But then again, just what does B&N think it's going to do if it gives up on Nook now?
Judging from the last time I was in a B&N (a few weeks ago), I'd say the answer is "become a high-class, more limited Target". They've had a DVD/CD section for some time now, and in the past few years they've started carrying toys, focusing mostly on exploratory, educational, or similar ones like various planetarium-style items and LEGO. I think they started doing stuffed animals recently.
I don't know how well this is serving them, but it seems that only half of a normal B&N is actually for reading materials now.
Am I the only one who sees various states (and/or the fed) trying to outlaw 3D printer weapons specifically? Not because they're a viable threat to anything, mind you, but because the expansion of 3D printers (now available at, what was it, Staples?) makes it continually easier for your average consumer to do this, plus the progression of the design, will make them a more interesting replacement for regular guns.
In other words, the NRA, which seems to work/lobby not on gun rights but on gun corporations' profits, will pay^H^H^Hconvince Congress to put the kibosh on these.
It doesn't even have to be as large as a mainframe application.
For my senior thesis for my Bachelor's degree, I took on the task of taking on an old DOS flat file "database" system and creating a modern equivalent. I did the same as a sibling post, asking how they use it, what could be what, etc., and then I started to make the program. As I did so, I started looking at the data it held for myself--the format (which I forget at the moment, but I think it was something from IBM) could designate "columns" with data types, and then completely disregard those data types. So you would have a field like "weight", and then the data could be "X1444RTTJU8" because when they had a an entry related to a problem, they would use that field for notes. And the program had no problem with this, even searched on that.
I only had a short time to work on this, and I got in way over my head. In the end, I had to leave the company before I could complete the project. No one there was disappointed, though, as the only reason they seemed interested in replacing it was due to a corporate mandate about replacing technology no longer supported after X years, and I made the fifth or sixth person to attempt and fail (all of us being interns or otherwise low-level devs) on this very task.
What I took away from the whole project (and what I wrote as the final portion of my thesis) was that I approached it from a completely wrong angle: I was trying to copy the program, when instead I should have been focusing on the task and goals and working from there.[1] Not that you can't miss edge cases in this scenario, but you will be better able to handle them because you won't be trying as stringently to maintain an outdated input system.
[1] Although I likely wouldn't have gotten too far with this, either, as those who actually used it seemed unwilling to help me; they were all folks that seemed very set in their ways, resistant to any change, and I got the feeling that they saw a replacement as a threat to their jobs. In addition, all of them were trained to use a set of instructions that was "Press X, now press T", etc., and not actually describing what they were doing, but just how to do it. If the program suddenly disappeared, I suspect they would have no idea how to do half their jobs.
This happened in the late 80s/early 90s as well, though; two games I remember in particular are Cool Spot, which I haven't played in over a decade but remember enjoying well enough as a kid, and M.C. Kids which I also recall as being okay (and, apparently, the Gameboy port became another Cool Spot game in North America and Japan, weird.)
These days it's a lot cheaper to just slap some promo stuff together for in-game advertising and use it in a bunch of different games. Of course, we still get the odd corporate game, like Sneak King...
I think this just shows the signs of decay (ha!) for EA, not for gaming in general.
If someone goes to popefrancis.biz and gets an advert for paint sales or something, yes, that's pretty benign.
Not so much so if you went to whitehouse.com to look for information on the US President and instead found yourself with a page full of breasts. Many might prefer this new information (especially on slashdot; I know I'd rather see actual boobs then the boobs in Congress), but it's not as funny to those trying to do a grade school project, typing in ".com" by habit at work, or who has "delicate sensibilities".
None of this really matters considering Vatican City has its own TLD of.va
Because absolutely no one went to whitehouse.com when trying to get information about the White House in Washington, D.C.
(For those not in the know, whitehouse.com was once a porn site; whitehouse.gov is the USG's website. According to Wiki the.com domain changed hands and content a little under a decade ago, shows how current I am.)
You're making the assumption that the submitter has a choice in the matter; this may not be the case. The college I went to had one set of dorms (set up in an "8" format with two middle areas no one ever used) and all freshmen were required to live it in it unless they lived within a certain mile range of the campus. Even if we had been able to change rooms (which seemed possible, but only for when you returned from work term), you wouldn't notice much of a change unless you went from one extreme end of the dorms to the other.
Now, if they go to a state or large and popular college/uni, they might have options.
As to submitter, is this self-diagnosed ADHD or do you have a clinical diagnoses?
If clinical: are you taking medication to help with it? If so, perhaps its worth talking to your provider about a change in prescription/dose. If you're not taking meds, perhaps talking with your doctor or a school counselor and trying some might be helpful. Even if you could sound-proof your room, you're going to get tons of distractions all over college, so it's something to look into.
If self-diagnosed: Talk to a college counselor (my small one had two, though it could be hard to get ahold of them) or doctor if you don't have your own to get references to those who can officially diagnose you. This will make your college stay far, far easier. They can help you to control it, maybe do some of the aforementioned medication.
