I got a Mi Band 2. I've wanted something like this for a long time but was always turned off by the price and the reported inaccuracy.
However, this thread caused me to research them again and see what was available and for less than $35 I just had to get the Mi Band 2 especially since it purports to track steps and heart rate and also very important to me sleep.
I'm both impressed and underwhelmed. I really hope the heart rate monitor is horribly inaccurate because I have seen it go from 99 bpm to 41 bpm in less than a minute, all the while I was sitting restfully at my desk. I've also seen it go from 47 bpm to 94 in also about a minute.
Maybe I should just ignore the outliers. The very first read I got from it was 72 which sounds healthy to me. Take the readings with a grain of salt - or maybe not with salt if you're concerned about your heart.
The steps are also not 100% accurate but they're pretty good. At least I can get an idea of how much more I walked today than yesterday even if it doesn't always register all my steps - and possibly overcounts others.
I've only had the thing about 8 hours and I'm really curious what it will do when I go to sleep. I did lay down earlier perfectly still for about a half hour and it didn't think I was asleep which was true. I was awake the whole time although I have no idea how it's supposed to know the difference.
It's a cool toy and even though I don't trust the heart rate monitor it suggests to me that maybe I should ask my doctor if my heart rate is too high even when I'm resting.
I also feel incentivized to meet my suggested goal of walking at least 8000 steps.
The idea of "gamefiying" health is a great idea IMO. I've already gone out of my way to put in a few extra steps.
Maybe the novelty will wear off and it's certainly not a solution in and of itself to getting healthier but so far I like it.
If I were willing to spend more money I'm sure there are much better toys on the market.
I put in my name and got nearly 120 results found. But most of them didn't share either my first or last name. A lot of them did share my name though and everyone I checked put in something other than my own address. Okay, when I put my name in quotes I only got about 50 hits and most seemed to actually share my name but there's still no way to narrow it down further.
I have no reason to doubt that those people are real. But I couldn't punch in my name and ZIP code and I'm not going to click on that many names just to check each one of them and what if I found something? Who would I call?
Oh right - I click on a link and report it and then what - do I really think that would do anything?
This whole idea on anonymous online petitions is stupid. Don't tell me it's not anonymous just because you have to put in a name. I can think of thousands of fake names.
I just searched for "donald trump" and got over 1600 results, but it's searching the comments too. Most of these people mentioned "donald trump" in the comments but they're not claiming to be named donald trump.
One person did claim to be named Donald Trump and lists his address as 600 Pennsylvania Avenue. (I know, the WH is at 1600 Pennsylvania, but does trump know that? Do his supporters?)
How would anyone go about separating the fake from the real for something like this?
I actually agree with "donald trump" of 600 Pennsylvania Avenue but I suspect that's neither his real name nor his real address.
I'm not much of a gamer, but I do play two games online.
One is a really boring game with only maybe a dozen players still hanging on after about 10 years. I'm the highest level. My rival has the highest stats and I'm convinced he bought them too, but that's what keeps this guy running his server. Some people even took pride in the fact that they never paid anything to achieve what they have, but others pay the bills.
The other is a tower defense game that I was grinding away at always ignoring the nags for micro-payments and then about a month ago I tried to login and they said they were hacked and I had to reset my password. I didn't even know which email I used to register so everything was lost. At that point I was relieved that I NEVER paid them any money although I often felt I should because I had spent hours playing it.
The first game I mentioned is probably more of a hobby(or perhaps a student project) to the developer and for the past 5 years at least he's just kept his domain registered and kept his server running - he's joked before that it's running on a Commodore 64 (and it's so simple, I'm not completely sure if he's actually joking or not). He probably gets just enough to pay for his costs and maybe to take his family out to dinner once a year.
As for the 2nd game, I'm glad there are suckers willing to pay to play because otherwise I probably couldn't play for free.
Granted those are very niche markets, but I don't pay for games as a general rule. I don't think I've paid up front for a game since the '90s (although I did make a few purchases on the first game I mentioned, but only after playing it for a while).
In the tower defense game there were several times where I felt I had hit a wall and couldn't advance without making micropayments. Instead I changed strategy a bit and always found a way past that point. That's the sign of a good game in my opinion. It should be hard and it should challenge you to rethink your strategy.
