This. I have a friend who had a great (he thought) idea and went to a bunch of different venture capitalists to try to raise funding. The first few he walked in with an NDA and asked them to sign- they told him to GTFO with your little NDA, nobody here cares. The only question they were interested in answering was whether he was the kind of individual who could execute on his idea.
Actually, the kindle paperwhite doesn't use backlight, it uses a light guide, or kind of a flattened fiber optic cable that redirects the light down onto the page.. Maybe not exactly like direct lighting but closer than led backlight. Or so they say.
Leap Motion is cool. SoftKinetic is cooler. Kinect 1 uses structured light, or a grid of IR beams to calculate depth with parallax- SoftKinect actually uses photon time of flight (!!). Blows kinect out of the water for fidelity. Joint, fingers no problem in near mode. I have developed apps with both, and I can't for the life of me figure out why nobody has every heard of SoftKinetic. Not MS backed I guess.
It's a mock up. Do you seriously think that early tech prototypes designed to showcase potential cockpits are made of production hardware and materials anywhere?
Some questions/thoughts that to me show it is a mock/fake/whatever:
1. Where are the rudder pedals? In the BBC video the pilot's legs were clearly bent with his knees pointing up in the air. That means his feet were pretty much flat on the cockpit floor and I didn't see rudder pedals there. Maybe the edge of one in the cockpit photo here.
2. Again back to the knees- with his knees up in the air like that his legs are clearly blocking access to the two front panels on the left and right. The pilot couldn't even SEE those panels. I dunno, but I'm guessing there's stuff a pilot might need there at some point.
3. A last thought on the knees. I'm not a doctor, but I think that to pull heavy G's that may not be the most optimal body position.
4. Finally, that thing is SMALL. Like, tiny. What is this aircraft for anyways? It sure can't carry any ordinance.
5. The vids of the thing flying? Looks, behaves and sounds a lot like this RC F-16
So I totally agree this thing is a mock up, or prototype, or fake or whatever. What make's them look like idiots is it appears they are trying to pass it off as the real deal, and certainly implying it is functional and 'defending Iran'.
I don't really get articles like this. Just because win8 CAN be used on on touchscreen doesn't mean that will be the only way to interact with that device. Everyone loves to bash MS for their lack of foresight, how they are going to alienate all their customers, etc., etc. But they created an OS that was flexible enough to run on mobile devices in just that start menu mode (metro) or upgrade win7 for use in workstations or desktop pcs. Kinda cool I think.
Have the bashers USED win8? Maybe, maybe not. I use it all day, every day. It appears to me to be a nice desktop upgrade to windows 7, nothing more. Why? Because I use it as a DESKTOP not a touch device. I never see the start screen unless I want to see it. This is the same start screen that guys like David Pogue claim will take over your computer.
Gorilla Arm? Give me a break. Who uses touchscreens to develop code, write word documents or get business work done? Touchscreens are not desktop pc replacements. They are great for certain things, but they do NOT replace the workstation.
I think it's a hoax as well.
Imagine you live in China, and somehow got the emails of a bunch of developers. You don't have much money maybe and you just LOVE the N9! Might you not send such an email to try to fool the devs into providing their apps for free?
Just saying.
I worked with a friend a while back while he was trying to scare up funds from VCs for an idea he wanted to turn into a company. He went in with the expectation that they would sign his NDA. They told him GTFO with your little NDA. He soon discovered that from the perspective of the VC's an idea itself is generally of very little value- it is the ability to execute and bring something to market based on that idea that has real value. At least this is what they explained to him as he tried to explain to them about his valuable idea and dire need for an NDA.
The VC's were not interested in in his idea beyond the point of ensuring it was valid and had potential. They were really interested in whether HE could bring it to market. He didn't get the funds, so I guess not.
On the other hand though, I work for a software company where nobody will talk to us about the work they want us to do unless we sign an NDA. I can't speak for other companies, maybe it's just us. But for me, I kind of agree with the VC's. I have some good ideas too, but have I produced anything from them? Not yet!:)
For some reason I have a false sense of security now- if this is the kind of 'exploit' that gets reported and/.ed and that I need to worry about, life is good! I mean really- you have to have Win7 x64, with Safari AND then navigate to a site that serves up a bogus iframe height, AND uses the exploit to make bad on your machine. I can't imagine this affects too many people. Also, why is this a 'Windows Remote' exploit? Safari would seem to not handle the iframe exception, whereas IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera DO? If this were a true windows exploit I would expect it to occur regardless of the browser. And what other kind of exploit (as it's defined ITA) is there besides a remote one? A local exploit, where someone turns off my machine? I read 'remote' and think RDP... which is not the case here at all.