In either case, distractions like the ones you mention are a part of life, and you will have situations where you will be completely unable to use foam, ear plugs, white noise through headphones, or what have you, so working now to deal with these distractions instead of just trying to block them out is in your interest. (I know nothing about ADHD except the very general notion, which is another good reason to talk to university counselors (which can be cheap or free) or doctors.)
This is true, and a reason I always chide those who go on about the President controlling things like gas prices. However, in the case of laws, President Obama is slightly different: When he was campaigning for his first term, he was against immunity for telecos on warrantless wiretapping. But, while still Senator Obama, he voted for immunity, and has done many things since to keep it in action (like arguing against the journalists in the SC that they can't even challenge the law when there's no way to find out who can, IIRC).
So, yes, the President doesn't write or vote in laws, but he has the power to veto them. According to Wikipedia, he's used this power twice, once in each of his first years in office. He certainly hasn't used it on anything that should have been veto'd, like FISA extensions/renewals. Even if it were certain that whatever he vetoes would get the necessary overriding votes in Congress, it would still send a message.
As things stand, he's no better than the driver of the get-away van for a bank robbery who spends the whole time thinking/saying "this is wrong", but doesn't hesitate to drive for a moment.
I do thank President Obama for one thing, though: His actions have opened my eyes to how the Democrats are just as shitty as the Republicans, and that our two-party system is horrible.
Re:No backwards compatibility (no physical media?)
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Sony Announces the PS4
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Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm in the (apparently vocally large) Slashdot crowd that will go out of our way to avoid buying anything Sony. However, Sony could still make some good decisions. And this is certainly not one of them. Were I not turned off by all of Sony's other shenanigans, I would by solely by the lack backwards compatibility and physical media (and, thus, second-hand sales!)
One of the most damning things to me is the lack of backwards compatibility (at least, far as I can tell from the Engadget feed I've been sort of following). I lost all interest in the PS3 when they stopped including PS2/1 compatibility (yes, I know I can find older, used systems, but screw Sony). Considering the library many gamers have, I don't think that having one prior console's worth of compatibility is asking too much, especially to help boost early sales if the launch library is less than tremendous.
But a part of this that I find highly interesting that there's no mention of physical media. Plenty of talk about the cloud, downloading games in the background and playing them as they download (I will be highly interested to see how this works out, if at all), and an internal hard drive... but no physical media. I mean, BluRay is the obvious choice for Sony, but not a mention either in the Ars article or the Engadget feed (unless I missed it.) Even the concise "Informed System Architecture" shows all your regular parts of a system... except the media.
Why bother with a tax? It will just be misdirected or misappropriated in the government, and the manufacturer will pass it on to the consumer (unless you're talking about having it apply as a sales tax at the consumer level already.). Instead, let's have a law that everything that's not a consumable (everything, even stuff like Tupperware) have a two year, full-replacement warranty, where any shipping & handling is paid for by the manufacturer, and replacements must be a brand new item, none of this refurbished shit. I bet we'd see a huge uptick in quality across the board as businesses figure out it's cheaper to produce higher quality goods than to deal with paying S&H both ways plus the loss of a stock item plus the loss of time.
I believe there's a large factor that is the difference between the past upsets and now: AI.
Yeah, the printing press put most scribes out of work, but in their place popped up a lot of book salesmen because books suddenly became so cheap. However, you still needed humans at both ends of the chains (writer to salesman) to get the product to the consumer. With this turn, though, we're not just making mechanical machines to replace human work, we're making thinking mechanical machines to replace human work.
Sticking with the printing press example, let's take what things might be like in the "near" future: Consumer wants a book. Consumer goes online, downloads the first chapter of various books of interest, and picks one s/he wants. If the user wants an eBook or other digital format, that's the end. The only people necessary in this chain are the writer, the web administrator/developer/designer, and the ISP. However, the web admin/dev has created an automated system to upload and produce eBooks, so they aren't expressly part of this process. Similarly, the ISP has already laid/rented the cable and set up their servers for automatic protocol handling, so they aren't expressly part of this process, either. Thus, the only necessary person in this chain is the writer.
