We don't know the tumor "forced" him to become a child abuser.
I'd also question whether or not removal of the tumor really "cured" him...
"So, Mr. Jones, we've found you guilty of molesting kids. Enjoy the
next 20 years with your new cellmate, Bubba."
(Three months later, he has a tumor removed)
"No, really your honor, the tumor made me do it. You should let
me out now. All better, see?"
Yeah. No possible motivation for someone to, y'know, lie
about having a miracle cure...
The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in
order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought
to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.
I think I speak for EVERYONE on the planet, except the idiots that lead us,
when I say: What The Fuck???
If we have no free will, then you also can't blame people for
their actions. Though a new application of it, this concept has
surfaced as one of the key problems philosophers have had with the
Abrahamic religions - If god has even the teensiest capacity for
mercy, it can't very well send you to some form of hell for doing
what it already knew you would do, and indeed made you to do.
The same applies to a society's criminals. If a person has no free will,
then they exist purely as a product of genetics and their social conditioning.
Unless the UK wants to start a eugenics program, that leaves us with laying
the blame on how society raised someone in the first place.
Thus, without locking up everyone for creating the conditions
that lead to criminal behavior, you need to stay well clear of that
particular slippery slope.
And all of that presumes the government would act in the best
interest of the people, rather than its own perpetuation and the self
interest of our leaders. Which, if you believe that, I have a
bridge for sale on the cheap...
but it doesn't really have much to do with the aide's
aide-ness or republican-ness.
If a guy gets busted for BBQ'ing a bald eagle, would it
make it more, or less, of a story if he worked for PETA?
Although the last 12 years have made the whole concept into
something of a joke, the Republicans tout themselves as the
"party of reform". And we just keep seeing scandal after
unethical scandal from them.
No worries, though, in another 12 years we can say the same
thing about the Democrats, who apparently didn't learn from
the Republicans error and now want to position themselves
as the Party-O'-Reform. But, having the same complete and utter
lack of ethics as all politicians, they'll start making
the same egotistical blunders as the Republicans did, once they
take their new seats in January.
As long as I PAY FOR the goddamned game, the advertisers
will accomplish nothing but pissing me off by trying to advertise
to me in-game.
When they start giving the games away, my opinion on the matter
may change (though if my stance on ad-funded television means
anything, I just won't play those games). But I do not pay
to watch ads.
Pay up front, or watch ads. Make me do both, and you've lost a
customer.
Is there some keyboard shortcut in Google Mail that I'm missing?
You can (and generally should) get to your GMail account
via POP/SSL (and SMTP/TLS for sending). You can then access
it from a properly configured Thunderbird (such as the highly
recommended Portable ThunderBird 1.5, the version with GPG and
Enigmail pre-installed - Skip 2.0 for now, though... It ate
quite a few messages before I noticed).
And if that takes too much effort, stick with your Yahoo
or MSN email, and just don't worry about privacy - Big Brother
loves us all and only ever acts in our best interests.
Console systems, on the other hand, are engineered for
a very tight, very specific, set of tasks. This is why a
console with comparatively crappy stats can walk all over
a much beefier computer, and vice versa.
While once true and quite insightful, I don't know if that
really applies to modern consoles.
With earlier consoles, you had devices with shockingly low
CPU power, optimized for sound and video I/O. After those
came a gen of GPUs-with-sound-and-ohyeahawimpyCPU. And then?
Although we could argue about the PS1, certainly the original
XBox invited comparisons (since it basically used nothing but
mildly locked-down PC hardware), but even the competition
has opened the door to thinking in terms of MIPS rather than
polygons.
Some CIOs are embracing the influx while others continue to resist it.
As a member of a rather small "corporate" IT department, I can appreciate
the difference between using certain programs at home vs at work. The
number one rule people need to understand, don't expose the company to
legal liability, ever. The number two rule, don't do anything
that will risk bringing the network down (or critical servers, though
most people don't appreciate the difference).
