and fail than not try at all (I'm also a musician stuck in an IT job). If you don't go for it you'll always wonder what would have happened if you had. If you do it and end up back at a desk in three months, at least you won't have to ask yourself "what if?" every day for the rest of your life.
The loneliest words you'll ever know,
If only, if only it were so.
The emptiest words that there'll ever be,
It could've been me. It could've been me -- Jim Steinman