Re:To everyone complaining about the positive revi
on
The Laidoff Ninja
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· Score: 1
I would imagine that the publishers do a pretty good job of keeping books off the shelves that score on the low end of the scale.
Now if you bought an ebook or something off lulu, then maybe it might have a chance at scoring a 2...but a low score is going to be truly awful to the point where it wouldn't be worth finishing and reviewing let alone publishing
What if I want to buy a happy meal because it actually gets you a nice amount of food from mcdonalds (4 pc nuggets, little bit of fries, a smaller drink)?
I usually get some small temporary enjoyment out of whatever piece of crap toy they give me...
yeah, but what will you do when verizon starts doing this and the hordes of people who use 4.2.2.X (hey...it is easy to remember) will all be screwed?
I am confused though...I thought I had my router pointing to OpenDNS and my machines taking their settings via dhcp from the router...but I still occasionally get those search pages from my ISP (RCN).
No requirement to produce physical identification has been tried in the supreme court. What they have said is that it is acceptable for a state to pass a law that says you must identify yourself--so when a cop asks for your name, you must provide it.
A requirement to do anything more than state your name (such as provide physical evidence of your name or say...your immigration status) has not been brought to the supreme court and it is likely (from previous opinions) that they would not view this requirement as acceptable.
As for drivers/passengers of vehicles--that varies by state. Most state vehicle codes require you to produce proof that you are eligible to be driving (and the issued proof happens to be an ID card). Passengers less so--it would vary by state and I wouldn't be surprised if it has never been contested strongly in places where it exists.
As it stands, nowhere in the country are you required to carry identification papers to stand on a street corner.
Instead of releasing or waiting, you occasionally get an option to be the "defender" depending on the circumstances in which you were killed. If you want to keep on questing, you can just go about your business--but if you want to extract your revenge, you can come back as a short term town guard of sorts.
Of course I sold my WoW account years ago and will probably never play another MMORPG (at least not to the extent equivalent to having a best-on-server 39 mage twink and a 70 shadow priest doing kara).
It is misguided to suggest that MS should be forced to release the server source or anything like that, but in exchange for not doing so, would it be so hard to put a label promising XX years of service? It would force them to carry a liability on their balance sheet though--could be bad if the game is a total flop--so I could see them offering relatively short guarantee periods with extension being the status quo on any popular game.
They probably were aware...but whats the point of doing anything about it?
I mean, the full HDD lawyer's job is probably to prosecute people that the SEC examiners have found evidence against...So as far as I can tell, he was doing his job since they had failed to actually find anybody to prosecute before everything fell apart.
Also..SEC...the X key is surprisingly close to the C key
HL2 doesn't look like quake 1, but it looks and plays an awfully lot like CS:S, DoD:S, TF2, L4D, L4D2, Portal, and of course all of the DLC.
Even though taking it back to quake's engine is a bit extreme (maybe for HL1...source is pushing it though), it seems that Valve has gotten this idea. They have made engine tweaks and updates along the way--but they are a much larger team than this guy and when you already have the team of graphic designers on salary...might as well let them work while guys like this design new stories and level designers design new levels (maybe with new models and textures but in the exact same Hammer Editor).
HL2 came out in what...2004? L4D2 came out in late 2009 and there is supposed to be some portal sequel eventually (not to mention the inevitable HL2 ep 3). That is a pretty good run for an engine. I know that valve tends to be a company that gets things "right" and that this guy is railing against the big EA/Activision type devs...but I am surprised he didn't think they deserved a mention.
That would only be true if it was a pure commodity item with no real differances besides grading--think meat...You wouldn't downgrade a bunch of Prime beef to Choice just because your cow ended up being 100% Prime. You would sell everything at Prime price and assume that the Choice market would be filled by farmers who got unlucky and had cows with no prime meat.
