The character outlines are nicely distinct, which means that even basic OCR software should be able to break the CAPTCHA. Since it's so easy to break, you want to hide it from any bots that come by: remove all references to "captcha" from the page source, and you might want to move the HTML for the image away from the HTML for the entry box.
OCR software isn't as good as you think. It is also highly sensitive to the type of work you are using it for. At work we instituted an automated fax server system to read particular areas of inbound faxes and to use the text that it read as part of the incoming fax's filename. Well, we had to use specific types of fonts (san-serif fonts) on the forms that were outbound (which were eventually sent back in as the inbound faxes) and specific font size (larger than 12pt I believe). The OCR engine that was used in the COTS software was capable of realizing when characters were totally upside down but it would have trouble with certain characters such as 'e' and 'o' or even 'b' and 'd' especially when they were right next to each other in the field we were reading. Sufficient background noise that got picked up on the line and subsequently added to the page's text would confuse the OCR software so any CAPTCHA that uses the diagonal-lined background (I think they all do that for the very reason of making it hard for software to read them but even humans have trouble with them) can cause OCR to not work correctly. Not to mention that the characters in a CAPTCHA are not perfectly straight but squiggly.
Now these all seems to fly in the face of OCR software that I hear about that runs at post offices around the country to read mailing addresses on envelopes and those are reading thousands of envelopes a day and don't seem to make too many mistakes so why some types of OCR software doesn't work as good is beyond me. I think they are highly specialized after my experience at work concerning fonts and font sizes.
Obviously in this case we wouldn't be going from analog to digital prior to OCR so maybe that would tremendously help, especially with having a noise phone line out of the picture but I still think the OCR wouldn't be as good as you think it would be.
That reminds me of the age check for Leisure Suit Larry back in the day... Who knew that the desire of a horny teen to see pixellated boobs would lead to history research?
Or what about the copy protection used for X-Wing series from LucasArts? They would ask you to enter in the symbol at the bottom of a randomly picked page of the manual. If you gave away the disks without the manual the player couldn't use X-Wing. Of course, Yahoo would need to distribute something to users for that to work (and there are probably other things wrong with the idea too). Seeing Leisure Suit Larry just brought back memories of how LucasArts handled copy protection since both X-Wing and LSL were out around the same time (mid to late 90s). I played X-Wing and the subsequet TIE Fighter series but never played LSL.
Until there is real social and economic changes in the middle east the countries will continue to breed extremists, because people without prospects for the future will always cause trouble.
I will probably offend some by saying this but sometimes the truth hurts, but this sounds quite like the problem in many inner-city neighborhoods where most of the crimes are committed in any given city. Without prospects what are teenagers and 20-somethings supposed to do beyond criminal activity? Of course, getting a job and staying off welfare would be the obvious choice but that seems to rarely happen. That's why many after-school activities help because they keep the kids off the streets and out of trouble. Proper education early helps but once they turn 18 it's their own responsibility to hang with the right crowd. It isn't a societal issue because not everyone from the inner city ends up in a gang or with a RAP sheet a mile long by age 18. It's a personal responsibility issue. In the Middle East it is nearly the same thing but it seems more widespread and harder to reverse the trend because it is more prevalent. There is only a small minority that do not conform to the mindset that the West is to blame for everything wrong with their lives. There are still people who take advantage of the situation and spread propaganda (bin Laden) which is why their situation isn't exactly the same as inner-city issues in the US.
Authors Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog chalk this all up to what they call the 'engineering mindset,' which they define as 'a mindset that inclines them to take more extreme conservative and religious positions.'
Most engineering people and CS people I know are not religious and are not conservative unless by 'religious positions' they mean 'atheist'.
They also have many of the earmarks of urban legends. "We know exactly who is responsible" -- OK, then, what are their names? Where are their photographs? Surely the Russian government wouldn't deny a simple request for criminal conviction records, if we asked nicely.
What makes you think their names will get released? They could be employees of the Russian gov't and if so Putin will want them protected and not cooperate but he'll know whether we are on the right track when we ask. Publically releasing their names could allow some vigilante who knows the authors to do something to them which could prevent the US from arresting and prosecuting them. Or if they aren'r gov't employees and their names are released then they will flee St. Pete, if that's where they are, in order to avoid capture.