Okay, but that doesn't involve AI much, if at all, and that isn't the "near" future, that's the "now" future. So what if the consumer wants dead tree format? An automatic printing system prints the book on demand (only high-demand or brand new books are stocked), an automatic sorting and packaging system puts the book into a shipping container, where a conveyer belt moves it to the shipping truck. Depending on how "near" this is, you might need a human to properly put the packages in the truck, but in the further future I'm sure we'll have robotic hands that will be able to handle that (and better, because they can predict the best location for packages as they're added to the truck's packing list but before the package arrives at the truck).[1] This shipping truck is driver-less and makes its own way to a central shipping hub where the book is unloaded and mixed with other packages. These are loaded onto an automated bullet train (perhaps they'll still do the plane thing, in which case you would have pilots) in a similar manner, go through the process at another hub, and are put on an automated delivery vehicle. If there's no mechanism for automatically receiving packages (I'm thinking a large mailbox-like device that has locks and can dock with a port on the delivery truck), the consumer receives a call or text message (or a notification on their HUD!) that the truck is coming, and then that it is waiting outside. They go out, do whatever verification is in place to receive the package, and that's it. Max possible people involved in the process: 8 (writer, one for loading the book, one for handling the package at each end of the hub, +possible pilot and co-pilot). Minimum number of people involved in the process: 1, the writer (assuming robotic package handling and automated bullet train)
A similar process is used for most home decorations or, perhaps, even furniture: either the user has a basic 3D printer at home and orders the blueprints, then waits a bit; or orders the item from a company that has a high-speed, advanced 3D printer, in place of the book printer of my above example. AI is massively involved in all of this. Before we still had to actively work on or with machines. Now we just set them up with commands, conditions, and monitoring systems and set them on their way. Our machines can (or soon will) not only do the work for us, but do the basic [i]thinking about the work[/i] for us. That wasn't there for the wheel, or for the loom, or for even for initial bombers. And as AI research progresses, mechanical contraptions become more nimble (like this high-speed robot hand that can toss and catch a cellphone (near the end o
The constant concern that my very involvement in anything brings down the overall happiness of the group. (Also, for my nearby relatives, I have nothing in common with them; I don't do small talk and become bored easily and would start focusing on other things, so my view is that the slight of not going at all is less than going and ignoring them.)
Today is Monday, tomorrow is Tuesday. Tonight marks one complete rotation (roughly) of our planet around our sun.
I have no idea what my community is doing, but I plan to treat it as any other night, with the exception that I get tomorrow off. As I've grown older (27, for reference) and gotten out and lived on my own I find that annual celebrations hold little meaning to me, including my own birthday. If I'm going to celebrate, it's going to be for a relevant, contemporary event. If I'm going to make changes to my life, it's going to be when I realize those changes need to be made, not some arbitrary date. If I want to get together with loved ones, I'll do it when the urge strikes (at least, in so far as those I want to spend time with are also available.)
(Of course, I've no friends, no close relatives, and am anti-social, so my view could be skewed.)
As another former soldier (also honorably discharged, as a Specialist), I'm calling bullshit on your call of bullshit. I read the parent's reply and nodded with each and every complaint he had. My MOS in the military was that as 92G - Food Service Specialist (I maintain this as the biggest mistake in my life). Basic was a joke, I never should have graduated when I did as I spent the entire first week in quarters (this alone should have forced me to restart the cycle, IMO); I only did so for three reasons: A) I barely hit enough targets B) I barely ran fast enough C) I didn't make my drill sergeants too mad at me (excelling only in book learning and Land Nav, I took an otherwise heads-down approach) From our company about two dozen people fell out of our final victory run (6 miles, IIRC), and the pace was moderate at worst.
I was Whiskey (you know~) Co. at Ft. Lee, VA (I forget which BN, the one for Quartermasters, doesn't really matter now). It was a continual, downright embarrassment. Day one, after everyone else had gone to their training unit, my group of 70+ people waited for four hours for our sergeants to arrive. Then we sat in our common room for four hours, doing nothing. Then they realized that, hey, we might want to have dinner, so they managed to scrounge up a box of MREs for us. Much latter in the cycle, one of my and another platoon's SSGs came quite close to fisticuffs, in front of both platoons, over who would be able to use the bus to move their platoon. My platoon had to go to a training center on the other side of the post. The other platoon had to go four blocks, and apparently the other SSG didn't want to march his 98ish person platoon (yes, 98) the four blocks. (That's nothing, an incoming platoon the week we did our final field mission was 120 or so, I believe.) During this time I learned enough to basically work at a Golden Corral, if that. I had to relearn most of the actual cooking once I was assigned to my final unit. My final PT card was falsified, a fact which I found out only after arriving at my final unit, and I only knew this because the sergeant that filled it out put down the wrong time to get the minimum of 60 points (the time he put down would have actually given me 55 or so) and did not put down the right number of sit ups (he once again put down the minimum, when I know for a fact I did 10 above that).
At my unit, the first E6 I had (who is now the only E7, from talking to friends still in) for us cooks was atrocious at any kind of leadership and taking care of her soldiers, preferring to accommodate requests from anyone above her rank, even those she couldn't realistically fulfill (such as promising an extra meal we did not have the supplies for at a time after we were to head back to the rear; thankfully another SSG stepped in and ended that one). After a nervous breakdown one night (which began the path to my discharge) I straight-up told her that I had planned to kill myself, and wanted to see a psychiatrist or maybe even check into the psych ward (I had come out of a deep depression, but did not know if I'd go back in). Her reply, literally, was "Well, soldier on." Later she gave me a card with the number for 1 Stop (I think that was the number, whatever they put on the ACE cards). My BN commander would sometimes get on the radio during field missions and curse out a SSG or SFC who had the audacity to confirm a conflicting order from their own 1SG. Dates for field missions often were not confirmed until two or so weeks before the actual start (an issue for us cooks because we had to put in UGR orders 30 days in advance). My direct CO called my direct SGT a "fucking retard", to my face. One of my squad members was dealing with depression and I was worried he was going to lash out at someone and even threatened many times to do it; I talked to his SGT (who was one year younger than I) multiple times about this and, to my knowledge, nothing was ever done. They drilled it into us in Basic to not salute in the field, and when I walked past our
Do you happen to have a link for this quote? I would love to share the source with a number of my ultra-religious relatives on Facebook. (None of them think he's a secret Muslim, to my knowledge, but I'd still be interested to see their reaction to this.)