This is a weird question. Like we are all just hopelessly stuck on this crappy Windows system, and while we are secretly dying to move to another OS there are just some reasons we can't get past to do it.
Huh? How about why aren't all the other OS users moving to Windows? What is it about the linux command line you love so much you just can't walk away? Or about MacOS that grips you so you cant move to Windows? Or the lack of gaming everywhere else, etc, etc.
Just sayin' that's a more interesting question.
I think it is absolutely criminal what these idiot parents did by not vaccinating their children. And to say that they were gullible is too nice- they were too fucking lazy to spend a few minutes searching on the internet to see if there was any factual basis to what Jenny and Oprah were spouting.
With access to the internet and the wealth of knowledge there, how friggin hard is it to look at as much information as you can and make the best informed decision that you can? And keep in mind these parents weren't in a 3rd world country they were in uppity places like Marin County.
To be really, really cynical though, isn't this kind of Darwinism? The stupid parents weren't able to make a good enough decision to keep their children alive, so that genetic line will end. And since I'm already going to hell for that statement, I might as well propose that those stupid parents would probably have raised more stupid people.
I don't really get it. How is this any different than entering 'Spirit mode' or whatever from any number of games? Prey is a good example. And bringing some object with you? You can call it whatever you want, 4th dimension, Spirit World, Dreamtime etc. but it still seems like the same concept to me.
I find learning a new language is easy, learning the new tools is a pain in the ass.
Java was easy. I found Eclipse RCP/Spring/Hibernate more difficult to learn.
C# was easy too. Learning WPF, WCF and all the.NET 3.5 (and now 4.0) technologies was much harder (still doing it in fact).
Not to say these things are truly difficult, they're not. But there is a LOT to them and it takes time to understand it all.
I don't think most programming jobs are about the language at all anymore, its more about the tools used to build apps. Understanding the syntax of a language seems to be kind of a given.
I'll second this one, and take it even a step further. I worked in academia for a while, surrounded by our (and other) nation's brightest scientists. As a general rule, they were indeed brilliant. But there was also a large group of people with MD's or PhD's who were just friggin IDIOTS. I mean no common sense whatsoever, no ability to function in a normal way. But they got good grades in school, didn't they! Maybe even went to a school for the gifted because they were so 'smart'?
Which brings me to the second point- I bet if you were to track the success (don't ask me how to define success, use your own definition) of average people vs the 'smart' ones you might be suprised. I doubt very much it would be skewed towards the smart ones. My personal theory is the smart ones know what they are in for so don't try and take risks they feel are unacceptable. The less smart just go for it, and sometimes succeed in a spectacular fashion.
Have to say Im pretty sure this guy would have been able to walk as described sans spider bite. In fact,
if he had been hospitalized several years before maybe the outcome would have been the same.
And on top of that,
I doubt even more that he was bitten by a brown recluse. These are extremely rare if not nonexistant in California (http://spiders.ucr.edu/myth.html).
And on top of THAT, what looks like a brown recluse spider bite is most often
a misdiagnosed staph or other necrotic infection (http://spiders.ucr.edu/necrotic.html).
And despite all this misinformation, probably safe to say people will believe that brown recluse spider bites are like the next stem cell technology.
I travel outside the US all the time, only once (several years ago) have I ever been asked to open the laptop and turn it on. Once they saw it booting up that was all they wanted to see.
Im sure many others have horror stories about this, but for me they scan it in a separate bucket and that's pretty much it.
Also, what 'remote access' software did he use to 'watch' his laptop? I get the DnyDNS part, but the remote access apps I know (remote desktop, vnc, tightvnc, etc) either create a new desktop session, boot off the currently logged in user, or would have to notify the laptop user that someoe is trying to connect.
The application he used was either just a keystroke logger (in which case, how did he get to it without the thief knowing), or some software Im not aware of that lets you watch what someone is doing on a machine without any notification.
Anyone know what he used or would allow you to do this?