They were actually a bit hard for me to get into the first time I saw them. They seemed to be very.....disjointed and rambling on pointless jams and I say this as a huge Grateful Dead fan. Sometimes they just seemed silly. Their drummer often wore a dress (or a mumu?) and sometimes they'd jump up and down on small trampolines while playing their guitars and basses.
Nonetheless I came to appreciate them a bit. I was never a die-hard Phish head but they were good. Maybe they still are - I haven't seen or even heard them in years. I heard Trey Anastasio had to get sober. They often did covers like that one I linked to from Grand Funk Railroad, but they also had a lot of original stuff too.
It was actually a Dead Head who dragged me to that first Phish show. A lot of my other Dead Head friends didn't care for them at all but I recommend checking them out - I also recommend you smoke a huge joint while you do so.
Few bands can stretch a 3 minute song out for nearly half an hour to the point where you forget what song they're actually playing. Phish is one of them.
BTW, what does an American Band look like? Like Grand Funk? LIke Phish? The Allman Brothers? The Rolling Stones (just kidding, I know they're British) but how could you tell from looking at them?
They're from Vermont, which is practically Canada to those of us in the Southwest./s
Take the streetlights. Turning them off had saved the city about $1.25 million. What had not made the national news stories was what had happened while those lights were off. Copper thieves, emboldened by the opportunity to work without fear of electrocution, had worked overtime scavenging wire. Some, the City Council learned, had even dressed up as utility workers and pried open the boxes at the base of streetlights in broad daylight. Keeping the lights off might have saved some money in the short term, but the cost to fix what had been stolen ran to some $5 million.
Because I guarantee you the beer and pizza will catch up with you eventually. I actually love beer, but loathe pizza which makes for a strange health case.
Salads and vegetables and fruits as well as a good dose of protein in the form of meat actually make me feel better than eating crap like pizza - and I also feel healthier without the beer, but I do love it so much.
And yeah, sometimes I hate eating my vegetables but I feel better overall when I eat them.
Imagine the flip-side. You give up drinking like a fish and try to eat a bit healthier and you get some exercise every once in a while and you STILL can go on that cruise or that vacation and you can even pig out occasionally at family BBQs.
i've known people who have died at far too young of an age and if they were still around they would still be able to enjoy those things.
Some died unexpectedly. Others died after long illnesses which weren't exactly pleasant. If we could ask them, would they say it was worth it? Well, we can't ask them, can we?
I'm not sure how typical this is, but I use mine until it breaks. Then I run to the phone store (Verizon in my case) with no clue what I want and end up buying whatever they're pushing.
It's a bad strategy I know, but I don't spend a lot of time keeping up with the latest phones. I have my own prejudices too. I don't want an iPhone and I don't want Samsung so that makes my choices narrower. I ended up with an LG V20 this time. It's a nice phone. It has a removable battery and one of those old fashioned headphone jacks. It is also stuck at Android 7.0 and I know better than to expect an update.
It's more than adequate though.
Am I worried about security? Not really. If you had full access to my phone you'd get my contacts and a few uninteresting text messages. You could also post to Slashdot under my account and make me look like an asshole, but that's about it. You wouldn't be able to order anything from Amazon because I don't order shit from Amazon on my phone. Nor do I do any kind of banking on my phone.
I try not to think too much about whether I should have bought a different phone. I really just wanted to get the hell out of the store and get on with my life.
Although they did play that song, that's Wallace Saunders' version.
The original song memorializing Casey Jones was written a few days after the accident by , Jones' friend Wallace Saunders, an African American engine wiper.
The Dead's version (along with some annotations including the above quote) appears here:
I still read the alumni magazine my alma mater sends me. I read about amazing students and professors doing great things in their chosen fields and even starting businesses. Usually those businesses are in the US employing Americans.
And quite often these people come from other continents..
The school I went to is looking for the best students they can get and if they come from a foreign land that's okay. In fact, I'd be upset if they told some prospective student who was intelligent and had a good work ethic that they couldn't be admitted because they already had too many foreigners.
We should want smart immigrants who are willing to work for an education to come here. My ancestors just a few generations back were immigrants and yours probably were too.
Of course we could turn these students away along with all their potential. Maybe they'll go to Canada or Europe or maybe they'll start their own universities in Asia or South America or Africa which in a few decades will make our schools look merely average or worse because we told the best students to stay out of our country.
I haven't done it often but sometimes I type "defence" or insert unnecessary 'u's. Usually people don't even take the bait.