The order of those may change depending on the nature of the company, but
those pretty much account for 99% of the "stupid" IT rules that people
don't like following. Sure, you run BitTorrent at home and have never
had a problem. Perhaps you even use it legally (riiiiight... But hey,
I'll admit it could happen). Move that into a corporate environment,
however, and your "just a tenth of my bandwidth, and low chance of getting
caught pirating music", times 50 users, turns into "why does our network
suck so much" and "I have the RIAA's lawyers on line 2...".
Additionally, most people absolutely suck at protecting their
home PCs, and in my experience, they take even fewer precautions at
work. Now, we run all the standard protections, such as AV, AS, mail
and web filtering, and so on. But no amount of automated protection
can ever suffice to stop determined insiders from managing to crash
(or worse, compromise) their own workstations. Sure, you can fire
the malicious ones after-the-fact (and the threat of that at least
encourages some cooperation), but that doesn't undo the damage.
As an aside, I consider myself something of a "dark-grey hat". I will
gladly teach my users how to do things so they stay juuuuuuust
barely on the right side of the law. But even that doesn't always
help... It lets people know that when I do give them rules, I
most likely have a damned good reason for it; but you'll always
have people who just don't "get" it, and don't understand why installing
every toolbar, cursor enhancement, and systray bug they can find makes
those fascist IT guys so annoyed.
As another aside, I've worked the other side of the fence as well,
an engineer working as not part of the IT department. As for
how to deal with that situation - Well, let's just say I
thank Zeus that I don't have someone like myself as a one of my
users.;-)
You left off the single most glaring problem with Amazon's search...
Why do they not have a great big checkbox to only show "real" Amazon
products (ie, exclude all their BS "marketplace" partners,
who almost without fail advertise great prices but then shipping
costs higher than the actual products, thus making "sort by lowest
price" useless)?
I can live with having to read product details before I buy. But
having to get to the LAST step of checking out before I can see that
a $10 item will cost me $15 in shipping (real example!) just drives
me up a frickin' wall.
In this case it was easy enough to do, which meant we were
providing the reports that senior management needed right away,
giving us time to relax and build a proper & full scale SQL
replacement.
It strains credibility to claim that, after producing something
functional, management would give you the time to replace it with
something such that, "the recipients never knew when we migrated
from the stop-gap to the final".
And I don't mean that as a typical geek management-slam - If they
can't tell the difference, why should they approve the
team spending twice as long on the cleanup as on the prototype?
Yeah, the engineers might know the difference, but the aesthetics
of the underlying code rarely counts as making for a better a
business case.
This is yet another jab at intelligent design that scientists attempt so gingerly. Really why do the miracles of Buckaroo B have to be broken down
Sometimes, even normally staid scientists can derive some pleasure in
terminating the trajectory of anaerobic-decompositionally accelerated
projectiles into cylindrically confined ichthyoids.
Or in this case, taunting the laughably ignorant fundies.
Still, it's pretty nice to think that they're going offline
because they've largely solved the problem they were fighting.
I wish I could agree with that sentiment, but I'd call it a closer
analogy to say that the disease gained immunity to the best known
antibiotic so far and further use of it just wastes resources
better spent elsewhere.
The governments of the world need to make it legal to hunt
down and torture spammers and their extended families to death.
Until then, they will always find ways to fill our inboxes
with garbage.
Or, the most likely of all, by analogy to IBM -> HAL (as in, HAL-9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey),
VMS -> W(indows)NT. I would normally consider that a cute coincidence, if
they didn't share Dave Cutler as a lead designer on
both projects.
But given that he did help design both OSs, and the propensity for geeks to come up with
bizarrely convoluted acronyms, I'd call that the "right" answer as to the origins of the name "NT".
That's it. I've heard it 5 too many times only TODAY: I've never used Opera and I couldn't care less if it exists.
Fixed.
No, not fixed - completely rephrased to mean something
similar that you like better.
He had it right in the first place - That phrase uses a
highly technical linguisitic device known as "sarcasm", wherein the
speaker says exactly the opposite of what they mean. (The clever
bunny might notice I used the same device for illustration at the
start of that sentence, as one wouln't normally call sarcasm "highly
technical")
The GP's particular use, unfortunately, has spawned off something
of a holy war, in that the vocal inflections used to frame the
sarcasm totally vanish. But even though it doesn't translate well
to the written word, you can't call actually call it an error...