What? If there were signals, maybe you missed the first by 100000 years, and the next ones won't get here for another 500000 years. Where is the sense of scale? To believe an an ultimate creator because you don't make contact within a 50 year window is a bit naive imo.
Great idea. And then they would have said, "No problem! Drop the course and take it later we will refund the cost of the class."
And then what would happen? You would be short of a full load, waiting to take the class the next quarter/semester. Praying the whole time that the asshole isn't the ONLY guy who teaches that level 200 course.
Not to mention also praying that the course is offered at all in the next quarter or semester!
If either one of those things turns out to be true (which is almost certain), Then YOU are the ass, as you will end up delaying your graduation date because of one prick and one class that you couldn't handle.
In a perfect world we go to college to get educated and you would spend the 10 years there battling it out with the adminstration to get the education you deserve for your money.
In reality, most people just want to graduate so they can get on with their lives.
In addition to this advice, don't forget you have a certain amount of leverage- they wanted to hire you. It is damn hard to find good people (giving you the benefit of the doubt I will assume you are one of these).
The people who offered you the position are almost certainly going to be pissed off when they learn that you might have to respectfully decline their offer because someone in HR or relocating is trying to weasel you out of some money. You need to play off this as the OP suggested, only deal with the person who hired you, not HR.
In my company if this happened, whoever in HR is fucking around with this kind of stunt would get slammed. You cant afford to lose good people because of a couple grand in relocation funds.
If it were me and they didn't see it this way this isn't a company I would want to work for anyways. The employees aren't thinking about what is best for the company anymore.
When I was in college at UCSB they sold the notes for lectures. They being the associated student body. Students could sign up as note takers, and go to lectures and take notes, for which they were paid.
In fact, for one class, the professor was so friggin boring I decided to get the notes, only to discover that he was reading his lectures FROM the AS notes, which he had provided! Sweet! Never went to class again and got an A.
Did I learn the material? Apparently so. IMHO college is about the information you can gain, and less about the medium in which you receive it.
Slashdot Mirror
This. I have a friend who had a great (he thought) idea and went to a bunch of different venture capitalists to try to raise funding. The first few he walked in with an NDA and asked them to sign- they told him to GTFO with your little NDA, nobody here cares. The only question they were interested in answering was whether he was the kind of individual who could execute on his idea.
Actually, the kindle paperwhite doesn't use backlight, it uses a light guide, or kind of a flattened fiber optic cable that redirects the light down onto the page.. Maybe not exactly like direct lighting but closer than led backlight. Or so they say.
Leap Motion is cool. SoftKinetic is cooler. Kinect 1 uses structured light, or a grid of IR beams to calculate depth with parallax- SoftKinect actually uses photon time of flight (!!). Blows kinect out of the water for fidelity. Joint, fingers no problem in near mode. I have developed apps with both, and I can't for the life of me figure out why nobody has every heard of SoftKinetic. Not MS backed I guess.
It's a mock up. Do you seriously think that early tech prototypes designed to showcase potential cockpits are made of production hardware and materials anywhere?
Some questions/thoughts that to me show it is a mock/fake/whatever:
1. Where are the rudder pedals? In the BBC video the pilot's legs were clearly bent with his knees pointing up in the air. That means his feet were pretty much flat on the cockpit floor and I didn't see rudder pedals there. Maybe the edge of one in the cockpit photo here.
2. Again back to the knees- with his knees up in the air like that his legs are clearly blocking access to the two front panels on the left and right. The pilot couldn't even SEE those panels. I dunno, but I'm guessing there's stuff a pilot might need there at some point.
3. A last thought on the knees. I'm not a doctor, but I think that to pull heavy G's that may not be the most optimal body position.
4. Finally, that thing is SMALL. Like, tiny. What is this aircraft for anyways? It sure can't carry any ordinance.
5. The vids of the thing flying? Looks, behaves and sounds a lot like this RC F-16
So I totally agree this thing is a mock up, or prototype, or fake or whatever. What make's them look like idiots is it appears they are trying to pass it off as the real deal, and certainly implying it is functional and 'defending Iran'.