These are not cows--these are high end CPU's, there are two major industry players and they do not make identical products. In this market, you would rather price discriminate. AMD historically has had lower prices than intel but people still buy intel--so there must be more to the story than you are imagining. The key here is that AMD gets to segment their market and price discriminate. Sure, they are selling you 4 cores for 80% of the 4 core price by labeling them as 3 cores, but that means they get to make a 20% premium on people who want guaranteed 4-core functionality.
I am explaining this poorly--but for someone accusing everyone of having a "poor understanding of economics" you sure seem to be spewing a lot of misinformation (mainly driven by your interpretation of CPUs as a commodity).
I completely agree. The convenience of them gathering extra info do do the taxes for us is not worth the extra privacy loss.
For a lot of people however, W2 income is almost all you need (renters with no dependants and no investments who take the standard deduction often fit this)--This will be the first year where I actually have to provide anything beyond W2 income and I probably started filing taxes in 2002 or 2003.
The only reason they don't already do this, is they have gotten a lot of pushback from Intuit and H&R Block. I think california wanted to make an easy e-file system that already included the basic data they receive from your employer but a bunch of lawsuits sprung up and they abandoned the plan. It will never be as simple as the Norway example because our tax code is far more complicated, but entering W2s would be a nice start and would take care of a lot of simple wage-earners.
And when you sell it to gizmodo, they can protect you as a confidential source. If some court tries to force them to reveal, everyone will be up in arms.
It is not a standard clause as it is not standard for companies to pay for an MBA or other further degrees (though this/. post is about certifications and not schooling).
Those companies that do offer to pay for MBAs or what have you, often do have clauses where you have to work for them for X years after completion of your degree or pay. Companies often buy out employee's debts when they want to hire them badly enough.
I am not sure they would have to replicate the pages exactly. Just take whatever shows up on archive.org and and slap a current date on it.
The cloners are not trying to recreate your business--they just have to make it look like the business still has an active website. Then they use the emails that they now control to get back into old accounts.
As for knowing which third-party services were used, there may be some indication on the archived site or there may be something available with enough googling--maybe they find a former client from a "site design by..." tag and social engineer some answers out of them (they don't have to be an insider or client themselves...they just use your old email address and ask a former client). There can't be that many providers of some of these services that were active when the business was running and are still active now...just start using lost password forms.
They might have to reinstate your old payments, but a few months of invoicing service is a drop in the bucket compared to what they could then invoice your clients for (and bigger corporate customers might not ask questions before cutting a check to a company already in the system).
Wifi signal power is almost certainly a software option. A lot of consumer routers have a function to reduce power (if your house is covered and you don't need it leaking into your neighbors. DD-WRT even lets me increase my power above the standard levels.
I would imagine apple just flips a few bits and it will pass inspection elsewhere.
It isn't too much more work to just have a 4 password rotation of actually different passwords.
I can remember 4 different passwords, especially if they are variations on a theme (same sort of construction but not at all linked).
My biggest password annoyance is my 3 student loans--they all have different requirements such that no password can work for all three sites (and all in some way limiting complexity). Since I can barely remember the URLs to log into these things...I'd like to just simplify my life by having a single student-loan password. To make matters worse, one of them forces (or used to...I complained and maybe they changed it) a password change every 30 days--WTF? I have a monthly payment due...this basically translates to one password per login...or in reality, a whole lot of password reset forms/phone calls.
My temporary solution on forced password change was to immediately go and change my password 5 times and then set it back to the original (it only kept the last 5). I think I have now finally managed to get to the point where I trust their direct debit system to make the correct payments so I can just forget the passwords...
My favorite part is that two of the websites are actually identical. They have different policies (one has the 30-day reset...) and different names on the top of the page but the site itself has no changes. My (subsidized)stafford loans were all sold from their originating bank to the federal government last year and it has been a giant clusterfuck. The government has some of the worst designed financial sites I have ever seen...I had to mail a paper form with handwritten account numbers just to set up a simple ACH relationship for direct payment. My third loan may suffer from incompetent password policies, but at least it followed the same standard ACH procedures that every other financial site follows.