Just a poor choice of phrases for this medium.
The Executive branch has forgotten it can't make laws.
The USGS, the FCC, the DOE, and countless other government "agencies"
derive their power directly from the president. If he tells them they
need to wear only bright purple clothing every Thursday, they'd damned
well better do so.
Now, I will agree 100% with those suggesting the purely political
motives behind this decree. But at least on this one, the asshat-in-chief
does have the authority (if not the intellect or scientific understanding)
to singlehandedly tell the USGS how to do their jobs.
They don't have the resumes, the skills, or the experience yet, so I think they
have to be judged on other factors that are harder to qualify.
I tried to think of a good answer, and had decided on "fix this PC" (where it has
some glaringly obvious problem that should take any decent tech under five minutes
to find and fix, such as a dead HDD), but then re-read the part I quote above...
What requirements does this job have, that you expect applicants lacking the
skills and experience to do the job?
I would agree completely that overall familiarity with PC architecture and
problem solving skills in general matter far more than having the LED error
codes for a Dell Dimension 4300s memorized - But it sounds like you expect
to not only interview, but hire, completely clueless individuals.
At the very least, you should have no trouble finding people who can demonstrate
simple tasks such as installing RAM or setting up a modem connection on XP. Don't
settle for less in the hope that you can train someone up the level of basic competency
the job demands.
Unless, of course, you plan to have these people do nothing but take calls
and read scripts - In which case, for all our sakes, just make sure
they can read and speak reasonably clear English. Although that particular "test"
would probably break the law, you can easily give it in a roundabout way
that answers the question without raising any eyebrows.
Waitasec... Under the "SkyDancers" entry, it mentions "broken ribs". I can see the other mild forms of
damage, particularly eye injuries, but how the hell would six ounces of plastic and foam, even spinning
as fast as its little plastic launcher can make it, manage to break bones?
I took issue with a few other entries as well, but it seems like many of these "dangers" don't
really involve the toy itself, much like "injury while under the influence" - The alcohol
doesn't hurt you, your actions while drunk hurt you.
Some stupid kid probably launched one of these off the roof to see how far it could go, then
proceeded to fall off the roof. Do we blame the toy for that?
Just like a religion that says the earth is the center of the universe is provably WRONG
Although I see your point, that one doesn't technically count as true. You can prove the
Earth as not the center of the solar system, but you can't prove that we don't sit
right smack-dab in the center of the universe. To do that, we'd need to know the
boundaries of the universe - And since those either don't exist (infinite universe) or
recede away from us at the speed of light (greater, if you take inflation into account),
we can never actually point to a spot in the sky and say "There lies the center of the universe,
which we don't occupy".
However-- evolution theory says NOTHING about the start.
That all depends on what you call "evolution", which despite the best attempts of
folks who throw about terms like "evolutionists", actually includes quite a good number
of smaller well-tested theories (with, admittedly, a few SMALL gaps, but I say that
in the interest of the truth, not because I erroneously believe that it matters if we
don't have a perfect fossil of a particular prehuman ancestor).
Miller and Urey's famous 1953 experiment demonstrated that you can "create" relatively complex
organic molecules (such as amino acids) with just water, ammonia, methane, and lightning.
More recent experiments (I don't have a cite for any, sorry - someone feel free to provide one)
found that seasonal movement beween ice sheets can combine simple amino acids into much longer
protein chains. And there you can stop, since you have all the preconditions needed for
prions (self-replicating proteins). Once you have self-replication, the "theory of evolution"
as most people understand it (basically just natural selection) kicks in, and you just need to
wait for random mutations to do the rest.
The rest of the collection of smaller, testable theories I refer to provide proof-of-concept for possible
paths (though of course, not proveably "the" path, but irrelevant) to most of the major leaps needed to
go from Miller's flask to humans (such as bilipid membranes, RNA, cellular organelles,
cells, and so on). But those just ice the cake, as I point out above. Once you have self-replication,
game over, "life" wins.
