Nah - they say that for the same reason that grant writers say it - if you want money you say "climate change" right now. In the last administration the same guys would be talking "TERRORISTS!"
Look, the Pentagon just wants its new $50B aircraft carrier or whatever. If a Republican is in the White House the USS "W" will be pitched as helping to secure the seas from the evil terrorist task forces. If a Democrat is in the White House the USS Gore will be pitched as preserving democracy for penguins when the icecaps thaw and as a platform for oceanic research. Either way the ships will spend most of their time bombing 3rd world dictators somewhere.
We do the same thing at work. New boss comes along and has new buzzwords. Everybody pitches the same ideas they would have pitched to the old boss, but now they're all about the new initiative and have nothing to do with that old way of thinking...
Yup. No reason that exchanges can't operate in a fairly simple way:
1. You send money to an exchange, which goes into an account. 2. You log into a website and place orders. 3. At midnight every day the book is processed and shares/money change hands. The exact time varies randomly with a standard deviation of 30 seconds - no gaming the system with last-nanosecond offers. Companies are prohibited from releasing news after 6PM. Can't do anything about external events obviously. 4. At 5:01PM every day the daily cost to run the exchange is divided by the number of dollars that changed hands. Then everybody who had a transaction is assessed a proportionate share of the operating expenses. 5. At 5:02PM everybody gets a deposit into their account of interest at the current treasury bill rate. 6. The government holds all money in accounts and guarantees the value of the cash in the accounts, and that your shares won't mysteriously disappear. The value of the shares is whatever you can get somebody to trade for. 7. Shares can only be traded on the exchange, and requests to transfer shares to a specific person at a specific price will not be filled. 8. The contents of the order book are secret before trades execute, and are publicly disclosed afterwards. Orders placed by the same person/institution will be linked, but with a number that is randomly generated and modified daily to allow everybody to see how orders are being placed but maintain privacy.
Even with typical government inefficiency the cost to operate an exchange like this probably would amount to a transaction fee of maybe 0.001%. There wouldn't be any gaming the system, and ordinary people would have a good chance of being able to not lose their shirts, since you could hear about news and react in a few hours and still get the same price as the institutional trader with twitchy fingers.
The only thing this system does away with is the 40 bazillion middle-men and institutional traders skimming money off the system no matter which way the market moves. Stock ownership is nothing more than records in a database - it should be trivial to administer.
Well, they never would be outsourced per-se. However, it is likely that once all the expertise is in China or whatever the local companies will just take over the market, and never hire American executives in the first place. Perhaps they might outsource some of their lower-value work to the US where people will accept any salary.
Well, I don't know that climate change will ever itself directly shape the future of politics. Economics certainly will.
Right now the main economic effect of climate change is that people want to spend a lot of tax money on stuff and make some things more expensive due to concern about what might/will happen 20 years from now. The average taxpayer will just say "I care about the planet - as long as somebody else pays for it." Not much will happen - at least not in the US.
If the climate change folks are right then 20 years from now NYC will start going underwater. That also has a direct economic effect, and now you'll see all kinds of appropriations to mitigate the effects of climate change (or relocate NYC - not likely considering New Orleans didn't get moved). You'll also see funds to put a navy in the arctic ocean.
People pay for problems they are having now, or which based on personal experience they feel like they'll have in a few years. They're much less likely to pay for something that has never happened in the last 30 years, like ocean levels rising, or whatever. Them's the breaks...
I know somebody who had a daughter of average intelligence who had a real knack for cosmetics, but really struggled to get mediocre grades in an academic track.
I have no doubts that she could have been accepted into a college (likely with no merit-based financial aid), and graduated with a degree in something. Many pressured her to do this. In the end she was persuaded by her mother to pursue cosmetology.
Most of her friends now envy her - she is about to enter the working world and already has jobs lined up. By the time they are midway through their sophomore year of college she will be past entry level. She is doing something that she has the potential to perform at a regional or maybe with time even a national level if she expends the effort. With college she might have gotten a job as a secretary somewhere barely able to pay her loans, and with a trade school she will probably make money, have numerous employment options (self-employed, employee, etc), and have the opportunity to make a name for herself if she wishes. She'll also be working in a trade that is easily transfered anywhere in the US.