I don't think they should really worry too much about the evolution of language though. Can we still understand each other? Are people saying or writing what comes naturally?
I just got a new keyboard 2 days ago. It's a Logitech K800*. At first I didn't like it because the keys were closer together than the old Saitek keyboard I had used for years. I usually take the attitude that a keyboard is just a keyboard anyway.
But after about a day of using this new one and getting used to it I have found I actually type better.
To check my perception I just pulled out a ruler and measured the distance between the left edge of the "Q" key and the right edge of the "P" key on the Logitech, the Saitek and an old Toshiba laptop. Despite what I thought they're all very close to equal in distance - any difference is barely perceptible with the ruler I used.
The biggest difference seems to be how low a profile a laptop's keys and the logitech's keys have compared to the Saitek.
But why would you judge a laptop solely on its keyboard? I used to be a road warrior and I lugged my laptop all over the country but I adapted to whatever keyboard my laptop had.
At home or in my cubicle though I have almost always have used an external keyboard. It's just too much to carry when you travel but if I really hated my laptop's keyboard that much I would have.
* - sorry if I sound like a shill for Logitech. I know everyone hates them for what they tried to do with their Harmony remote. I've used their trackballs for half my life and I love them. I would be upset if you made me use a mouse.
And another thing. (possibly wandering off topic, sorry)
Why are computers sold with keyboards and a mouse anyway these days. A week ago I woke up to a dead laptop and in desperation I went to Walmart and bought an HP desktop. It was desperation that drove me to that choice, but why did it come with a mouse and a keyboard but NO speakers?
HP couldn't even include a shitty speaker inside their computer? But they insist on giving me a keyboard and mouse that I will NEVER use? WTF?
I know, some people would be pissed off if they spent $500 on a computer and they got it home and realized they had no keyboard but there's also a good reason I didn't buy a monitor with it - because I already had one. They were in fact selling computers with monitors all wrapped up neatly in one box.
I guess the reason they can't package and sell the keyboards/mice separately is a marketing decision. People would get freaked out if they had to start buying accessories? (just a guess). Besides, keyboards and mice are so cheap they're practically disposable.
Require the ticket user's name be printed on the ticket, and confirm your ID matches before you're allowed in.
This idea has some merit but you're always going to have people who for one reason or another can't go at the last minute and the ticket shouldn't have to be burnt just because of that.
Limiting the number of tickets one can buy is something would help and I think they do - I haven't bought tickets in a while, but I remember ticket scalpers recruiting my friends who had to physically wait in line to buy extra tickets for them. They would basically get a free ticket in exchange for waiting for hours to buy tickets just so they could buy the maximum available and give the rest to the scalpers.
I used to go to Dead shows and saw people holding up their fingers looking for their "miracle ticket" while others had stickers or signs which said "Die Scalper Scum".....and one woman wandering around saying she would give a blow job for a ticket.
I've also encountered people who even days before a show say their friend couldn't make it and asking if they could they just get face value for the ticket sometimes even neglecting the associated fees.
And then there's the scalpers I've seen when I was late and the show had already started just begging to sell their tickets at less than face value. I just laughed - every time I saw that I already had a ticket.
I went through a couple of years when I blacked out everything. If I saw the slightest bit of light through a window or even my router I covered them up until everything was completely dark. It's actually quite amazing how bright some LEDs are once you make everything else dark. Suddenly even my alarm clock seemed too bright. That's one of the few things I let shine in the darkness so maybe I didn't go far enough.
I didn't find that it actually helped me sleep better. Often just leaving the TV on with all its light with the volume just barely audible lulls me to sleep. It helps if whatever is on the TV isn't filled with jarring commercials or sensational promos for "Breaking News".
I frequently send my guys home during stressful times with instructions to go to bed early.
This was pretty much the opposite of a place I used to work. When I started there we rotated a pager among 6 people. By the time I left it was just me and one other person and the CEO who came on board during my time there demanded to see people at their desks. Telecommuting became frowned upon.
It didn't matter that right when I went to bed I got a call and spent the next 6 hours debugging some horrible code that didn't even have error checking.
And there were nights where the problems were easy, but they wouldn't let me sleep more than an hour at a time.
You're probably thinking we must have had some pretty horrible code to wake me up so often and you'd be right, but they were very reluctant to let us fix it.
The best people quit for better opportunities. Many of the average people got "laid off" or were just fired after they got completely burned out.