I did mean it as a joke (which I hoped would be obvious, but from some replies might not be), but there's a reason they wouldn't apply Funny: Funny doesn't apply any kind of karma bonus, but Insightful/Interesting does. So at times mods will use those moderations in order to also give a karma modifier as well as +1, if someone has already modded it Funny. Since my post has more Insightful ratings than Funny ratings, it's marked as "Insightful".
(I don't need the karma, I have more than enough in my account, but it's still a nice thought on the part of the mods.)
I've had a few conversations with employees over the years, mostly suggesting bands to add or asking (or complaining) about features they should add or removed. I wonder if they have flagged some accounts as "lead users" (or "problem users") or something like that, and have ads excluded from our accounts?
I wouldn't be surprised. I was having an issue with their web player where it would get part-way through a song and suddenly jump to the next one. No stuttering, internet lag, or anything else to communicate the issue. I contacted their support and, likely from the techie details I sent with the first response, one of their people got back to me and asked if I could help them troubleshoot; apparently it was an issue affecting a small amount of users, but they had no clue what was causing it. I was happy to do so, and over three months or so I tried various configurations of browsers (both versions and types) and Flash versions to see if we could at least eliminate the issue. In the end we didn't really make any headway, but they had a bunch of data to work with and asked for my home address; as their way of saying thanks for my help, I got a free Pandora hat (very nice looking until I left it sitting in my car rear dash for weeks, good quality material).
I subscribe to their Pandora One service now, and feel it's quite worth it. Their desktop player is missing some of the web player features (such as moving a song to another station), but I have no problem using the web player since it's always at work or home, anyway.
Especially considering it's a personal anecdote, this seems like one of those "causation vs. correlation" things; like how more intelligent children tend to have households with more books per person than less intelligent ones. (There are plenty of studies on the effects of TV on youth, and to my knowledge they all make a negative correlation, but I can't be arsed to find any right now.)
In both cases, it's not that the child is reading a crap-load of books or that the child has completely avoided any sort of media (unless they were Amish, I'd be freaking amazed if the children of those five families had not watched TV or a movie once before puberty), but that they have parents who not only take a vested interest in their child's upbringing, as well as have the time and resources to accomplish such a task. (The former for sure, the latter possibly.) They likely also made sure they got healthy meals wherever, got them interested in a number of topics, at least tried to get them to learn an instrument and play a sport regularly, and so on.
I wouldn't say that TV itself is destructive, but unchecked TV can be. If the children aren't being taught that much of what they see on TV is fake (I'm not even talking about sci-fi, I'm talking about things like CSI and soap operas), they'll come to expect that as being normal/expected because as they grow they take in everything they can from their surroundings to build a world basis upon. If they're watching copious amounts of TV, it means the parents don't care to make sure they are introduced to a large variety of activities, or perhaps they are a single-parent household where the parent has to work multiple jobs without being able to afford a babysitter (or the sitter in question allows such TV viewing)--both these things can be detrimental to a child's development, even without a TV present.
A little late, but I wanted to throw my hat in with support.
I'm 230ish (haven't actually weighed myself in a while, but my body size hasn't changed much). Three weeks ago I moved from a location almost a half hour away from work to a location a quarter mile away, and in a super-bike-friendly city. I now bike to work every day, and in addition I bike home for lunch (and a short-ish nap) as well. In the three weeks since I started, doing only 20 minutes of light biking per day, I've found myself with a huge burst in energy[1]. I go to bed at the same time but I wake up earlier (which is helpful in getting the time for the nap). In addition, since it takes more energy to go get fast food for lunch/dinner, either I save money and just don't get any, or I bike there and burn at least some of the extra calories I will take in doing that. Once I get my leg muscles up to speed I will be biking around town for the majority of my errands, as well. I'm sure that after a few months of this (assuming the winter doesn't completely destroy my ability to bike) I will have lost at least some weight without changing my other habits (I made soda a rarity months ago, at most I'll have one 20oz per week).
Not everyone can move that close to work like I did, but the point is that if you can increase the amount of energy you expend each day you will find that it will help you feel better and thus become even more motivated to work out more. After just two weeks I up and decided to just bike for a while when I left work. In the end I biked a mile or so--no great amount at all, even if I had been running, but that one bike ride was still more exercise than I had in the entire month of August (or between May and August, for that matter).