So...you buy a $130 device and pay a few hundred a year (to use outside your home)...to connect your old few hundred dollar device to your new few hundred dollar device?
And all it gets you is 16 more GB than the biggest version of the new few hundred dollar device? Only when it has internet access? And this genius gets on the front page?
Considering this guy already had one "company" that sold to google (and since at that point there can't have been more than a handful of people since it was really more of an idea+implementation than a company at the time), he probably has enough money to do what he loves quite comfortably.
At this point maybe he likes working on the software on his own terms. If he sold, he would have to come up with a whole new extension of his original idea if he wanted something to dabble with--maybe this feels like a hobby project to him and he doesn't want to let it go. Also, if somebody thinks it is worth money now...it could still be worth money in the future when he gets bored with it.
I really think you are confusing high frequency trading with something else. Having somebody trading quickly in the middle is not going to screw over little old ladies, it is just going to narrow the spread. There are a whole host of other things (like rampant speculation on questionable derivatives) that could screw stuff up but HFT is not one of them.
It doesn't even really mess with the value of the stock--the end shareholders are still paying what they think it is worth (the HFT people certainly are not holding these stocks...so there has to be somebody who wants to buy them). The thing that people don't like is that its a bunch of guys making a lot of money simply because they can afford to get at the market data faster than anyone else (which is why the SEC doesn't like it...it is not an even playing field).
What is happening is this: you are selling your car and you put out an ad in the paper saying "anybody want to buy my car" and Mr. HFT says "ok how about $10,000". If you accept his offer, it means you were perfectly willing to accept $10,000--if Bob was willing to offer $10,001 but waited too long to call you, it does not mean that Mr. HFT stole from you. If Mr. HFT turns around and sells the car to Bob for $10,001 (at a whopping $1 profit), it doesn't mean he has stolen from Bob--Sure bob could have gotten the car earlier for $10,000 but he has demonstrated that he is perfectly willing to pay $10,001 for the car.
If you don't like the price offered, you do not have to enter into the transaction. No sane person who actually understands the issues would say that the high-frequency traders are stealing. The questionable part of the practice that the SEC would like to ban is the way in which they get the information--they are the first guy on the paper route (or sometimes they work at the printing press) while bob is a few houses down. This gives them an unfair advantage that allows them to hop on these deals first--remember, the seller is still perfectly willing to sell for their price and and the buyer is perfectly willing to buy and all parties walk away satisfied. The only problem is the unfair advantage which does not make it stealing.
Maybe parts of the new generation of "professional" photographers (the people like the poster a little ways up who thinks that buying a fancy camera makes you ready to go head to head with a pro) are in the habit of selling their photos outright, but most of the industry certainly is not.
Photos are licensed for a specific use. If you *really* want the full rights, you can probably buy them--but they will be expensive. It is in the interest of both parties to agree to licensing. The buyer gets all of their needs met for a price less than they would have to pay for full rights (and they can always pay more later if they want to say reprint the photos from the magazine in a "best-of" book) and the photographer maintains the rights to their work for future use.
If you are selling the copyright, you are selling yourself short. Why do we respect it when musicians have managed to hold onto their catalog instead of losing it all to a label but get confused that a photographer might not want to relinquish the rights to a photo they created.
These are not the computers that make up the underlying infrastructure of financial trading.
These are the computers that other people use to tap into those computers for data and then make lots and lots of calculations on that data. The worst thing that could happen if you (Mr. Trading Firm) open up your after hours cpu cycles to joe-coder (or jack-hacker) is that they might be able to hack in and steal or front-run your model.
Sure, it sucks for your company, but you were the one who decided to do it and you were the one who screwed up the security. I am sure people get their models stolen or abused all of the time through other means (employees changing hands, industrial espionage, whatever) so the security risk is nothing new.