This is the same way that Instant Messaging services such as AIM work too. If the admins don't
want those services enabled, they should inform their users and then block Skype IP ranges.
I see you've never actually tried to block AIM at the firewall...
Twelve ports, two protocols, and ten or so class-C address ranges later, I still have
some of my users occasionally succeed in getting the damned thing to connect.
the Opteron ended up drawing much less power at idle than the Xeons ... the Xeon 5160 used the least energy in completing our multithreaded
MyriMatch search, in part because it completed the task so quickly.
So what does this mean for people shopping for servers?
If your servers constantly tick along at nearly 100% CPU use, you might
do better going with the Xeon system. If your machines basically sit idle
most of the time with an occasional spike for a few seconds when it actually
does something, the AMD would save you more on electricity.
Of course, this raises a third possibility - Would running a number of
virtual servers on one large Xeon machine waste more energy than it
saves, or give a net gain?
based on a random sampling of 2,000 credit card accounts,
Ummm... Now, I harbor no delusions that my credit card history really
counts as a secret - Obviously my CC company has it and uses it to
market bizarre crap to me, and they'd turn it over to the government
without thinking twice about it.
But how does some guy just go and "randomly sample" 2000 cards' histories?
If I wanted to validate his study, could I do the same?
Something doesn't seem right here, and I don't think most people
would like the "how" either way.
I don't even know why this is news. Sun activity is very low right now, we're at the bottom of
the cycle right now: http://www.sec.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/ A few years ago we had that X28 flare!
It counts as news because CMEs occur with equal probability in all directions.
The Earth, from the Sun, counts as a very very VERY small target - Given a straight-line probability of
hitting us, the Earth only occupues 0.00005% of vectors heading outward from the Sun. Granted, a CME
takes the form of a rather large cloud, so boost that by a factor of a thousand (give or take an order of
magnitude), but we still have an exceptionally small chance of getting hit by any given CME.
Well, this one hit us, and as I write this, we have a Kp of >8, with a G4 intensity geomagnetic storm going
on (the scale only goes to 5, much like hurricanes). To get an idea of what that means, I live a mile
south of a international airport, my neighbor (to the North) has a brazillian watts worth of christmas
lights out, and the sky still looks bright frickin' green (unfortunately we have some serious cloud
cover here, or I'd have a hell of a show and certainly wouldn't waste it writing on Slashdot).
Or to put it another way - if an X28 CME actually hit the Earth straight on, we wouldn't have any
functional satellites left to tell us about it, nor would most of us hear about it on the news for a week
or so due to massivly widespread blackouts.
I dont see why a water shortage is an issue...
Hydrogen is water-neutral.
Actually, better than neutral in this case. You start with
raw seawater, and end with potable water.
The entire linked articles seems like the worst kind of red
herring... It addresses "problems" that a hydrogen energy economy
would allow us to fix. Seawater-to-potable as one example.
As the source of energy, we could run a large number of breeder
reactors in the middle of nowhere; No one around to complain about
the spooooooky nukular, and they make more fuel than they consume.
As for transportation, yeah, Hydrogen can explode - But apparently
the authors have never tossed a cup of petrol on a bonfire (or used
a cigarette lighter, for that matter).
You can fairly make one, and only one, complaint about switching
to Hydrogen - The media doesn't really understand that Hydrogen
would act as an energy transport, rather than as a source. But
the rest just needs us to get off our butts and start building the
infrastructure needed to make the switch. Once we have that, the
actual source doesn't matter (well, it does, but only in that
it should address the problems we currently have with our
oil-based energy economy - From an end-user perspective, it could
come from an army of gerbils running in their little wheels for
all they care).
Slashdot Mirror
We don't know the tumor "forced" him to become a child abuser.
I'd also question whether or not removal of the tumor really "cured" him...
"So, Mr. Jones, we've found you guilty of molesting kids. Enjoy the next 20 years with your new cellmate, Bubba."