Try parking further away from work. If you have a bike and a bike rack on your car, drive most of the way and bike the rest (this will be handy if you have a crowded lot, little/expensive parking, or just want to save on gas). If you don't but have the money, seriously consider getting such a setup. Even doing errands, park as far away from the doors as you can (taking into account whatever you might buy). Use a hand basket instead of a cart when doing grocery shopping to both give your upper body a little extra work out and to force you to be more choosey in what you buy (since it's far harder to overload a basket than a cart.) On that note, make a list before you go shopping and buy only what's on that list--this is something else I did a while back and found myself doing a lot less junk food and impulse purchases (also make sure not to go grocery shopping while hungry).
There are a lot of little things like what I listed that can be done to make up to a larger goal (if you're a coder, think of it like taking a large function and breaking it into multiple, smaller functions that each do a simpler task.) If you go into weight loss thinking that you'll do a gym membership with daily lifting or jumping into P90X, you'll quickly find yourself overwhelmed and give up. You can do it! Just start by looking at the every day and asking how a task could be modified to help you with weight loss.
[1] Full disclosure, I've taken a huge downturn this week in energy and sleep pattern; however, I believe I am (successfully) fighting off either a cold or a severe seasonal allergy attack, so I don't consider it a failure of the changes I've made.
Slashdot Mirror
Judging from the last time I was in a B&N (a few weeks ago), I'd say the answer is "become a high-class, more limited Target". They've had a DVD/CD section for some time now, and in the past few years they've started carrying toys, focusing mostly on exploratory, educational, or similar ones like various planetarium-style items and LEGO. I think they started doing stuffed animals recently.
I don't know how well this is serving them, but it seems that only half of a normal B&N is actually for reading materials now.
Am I the only one who sees various states (and/or the fed) trying to outlaw 3D printer weapons specifically? Not because they're a viable threat to anything, mind you, but because the expansion of 3D printers (now available at, what was it, Staples?) makes it continually easier for your average consumer to do this, plus the progression of the design, will make them a more interesting replacement for regular guns.
In other words, the NRA, which seems to work/lobby not on gun rights but on gun corporations' profits, will pay^H^H^Hconvince Congress to put the kibosh on these.
Maybe I'm just being cynical.
As of this posting, it is.
It doesn't even have to be as large as a mainframe application.
For my senior thesis for my Bachelor's degree, I took on the task of taking on an old DOS flat file "database" system and creating a modern equivalent. I did the same as a sibling post, asking how they use it, what could be what, etc., and then I started to make the program. As I did so, I started looking at the data it held for myself--the format (which I forget at the moment, but I think it was something from IBM) could designate "columns" with data types, and then completely disregard those data types. So you would have a field like "weight", and then the data could be "X1444RTTJU8" because when they had a an entry related to a problem, they would use that field for notes. And the program had no problem with this, even searched on that.
I only had a short time to work on this, and I got in way over my head. In the end, I had to leave the company before I could complete the project. No one there was disappointed, though, as the only reason they seemed interested in replacing it was due to a corporate mandate about replacing technology no longer supported after X years, and I made the fifth or sixth person to attempt and fail (all of us being interns or otherwise low-level devs) on this very task.
What I took away from the whole project (and what I wrote as the final portion of my thesis) was that I approached it from a completely wrong angle: I was trying to copy the program, when instead I should have been focusing on the task and goals and working from there.[1] Not that you can't miss edge cases in this scenario, but you will be better able to handle them because you won't be trying as stringently to maintain an outdated input system.
[1] Although I likely wouldn't have gotten too far with this, either, as those who actually used it seemed unwilling to help me; they were all folks that seemed very set in their ways, resistant to any change, and I got the feeling that they saw a replacement as a threat to their jobs. In addition, all of them were trained to use a set of instructions that was "Press X, now press T", etc., and not actually describing what they were doing, but just how to do it. If the program suddenly disappeared, I suspect they would have no idea how to do half their jobs.
This happened in the late 80s/early 90s as well, though; two games I remember in particular are Cool Spot, which I haven't played in over a decade but remember enjoying well enough as a kid, and M.C. Kids which I also recall as being okay (and, apparently, the Gameboy port became another Cool Spot game in North America and Japan, weird.)
These days it's a lot cheaper to just slap some promo stuff together for in-game advertising and use it in a bunch of different games. Of course, we still get the odd corporate game, like Sneak King...
I think this just shows the signs of decay (ha!) for EA, not for gaming in general.
If someone goes to popefrancis.biz and gets an advert for paint sales or something, yes, that's pretty benign.
Not so much so if you went to whitehouse.com to look for information on the US President and instead found yourself with a page full of breasts. Many might prefer this new information (especially on slashdot; I know I'd rather see actual boobs then the boobs in Congress), but it's not as funny to those trying to do a grade school project, typing in ".com" by habit at work, or who has "delicate sensibilities".
Because absolutely no one went to whitehouse.com when trying to get information about the White House in Washington, D.C.
(For those not in the know, whitehouse.com was once a porn site; whitehouse.gov is the USG's website. According to Wiki the .com domain changed hands and content a little under a decade ago, shows how current I am.)