In contrast I know somebody else who sent their son to college for four years. He wasn't terribly enthusiastic about doing anything in particular, and now works as a clerk in retail. His parents are presumably paying his loan payments, as I doubt he can afford to do so. He was contemplating the military - too bad he didn't do that back when they could have just paid the college bill for him.
College is incredibly expensive these days, and I'm not convinced that the average teenager has the life experience to determine that it is a wise use of $100k or whatever they plan on borrowing. In many cases their parents just pay the bills for their kids, which is nice I guess when you have the money. Kids just view college as the next step they're supposed to take, and consider it more of a life-changing experience socially than academically.
I think that most college-bound students would do far better in something more applied. College is a means to an end and not just 13th grade. I'd never write a tuition check for somebody or cosign on a loan unless they've already proven their ability and interest in making money in the field they want to study, and that college is the best way to advance in that career and is self-funding with a reasonable ROI.
Yup, I know somebody whose US employer had layoffs in Japan. Apparently it was quite traumatic with all kinds of special counseling required, due to the huge culture difference.
I don't believe the CEO flew over to get down on his knees and beg forgiveness for his failure to grow the business. I think he might have bowed his head in a moment of silence before depositing his bonus check, however.
Uh, if you pay $6k for a 1kW panel, and electricity is worth 8c/kWh, then you're recovering money at a rate of about $19/month (assuming you get 1kW for 8 hours a day - that seems generous to me). That is $230/yr.
The interest on a 4% loan (a very low rate) on $6k is $240/yr.
A better investment is to just write a $6k check to your mortgage company.
Most of these panels-pay-for-themselves calculations tend to neglect time-value-of-money and opportunity cost. They assume that if you didn't buy the panels you'd leave the $6k sitting in a wad of $20's on your dresser or something.
Sure, buy panels to save the earth, but don't do it to save money - at least not at current rates.
And anybody with a T-Mobile 3G phone will be stuck with either going back to Edge, or getting a super-locked-down lousy ATT phone...
I'm only 3 months into a 2 year T-Mo contract. I'm just crossing my fingers that my 3G holds out long enough to switch to Verizon or something. And to think I was happy to have a phone that actually worked internationally. No way I'd ever buy an Android phone from ATT - not unless they change their tune in a major way. If they change their frequencies early and offer me a free phone I'm going to probably argue breach of contract and try to get out of it, unless one of the free phone options already has good Cyanogenmod support...
Makes sense, although count on those phones being plenty expensive.
I know somebody who works for a government contractor and they told me a story they heard about some army meeting with a cell phone manufacturer. The army promised that if they tailored a phone to their specs they'd buy 100k of them. The manufacturer told them that they didn't deal with such small quantities. The army was apparently shocked, not realizing the true scale of consumer hardware manufacture.
Likewise he had stories of meetings where big contractors are lambasted because generals can buy apps on their app store for $1 on a consumer phone, but anything made for the military is the size of a laptop and has all of 5 apps for it that cost $50M each or whatever. The contractor tried to explain that the company making the consumer phone gets to build whatever they think people will buy and make it to the least common denominator, while the army won't buy it unless you can run over it with a tank and wants to pre-approve just about every aspect of the UI/etc.
The reality is that both general consumer and custom-made hardware have their places. Your iphone would be fried if taken through the radiation belts to the moon, and your $50 commercial GPS would be useless in WWIII 10 seconds after all the jamming starts (let alone selective availability).
That said, the consumer world could stand to take some lessons from the army. Ages ago NATO decided to standardize their ammunition on small arms, so that the depot wouldn't need to stock 57 different kinds of ammo based on the requirements of all the member country armies. If only lithium ion batteries came in standard sizes and configurations, with standard chargers. It would probably cut the price of laptop batteries in half, and prevent quite a few fires...
As multi-player became more popular, I found I didn't have the time to invest in trying to beat some twitchy 15 year old who had nothing better to do all day.
Unfortunately, I think those twitchy 15 year olds are basically the main market for console games these days, and many PC games are just ports of the console games.
My step-son just can't get enough of the various COD titles. He never plays the campaigns at all - just multiplayer. I'm just amazed that he basically spends a considerable chunk of his christmas money/etc to finance the online membership required to just keep playing the game, and the rare new title. I do remember playing Unreal Tournament a little back in the day and honestly I don't see the new titles offering anything new - if anything they are more limited but with better graphics. However, as long as you shell out the cash they do make it very easy to play, and I think that is the market (what kid wants to understand TCP/IP when they could be blowing up friends?).