Since you asked, I've seen plenty. Including two people I work with (a Java developer and an InstallShield developer), one unlocked for Tmobile. Seen a few at grocery stores and hockey rinks. Also know of at least one person at Harmonix who has one. I want one myself (but I'm waiting for the final word on first telecom immunity and second the current lawsuits against AT&T and friends). I like the interface. Everyone I know who has played with one agrees that it has the best interface. I've tried to use other similar features on nokia, samsung, and motorola phones, and even manage to convince myself of their adequacy. Until I pick up an iphone and realize the sad truth that for the market segment it targets, nothing else I've tried out comes close to the iphone.
Well my anecdote goes like this, I know at least 200 people with the vast majority being coworkers who are technical people. Out of all those people I know 1 of them has an iPhone and he is a new employee that's been with us just a few months.
I'm sorry to tell you this, but the reason that extension cord you bought had 4 different warning labels on it was because of morons that do something completely stupid, and then blame the manufacturer for not having a warning label telling you not to do it.
I've always had the mindset that if I see a stupid warning on something I bought then I know that someone before me bought the same thing, tried whatever the warning label said not to do, and the company instituted the warning label as a result. If the courts didn't reward such stupidity the companies wouldn't have to make the rest of us laugh at the various types of warning labels that have to be used. Of course the companies probably are more proactive now and, as you said, have their lawyers come up with ways that a product should not be used. Of course, there are really an infinite number of ways of how something should not be used but I guess they try to target the most common denominator of stupidity to save money.
Dangerous or not, how is this any worse than coal mining, products unearthed by miners who risk their lives for the sake of simply having work?
Nuclear isn't any worse as far as danger is concerned and in fact it is safer. It is also cheaper and more efficient. I also live in WV (northern half) and my Dad is an ex-miner who worked in the mines in his 20s. He hurt his back in the mine and has had life-long pain ever since. I'm glad he doesn't work in the mines anymore. The guys don't get paid enough for the dangers present.
except that the origin of life is abiogenesis not biological evolution. biological evolution starts the very instant life started to divide and replicate not before that.
I don't care what you call it. The problem of explaining it still exists whatever name you care to give it.
quit anthropomorphizing biological compounds they *hate* it when you do that...
Fine. Tell me how I should say it and I'll say it that way. Should I word it such that evolution is doing the learning? Anyway you say it makes it sound stupid because all the things that had to happen for us to exist using evolutionary theory had to be done in the right order, through several very small stages that were built upon each other with dependent parts of the microscopic human body all working towards the end goal of a single living cell which don't exactly live well outside the body today. And yet they did in the supposed extreme conditions back when this whole story started. Makes you wonder why 2 different cells didn't start up if one could do so using evolutionary logic such that the end result would be 2 independent animal kingdoms instead of just 1.
RNA remained a large part of the process that synthesizes proteins even 3.5 billion years later. all of the complexity you see is the result of millions and billions of iterations, each a simple step from the last building up until you get something like the immune system, the eye, flagella, ribosomes, nylonase [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylonase] and everything else that exists in biology.
I'm still waiting for a timeline and a model to be published which shows when and how all that happened with interspersed explanations of how biological dependencies (i.e. chicken and egg type issues in animal biology) that we know exist today were solved using the idea that this all happened by accident.
that's the point, to argue that there isn't an explanation for anything in biology by any materialistic [evidence based] explanation therefore God did it... and there's the end of intelligent design, no evidence, no predictions, no explanation, nothing at all. It fails to explain *anything* at all that we already know let alone predict anything which makes it pretty useless other than being a God of the gaps argument.
I've yet to see a prediction by scientists of when, where, and what the next species will be, care of evolution. And I already mentioned the lack of many explanations in my text above. As far as evidence is concerned, I haven't seen much of that either, at least none that was interpreted correctly and without prejudice. Occam's razor, Creation makes the existence of this world simpler and yet scientists choose to make explanations harder by trying to figure out every single transition that evolution caused for us to exist. Creation does explain the universe in many areas, if you choose to have an open enough mind about it. Astronomers already have proven there was a point of Creation with the universe. Oddly enough the Holy Bible had that fact recorded long ago but no one (well, anyone w/o faith) cared to pay attention to it including Fred Hoyle who believed in the steady-state theory even up to his deathbed.