You're making the assumption that the submitter has a choice in the matter; this may not be the case. The college I went to had one set of dorms (set up in an "8" format with two middle areas no one ever used) and all freshmen were required to live it in it unless they lived within a certain mile range of the campus. Even if we had been able to change rooms (which seemed possible, but only for when you returned from work term), you wouldn't notice much of a change unless you went from one extreme end of the dorms to the other.
Now, if they go to a state or large and popular college/uni, they might have options.
As to submitter, is this self-diagnosed ADHD or do you have a clinical diagnoses?
If clinical: are you taking medication to help with it? If so, perhaps its worth talking to your provider about a change in prescription/dose. If you're not taking meds, perhaps talking with your doctor or a school counselor and trying some might be helpful. Even if you could sound-proof your room, you're going to get tons of distractions all over college, so it's something to look into.
If self-diagnosed: Talk to a college counselor (my small one had two, though it could be hard to get ahold of them) or doctor if you don't have your own to get references to those who can officially diagnose you. This will make your college stay far, far easier. They can help you to control it, maybe do some of the aforementioned medication.
In either case, distractions like the ones you mention are a part of life, and you will have situations where you will be completely unable to use foam, ear plugs, white noise through headphones, or what have you, so working now to deal with these distractions instead of just trying to block them out is in your interest. (I know nothing about ADHD except the very general notion, which is another good reason to talk to university counselors (which can be cheap or free) or doctors.)
This is true, and a reason I always chide those who go on about the President controlling things like gas prices. However, in the case of laws, President Obama is slightly different: When he was campaigning for his first term, he was against immunity for telecos on warrantless wiretapping. But, while still Senator Obama, he voted for immunity, and has done many things since to keep it in action (like arguing against the journalists in the SC that they can't even challenge the law when there's no way to find out who can, IIRC).
So, yes, the President doesn't write or vote in laws, but he has the power to veto them. According to Wikipedia, he's used this power twice, once in each of his first years in office. He certainly hasn't used it on anything that should have been veto'd, like FISA extensions/renewals. Even if it were certain that whatever he vetoes would get the necessary overriding votes in Congress, it would still send a message.
As things stand, he's no better than the driver of the get-away van for a bank robbery who spends the whole time thinking/saying "this is wrong", but doesn't hesitate to drive for a moment.
I do thank President Obama for one thing, though: His actions have opened my eyes to how the Democrats are just as shitty as the Republicans, and that our two-party system is horrible.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm in the (apparently vocally large) Slashdot crowd that will go out of our way to avoid buying anything Sony. However, Sony could still make some good decisions. And this is certainly not one of them. Were I not turned off by all of Sony's other shenanigans, I would by solely by the lack backwards compatibility and physical media (and, thus, second-hand sales!)
One of the most damning things to me is the lack of backwards compatibility (at least, far as I can tell from the Engadget feed I've been sort of following). I lost all interest in the PS3 when they stopped including PS2/1 compatibility (yes, I know I can find older, used systems, but screw Sony). Considering the library many gamers have, I don't think that having one prior console's worth of compatibility is asking too much, especially to help boost early sales if the launch library is less than tremendous.
But a part of this that I find highly interesting that there's no mention of physical media. Plenty of talk about the cloud, downloading games in the background and playing them as they download (I will be highly interested to see how this works out, if at all), and an internal hard drive... but no physical media. I mean, BluRay is the obvious choice for Sony, but not a mention either in the Ars article or the Engadget feed (unless I missed it.) Even the concise "Informed System Architecture" shows all your regular parts of a system... except the media.
Why bother with a tax? It will just be misdirected or misappropriated in the government, and the manufacturer will pass it on to the consumer (unless you're talking about having it apply as a sales tax at the consumer level already.). Instead, let's have a law that everything that's not a consumable (everything, even stuff like Tupperware) have a two year, full-replacement warranty, where any shipping & handling is paid for by the manufacturer, and replacements must be a brand new item, none of this refurbished shit. I bet we'd see a huge uptick in quality across the board as businesses figure out it's cheaper to produce higher quality goods than to deal with paying S&H both ways plus the loss of a stock item plus the loss of time.
I believe there's a large factor that is the difference between the past upsets and now: AI.
Yeah, the printing press put most scribes out of work, but in their place popped up a lot of book salesmen because books suddenly became so cheap. However, you still needed humans at both ends of the chains (writer to salesman) to get the product to the consumer. With this turn, though, we're not just making mechanical machines to replace human work, we're making thinking mechanical machines to replace human work.
Sticking with the printing press example, let's take what things might be like in the "near" future: Consumer wants a book. Consumer goes online, downloads the first chapter of various books of interest, and picks one s/he wants. If the user wants an eBook or other digital format, that's the end. The only people necessary in this chain are the writer, the web administrator/developer/designer, and the ISP. However, the web admin/dev has created an automated system to upload and produce eBooks, so they aren't expressly part of this process. Similarly, the ISP has already laid/rented the cable and set up their servers for automatic protocol handling, so they aren't expressly part of this process, either. Thus, the only necessary person in this chain is the writer.