I've pretty-much moved away from FPS of any kind. In fact, I'm not even super-keen on the Bethesda titles for this reason (though I do play them a little). I prefer RPGs that require less finger twitching and which don't get my blood pressure up to 160. Anything that can't be saved and quitted at any moment is a bad in my book as well - I don't like putting real life on hold to get to a save point. Neverwinter Nights is about my limit as far as action goes.
Give me a good RPG/Simulation style game anytime. Unfortunately they are few and far between these days.
I don't understand this. I can work with BitTorrent from behind my home router without doing anything special. It just works. Why would an additional level added at the ISP change anything?
That only works because others in your swarm aren't behind NAT.
Your PC is making an outgoing connection to another PC in the swarm to download content. If a PC in the swarm wants to download something from you, it notifies the tracker, which you're already connected to, and the tracker tells your PC to make an OUTGOING connection to the other PC.
If all the PCs in the swarm were behind NAT then nobody could transfer anything, because one side of every connection has to be NAT-free (or have ports forwarded).
So, this is one of those herd immunity things - as long as lots of people aren't behind NAT you're fine. Once most people are, the whole thing starts collapsing.
Uh, ISO 9001 and the RFCs are completely different kinds of standards. You could compare the RFCs more to things issued by standards bodies like IEEE, and ISO in general (but not 9001).
ISO 9001 is a broad set of quality standards, and they're very generic. They don't tell you how to make anything in particular - rather they tell you how to go about making anything in general. They don't say that a good lightbulb should burn for xyz hours - they say that you should know how long a good lightbulb burns for and make sure your lightbulbs burn that long. In practice they also say that you have to kill a small forest writing documents that say that your lightbulbs burn long enough (whether they actually do is more of a byproduct of the process). There is also quite a bit more to it, and ISO 9001 is not unlike (and is often compatible with) numerous other quality management practices.
Disclaimer - I'm not an expert on ISO 9001, but I do work on software used as part of a quality management system so I try to generally stay up on such things though ISO 9001 is not one of the quality standards my employer cares greatly about (at least not specifically - I'm sure they could get certification if they wanted it).
If he does mean type 2 diabetes, then this does not provide support for sugar being toxic. As it is not the sugar making this happen, but instead it is a problem with the bodies internal ability to correctly produce insulin.
I think it is the sugar that causes damage to arteries (from what I've read). And type 2 diabetes is typically not associated with an inability to correctly produce insulin (at least not until it is very advanced). A type 2 diabetic produces perfectly normal insulin, and they make more of it than any non-diabetic by a long shot.
The problem in type 2 diabetes is that the cells in the body no longer respond to insulin as strongly.
Imagine sitting in a room listening to the TV at a comfortable level. I put some heavy-duty ear protectors on you. You reach over, turn up the volume really loud, but still have trouble hearing. You might think that there is a problem with the speakers, but in fact those speakers are practically blowing the windows out. Eventually if driven hard enough your speakers might actually fail after all, and this happens in type-2 diabetics as well...
My suspicion is that caloric intake vs expenditure is the primary cause of weight gain (gee, that's going out on a limb - conservation of energy and all that). However, you need to ask the question "why do some people eat so much more than they burn?"
Many answer "well, they just lack discipline/willpower/whatever!" That sounds nice on Dr. Phil or whatever, but do we really think that entire generations somehow have less willpower than their ancestors, or that entire nations are more disciplined than others on such a large scale?
My guess is that there are other causes that strongly govern our appetites, and that average people can only influence their eating within a certain range. If eating certain foods increases your appetite or lowers your activity, then you're going to be doomed to gaining weight unless you stop eating those foods - unless you have an iron will. I person of average willpower will not be able to resist the urge to eat, and since most people are average, that means most people will become obese.
Now, those factors might be what we eat, genetic, epigenetic, or perhaps something else. If I knew the answer to that question I'd be selling diet books...:)
Uh, publishers don't need a cut of used game sales, just like Ford doesn't need a cut of used car sales. Instead Ford will save $10 on the car by putting in a rubber timing belt that you'll pay one of their dealers $500 to replace every 90k miles or whatever...