(Three months later, he has a tumor removed)
"No, really your honor, the tumor made me do it. You should let me out now. All better, see?"
Yeah. No possible motivation for someone to, y'know, lie about having a miracle cure...
The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.
I think I speak for EVERYONE on the planet, except the idiots that lead us, when I say: What The Fuck???
If we have no free will, then you also can't blame people for their actions. Though a new application of it, this concept has surfaced as one of the key problems philosophers have had with the Abrahamic religions - If god has even the teensiest capacity for mercy, it can't very well send you to some form of hell for doing what it already knew you would do, and indeed made you to do.
The same applies to a society's criminals. If a person has no free will, then they exist purely as a product of genetics and their social conditioning. Unless the UK wants to start a eugenics program, that leaves us with laying the blame on how society raised someone in the first place.
Thus, without locking up everyone for creating the conditions that lead to criminal behavior, you need to stay well clear of that particular slippery slope.
And all of that presumes the government would act in the best interest of the people, rather than its own perpetuation and the self interest of our leaders. Which, if you believe that, I have a bridge for sale on the cheap...
but it doesn't really have much to do with the aide's aide-ness or republican-ness.
If a guy gets busted for BBQ'ing a bald eagle, would it make it more, or less, of a story if he worked for PETA?
Although the last 12 years have made the whole concept into something of a joke, the Republicans tout themselves as the "party of reform". And we just keep seeing scandal after unethical scandal from them.
No worries, though, in another 12 years we can say the same thing about the Democrats, who apparently didn't learn from the Republicans error and now want to position themselves as the Party-O'-Reform. But, having the same complete and utter lack of ethics as all politicians, they'll start making the same egotistical blunders as the Republicans did, once they take their new seats in January.
Meet the new boss...
There is room for advertising in-game
No. Not even a little.
As long as I PAY FOR the goddamned game, the advertisers will accomplish nothing but pissing me off by trying to advertise to me in-game.
When they start giving the games away, my opinion on the matter may change (though if my stance on ad-funded television means anything, I just won't play those games). But I do not pay to watch ads.
Pay up front, or watch ads. Make me do both, and you've lost a customer.
Is there some keyboard shortcut in Google Mail that I'm missing?
You can (and generally should) get to your GMail account via POP/SSL (and SMTP/TLS for sending). You can then access it from a properly configured Thunderbird (such as the highly recommended Portable ThunderBird 1.5, the version with GPG and Enigmail pre-installed - Skip 2.0 for now, though... It ate quite a few messages before I noticed).
And if that takes too much effort, stick with your Yahoo or MSN email, and just don't worry about privacy - Big Brother loves us all and only ever acts in our best interests.
Submitter seems to be implying that "-American" studies programs should not be taken seriously.
Agreed. We must take multiculturalism seriously!
No longer can we marginalize the contributions of great men such as Hubert Davis or Dave Matthews!
Now, Wymyn's studies... Well, let's just not take that detour to Radcliffe today.
Console systems, on the other hand, are engineered for a very tight, very specific, set of tasks. This is why a console with comparatively crappy stats can walk all over a much beefier computer, and vice versa.
While once true and quite insightful, I don't know if that really applies to modern consoles.
With earlier consoles, you had devices with shockingly low CPU power, optimized for sound and video I/O. After those came a gen of GPUs-with-sound-and-ohyeahawimpyCPU. And then? Although we could argue about the PS1, certainly the original XBox invited comparisons (since it basically used nothing but mildly locked-down PC hardware), but even the competition has opened the door to thinking in terms of MIPS rather than polygons.
Some CIOs are embracing the influx while others continue to resist it.
;-)
As a member of a rather small "corporate" IT department, I can appreciate the difference between using certain programs at home vs at work. The number one rule people need to understand, don't expose the company to legal liability, ever. The number two rule, don't do anything that will risk bringing the network down (or critical servers, though most people don't appreciate the difference).