By the way, why doesn't evolution explain plant life or does it and it just isn't discussed very much?
The problem with screen output and typed input is that you have to use both eyes and hands to operate the device. By contrast, using speech input and output only requires voice and ears.
In a perfect world yes, but until voice recognition is perfected the speech input method requires one of the same things as typed input, eyes, in order to make sure it recognizes everything correctly so that you can fix *its* mistakes when the words aren't recognized correctly.
All those characteristics of RNA still don't help evolution explain how DNA and RNA both came into existence from more fundamental chemicals and then were somehow encapsulated into the same first cell (along w/ other things like mitochondria) and for that cell to somehow learn to divide for, at the time, no apparent reason and for the DNA to magically divide correctly the first time in order to obtain replication ability (of course that had to be done prior to the cell itself replicating if I remember my biology correctly) and then for that cell, with the help of others, to somehow turn into an organism. I'm sure there are many other aspects of this area of biology I'm leaving out but I'm sure people get the point.
I always wonder why Microsoft gets so much publicity for point version upgrades. I mean, the other day I got an update from Ubuntu. So what?
So why did you comment? Why did you even click on the link to the post? Just to read the comments? Did you read the article too? But anyway, people on here always say they wait until SP1 for any new Windows OS is released before they would use it. Well, we're soon going to have them put their mouse where their mouth is.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the information is classified as secret.
I'm not sure who to blame more when I see things like this, the journalist or the squealer. I think both should be fired for improperly releasing information. Improperly in this case just means they were not responsible for talking to the press but they did so anyway against organizational rules. Luckily in this case it probably isn't a matter of national security since the information is only secret instead of classified.
This does bring up the interesting question though, of how one deals with kidporn that's being posted by the kids in the pictures. Obviously the nutjubs are going to go after whatever company is doing the hosting, but unless I'm missing something, if they're not aware of the content then all they have to do is make a good faith effort to delete anything they find, much like the case with copyright violations.
Anyone who downloads the torrent and doesn't delete anything they find that is child porn (if any exists in the file) could end up in a similar situation like this one. In this story, the prosecutor wants all kids who received the pictures to come forward or else they will be charged in juvenile court for possession of child porn despite not asking for them or actively pursuing them. At the end of the article the same prosecutor says they are't charging the kids for possessing the images so who knows what's going on.
The gov't already has an OMB mandate to have a certain percentage of each agencies workers telecommute. I don't recall the details but I've seen documentation since I'm a contractor for one of the agencies. The OMB mandate is a few years old but it takes time to create policies and procedures and to determine just who can do stuff at home and who can't because of security issues. Many people in the DOD and DOJ branches deal with sensitive data and the data resides on private internal networks so working from home just isn't possible. In other cases, some employees can do so (like HR) but these things still need planned and they are in addition to normal operations/maintenance and business responsiblities, plus we all know the speed at which the US gov't implements change.
The logistics of this are also complicated because users should have the capability to still be reached using their office phone number so some changes have to be implemented in PBX systems so calls to their office phone are redirected to their home. Also, the federal gov't isn't just in DC but in suburban areas and those aren't always able to provide nice broadband connections to users who work from home. Plus, who is responsible for providing all the equipment? The gov't? The user? Security is bad enough within gov't buildings; it is going to be a nightmare when users can take a laptop home or have a PC at home full time owned by the feds. Users don't lock their PCs now when they leave their desk. All of Johnny's friends will love to see what's on mom's PC when she has to pick up Johnny's sister from soccer practice since they know she works for the NSA. You think stolen data is a problem now? The data is just waiting to be stolen when it is sitting in a cache on a telecommuters hard drive.
Why is it a surprise they would only fund free training for their own software? I mean isnt that kind of a duh thing? Are linux companies sinister too now because they dont pay for free windows training for people who dont buy linux?