Maybe they just need to build software that breaks. Oh wait, they already do that - at least when the next big OS upgrade comes along.
Next thing you know they'll be doing this for single-player games as well.
Disclaimer on the side of box:
Thank you for buying 1 copy of the Duke Nukem Forever Installer! After installing the installer follow the instructions to register your product online. The first person to register each purchased installer gets a free copy of Duke Nukem Forever as a bonus! You are of course welcome to re-sell the Installer to anybody else that you want, but the recipient will only be able to use the Installer and not the game, as this is all that is included in the cost of this product.
The boxes will be sold next to $500 Giants hats that come with free superbowl tickets.
Well, when you have a bunch of devices on your network that don't follow the RFCs to the letter there are a couple of things you can do:
1. Ignore the problem - probably results in some degradation of service to everybody. 2. Workaround the problem - probably makes you use more IP space. 3. Ban devices - ticks everybody off but if you're the BOFH and for some reason can't be terminated might as well have some fun...
99% of everybody probably does #2, or #1 if they're really lazy. Seems like the admins at Princeton haven't figured out that the purpose of RFCs is to allow many devices to live together on the same network, not to keep as many devices as possible off the network.
Still, Google doesn't look good in their handling of the issue, and they'll look even worse when they only fix it on phones that start selling around EOY.
Agreed. I wonder how many serious security bugs users of the original direct-from-Google ADP are exposed to, because Google refuses to release updates for a phone they sold retail not much more than a year ago (right up until the release of the N1 I believe, which is only a little over a year old).
People bash other vendors for not supporting android hardware but tend to favor Google since they have supported the N1 with all of their updates quickly, but they forget that the N1 is not first android phone that Google sold. Google stopped releasing security updates for the ADP as soon as they released the N1 - the last update of any kind for the ADP was Android 1.6, which came out the summer before they stopped selling the phone.
I'll take android over Apple any day - but only if I can root the phone, and use a mostly-open-source distribution. For all of its issues at least Apple supports their hardware, and even they pale in comparison to Microsoft which still provides security updates Windows XP.
Not releasing security patches for an always-connected device for at least the full 2-3 year upgrade cycle after the last unit is sold is just irresponsible behavior. They don't need to release the latest and greatest features necessarily, but they should at least back-port serious bugfixes. If they are concerned about supporting all those sub-versions of android then they can either do releases more slowly, or at least migrate all phones to LTS releases of some kind.
Oh, he understands that. His point was that his MIS department managed to turn a $20 EC2 bill into a six month ordeal.
What I love about EC2 is that I can try something out for all of $5, and when I'm all done it just disappears. Or I can scale it up if I want to.
I can't tell you how many times I would have loved to have a few test virtual machines at work on 5 minutes notice, use them for a week or two, and make the whole mess disappear, with no paperwork and just a $50 chargeback or whatever...
At work they'd eventually provision something like the GP describes. It would be EC2, but at a price of $50/hr for a small instance.
Well, a big thing in cloud providers is that there is no red tape in provisioning. I go to EC2, fill out a one-time form to set up an account (about as complicated as buying a pair of shoes on the site), and I just pick an image and tell it how many servers of what size to fire up, and in a few minutes I have a list of DNS addresses to ssh into.
If I could have that at work it would be wonderful. Right now getting even a new virtual server seems to take forever. I'm all for resource accountability, but there is no reason provisioning should be so manual.
I'd love to see something like this at work. And, of course it gives you the ability to send peak demand offsite easily.
I'm not sure you could legally enforce the paycheck deduction unless you could prove the destruction was willful. The computer is company property and was destroyed in the course of doing company business. If a company couch collapses you can't payroll-deduct the last guy who sat on it, even if they are overweight.
Now, it would be different if this were a provide-you-own-tools shop of some kind. In that case employees provide their own laptops, and can perhaps tax-deduct its use, wear, destruction, etc. The company has nothing to do with the laptop, IT can't touch it, and if the employee breaks it, well they already bought it.
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Nah - they say that for the same reason that grant writers say it - if you want money you say "climate change" right now. In the last administration the same guys would be talking "TERRORISTS!"