The order of those may change depending on the nature of the company, but those pretty much account for 99% of the "stupid" IT rules that people don't like following. Sure, you run BitTorrent at home and have never had a problem. Perhaps you even use it legally (riiiiight... But hey, I'll admit it could happen). Move that into a corporate environment, however, and your "just a tenth of my bandwidth, and low chance of getting caught pirating music", times 50 users, turns into "why does our network suck so much" and "I have the RIAA's lawyers on line 2...".
Additionally, most people absolutely suck at protecting their home PCs, and in my experience, they take even fewer precautions at work. Now, we run all the standard protections, such as AV, AS, mail and web filtering, and so on. But no amount of automated protection can ever suffice to stop determined insiders from managing to crash (or worse, compromise) their own workstations. Sure, you can fire the malicious ones after-the-fact (and the threat of that at least encourages some cooperation), but that doesn't undo the damage.
As an aside, I consider myself something of a "dark-grey hat". I will gladly teach my users how to do things so they stay juuuuuuust barely on the right side of the law. But even that doesn't always help... It lets people know that when I do give them rules, I most likely have a damned good reason for it; but you'll always have people who just don't "get" it, and don't understand why installing every toolbar, cursor enhancement, and systray bug they can find makes those fascist IT guys so annoyed.
As another aside, I've worked the other side of the fence as well, an engineer working as not part of the IT department. As for how to deal with that situation - Well, let's just say I thank Zeus that I don't have someone like myself as a one of my users.
Why does the search suck?
You left off the single most glaring problem with Amazon's search...
Why do they not have a great big checkbox to only show "real" Amazon products (ie, exclude all their BS "marketplace" partners, who almost without fail advertise great prices but then shipping costs higher than the actual products, thus making "sort by lowest price" useless)?
I can live with having to read product details before I buy. But having to get to the LAST step of checking out before I can see that a $10 item will cost me $15 in shipping (real example!) just drives me up a frickin' wall.
In this case it was easy enough to do, which meant we were providing the reports that senior management needed right away, giving us time to relax and build a proper & full scale SQL replacement.
It strains credibility to claim that, after producing something functional, management would give you the time to replace it with something such that, "the recipients never knew when we migrated from the stop-gap to the final".
And I don't mean that as a typical geek management-slam - If they can't tell the difference, why should they approve the team spending twice as long on the cleanup as on the prototype? Yeah, the engineers might know the difference, but the aesthetics of the underlying code rarely counts as making for a better a business case.
Is there a chance you were down there on shore leave, got drunk, kissed an ugly girl, got a tattoo and passed the bar?
Hey, what happens in Surfers Paradise, stays in Surfers Paradise.
Really, would you admit passing the bar to your friends? Getting drunk and visiting a NZ sheep "farm", sure... But that? <shudder>.
This is yet another jab at intelligent design that scientists attempt so gingerly. Really why do the miracles of Buckaroo B have to be broken down
Sometimes, even normally staid scientists can derive some pleasure in terminating the trajectory of anaerobic-decompositionally accelerated projectiles into cylindrically confined ichthyoids.
Or in this case, taunting the laughably ignorant fundies.
Still, it's pretty nice to think that they're going offline because they've largely solved the problem they were fighting.
I wish I could agree with that sentiment, but I'd call it a closer analogy to say that the disease gained immunity to the best known antibiotic so far and further use of it just wastes resources better spent elsewhere.
The governments of the world need to make it legal to hunt down and torture spammers and their extended families to death. Until then, they will always find ways to fill our inboxes with garbage.
NT stand for Nested Task
Or, officially, "New Technology".
Or, the most likely of all, by analogy to IBM -> HAL (as in, HAL-9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey), VMS -> W(indows)NT. I would normally consider that a cute coincidence, if they didn't share Dave Cutler as a lead designer on both projects.
But given that he did help design both OSs, and the propensity for geeks to come up with bizarrely convoluted acronyms, I'd call that the "right" answer as to the origins of the name "NT".
That's it. I've heard it 5 too many times only TODAY: I've never used Opera and I couldn't care less if it exists.
Fixed.
No, not fixed - completely rephrased to mean something similar that you like better.