I don't really get articles like this. Just because win8 CAN be used on on touchscreen doesn't mean that will be the only way to interact with that device. Everyone loves to bash MS for their lack of foresight, how they are going to alienate all their customers, etc., etc. But they created an OS that was flexible enough to run on mobile devices in just that start menu mode (metro) or upgrade win7 for use in workstations or desktop pcs. Kinda cool I think. Have the bashers USED win8? Maybe, maybe not. I use it all day, every day. It appears to me to be a nice desktop upgrade to windows 7, nothing more. Why? Because I use it as a DESKTOP not a touch device. I never see the start screen unless I want to see it. This is the same start screen that guys like David Pogue claim will take over your computer. Gorilla Arm? Give me a break. Who uses touchscreens to develop code, write word documents or get business work done? Touchscreens are not desktop pc replacements. They are great for certain things, but they do NOT replace the workstation.
There's only one thing to do! We need the Rebel Alliance!
Nice! Someone was thinking about humanity. I mean really! Build the evil death star??
I think it's a hoax as well. Imagine you live in China, and somehow got the emails of a bunch of developers. You don't have much money maybe and you just LOVE the N9! Might you not send such an email to try to fool the devs into providing their apps for free? Just saying.
But but but.... where are the boobs that were flashed to get the beads?! She must have been smashed to end up on mars.
I worked with a friend a while back while he was trying to scare up funds from VCs for an idea he wanted to turn into a company. He went in with the expectation that they would sign his NDA. They told him GTFO with your little NDA. He soon discovered that from the perspective of the VC's an idea itself is generally of very little value- it is the ability to execute and bring something to market based on that idea that has real value. At least this is what they explained to him as he tried to explain to them about his valuable idea and dire need for an NDA.
:)
The VC's were not interested in in his idea beyond the point of ensuring it was valid and had potential. They were really interested in whether HE could bring it to market. He didn't get the funds, so I guess not.
On the other hand though, I work for a software company where nobody will talk to us about the work they want us to do unless we sign an NDA. I can't speak for other companies, maybe it's just us. But for me, I kind of agree with the VC's. I have some good ideas too, but have I produced anything from them? Not yet!
How to Avoid Huge Ships
For some reason I have a false sense of security now- if this is the kind of 'exploit' that gets reported and /.ed and that I need to worry about, life is good! I mean really- you have to have Win7 x64, with Safari AND then navigate to a site that serves up a bogus iframe height, AND uses the exploit to make bad on your machine. I can't imagine this affects too many people. Also, why is this a 'Windows Remote' exploit? Safari would seem to not handle the iframe exception, whereas IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera DO? If this were a true windows exploit I would expect it to occur regardless of the browser. And what other kind of exploit (as it's defined ITA) is there besides a remote one? A local exploit, where someone turns off my machine? I read 'remote' and think RDP... which is not the case here at all.
This is a weird question. Like we are all just hopelessly stuck on this crappy Windows system, and while we are secretly dying to move to another OS there are just some reasons we can't get past to do it. Huh? How about why aren't all the other OS users moving to Windows? What is it about the linux command line you love so much you just can't walk away? Or about MacOS that grips you so you cant move to Windows? Or the lack of gaming everywhere else, etc, etc. Just sayin' that's a more interesting question.
I think it is absolutely criminal what these idiot parents did by not vaccinating their children. And to say that they were gullible is too nice- they were too fucking lazy to spend a few minutes searching on the internet to see if there was any factual basis to what Jenny and Oprah were spouting.
With access to the internet and the wealth of knowledge there, how friggin hard is it to look at as much information as you can and make the best informed decision that you can? And keep in mind these parents weren't in a 3rd world country they were in uppity places like Marin County.
To be really, really cynical though, isn't this kind of Darwinism? The stupid parents weren't able to make a good enough decision to keep their children alive, so that genetic line will end. And since I'm already going to hell for that statement, I might as well propose that those stupid parents would probably have raised more stupid people.
I don't really get it. How is this any different than entering 'Spirit mode' or whatever from any number of games? Prey is a good example. And bringing some object with you? You can call it whatever you want, 4th dimension, Spirit World, Dreamtime etc. but it still seems like the same concept to me.
I find learning a new language is easy, learning the new tools is a pain in the ass. Java was easy. I found Eclipse RCP/Spring/Hibernate more difficult to learn. C# was easy too. Learning WPF, WCF and all the .NET 3.5 (and now 4.0) technologies was much harder (still doing it in fact).