Look, the Pentagon just wants its new $50B aircraft carrier or whatever. If a Republican is in the White House the USS "W" will be pitched as helping to secure the seas from the evil terrorist task forces. If a Democrat is in the White House the USS Gore will be pitched as preserving democracy for penguins when the icecaps thaw and as a platform for oceanic research. Either way the ships will spend most of their time bombing 3rd world dictators somewhere.
We do the same thing at work. New boss comes along and has new buzzwords. Everybody pitches the same ideas they would have pitched to the old boss, but now they're all about the new initiative and have nothing to do with that old way of thinking...
Yup. No reason that exchanges can't operate in a fairly simple way:
1. You send money to an exchange, which goes into an account.
2. You log into a website and place orders.
3. At midnight every day the book is processed and shares/money change hands. The exact time varies randomly with a standard deviation of 30 seconds - no gaming the system with last-nanosecond offers. Companies are prohibited from releasing news after 6PM. Can't do anything about external events obviously.
4. At 5:01PM every day the daily cost to run the exchange is divided by the number of dollars that changed hands. Then everybody who had a transaction is assessed a proportionate share of the operating expenses.
5. At 5:02PM everybody gets a deposit into their account of interest at the current treasury bill rate.
6. The government holds all money in accounts and guarantees the value of the cash in the accounts, and that your shares won't mysteriously disappear. The value of the shares is whatever you can get somebody to trade for.
7. Shares can only be traded on the exchange, and requests to transfer shares to a specific person at a specific price will not be filled.
8. The contents of the order book are secret before trades execute, and are publicly disclosed afterwards. Orders placed by the same person/institution will be linked, but with a number that is randomly generated and modified daily to allow everybody to see how orders are being placed but maintain privacy.
Even with typical government inefficiency the cost to operate an exchange like this probably would amount to a transaction fee of maybe 0.001%. There wouldn't be any gaming the system, and ordinary people would have a good chance of being able to not lose their shirts, since you could hear about news and react in a few hours and still get the same price as the institutional trader with twitchy fingers.
The only thing this system does away with is the 40 bazillion middle-men and institutional traders skimming money off the system no matter which way the market moves. Stock ownership is nothing more than records in a database - it should be trivial to administer.
Well, they never would be outsourced per-se. However, it is likely that once all the expertise is in China or whatever the local companies will just take over the market, and never hire American executives in the first place. Perhaps they might outsource some of their lower-value work to the US where people will accept any salary.
Well, I don't know that climate change will ever itself directly shape the future of politics. Economics certainly will.
Right now the main economic effect of climate change is that people want to spend a lot of tax money on stuff and make some things more expensive due to concern about what might/will happen 20 years from now. The average taxpayer will just say "I care about the planet - as long as somebody else pays for it." Not much will happen - at least not in the US.
If the climate change folks are right then 20 years from now NYC will start going underwater. That also has a direct economic effect, and now you'll see all kinds of appropriations to mitigate the effects of climate change (or relocate NYC - not likely considering New Orleans didn't get moved). You'll also see funds to put a navy in the arctic ocean.
People pay for problems they are having now, or which based on personal experience they feel like they'll have in a few years. They're much less likely to pay for something that has never happened in the last 30 years, like ocean levels rising, or whatever. Them's the breaks...
Agree on the popcorn bit...
I have to agree here.
I know somebody who had a daughter of average intelligence who had a real knack for cosmetics, but really struggled to get mediocre grades in an academic track.
I have no doubts that she could have been accepted into a college (likely with no merit-based financial aid), and graduated with a degree in something. Many pressured her to do this. In the end she was persuaded by her mother to pursue cosmetology.
Most of her friends now envy her - she is about to enter the working world and already has jobs lined up. By the time they are midway through their sophomore year of college she will be past entry level. She is doing something that she has the potential to perform at a regional or maybe with time even a national level if she expends the effort. With college she might have gotten a job as a secretary somewhere barely able to pay her loans, and with a trade school she will probably make money, have numerous employment options (self-employed, employee, etc), and have the opportunity to make a name for herself if she wishes. She'll also be working in a trade that is easily transfered anywhere in the US.
In contrast I know somebody else who sent their son to college for four years. He wasn't terribly enthusiastic about doing anything in particular, and now works as a clerk in retail. His parents are presumably paying his loan payments, as I doubt he can afford to do so. He was contemplating the military - too bad he didn't do that back when they could have just paid the college bill for him.