Finally, I would not be surprised to find that the firms who want to do this basically already have their own compute-farm clouds. Models are stored and worked from less powerful machines that then look to your local compute farm when they need to do the heavy lifting. If I can farm out my SAS computations to a system with far more CPU cycles (and faster, larger storage devices)...why can't some prop trading do the same with their models?
In fact, with after hours trading and foreign markets, it really does run 24/7, just not on the floor of the NYSE (and not as liquid).
I would posit that a good reason for this might be that the stock market is already panicky enough and being closed for most of the 24 hour day gives people a little more time to thing about what is going on. A perfect example is companies that release earnings and other important news after the closing bell. It gives people time to process the information rather than giving the fastest guy a chance to make a quick profit. For the *real* purpose of the stock exchange, it does not need to be open. If your goal is to raise capital for a business (or invest in one) rather than speculate and day-trade, the current market hours are just fine.
And how do you charge for support when it is a rather simple and small app (on the user side) that is written well enough to be essentially support free (with community support that answers any questions faster than you could pick up the phone and read in your credit card info for paid support)?
I highly doubt the reason everyone reads Anne Frank's diary in middle school is because their teachers thought it was a good book and they might like it.
My calculus book wasn't exactly a total hoot but I am still glad I read it.
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Now if you bought an ebook or something off lulu, then maybe it might have a chance at scoring a 2...but a low score is going to be truly awful to the point where it wouldn't be worth finishing and reviewing let alone publishing
I usually get some small temporary enjoyment out of whatever piece of crap toy they give me...
I am confused though...I thought I had my router pointing to OpenDNS and my machines taking their settings via dhcp from the router...but I still occasionally get those search pages from my ISP (RCN).
No requirement to produce physical identification has been tried in the supreme court. What they have said is that it is acceptable for a state to pass a law that says you must identify yourself--so when a cop asks for your name, you must provide it.
A requirement to do anything more than state your name (such as provide physical evidence of your name or say...your immigration status) has not been brought to the supreme court and it is likely (from previous opinions) that they would not view this requirement as acceptable.
As for drivers/passengers of vehicles--that varies by state. Most state vehicle codes require you to produce proof that you are eligible to be driving (and the issued proof happens to be an ID card). Passengers less so--it would vary by state and I wouldn't be surprised if it has never been contested strongly in places where it exists.
As it stands, nowhere in the country are you required to carry identification papers to stand on a street corner.
Instead of releasing or waiting, you occasionally get an option to be the "defender" depending on the circumstances in which you were killed. If you want to keep on questing, you can just go about your business--but if you want to extract your revenge, you can come back as a short term town guard of sorts.
Of course I sold my WoW account years ago and will probably never play another MMORPG (at least not to the extent equivalent to having a best-on-server 39 mage twink and a 70 shadow priest doing kara).
It is misguided to suggest that MS should be forced to release the server source or anything like that, but in exchange for not doing so, would it be so hard to put a label promising XX years of service? It would force them to carry a liability on their balance sheet though--could be bad if the game is a total flop--so I could see them offering relatively short guarantee periods with extension being the status quo on any popular game.
I mean, the full HDD lawyer's job is probably to prosecute people that the SEC examiners have found evidence against...So as far as I can tell, he was doing his job since they had failed to actually find anybody to prosecute before everything fell apart.
Also..SEC...the X key is surprisingly close to the C key
Even though taking it back to quake's engine is a bit extreme (maybe for HL1...source is pushing it though), it seems that Valve has gotten this idea. They have made engine tweaks and updates along the way--but they are a much larger team than this guy and when you already have the team of graphic designers on salary...might as well let them work while guys like this design new stories and level designers design new levels (maybe with new models and textures but in the exact same Hammer Editor).
HL2 came out in what...2004? L4D2 came out in late 2009 and there is supposed to be some portal sequel eventually (not to mention the inevitable HL2 ep 3). That is a pretty good run for an engine. I know that valve tends to be a company that gets things "right" and that this guy is railing against the big EA/Activision type devs...but I am surprised he didn't think they deserved a mention.