Okay, but that doesn't involve AI much, if at all, and that isn't the "near" future, that's the "now" future. So what if the consumer wants dead tree format? An automatic printing system prints the book on demand (only high-demand or brand new books are stocked), an automatic sorting and packaging system puts the book into a shipping container, where a conveyer belt moves it to the shipping truck. Depending on how "near" this is, you might need a human to properly put the packages in the truck, but in the further future I'm sure we'll have robotic hands that will be able to handle that (and better, because they can predict the best location for packages as they're added to the truck's packing list but before the package arrives at the truck).[1] This shipping truck is driver-less and makes its own way to a central shipping hub where the book is unloaded and mixed with other packages. These are loaded onto an automated bullet train (perhaps they'll still do the plane thing, in which case you would have pilots) in a similar manner, go through the process at another hub, and are put on an automated delivery vehicle. If there's no mechanism for automatically receiving packages (I'm thinking a large mailbox-like device that has locks and can dock with a port on the delivery truck), the consumer receives a call or text message (or a notification on their HUD!) that the truck is coming, and then that it is waiting outside. They go out, do whatever verification is in place to receive the package, and that's it. Max possible people involved in the process: 8 (writer, one for loading the book, one for handling the package at each end of the hub, +possible pilot and co-pilot). Minimum number of people involved in the process: 1, the writer (assuming robotic package handling and automated bullet train)
A similar process is used for most home decorations or, perhaps, even furniture: either the user has a basic 3D printer at home and orders the blueprints, then waits a bit; or orders the item from a company that has a high-speed, advanced 3D printer, in place of the book printer of my above example. AI is massively involved in all of this. Before we still had to actively work on or with machines. Now we just set them up with commands, conditions, and monitoring systems and set them on their way. Our machines can (or soon will) not only do the work for us, but do the basic [i]thinking about the work[/i] for us. That wasn't there for the wheel, or for the loom, or for even for initial bombers. And as AI research progresses, mechanical contraptions become more nimble (like this high-speed robot hand that can toss and catch a cellphone (near the end o
The constant concern that my very involvement in anything brings down the overall happiness of the group. (Also, for my nearby relatives, I have nothing in common with them; I don't do small talk and become bored easily and would start focusing on other things, so my view is that the slight of not going at all is less than going and ignoring them.)
Don't worry, we'll always have Half Life (Episode) 3 now. Gabe will make sure of that.
Yeah, it doesn't have the "Forever" in the title, but we get new jokes like how afraid Gabe is of the number 3.
Today is Monday, tomorrow is Tuesday. Tonight marks one complete rotation (roughly) of our planet around our sun.
I have no idea what my community is doing, but I plan to treat it as any other night, with the exception that I get tomorrow off. As I've grown older (27, for reference) and gotten out and lived on my own I find that annual celebrations hold little meaning to me, including my own birthday. If I'm going to celebrate, it's going to be for a relevant, contemporary event. If I'm going to make changes to my life, it's going to be when I realize those changes need to be made, not some arbitrary date. If I want to get together with loved ones, I'll do it when the urge strikes (at least, in so far as those I want to spend time with are also available.)
(Of course, I've no friends, no close relatives, and am anti-social, so my view could be skewed.)
As another former soldier (also honorably discharged, as a Specialist), I'm calling bullshit on your call of bullshit. I read the parent's reply and nodded with each and every complaint he had. My MOS in the military was that as 92G - Food Service Specialist (I maintain this as the biggest mistake in my life). Basic was a joke, I never should have graduated when I did as I spent the entire first week in quarters (this alone should have forced me to restart the cycle, IMO); I only did so for three reasons:
A) I barely hit enough targets
B) I barely ran fast enough
C) I didn't make my drill sergeants too mad at me (excelling only in book learning and Land Nav, I took an otherwise heads-down approach)
From our company about two dozen people fell out of our final victory run (6 miles, IIRC), and the pace was moderate at worst.
I was Whiskey (you know~) Co. at Ft. Lee, VA (I forget which BN, the one for Quartermasters, doesn't really matter now). It was a continual, downright embarrassment. Day one, after everyone else had gone to their training unit, my group of 70+ people waited for four hours for our sergeants to arrive. Then we sat in our common room for four hours, doing nothing. Then they realized that, hey, we might want to have dinner, so they managed to scrounge up a box of MREs for us. Much latter in the cycle, one of my and another platoon's SSGs came quite close to fisticuffs, in front of both platoons, over who would be able to use the bus to move their platoon. My platoon had to go to a training center on the other side of the post. The other platoon had to go four blocks, and apparently the other SSG didn't want to march his 98ish person platoon (yes, 98) the four blocks. (That's nothing, an incoming platoon the week we did our final field mission was 120 or so, I believe.) During this time I learned enough to basically work at a Golden Corral, if that. I had to relearn most of the actual cooking once I was assigned to my final unit. My final PT card was falsified, a fact which I found out only after arriving at my final unit, and I only knew this because the sergeant that filled it out put down the wrong time to get the minimum of 60 points (the time he put down would have actually given me 55 or so) and did not put down the right number of sit ups (he once again put down the minimum, when I know for a fact I did 10 above that).