College is incredibly expensive these days, and I'm not convinced that the average teenager has the life experience to determine that it is a wise use of $100k or whatever they plan on borrowing. In many cases their parents just pay the bills for their kids, which is nice I guess when you have the money. Kids just view college as the next step they're supposed to take, and consider it more of a life-changing experience socially than academically.
I think that most college-bound students would do far better in something more applied. College is a means to an end and not just 13th grade. I'd never write a tuition check for somebody or cosign on a loan unless they've already proven their ability and interest in making money in the field they want to study, and that college is the best way to advance in that career and is self-funding with a reasonable ROI.
Yup, I know somebody whose US employer had layoffs in Japan. Apparently it was quite traumatic with all kinds of special counseling required, due to the huge culture difference.
I don't believe the CEO flew over to get down on his knees and beg forgiveness for his failure to grow the business. I think he might have bowed his head in a moment of silence before depositing his bonus check, however.
Uh, if you pay $6k for a 1kW panel, and electricity is worth 8c/kWh, then you're recovering money at a rate of about $19/month (assuming you get 1kW for 8 hours a day - that seems generous to me). That is $230/yr.
The interest on a 4% loan (a very low rate) on $6k is $240/yr.
A better investment is to just write a $6k check to your mortgage company.
Most of these panels-pay-for-themselves calculations tend to neglect time-value-of-money and opportunity cost. They assume that if you didn't buy the panels you'd leave the $6k sitting in a wad of $20's on your dresser or something.
Sure, buy panels to save the earth, but don't do it to save money - at least not at current rates.
And anybody with a T-Mobile 3G phone will be stuck with either going back to Edge, or getting a super-locked-down lousy ATT phone...
I'm only 3 months into a 2 year T-Mo contract. I'm just crossing my fingers that my 3G holds out long enough to switch to Verizon or something. And to think I was happy to have a phone that actually worked internationally. No way I'd ever buy an Android phone from ATT - not unless they change their tune in a major way. If they change their frequencies early and offer me a free phone I'm going to probably argue breach of contract and try to get out of it, unless one of the free phone options already has good Cyanogenmod support...
Makes sense, although count on those phones being plenty expensive.
I know somebody who works for a government contractor and they told me a story they heard about some army meeting with a cell phone manufacturer. The army promised that if they tailored a phone to their specs they'd buy 100k of them. The manufacturer told them that they didn't deal with such small quantities. The army was apparently shocked, not realizing the true scale of consumer hardware manufacture.
Likewise he had stories of meetings where big contractors are lambasted because generals can buy apps on their app store for $1 on a consumer phone, but anything made for the military is the size of a laptop and has all of 5 apps for it that cost $50M each or whatever. The contractor tried to explain that the company making the consumer phone gets to build whatever they think people will buy and make it to the least common denominator, while the army won't buy it unless you can run over it with a tank and wants to pre-approve just about every aspect of the UI/etc.
The reality is that both general consumer and custom-made hardware have their places. Your iphone would be fried if taken through the radiation belts to the moon, and your $50 commercial GPS would be useless in WWIII 10 seconds after all the jamming starts (let alone selective availability).
That said, the consumer world could stand to take some lessons from the army. Ages ago NATO decided to standardize their ammunition on small arms, so that the depot wouldn't need to stock 57 different kinds of ammo based on the requirements of all the member country armies. If only lithium ion batteries came in standard sizes and configurations, with standard chargers. It would probably cut the price of laptop batteries in half, and prevent quite a few fires...
Well, when they said #4 in the world, they meant "world" like they mean it in the "World Series." :)
As multi-player became more popular, I found I didn't have the time to invest in trying to beat some twitchy 15 year old who had nothing better to do all day.
Unfortunately, I think those twitchy 15 year olds are basically the main market for console games these days, and many PC games are just ports of the console games.
My step-son just can't get enough of the various COD titles. He never plays the campaigns at all - just multiplayer. I'm just amazed that he basically spends a considerable chunk of his christmas money/etc to finance the online membership required to just keep playing the game, and the rare new title. I do remember playing Unreal Tournament a little back in the day and honestly I don't see the new titles offering anything new - if anything they are more limited but with better graphics. However, as long as you shell out the cash they do make it very easy to play, and I think that is the market (what kid wants to understand TCP/IP when they could be blowing up friends?).