These are not cows--these are high end CPU's, there are two major industry players and they do not make identical products. In this market, you would rather price discriminate. AMD historically has had lower prices than intel but people still buy intel--so there must be more to the story than you are imagining. The key here is that AMD gets to segment their market and price discriminate. Sure, they are selling you 4 cores for 80% of the 4 core price by labeling them as 3 cores, but that means they get to make a 20% premium on people who want guaranteed 4-core functionality.
I am explaining this poorly--but for someone accusing everyone of having a "poor understanding of economics" you sure seem to be spewing a lot of misinformation (mainly driven by your interpretation of CPUs as a commodity).
For a lot of people however, W2 income is almost all you need (renters with no dependants and no investments who take the standard deduction often fit this)--This will be the first year where I actually have to provide anything beyond W2 income and I probably started filing taxes in 2002 or 2003.
The only reason they don't already do this, is they have gotten a lot of pushback from Intuit and H&R Block. I think california wanted to make an easy e-file system that already included the basic data they receive from your employer but a bunch of lawsuits sprung up and they abandoned the plan. It will never be as simple as the Norway example because our tax code is far more complicated, but entering W2s would be a nice start and would take care of a lot of simple wage-earners.
For instance, when you get a W2 from your employer, they have already sent a copy to the government--so why do you have to retype the same data?
If you sell it to a fence...
Those companies that do offer to pay for MBAs or what have you, often do have clauses where you have to work for them for X years after completion of your degree or pay. Companies often buy out employee's debts when they want to hire them badly enough.
The cloners are not trying to recreate your business--they just have to make it look like the business still has an active website. Then they use the emails that they now control to get back into old accounts.
As for knowing which third-party services were used, there may be some indication on the archived site or there may be something available with enough googling--maybe they find a former client from a "site design by..." tag and social engineer some answers out of them (they don't have to be an insider or client themselves...they just use your old email address and ask a former client). There can't be that many providers of some of these services that were active when the business was running and are still active now...just start using lost password forms.
They might have to reinstate your old payments, but a few months of invoicing service is a drop in the bucket compared to what they could then invoice your clients for (and bigger corporate customers might not ask questions before cutting a check to a company already in the system).
I would imagine apple just flips a few bits and it will pass inspection elsewhere.
I can remember 4 different passwords, especially if they are variations on a theme (same sort of construction but not at all linked).
My biggest password annoyance is my 3 student loans--they all have different requirements such that no password can work for all three sites (and all in some way limiting complexity). Since I can barely remember the URLs to log into these things...I'd like to just simplify my life by having a single student-loan password. To make matters worse, one of them forces (or used to...I complained and maybe they changed it) a password change every 30 days--WTF? I have a monthly payment due...this basically translates to one password per login...or in reality, a whole lot of password reset forms/phone calls.
My temporary solution on forced password change was to immediately go and change my password 5 times and then set it back to the original (it only kept the last 5). I think I have now finally managed to get to the point where I trust their direct debit system to make the correct payments so I can just forget the passwords...
My favorite part is that two of the websites are actually identical. They have different policies (one has the 30-day reset...) and different names on the top of the page but the site itself has no changes. My (subsidized)stafford loans were all sold from their originating bank to the federal government last year and it has been a giant clusterfuck. The government has some of the worst designed financial sites I have ever seen...I had to mail a paper form with handwritten account numbers just to set up a simple ACH relationship for direct payment. My third loan may suffer from incompetent password policies, but at least it followed the same standard ACH procedures that every other financial site follows.
And all it gets you is 16 more GB than the biggest version of the new few hundred dollar device? Only when it has internet access? And this genius gets on the front page?
At this point maybe he likes working on the software on his own terms. If he sold, he would have to come up with a whole new extension of his original idea if he wanted something to dabble with--maybe this feels like a hobby project to him and he doesn't want to let it go. Also, if somebody thinks it is worth money now...it could still be worth money in the future when he gets bored with it.