Whatever happened to just making a good faith donation to schools because you have money to burn and they don't? If you are comfortable in your market then it shouldn't hurt any to give schools money and let them spend it however they want. If they like MS products they will buy them which is a win-win (tax deduction and more revenue) otherwise it is just a tax deduction if the school buys Apple products instead. Or maybe they will use the money for something else unrelated to technology and install Linux on everything because MS products are expensive and don't follow standards and they want their students to be well-rounded. Unfortunately MS is saying "we'll give you this money....if you spend it buying our stuff. Oh and we'll throw in free training too." which basically means they get their money back as well as a tax deduction and more kids who only learn MS products all while looking good because they "donated" (win-win-win-win).
the lowest tier's price will be what I'm paying now and it will only give me 5GB of transfer per month? And to get their top tier (40GB/month) I'll probably have to start paying above what TW's business class service costs. It wouldn't surprise me if that's what happens but ideally they should set the lowest tier to below what customers are currently charged ($45/mo for me right now) so that upper tier customers don't have to pay too much more than at present. I think I'll call TW tomorrow and let them know if this is rolled out nationally I'll be switching to someone else.
This article is talking about a transfer cap, or a limit on the number of bits that can be sent in a month. 15GiB a month doesn't have anything to do with the throughput. For example a 28.8Kbits/second modem sending for a solid month can send over 5 Gibibytes of data.
I remember a time when a gigabyte actually meant a gigabyte in base 2 and those who used the term used it properly. Now we have to put up with people who for some reason feel the need to use another system to help those who bastardized the original system. It's even more unfortunate that the original terms are now used to refer to the base 10 bastardized system instead of their original base 2 system. However, I'm glad you settled the issue between bandwidth caps and transfer caps. It seems on/. everyone uses 'bandwidth' for everything.
Dumbing down the curriculum isn't going to help, but teaching (truly teaching it and helping ensure they understand it)-- you have to know how a linked list works (and even better, Big-O, etc.) before you just start slapping together your java using the standard libraries these days. You have to know about profilers, and should know fundamentally (not that its practiced that much) formal specs. If anything, make them more rigorous on the comp-sci side. The senior level shouldn't be when they learn about software engineering methodologies beyond waterfall-- these should at latest be a fall junior topic, if even a sophomore level. Most of all, teach them THERE ARE NO SILVER BULLETS (Rapid Development, McConnell: MS Press).
At the very end there it seemed like you were starting to mix (I'm sure you are smart enough to not confuse them) CS with Software Engineering. I wish the college I went to took more time to show us how to debug our programs (we did do some symbol table stuff in the Assembly class) and there was talk of a SW engineering course but I never had the chance to take it because it started my last semester there and I didn't have time to take it. But the SW engineering course was just that, a course. There is a lot more to that than what can fit into a single course and it was a 400 level (advanced topics, i.e. optional) course to the CS program. It's SW engineering where student should learn exactly what you called software engineering methodologies. At least one course should be offered for this (even if many consider it boring) so that students get an idea for how the real world develops software. However at West Virginia University (up the highway from me) they offer a Master's degree in Software engineering. I think that is much more appropriate than trying to fit a bunch of it in at the undergraduate level and I apologize if trying to explain all sw engineering at an undergrad level wasn't what you meant.
Paradoxically, your cell phone, email, and Facebook networks are making it more attractive to meet people in the flesh.
Only because when people choose a picture for Facebook or Myspace, they always pick one which drastically misrepresents how attractive they are...
He doesn't say that the people in your network are more attractive but meeting them is more attractive which can mean because you most likely have people in your cell phone, address book, or IM lists that share similar interests as you then you want to meet them in person because it is usually more fun to share similar interests in person than not.