Not to say these things are truly difficult, they're not. But there is a LOT to them and it takes time to understand it all.
I don't think most programming jobs are about the language at all anymore, its more about the tools used to build apps. Understanding the syntax of a language seems to be kind of a given.
I'll second this one, and take it even a step further. I worked in academia for a while, surrounded by our (and other) nation's brightest scientists. As a general rule, they were indeed brilliant. But there was also a large group of people with MD's or PhD's who were just friggin IDIOTS. I mean no common sense whatsoever, no ability to function in a normal way. But they got good grades in school, didn't they! Maybe even went to a school for the gifted because they were so 'smart'?
Which brings me to the second point- I bet if you were to track the success (don't ask me how to define success, use your own definition) of average people vs the 'smart' ones you might be suprised. I doubt very much it would be skewed towards the smart ones. My personal theory is the smart ones know what they are in for so don't try and take risks they feel are unacceptable. The less smart just go for it, and sometimes succeed in a spectacular fashion.
I hate misleading articles like this.
Have to say Im pretty sure this guy would have been able to walk as described sans spider bite. In fact, if he had been hospitalized several years before maybe the outcome would have been the same.
And on top of that, I doubt even more that he was bitten by a brown recluse. These are extremely rare if not nonexistant in California (http://spiders.ucr.edu/myth.html).
And on top of THAT, what looks like a brown recluse spider bite is most often a misdiagnosed staph or other necrotic infection (http://spiders.ucr.edu/necrotic.html).
And despite all this misinformation, probably safe to say people will believe that brown recluse spider bites are like the next stem cell technology.
chmod a+x /bin/laden
I travel outside the US all the time, only once (several years ago) have I ever been asked to open the laptop and turn it on. Once they saw it booting up that was all they wanted to see.
Im sure many others have horror stories about this, but for me they scan it in a separate bucket and that's pretty much it.
Also, what 'remote access' software did he use to 'watch' his laptop? I get the DnyDNS part, but the remote access apps I know (remote desktop, vnc, tightvnc, etc) either create a new desktop session, boot off the currently logged in user, or would have to notify the laptop user that someoe is trying to connect.
The application he used was either just a keystroke logger (in which case, how did he get to it without the thief knowing), or some software Im not aware of that lets you watch what someone is doing on a machine without any notification.
Anyone know what he used or would allow you to do this?
What? If there were signals, maybe you missed the first by 100000 years, and the next ones won't get here for another 500000 years. Where is the sense of scale? To believe an an ultimate creator because you don't make contact within a 50 year window is a bit naive imo.
Great idea. And then they would have said, "No problem! Drop the course and take it later we will refund the cost of the class."
And then what would happen? You would be short of a full load, waiting to take the class the next quarter/semester. Praying the whole time that the asshole isn't the ONLY guy who teaches that level 200 course.
Not to mention also praying that the course is offered at all in the next quarter or semester!
If either one of those things turns out to be true (which is almost certain), Then YOU are the ass, as you will end up delaying your graduation date because of one prick and one class that you couldn't handle.
In a perfect world we go to college to get educated and you would spend the 10 years there battling it out with the adminstration to get the education you deserve for your money.
In reality, most people just want to graduate so they can get on with their lives.
In addition to this advice, don't forget you have a certain amount of leverage- they wanted to hire you. It is damn hard to find good people (giving you the benefit of the doubt I will assume you are one of these).
The people who offered you the position are almost certainly going to be pissed off when they learn that you might have to respectfully decline their offer because someone in HR or relocating is trying to weasel you out of some money. You need to play off this as the OP suggested, only deal with the person who hired you, not HR.
In my company if this happened, whoever in HR is fucking around with this kind of stunt would get slammed. You cant afford to lose good people because of a couple grand in relocation funds.
If it were me and they didn't see it this way this isn't a company I would want to work for anyways. The employees aren't thinking about what is best for the company anymore.
When I was in college at UCSB they sold the notes for lectures. They being the associated student body. Students could sign up as note takers, and go to lectures and take notes, for which they were paid.
In fact, for one class, the professor was so friggin boring I decided to get the notes, only to discover that he was reading his lectures FROM the AS notes, which he had provided! Sweet! Never went to class again and got an A.
Did I learn the material? Apparently so. IMHO college is about the information you can gain, and less about the medium in which you receive it.