It doesn't even really mess with the value of the stock--the end shareholders are still paying what they think it is worth (the HFT people certainly are not holding these stocks...so there has to be somebody who wants to buy them). The thing that people don't like is that its a bunch of guys making a lot of money simply because they can afford to get at the market data faster than anyone else (which is why the SEC doesn't like it...it is not an even playing field).
What is happening is this: you are selling your car and you put out an ad in the paper saying "anybody want to buy my car" and Mr. HFT says "ok how about $10,000". If you accept his offer, it means you were perfectly willing to accept $10,000--if Bob was willing to offer $10,001 but waited too long to call you, it does not mean that Mr. HFT stole from you. If Mr. HFT turns around and sells the car to Bob for $10,001 (at a whopping $1 profit), it doesn't mean he has stolen from Bob--Sure bob could have gotten the car earlier for $10,000 but he has demonstrated that he is perfectly willing to pay $10,001 for the car.
If you don't like the price offered, you do not have to enter into the transaction. No sane person who actually understands the issues would say that the high-frequency traders are stealing. The questionable part of the practice that the SEC would like to ban is the way in which they get the information--they are the first guy on the paper route (or sometimes they work at the printing press) while bob is a few houses down. This gives them an unfair advantage that allows them to hop on these deals first--remember, the seller is still perfectly willing to sell for their price and and the buyer is perfectly willing to buy and all parties walk away satisfied. The only problem is the unfair advantage which does not make it stealing.
Maybe parts of the new generation of "professional" photographers (the people like the poster a little ways up who thinks that buying a fancy camera makes you ready to go head to head with a pro) are in the habit of selling their photos outright, but most of the industry certainly is not.
Photos are licensed for a specific use. If you *really* want the full rights, you can probably buy them--but they will be expensive. It is in the interest of both parties to agree to licensing. The buyer gets all of their needs met for a price less than they would have to pay for full rights (and they can always pay more later if they want to say reprint the photos from the magazine in a "best-of" book) and the photographer maintains the rights to their work for future use.
If you are selling the copyright, you are selling yourself short. Why do we respect it when musicians have managed to hold onto their catalog instead of losing it all to a label but get confused that a photographer might not want to relinquish the rights to a photo they created.
These are the computers that other people use to tap into those computers for data and then make lots and lots of calculations on that data. The worst thing that could happen if you (Mr. Trading Firm) open up your after hours cpu cycles to joe-coder (or jack-hacker) is that they might be able to hack in and steal or front-run your model.
Sure, it sucks for your company, but you were the one who decided to do it and you were the one who screwed up the security. I am sure people get their models stolen or abused all of the time through other means (employees changing hands, industrial espionage, whatever) so the security risk is nothing new.
Finally, I would not be surprised to find that the firms who want to do this basically already have their own compute-farm clouds. Models are stored and worked from less powerful machines that then look to your local compute farm when they need to do the heavy lifting. If I can farm out my SAS computations to a system with far more CPU cycles (and faster, larger storage devices)...why can't some prop trading do the same with their models?
In fact, with after hours trading and foreign markets, it really does run 24/7, just not on the floor of the NYSE (and not as liquid).
I would posit that a good reason for this might be that the stock market is already panicky enough and being closed for most of the 24 hour day gives people a little more time to thing about what is going on. A perfect example is companies that release earnings and other important news after the closing bell. It gives people time to process the information rather than giving the fastest guy a chance to make a quick profit. For the *real* purpose of the stock exchange, it does not need to be open. If your goal is to raise capital for a business (or invest in one) rather than speculate and day-trade, the current market hours are just fine.
And how do you charge for support when it is a rather simple and small app (on the user side) that is written well enough to be essentially support free (with community support that answers any questions faster than you could pick up the phone and read in your credit card info for paid support)?
My calculus book wasn't exactly a total hoot but I am still glad I read it.