So I left the H1B guy as the only person responsible for the pager and last I heard he was hating life there too.
It just might be a bad sign if the first thing you do when you get home from work is to login to your work laptop.
The "unannounced (but obviously scheduled)" remark strikes me as funny because one time they told me my internet was out due to a "planned outage". I think the customer (dis)service representative was just trying to get rid of me but after repeatedly telling me there were no reported outages in my area (except the one I was reporting) they said it was a "planned outage".
And then I started ranting about Service Level Agreements which was useless and then I told them I wasn't going to be their customer anymore.
And I am no longer a Comcast customer. I hate CenturyLink too, but at least they're not Comcast. With only two choices of ISPs I can only refuse to be a customer of one of them.
And today I will cast my ballot to authorize my city to spend millions of dollars to build their own internet service. Comcast has already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to defeat this ballot measure.
If there's a compelling reason to connect the TV then do so, otherwise hell no.
If you've got a Roku and a gaming console that are already connected, what do you need the TV connected for? Not for gaming or Netflix or Amazon. Unless there's some service you really want that is available on your "smart" TV that isn't available on your Roku or gaming console why is this even a question?
I think I must have bought one of the last dumb TVs that Samsung made, but the Samsung BluRay player I bought with it was "smart". Just about every time I fired it up it had to update its firmware. None of the apps would work without an internet connection and the updates were mandatory - as Bryant said in Blade Runner "no choice, pal", but the apps were mostly crap anyway. The ones that weren't crap were just duplicating what the Roku could do (e.g. Netflix).
Eventually the firmware updates broke the BluRay player. NONE of the "smart" features work anymore and it struggles to play discs now. It won't do BluRay anymore. DVDs mostly work though.
I can't say for sure that the disc problems are due to firmware updates but I find it hard to believe the hardware suddenly stopped being able to read BluRays. I've got a 25 year old Sony Discman that still plays CDs despite being somewhat abused over the years. The BluRay player lost its shit about 3 years after I bought it and it had led a charmed life compared to the Discman.
My Panasonic TV is "smart" too, but the last time I checked they had removed all but one app from it and that wasn't even anything I was interested in. I can't even use it for Netflix.
I want a dumb monitor, not a "smart" TV. And my experience with the "smart" BluRay players killed buying movies for me. When I stuck in a disc that I only saw once and it wouldn't play - and all the other discs I had wouldn't play on either my Samsung or my "smart" Panasonic BluRay player I just gave up.
I don't now why you're modded funny instead of obvious.
There is no way you're going to convince me the stock sale had nothing to do with this.
Even if there is evidence that they were planning to sell the stock before the "hack" was known I would still think they knew about the data breach before they admitted that they did.
And that's BEFORE I even put my tin-foil hat on which suggests to me a whole host of other conspiracies some of which includes the idea that they intentionally leaked the data. That may be some crazy idea that they would intentionally do this but can the incompetence be explained any other way? And does anyone really think that if they couldn't profit from putting basically every adult with any credit in the US at risk (and many in a few other countries as well) that they wouldn't?
But what's a poor boy to do? I could protest I guess. I could vote against every incumbent from here on out. I could even vote for a third party. But we're powerless to do anything and I say that without my hat on.
I know I'm late to the party here, but I used perl extensively for maybe a year. It was the best choice for one particular task I had to do and that's also how I learned it.
I could have written the same tool in C but that would have been kind of silly and I could have written a horrible shell script but that would have been horrible.
I was parsing a lot of strings as best as I can recall and perl seemed to be good at that Use the right tool for the job.
--
To be honest and fair I had written things like that in C before. I really wanted to write this tool in Perl because I had never used it before and I wanted to learn it. Perl was well suited for that particular task though. OTOH, since then I've forgotten most of the Perl I learned but I still know C.
Slashdot Mirror
I got a Mi Band 2. I've wanted something like this for a long time but was always turned off by the price and the reported inaccuracy.
However, this thread caused me to research them again and see what was available and for less than $35 I just had to get the Mi Band 2 especially since it purports to track steps and heart rate and also very important to me sleep.
I'm both impressed and underwhelmed. I really hope the heart rate monitor is horribly inaccurate because I have seen it go from 99 bpm to 41 bpm in less than a minute, all the while I was sitting restfully at my desk. I've also seen it go from 47 bpm to 94 in also about a minute.