I've pretty-much moved away from FPS of any kind. In fact, I'm not even super-keen on the Bethesda titles for this reason (though I do play them a little). I prefer RPGs that require less finger twitching and which don't get my blood pressure up to 160. Anything that can't be saved and quitted at any moment is a bad in my book as well - I don't like putting real life on hold to get to a save point. Neverwinter Nights is about my limit as far as action goes.
Give me a good RPG/Simulation style game anytime. Unfortunately they are few and far between these days.
I don't understand this. I can work with BitTorrent from behind my home router without doing anything special. It just works. Why would an additional level added at the ISP change anything?
That only works because others in your swarm aren't behind NAT.
Your PC is making an outgoing connection to another PC in the swarm to download content. If a PC in the swarm wants to download something from you, it notifies the tracker, which you're already connected to, and the tracker tells your PC to make an OUTGOING connection to the other PC.
If all the PCs in the swarm were behind NAT then nobody could transfer anything, because one side of every connection has to be NAT-free (or have ports forwarded).
So, this is one of those herd immunity things - as long as lots of people aren't behind NAT you're fine. Once most people are, the whole thing starts collapsing.
Uh, ISO 9001 and the RFCs are completely different kinds of standards. You could compare the RFCs more to things issued by standards bodies like IEEE, and ISO in general (but not 9001).
ISO 9001 is a broad set of quality standards, and they're very generic. They don't tell you how to make anything in particular - rather they tell you how to go about making anything in general. They don't say that a good lightbulb should burn for xyz hours - they say that you should know how long a good lightbulb burns for and make sure your lightbulbs burn that long. In practice they also say that you have to kill a small forest writing documents that say that your lightbulbs burn long enough (whether they actually do is more of a byproduct of the process). There is also quite a bit more to it, and ISO 9001 is not unlike (and is often compatible with) numerous other quality management practices.
Disclaimer - I'm not an expert on ISO 9001, but I do work on software used as part of a quality management system so I try to generally stay up on such things though ISO 9001 is not one of the quality standards my employer cares greatly about (at least not specifically - I'm sure they could get certification if they wanted it).
And they can get it after I have my flying car...
If he does mean type 2 diabetes, then this does not provide support for sugar being toxic. As it is not the sugar making this happen, but instead it is a problem with the bodies internal ability to correctly produce insulin.
I think it is the sugar that causes damage to arteries (from what I've read). And type 2 diabetes is typically not associated with an inability to correctly produce insulin (at least not until it is very advanced). A type 2 diabetic produces perfectly normal insulin, and they make more of it than any non-diabetic by a long shot.
The problem in type 2 diabetes is that the cells in the body no longer respond to insulin as strongly.
Imagine sitting in a room listening to the TV at a comfortable level. I put some heavy-duty ear protectors on you. You reach over, turn up the volume really loud, but still have trouble hearing. You might think that there is a problem with the speakers, but in fact those speakers are practically blowing the windows out. Eventually if driven hard enough your speakers might actually fail after all, and this happens in type-2 diabetics as well...
From what I've read it is high blood sugar that causes damage to arteries.
Now, Type 2 diabetes is the leading cause of high blood sugar.
My suspicion is that caloric intake vs expenditure is the primary cause of weight gain (gee, that's going out on a limb - conservation of energy and all that). However, you need to ask the question "why do some people eat so much more than they burn?"
Many answer "well, they just lack discipline/willpower/whatever!" That sounds nice on Dr. Phil or whatever, but do we really think that entire generations somehow have less willpower than their ancestors, or that entire nations are more disciplined than others on such a large scale?
My guess is that there are other causes that strongly govern our appetites, and that average people can only influence their eating within a certain range. If eating certain foods increases your appetite or lowers your activity, then you're going to be doomed to gaining weight unless you stop eating those foods - unless you have an iron will. I person of average willpower will not be able to resist the urge to eat, and since most people are average, that means most people will become obese.