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OCR software isn't as good as you think. It is also highly sensitive to the type of work you are using it for. At work we instituted an automated fax server system to read particular areas of inbound faxes and to use the text that it read as part of the incoming fax's filename. Well, we had to use specific types of fonts (san-serif fonts) on the forms that were outbound (which were eventually sent back in as the inbound faxes) and specific font size (larger than 12pt I believe). The OCR engine that was used in the COTS software was capable of realizing when characters were totally upside down but it would have trouble with certain characters such as 'e' and 'o' or even 'b' and 'd' especially when they were right next to each other in the field we were reading. Sufficient background noise that got picked up on the line and subsequently added to the page's text would confuse the OCR software so any CAPTCHA that uses the diagonal-lined background (I think they all do that for the very reason of making it hard for software to read them but even humans have trouble with them) can cause OCR to not work correctly. Not to mention that the characters in a CAPTCHA are not perfectly straight but squiggly.
Now these all seems to fly in the face of OCR software that I hear about that runs at post offices around the country to read mailing addresses on envelopes and those are reading thousands of envelopes a day and don't seem to make too many mistakes so why some types of OCR software doesn't work as good is beyond me. I think they are highly specialized after my experience at work concerning fonts and font sizes.
Obviously in this case we wouldn't be going from analog to digital prior to OCR so maybe that would tremendously help, especially with having a noise phone line out of the picture but I still think the OCR wouldn't be as good as you think it would be.
Or what about the copy protection used for X-Wing series from LucasArts? They would ask you to enter in the symbol at the bottom of a randomly picked page of the manual. If you gave away the disks without the manual the player couldn't use X-Wing. Of course, Yahoo would need to distribute something to users for that to work (and there are probably other things wrong with the idea too). Seeing Leisure Suit Larry just brought back memories of how LucasArts handled copy protection since both X-Wing and LSL were out around the same time (mid to late 90s). I played X-Wing and the subsequet TIE Fighter series but never played LSL.
I will probably offend some by saying this but sometimes the truth hurts, but this sounds quite like the problem in many inner-city neighborhoods where most of the crimes are committed in any given city. Without prospects what are teenagers and 20-somethings supposed to do beyond criminal activity? Of course, getting a job and staying off welfare would be the obvious choice but that seems to rarely happen. That's why many after-school activities help because they keep the kids off the streets and out of trouble. Proper education early helps but once they turn 18 it's their own responsibility to hang with the right crowd. It isn't a societal issue because not everyone from the inner city ends up in a gang or with a RAP sheet a mile long by age 18. It's a personal responsibility issue. In the Middle East it is nearly the same thing but it seems more widespread and harder to reverse the trend because it is more prevalent. There is only a small minority that do not conform to the mindset that the West is to blame for everything wrong with their lives. There are still people who take advantage of the situation and spread propaganda (bin Laden) which is why their situation isn't exactly the same as inner-city issues in the US.
Most engineering people and CS people I know are not religious and are not conservative unless by 'religious positions' they mean 'atheist'.
What makes you think their names will get released? They could be employees of the Russian gov't and if so Putin will want them protected and not cooperate but he'll know whether we are on the right track when we ask. Publically releasing their names could allow some vigilante who knows the authors to do something to them which could prevent the US from arresting and prosecuting them. Or if they aren'r gov't employees and their names are released then they will flee St. Pete, if that's where they are, in order to avoid capture.
Well my anecdote goes like this, I know at least 200 people with the vast majority being coworkers who are technical people. Out of all those people I know 1 of them has an iPhone and he is a new employee that's been with us just a few months.
Well in that case we just need tighter Apple insiders....how many of those insiders are women I wonder?
I've always had the mindset that if I see a stupid warning on something I bought then I know that someone before me bought the same thing, tried whatever the warning label said not to do, and the company instituted the warning label as a result. If the courts didn't reward such stupidity the companies wouldn't have to make the rest of us laugh at the various types of warning labels that have to be used. Of course the companies probably are more proactive now and, as you said, have their lawyers come up with ways that a product should not be used. Of course, there are really an infinite number of ways of how something should not be used but I guess they try to target the most common denominator of stupidity to save money.
Maybe not but the reverse has basically happened already.
Nuclear isn't any worse as far as danger is concerned and in fact it is safer. It is also cheaper and more efficient. I also live in WV (northern half) and my Dad is an ex-miner who worked in the mines in his 20s. He hurt his back in the mine and has had life-long pain ever since. I'm glad he doesn't work in the mines anymore. The guys don't get paid enough for the dangers present.