Maybe I should just ignore the outliers. The very first read I got from it was 72 which sounds healthy to me. Take the readings with a grain of salt - or maybe not with salt if you're concerned about your heart.
The steps are also not 100% accurate but they're pretty good. At least I can get an idea of how much more I walked today than yesterday even if it doesn't always register all my steps - and possibly overcounts others.
I've only had the thing about 8 hours and I'm really curious what it will do when I go to sleep. I did lay down earlier perfectly still for about a half hour and it didn't think I was asleep which was true. I was awake the whole time although I have no idea how it's supposed to know the difference.
It's a cool toy and even though I don't trust the heart rate monitor it suggests to me that maybe I should ask my doctor if my heart rate is too high even when I'm resting.
I also feel incentivized to meet my suggested goal of walking at least 8000 steps.
The idea of "gamefiying" health is a great idea IMO. I've already gone out of my way to put in a few extra steps.
Maybe the novelty will wear off and it's certainly not a solution in and of itself to getting healthier but so far I like it.
If I were willing to spend more money I'm sure there are much better toys on the market.
This deserves to be modded up.
Well done.
I put in my name and got nearly 120 results found. But most of them didn't share either my first or last name. A lot of them did share my name though and everyone I checked put in something other than my own address. Okay, when I put my name in quotes I only got about 50 hits and most seemed to actually share my name but there's still no way to narrow it down further.
I have no reason to doubt that those people are real. But I couldn't punch in my name and ZIP code and I'm not going to click on that many names just to check each one of them and what if I found something? Who would I call?
Oh right - I click on a link and report it and then what - do I really think that would do anything?
This whole idea on anonymous online petitions is stupid. Don't tell me it's not anonymous just because you have to put in a name. I can think of thousands of fake names.
I just searched for "donald trump" and got over 1600 results, but it's searching the comments too. Most of these people mentioned "donald trump" in the comments but they're not claiming to be named donald trump.
One person did claim to be named Donald Trump and lists his address as 600 Pennsylvania Avenue. (I know, the WH is at 1600 Pennsylvania, but does trump know that? Do his supporters?)
How would anyone go about separating the fake from the real for something like this?
I actually agree with "donald trump" of 600 Pennsylvania Avenue but I suspect that's neither his real name nor his real address.
I don't like it, but then again I don't really like the band this AI learned from.
Feed it music I like and see what it comes up with - it seemed to stay true enough to the original music
I'm not much of a gamer, but I do play two games online.
One is a really boring game with only maybe a dozen players still hanging on after about 10 years. I'm the highest level. My rival has the highest stats and I'm convinced he bought them too, but that's what keeps this guy running his server. Some people even took pride in the fact that they never paid anything to achieve what they have, but others pay the bills.
The other is a tower defense game that I was grinding away at always ignoring the nags for micro-payments and then about a month ago I tried to login and they said they were hacked and I had to reset my password. I didn't even know which email I used to register so everything was lost. At that point I was relieved that I NEVER paid them any money although I often felt I should because I had spent hours playing it.
The first game I mentioned is probably more of a hobby(or perhaps a student project) to the developer and for the past 5 years at least he's just kept his domain registered and kept his server running - he's joked before that it's running on a Commodore 64 (and it's so simple, I'm not completely sure if he's actually joking or not). He probably gets just enough to pay for his costs and maybe to take his family out to dinner once a year.
As for the 2nd game, I'm glad there are suckers willing to pay to play because otherwise I probably couldn't play for free.
Granted those are very niche markets, but I don't pay for games as a general rule. I don't think I've paid up front for a game since the '90s (although I did make a few purchases on the first game I mentioned, but only after playing it for a while).
In the tower defense game there were several times where I felt I had hit a wall and couldn't advance without making micropayments. Instead I changed strategy a bit and always found a way past that point. That's the sign of a good game in my opinion. It should be hard and it should challenge you to rethink your strategy.
Yes, they are an American Band. They're comin' to your town, they'll help you party it down, they're an American Band.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
They were actually a bit hard for me to get into the first time I saw them. They seemed to be very.....disjointed and rambling on pointless jams and I say this as a huge Grateful Dead fan. Sometimes they just seemed silly. Their drummer often wore a dress (or a mumu?) and sometimes they'd jump up and down on small trampolines while playing their guitars and basses.