Now, those factors might be what we eat, genetic, epigenetic, or perhaps something else. If I knew the answer to that question I'd be selling diet books... :)
Uh, publishers don't need a cut of used game sales, just like Ford doesn't need a cut of used car sales. Instead Ford will save $10 on the car by putting in a rubber timing belt that you'll pay one of their dealers $500 to replace every 90k miles or whatever...
Maybe they just need to build software that breaks. Oh wait, they already do that - at least when the next big OS upgrade comes along.
Next thing you know they'll be doing this for single-player games as well.
Disclaimer on the side of box:
Thank you for buying 1 copy of the Duke Nukem Forever Installer! After installing the installer follow the instructions to register your product online. The first person to register each purchased installer gets a free copy of Duke Nukem Forever as a bonus! You are of course welcome to re-sell the Installer to anybody else that you want, but the recipient will only be able to use the Installer and not the game, as this is all that is included in the cost of this product.
The boxes will be sold next to $500 Giants hats that come with free superbowl tickets.
Well, when you have a bunch of devices on your network that don't follow the RFCs to the letter there are a couple of things you can do:
1. Ignore the problem - probably results in some degradation of service to everybody.
2. Workaround the problem - probably makes you use more IP space.
3. Ban devices - ticks everybody off but if you're the BOFH and for some reason can't be terminated might as well have some fun...
99% of everybody probably does #2, or #1 if they're really lazy. Seems like the admins at Princeton haven't figured out that the purpose of RFCs is to allow many devices to live together on the same network, not to keep as many devices as possible off the network.
Still, Google doesn't look good in their handling of the issue, and they'll look even worse when they only fix it on phones that start selling around EOY.
Agreed. I wonder how many serious security bugs users of the original direct-from-Google ADP are exposed to, because Google refuses to release updates for a phone they sold retail not much more than a year ago (right up until the release of the N1 I believe, which is only a little over a year old).
People bash other vendors for not supporting android hardware but tend to favor Google since they have supported the N1 with all of their updates quickly, but they forget that the N1 is not first android phone that Google sold. Google stopped releasing security updates for the ADP as soon as they released the N1 - the last update of any kind for the ADP was Android 1.6, which came out the summer before they stopped selling the phone.
I'll take android over Apple any day - but only if I can root the phone, and use a mostly-open-source distribution. For all of its issues at least Apple supports their hardware, and even they pale in comparison to Microsoft which still provides security updates Windows XP.
Not releasing security patches for an always-connected device for at least the full 2-3 year upgrade cycle after the last unit is sold is just irresponsible behavior. They don't need to release the latest and greatest features necessarily, but they should at least back-port serious bugfixes. If they are concerned about supporting all those sub-versions of android then they can either do releases more slowly, or at least migrate all phones to LTS releases of some kind.
Yeah, Google is already working on that one, sort of... :)
Oh, he understands that. His point was that his MIS department managed to turn a $20 EC2 bill into a six month ordeal.
What I love about EC2 is that I can try something out for all of $5, and when I'm all done it just disappears. Or I can scale it up if I want to.
I can't tell you how many times I would have loved to have a few test virtual machines at work on 5 minutes notice, use them for a week or two, and make the whole mess disappear, with no paperwork and just a $50 chargeback or whatever...
At work they'd eventually provision something like the GP describes. It would be EC2, but at a price of $50/hr for a small instance.
Well, a big thing in cloud providers is that there is no red tape in provisioning. I go to EC2, fill out a one-time form to set up an account (about as complicated as buying a pair of shoes on the site), and I just pick an image and tell it how many servers of what size to fire up, and in a few minutes I have a list of DNS addresses to ssh into.
If I could have that at work it would be wonderful. Right now getting even a new virtual server seems to take forever. I'm all for resource accountability, but there is no reason provisioning should be so manual.
I'd love to see something like this at work. And, of course it gives you the ability to send peak demand offsite easily.
I'm not sure you could legally enforce the paycheck deduction unless you could prove the destruction was willful. The computer is company property and was destroyed in the course of doing company business. If a company couch collapses you can't payroll-deduct the last guy who sat on it, even if they are overweight.
Now, it would be different if this were a provide-you-own-tools shop of some kind. In that case employees provide their own laptops, and can perhaps tax-deduct its use, wear, destruction, etc. The company has nothing to do with the laptop, IT can't touch it, and if the employee breaks it, well they already bought it.
IANAL...