I don't care what you call it. The problem of explaining it still exists whatever name you care to give it.
quit anthropomorphizing biological compounds they *hate* it when you do that...Fine. Tell me how I should say it and I'll say it that way. Should I word it such that evolution is doing the learning? Anyway you say it makes it sound stupid because all the things that had to happen for us to exist using evolutionary theory had to be done in the right order, through several very small stages that were built upon each other with dependent parts of the microscopic human body all working towards the end goal of a single living cell which don't exactly live well outside the body today. And yet they did in the supposed extreme conditions back when this whole story started. Makes you wonder why 2 different cells didn't start up if one could do so using evolutionary logic such that the end result would be 2 independent animal kingdoms instead of just 1.
RNA remained a large part of the process that synthesizes proteins even 3.5 billion years later. all of the complexity you see is the result of millions and billions of iterations, each a simple step from the last building up until you get something like the immune system, the eye, flagella, ribosomes, nylonase [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylonase] and everything else that exists in biology.I'm still waiting for a timeline and a model to be published which shows when and how all that happened with interspersed explanations of how biological dependencies (i.e. chicken and egg type issues in animal biology) that we know exist today were solved using the idea that this all happened by accident.
that's the point, to argue that there isn't an explanation for anything in biology by any materialistic [evidence based] explanation therefore God did it... and there's the end of intelligent design, no evidence, no predictions, no explanation, nothing at all. It fails to explain *anything* at all that we already know let alone predict anything which makes it pretty useless other than being a God of the gaps argument.I've yet to see a prediction by scientists of when, where, and what the next species will be, care of evolution. And I already mentioned the lack of many explanations in my text above. As far as evidence is concerned, I haven't seen much of that either, at least none that was interpreted correctly and without prejudice. Occam's razor, Creation makes the existence of this world simpler and yet scientists choose to make explanations harder by trying to figure out every single transition that evolution caused for us to exist. Creation does explain the universe in many areas, if you choose to have an open enough mind about it. Astronomers already have proven there was a point of Creation with the universe. Oddly enough the Holy Bible had that fact recorded long ago but no one (well, anyone w/o faith) cared to pay attention to it including Fred Hoyle who believed in the steady-state theory even up to his deathbed.
By the way, why doesn't evolution explain plant life or does it and it just isn't discussed very much?
In a perfect world yes, but until voice recognition is perfected the speech input method requires one of the same things as typed input, eyes, in order to make sure it recognizes everything correctly so that you can fix *its* mistakes when the words aren't recognized correctly.
All those characteristics of RNA still don't help evolution explain how DNA and RNA both came into existence from more fundamental chemicals and then were somehow encapsulated into the same first cell (along w/ other things like mitochondria) and for that cell to somehow learn to divide for, at the time, no apparent reason and for the DNA to magically divide correctly the first time in order to obtain replication ability (of course that had to be done prior to the cell itself replicating if I remember my biology correctly) and then for that cell, with the help of others, to somehow turn into an organism. I'm sure there are many other aspects of this area of biology I'm leaving out but I'm sure people get the point.
How many users of Sweden are there?
So why did you comment? Why did you even click on the link to the post? Just to read the comments? Did you read the article too? But anyway, people on here always say they wait until SP1 for any new Windows OS is released before they would use it. Well, we're soon going to have them put their mouse where their mouth is.
I'm not sure who to blame more when I see things like this, the journalist or the squealer. I think both should be fired for improperly releasing information. Improperly in this case just means they were not responsible for talking to the press but they did so anyway against organizational rules. Luckily in this case it probably isn't a matter of national security since the information is only secret instead of classified.
Anyone who downloads the torrent and doesn't delete anything they find that is child porn (if any exists in the file) could end up in a similar situation like this one. In this story, the prosecutor wants all kids who received the pictures to come forward or else they will be charged in juvenile court for possession of child porn despite not asking for them or actively pursuing them. At the end of the article the same prosecutor says they are't charging the kids for possessing the images so who knows what's going on.