Nonetheless I came to appreciate them a bit. I was never a die-hard Phish head but they were good. Maybe they still are - I haven't seen or even heard them in years. I heard Trey Anastasio had to get sober. They often did covers like that one I linked to from Grand Funk Railroad, but they also had a lot of original stuff too.
It was actually a Dead Head who dragged me to that first Phish show. A lot of my other Dead Head friends didn't care for them at all but I recommend checking them out - I also recommend you smoke a huge joint while you do so.
Few bands can stretch a 3 minute song out for nearly half an hour to the point where you forget what song they're actually playing. Phish is one of them.
Perfect example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
BTW, what does an American Band look like? Like Grand Funk? LIke Phish? The Allman Brothers? The Rolling Stones (just kidding, I know they're British) but how could you tell from looking at them?
They're from Vermont, which is practically Canada to those of us in the Southwest. /s
Back in 2010 or so Colorado Springs turned off 1/3 of their streetlights to save money.
People started stealing the wire.
https://www.politico.com/magaz...
Take the streetlights. Turning them off had saved the city about $1.25 million. What had not made the national news stories was what had happened while those lights were off. Copper thieves, emboldened by the opportunity to work without fear of electrocution, had worked overtime scavenging wire. Some, the City Council learned, had even dressed up as utility workers and pried open the boxes at the base of streetlights in broad daylight. Keeping the lights off might have saved some money in the short term, but the cost to fix what had been stolen ran to some $5 million.
How old are you?
Because I guarantee you the beer and pizza will catch up with you eventually. I actually love beer, but loathe pizza which makes for a strange health case.
Salads and vegetables and fruits as well as a good dose of protein in the form of meat actually make me feel better than eating crap like pizza - and I also feel healthier without the beer, but I do love it so much.
And yeah, sometimes I hate eating my vegetables but I feel better overall when I eat them.
Clams are delicious and they're not going to kill you in small doses.
Imagine the flip-side. You give up drinking like a fish and try to eat a bit healthier and you get some exercise every once in a while and you STILL can go on that cruise or that vacation and you can even pig out occasionally at family BBQs.
i've known people who have died at far too young of an age and if they were still around they would still be able to enjoy those things.
Some died unexpectedly. Others died after long illnesses which weren't exactly pleasant. If we could ask them, would they say it was worth it? Well, we can't ask them, can we?
They're dead and gone.
I'm not sure how typical this is, but I use mine until it breaks. Then I run to the phone store (Verizon in my case) with no clue what I want and end up buying whatever they're pushing.
It's a bad strategy I know, but I don't spend a lot of time keeping up with the latest phones. I have my own prejudices too. I don't want an iPhone and I don't want Samsung so that makes my choices narrower. I ended up with an LG V20 this time. It's a nice phone. It has a removable battery and one of those old fashioned headphone jacks. It is also stuck at Android 7.0 and I know better than to expect an update.
It's more than adequate though.
Am I worried about security? Not really. If you had full access to my phone you'd get my contacts and a few uninteresting text messages. You could also post to Slashdot under my account and make me look like an asshole, but that's about it. You wouldn't be able to order anything from Amazon because I don't order shit from Amazon on my phone. Nor do I do any kind of banking on my phone.
I try not to think too much about whether I should have bought a different phone. I really just wanted to get the hell out of the store and get on with my life.
Although they did play that song, that's Wallace Saunders' version.
The original song memorializing Casey Jones was written a few days after the accident by , Jones' friend Wallace Saunders, an African American engine wiper.
The Dead's version (along with some annotations including the above quote) appears here:
http://artsites.ucsc.edu/GDead...
I still read the alumni magazine my alma mater sends me. I read about amazing students and professors doing great things in their chosen fields and even starting businesses. Usually those businesses are in the US employing Americans.
And quite often these people come from other continents..
The school I went to is looking for the best students they can get and if they come from a foreign land that's okay. In fact, I'd be upset if they told some prospective student who was intelligent and had a good work ethic that they couldn't be admitted because they already had too many foreigners.
We should want smart immigrants who are willing to work for an education to come here. My ancestors just a few generations back were immigrants and yours probably were too.
Of course we could turn these students away along with all their potential. Maybe they'll go to Canada or Europe or maybe they'll start their own universities in Asia or South America or Africa which in a few decades will make our schools look merely average or worse because we told the best students to stay out of our country.
I haven't done it often but sometimes I type "defence" or insert unnecessary 'u's. Usually people don't even take the bait.