He had it right in the first place - That phrase uses a highly technical linguisitic device known as "sarcasm", wherein the speaker says exactly the opposite of what they mean. (The clever bunny might notice I used the same device for illustration at the start of that sentence, as one wouln't normally call sarcasm "highly technical")
The GP's particular use, unfortunately, has spawned off something of a holy war, in that the vocal inflections used to frame the sarcasm totally vanish. But even though it doesn't translate well to the written word, you can't call actually call it an error... Just a poor choice of phrases for this medium.
The Executive branch has forgotten it can't make laws.
The USGS, the FCC, the DOE, and countless other government "agencies" derive their power directly from the president. If he tells them they need to wear only bright purple clothing every Thursday, they'd damned well better do so.
Now, I will agree 100% with those suggesting the purely political motives behind this decree. But at least on this one, the asshat-in-chief does have the authority (if not the intellect or scientific understanding) to singlehandedly tell the USGS how to do their jobs.
They don't have the resumes, the skills, or the experience yet, so I think they have to be judged on other factors that are harder to qualify.
I tried to think of a good answer, and had decided on "fix this PC" (where it has some glaringly obvious problem that should take any decent tech under five minutes to find and fix, such as a dead HDD), but then re-read the part I quote above...
What requirements does this job have, that you expect applicants lacking the skills and experience to do the job?
I would agree completely that overall familiarity with PC architecture and problem solving skills in general matter far more than having the LED error codes for a Dell Dimension 4300s memorized - But it sounds like you expect to not only interview, but hire, completely clueless individuals.
At the very least, you should have no trouble finding people who can demonstrate simple tasks such as installing RAM or setting up a modem connection on XP. Don't settle for less in the hope that you can train someone up the level of basic competency the job demands.
Unless, of course, you plan to have these people do nothing but take calls and read scripts - In which case, for all our sakes, just make sure they can read and speak reasonably clear English. Although that particular "test" would probably break the law, you can easily give it in a roundabout way that answers the question without raising any eyebrows.
Waitasec... Under the "SkyDancers" entry, it mentions "broken ribs". I can see the other mild forms of damage, particularly eye injuries, but how the hell would six ounces of plastic and foam, even spinning as fast as its little plastic launcher can make it, manage to break bones?
I took issue with a few other entries as well, but it seems like many of these "dangers" don't really involve the toy itself, much like "injury while under the influence" - The alcohol doesn't hurt you, your actions while drunk hurt you.
Some stupid kid probably launched one of these off the roof to see how far it could go, then proceeded to fall off the roof. Do we blame the toy for that?
Just like a religion that says the earth is the center of the universe is provably WRONG
Although I see your point, that one doesn't technically count as true. You can prove the Earth as not the center of the solar system, but you can't prove that we don't sit right smack-dab in the center of the universe. To do that, we'd need to know the boundaries of the universe - And since those either don't exist (infinite universe) or recede away from us at the speed of light (greater, if you take inflation into account), we can never actually point to a spot in the sky and say "There lies the center of the universe, which we don't occupy".
However-- evolution theory says NOTHING about the start.
That all depends on what you call "evolution", which despite the best attempts of folks who throw about terms like "evolutionists", actually includes quite a good number of smaller well-tested theories (with, admittedly, a few SMALL gaps, but I say that in the interest of the truth, not because I erroneously believe that it matters if we don't have a perfect fossil of a particular prehuman ancestor).
Miller and Urey's famous 1953 experiment demonstrated that you can "create" relatively complex organic molecules (such as amino acids) with just water, ammonia, methane, and lightning. More recent experiments (I don't have a cite for any, sorry - someone feel free to provide one) found that seasonal movement beween ice sheets can combine simple amino acids into much longer protein chains. And there you can stop, since you have all the preconditions needed for prions (self-replicating proteins). Once you have self-replication, the "theory of evolution" as most people understand it (basically just natural selection) kicks in, and you just need to wait for random mutations to do the rest.