The gov't already has an OMB mandate to have a certain percentage of each agencies workers telecommute. I don't recall the details but I've seen documentation since I'm a contractor for one of the agencies. The OMB mandate is a few years old but it takes time to create policies and procedures and to determine just who can do stuff at home and who can't because of security issues. Many people in the DOD and DOJ branches deal with sensitive data and the data resides on private internal networks so working from home just isn't possible. In other cases, some employees can do so (like HR) but these things still need planned and they are in addition to normal operations/maintenance and business responsiblities, plus we all know the speed at which the US gov't implements change.
The logistics of this are also complicated because users should have the capability to still be reached using their office phone number so some changes have to be implemented in PBX systems so calls to their office phone are redirected to their home. Also, the federal gov't isn't just in DC but in suburban areas and those aren't always able to provide nice broadband connections to users who work from home. Plus, who is responsible for providing all the equipment? The gov't? The user? Security is bad enough within gov't buildings; it is going to be a nightmare when users can take a laptop home or have a PC at home full time owned by the feds. Users don't lock their PCs now when they leave their desk. All of Johnny's friends will love to see what's on mom's PC when she has to pick up Johnny's sister from soccer practice since they know she works for the NSA. You think stolen data is a problem now? The data is just waiting to be stolen when it is sitting in a cache on a telecommuters hard drive.
Does sloppy focus on writing good code and shady practices marketing Windows qualify?
Whatever happened to just making a good faith donation to schools because you have money to burn and they don't? If you are comfortable in your market then it shouldn't hurt any to give schools money and let them spend it however they want. If they like MS products they will buy them which is a win-win (tax deduction and more revenue) otherwise it is just a tax deduction if the school buys Apple products instead. Or maybe they will use the money for something else unrelated to technology and install Linux on everything because MS products are expensive and don't follow standards and they want their students to be well-rounded. Unfortunately MS is saying "we'll give you this money....if you spend it buying our stuff. Oh and we'll throw in free training too." which basically means they get their money back as well as a tax deduction and more kids who only learn MS products all while looking good because they "donated" (win-win-win-win).
the lowest tier's price will be what I'm paying now and it will only give me 5GB of transfer per month? And to get their top tier (40GB/month) I'll probably have to start paying above what TW's business class service costs. It wouldn't surprise me if that's what happens but ideally they should set the lowest tier to below what customers are currently charged ($45/mo for me right now) so that upper tier customers don't have to pay too much more than at present. I think I'll call TW tomorrow and let them know if this is rolled out nationally I'll be switching to someone else.
I remember a time when a gigabyte actually meant a gigabyte in base 2 and those who used the term used it properly. Now we have to put up with people who for some reason feel the need to use another system to help those who bastardized the original system. It's even more unfortunate that the original terms are now used to refer to the base 10 bastardized system instead of their original base 2 system. However, I'm glad you settled the issue between bandwidth caps and transfer caps. It seems on /. everyone uses 'bandwidth' for everything.
At the very end there it seemed like you were starting to mix (I'm sure you are smart enough to not confuse them) CS with Software Engineering. I wish the college I went to took more time to show us how to debug our programs (we did do some symbol table stuff in the Assembly class) and there was talk of a SW engineering course but I never had the chance to take it because it started my last semester there and I didn't have time to take it. But the SW engineering course was just that, a course. There is a lot more to that than what can fit into a single course and it was a 400 level (advanced topics, i.e. optional) course to the CS program. It's SW engineering where student should learn exactly what you called software engineering methodologies. At least one course should be offered for this (even if many consider it boring) so that students get an idea for how the real world develops software. However at West Virginia University (up the highway from me) they offer a Master's degree in Software engineering. I think that is much more appropriate than trying to fit a bunch of it in at the undergraduate level and I apologize if trying to explain all sw engineering at an undergrad level wasn't what you meant.
Ah...joke? Maybe. It wasn't worded like one and it wasn't that funny either.
He doesn't say that the people in your network are more attractive but meeting them is more attractive which can mean because you most likely have people in your cell phone, address book, or IM lists that share similar interests as you then you want to meet them in person because it is usually more fun to share similar interests in person than not.