I don't think they should really worry too much about the evolution of language though. Can we still understand each other? Are people saying or writing what comes naturally?
Then I don't see a problem.
Soon the rich will be able to form holding companies and tax haven banks in space
Yeah, screw offshore accounts.
A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.
(and tax havens).
I don't suppose the FDIC covers off-world banks.
I just got a new keyboard 2 days ago. It's a Logitech K800*. At first I didn't like it because the keys were closer together than the old Saitek keyboard I had used for years. I usually take the attitude that a keyboard is just a keyboard anyway.
But after about a day of using this new one and getting used to it I have found I actually type better.
To check my perception I just pulled out a ruler and measured the distance between the left edge of the "Q" key and the right edge of the "P" key on the Logitech, the Saitek and an old Toshiba laptop. Despite what I thought they're all very close to equal in distance - any difference is barely perceptible with the ruler I used.
The biggest difference seems to be how low a profile a laptop's keys and the logitech's keys have compared to the Saitek.
But why would you judge a laptop solely on its keyboard? I used to be a road warrior and I lugged my laptop all over the country but I adapted to whatever keyboard my laptop had.
At home or in my cubicle though I have almost always have used an external keyboard. It's just too much to carry when you travel but if I really hated my laptop's keyboard that much I would have.
* - sorry if I sound like a shill for Logitech. I know everyone hates them for what they tried to do with their Harmony remote. I've used their trackballs for half my life and I love them. I would be upset if you made me use a mouse.
And another thing. (possibly wandering off topic, sorry)
Why are computers sold with keyboards and a mouse anyway these days. A week ago I woke up to a dead laptop and in desperation I went to Walmart and bought an HP desktop. It was desperation that drove me to that choice, but why did it come with a mouse and a keyboard but NO speakers?
HP couldn't even include a shitty speaker inside their computer? But they insist on giving me a keyboard and mouse that I will NEVER use? WTF?
I know, some people would be pissed off if they spent $500 on a computer and they got it home and realized they had no keyboard but there's also a good reason I didn't buy a monitor with it - because I already had one. They were in fact selling computers with monitors all wrapped up neatly in one box.
I guess the reason they can't package and sell the keyboards/mice separately is a marketing decision. People would get freaked out if they had to start buying accessories? (just a guess). Besides, keyboards and mice are so cheap they're practically disposable.
Require the ticket user's name be printed on the ticket, and confirm your ID matches before you're allowed in.
This idea has some merit but you're always going to have people who for one reason or another can't go at the last minute and the ticket shouldn't have to be burnt just because of that.
Limiting the number of tickets one can buy is something would help and I think they do - I haven't bought tickets in a while, but I remember ticket scalpers recruiting my friends who had to physically wait in line to buy extra tickets for them. They would basically get a free ticket in exchange for waiting for hours to buy tickets just so they could buy the maximum available and give the rest to the scalpers.
I used to go to Dead shows and saw people holding up their fingers looking for their "miracle ticket" while others had stickers or signs which said "Die Scalper Scum".....and one woman wandering around saying she would give a blow job for a ticket.
I've also encountered people who even days before a show say their friend couldn't make it and asking if they could they just get face value for the ticket sometimes even neglecting the associated fees.
And then there's the scalpers I've seen when I was late and the show had already started just begging to sell their tickets at less than face value. I just laughed - every time I saw that I already had a ticket.
I went through a couple of years when I blacked out everything. If I saw the slightest bit of light through a window or even my router I covered them up until everything was completely dark. It's actually quite amazing how bright some LEDs are once you make everything else dark. Suddenly even my alarm clock seemed too bright. That's one of the few things I let shine in the darkness so maybe I didn't go far enough.
I didn't find that it actually helped me sleep better. Often just leaving the TV on with all its light with the volume just barely audible lulls me to sleep. It helps if whatever is on the TV isn't filled with jarring commercials or sensational promos for "Breaking News".
I frequently send my guys home during stressful times with instructions to go to bed early.
This was pretty much the opposite of a place I used to work. When I started there we rotated a pager among 6 people. By the time I left it was just me and one other person and the CEO who came on board during my time there demanded to see people at their desks. Telecommuting became frowned upon.
It didn't matter that right when I went to bed I got a call and spent the next 6 hours debugging some horrible code that didn't even have error checking.