The rest of the collection of smaller, testable theories I refer to provide proof-of-concept for possible paths (though of course, not proveably "the" path, but irrelevant) to most of the major leaps needed to go from Miller's flask to humans (such as bilipid membranes, RNA, cellular organelles, cells, and so on). But those just ice the cake, as I point out above. Once you have self-replication, game over, "life" wins.
This is the same way that Instant Messaging services such as AIM work too. If the admins don't want those services enabled, they should inform their users and then block Skype IP ranges.
I see you've never actually tried to block AIM at the firewall...
Twelve ports, two protocols, and ten or so class-C address ranges later, I still have some of my users occasionally succeed in getting the damned thing to connect.
the Opteron ended up drawing much less power at idle than the Xeons
...
the Xeon 5160 used the least energy in completing our multithreaded MyriMatch search, in part because it completed the task so quickly.
So what does this mean for people shopping for servers?
If your servers constantly tick along at nearly 100% CPU use, you might do better going with the Xeon system. If your machines basically sit idle most of the time with an occasional spike for a few seconds when it actually does something, the AMD would save you more on electricity.
Of course, this raises a third possibility - Would running a number of virtual servers on one large Xeon machine waste more energy than it saves, or give a net gain?
based on a random sampling of 2,000 credit card accounts,
Ummm... Now, I harbor no delusions that my credit card history really counts as a secret - Obviously my CC company has it and uses it to market bizarre crap to me, and they'd turn it over to the government without thinking twice about it.
But how does some guy just go and "randomly sample" 2000 cards' histories? If I wanted to validate his study, could I do the same?
Something doesn't seem right here, and I don't think most people would like the "how" either way.
I don't even know why this is news. Sun activity is very low right now, we're at the bottom of the cycle right now: http://www.sec.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/
A few years ago we had that X28 flare!
It counts as news because CMEs occur with equal probability in all directions.
The Earth, from the Sun, counts as a very very VERY small target - Given a straight-line probability of hitting us, the Earth only occupues 0.00005% of vectors heading outward from the Sun. Granted, a CME takes the form of a rather large cloud, so boost that by a factor of a thousand (give or take an order of magnitude), but we still have an exceptionally small chance of getting hit by any given CME.
Well, this one hit us, and as I write this, we have a Kp of >8, with a G4 intensity geomagnetic storm going on (the scale only goes to 5, much like hurricanes). To get an idea of what that means, I live a mile south of a international airport, my neighbor (to the North) has a brazillian watts worth of christmas lights out, and the sky still looks bright frickin' green (unfortunately we have some serious cloud cover here, or I'd have a hell of a show and certainly wouldn't waste it writing on Slashdot).
Or to put it another way - if an X28 CME actually hit the Earth straight on, we wouldn't have any functional satellites left to tell us about it, nor would most of us hear about it on the news for a week or so due to massivly widespread blackouts.
I dont see why a water shortage is an issue... Hydrogen is water-neutral.
Actually, better than neutral in this case. You start with raw seawater, and end with potable water.
The entire linked articles seems like the worst kind of red herring... It addresses "problems" that a hydrogen energy economy would allow us to fix. Seawater-to-potable as one example. As the source of energy, we could run a large number of breeder reactors in the middle of nowhere; No one around to complain about the spooooooky nukular, and they make more fuel than they consume. As for transportation, yeah, Hydrogen can explode - But apparently the authors have never tossed a cup of petrol on a bonfire (or used a cigarette lighter, for that matter).
You can fairly make one, and only one, complaint about switching to Hydrogen - The media doesn't really understand that Hydrogen would act as an energy transport, rather than as a source. But the rest just needs us to get off our butts and start building the infrastructure needed to make the switch. Once we have that, the actual source doesn't matter (well, it does, but only in that it should address the problems we currently have with our oil-based energy economy - From an end-user perspective, it could come from an army of gerbils running in their little wheels for all they care).
I know this is a common stereotype around /., but I
wondered if you have any evidence of this.
Well, I do have to admit that I know of no actual statistically reliable studies on the subject.
Considering Slashdot as representative of geeks in general, however, I'd say the recognition of the stereotype here all but proves the point.