And there were nights where the problems were easy, but they wouldn't let me sleep more than an hour at a time.
You're probably thinking we must have had some pretty horrible code to wake me up so often and you'd be right, but they were very reluctant to let us fix it.
The best people quit for better opportunities. Many of the average people got "laid off" or were just fired after they got completely burned out.
So I left the H1B guy as the only person responsible for the pager and last I heard he was hating life there too.
It just might be a bad sign if the first thing you do when you get home from work is to login to your work laptop.
I'm never going to get rich being a paperclip tycoon.
I played for about 2 minutes and I only made about $10. That game sucks.
Very slow you say? So situation normal?
Back when I had Comcast that was normal.
The "unannounced (but obviously scheduled)" remark strikes me as funny because one time they told me my internet was out due to a "planned outage". I think the customer (dis)service representative was just trying to get rid of me but after repeatedly telling me there were no reported outages in my area (except the one I was reporting) they said it was a "planned outage".
And then I started ranting about Service Level Agreements which was useless and then I told them I wasn't going to be their customer anymore.
And I am no longer a Comcast customer. I hate CenturyLink too, but at least they're not Comcast. With only two choices of ISPs I can only refuse to be a customer of one of them.
And today I will cast my ballot to authorize my city to spend millions of dollars to build their own internet service. Comcast has already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to defeat this ballot measure.
If there's a compelling reason to connect the TV then do so, otherwise hell no.
If you've got a Roku and a gaming console that are already connected, what do you need the TV connected for? Not for gaming or Netflix or Amazon. Unless there's some service you really want that is available on your "smart" TV that isn't available on your Roku or gaming console why is this even a question?
I think I must have bought one of the last dumb TVs that Samsung made, but the Samsung BluRay player I bought with it was "smart". Just about every time I fired it up it had to update its firmware. None of the apps would work without an internet connection and the updates were mandatory - as Bryant said in Blade Runner "no choice, pal", but the apps were mostly crap anyway. The ones that weren't crap were just duplicating what the Roku could do (e.g. Netflix).
Eventually the firmware updates broke the BluRay player. NONE of the "smart" features work anymore and it struggles to play discs now. It won't do BluRay anymore. DVDs mostly work though.
I can't say for sure that the disc problems are due to firmware updates but I find it hard to believe the hardware suddenly stopped being able to read BluRays. I've got a 25 year old Sony Discman that still plays CDs despite being somewhat abused over the years. The BluRay player lost its shit about 3 years after I bought it and it had led a charmed life compared to the Discman.
My Panasonic TV is "smart" too, but the last time I checked they had removed all but one app from it and that wasn't even anything I was interested in. I can't even use it for Netflix.
I want a dumb monitor, not a "smart" TV. And my experience with the "smart" BluRay players killed buying movies for me. When I stuck in a disc that I only saw once and it wouldn't play - and all the other discs I had wouldn't play on either my Samsung or my "smart" Panasonic BluRay player I just gave up.
I don't now why you're modded funny instead of obvious.
There is no way you're going to convince me the stock sale had nothing to do with this.
Even if there is evidence that they were planning to sell the stock before the "hack" was known I would still think they knew about the data breach before they admitted that they did.
And that's BEFORE I even put my tin-foil hat on which suggests to me a whole host of other conspiracies some of which includes the idea that they intentionally leaked the data. That may be some crazy idea that they would intentionally do this but can the incompetence be explained any other way? And does anyone really think that if they couldn't profit from putting basically every adult with any credit in the US at risk (and many in a few other countries as well) that they wouldn't?
But what's a poor boy to do? I could protest I guess. I could vote against every incumbent from here on out. I could even vote for a third party. But we're powerless to do anything and I say that without my hat on.
I know I'm late to the party here, but I used perl extensively for maybe a year. It was the best choice for one particular task I had to do and that's also how I learned it.
I could have written the same tool in C but that would have been kind of silly and I could have written a horrible shell script but that would have been horrible.
I was parsing a lot of strings as best as I can recall and perl seemed to be good at that Use the right tool for the job.
--
To be honest and fair I had written things like that in C before. I really wanted to write this tool in Perl because I had never used it before and I wanted to learn it. Perl was well suited for that particular task though. OTOH, since then I've forgotten most of the Perl I learned but I still know C.
Es una tradicion en los Estados Unidos escribir mal el nombre de su pais.
It really is. I probably see it misspelled more often that not.