At my unit, the first E6 I had (who is now the only E7, from talking to friends still in) for us cooks was atrocious at any kind of leadership and taking care of her soldiers, preferring to accommodate requests from anyone above her rank, even those she couldn't realistically fulfill (such as promising an extra meal we did not have the supplies for at a time after we were to head back to the rear; thankfully another SSG stepped in and ended that one). After a nervous breakdown one night (which began the path to my discharge) I straight-up told her that I had planned to kill myself, and wanted to see a psychiatrist or maybe even check into the psych ward (I had come out of a deep depression, but did not know if I'd go back in). Her reply, literally, was "Well, soldier on." Later she gave me a card with the number for 1 Stop (I think that was the number, whatever they put on the ACE cards). My BN commander would sometimes get on the radio during field missions and curse out a SSG or SFC who had the audacity to confirm a conflicting order from their own 1SG. Dates for field missions often were not confirmed until two or so weeks before the actual start (an issue for us cooks because we had to put in UGR orders 30 days in advance). My direct CO called my direct SGT a "fucking retard", to my face. One of my squad members was dealing with depression and I was worried he was going to lash out at someone and even threatened many times to do it; I talked to his SGT (who was one year younger than I) multiple times about this and, to my knowledge, nothing was ever done. They drilled it into us in Basic to not salute in the field, and when I walked past our
Do you happen to have a link for this quote? I would love to share the source with a number of my ultra-religious relatives on Facebook. (None of them think he's a secret Muslim, to my knowledge, but I'd still be interested to see their reaction to this.)
I did mean it as a joke (which I hoped would be obvious, but from some replies might not be), but there's a reason they wouldn't apply Funny: Funny doesn't apply any kind of karma bonus, but Insightful/Interesting does. So at times mods will use those moderations in order to also give a karma modifier as well as +1, if someone has already modded it Funny. Since my post has more Insightful ratings than Funny ratings, it's marked as "Insightful".
(I don't need the karma, I have more than enough in my account, but it's still a nice thought on the part of the mods.)
No, because your UID does not meet the requirements set forth (UID.length<5). Once that fifth digit hits, it's anyone's game! :)
His (her?) UID is less than five digits, of course.
I wouldn't be surprised. I was having an issue with their web player where it would get part-way through a song and suddenly jump to the next one. No stuttering, internet lag, or anything else to communicate the issue. I contacted their support and, likely from the techie details I sent with the first response, one of their people got back to me and asked if I could help them troubleshoot; apparently it was an issue affecting a small amount of users, but they had no clue what was causing it. I was happy to do so, and over three months or so I tried various configurations of browsers (both versions and types) and Flash versions to see if we could at least eliminate the issue. In the end we didn't really make any headway, but they had a bunch of data to work with and asked for my home address; as their way of saying thanks for my help, I got a free Pandora hat (very nice looking until I left it sitting in my car rear dash for weeks, good quality material).
I subscribe to their Pandora One service now, and feel it's quite worth it. Their desktop player is missing some of the web player features (such as moving a song to another station), but I have no problem using the web player since it's always at work or home, anyway.
(Apparent) penis enlargement.
Especially considering it's a personal anecdote, this seems like one of those "causation vs. correlation" things; like how more intelligent children tend to have households with more books per person than less intelligent ones. (There are plenty of studies on the effects of TV on youth, and to my knowledge they all make a negative correlation, but I can't be arsed to find any right now.)
In both cases, it's not that the child is reading a crap-load of books or that the child has completely avoided any sort of media (unless they were Amish, I'd be freaking amazed if the children of those five families had not watched TV or a movie once before puberty), but that they have parents who not only take a vested interest in their child's upbringing, as well as have the time and resources to accomplish such a task. (The former for sure, the latter possibly.) They likely also made sure they got healthy meals wherever, got them interested in a number of topics, at least tried to get them to learn an instrument and play a sport regularly, and so on.
I wouldn't say that TV itself is destructive, but unchecked TV can be. If the children aren't being taught that much of what they see on TV is fake (I'm not even talking about sci-fi, I'm talking about things like CSI and soap operas), they'll come to expect that as being normal/expected because as they grow they take in everything they can from their surroundings to build a world basis upon. If they're watching copious amounts of TV, it means the parents don't care to make sure they are introduced to a large variety of activities, or perhaps they are a single-parent household where the parent has to work multiple jobs without being able to afford a babysitter (or the sitter in question allows such TV viewing)--both these things can be detrimental to a child's development, even without a TV present.
A little late, but I wanted to throw my hat in with support.
I'm 230ish (haven't actually weighed myself in a while, but my body size hasn't changed much). Three weeks ago I moved from a location almost a half hour away from work to a location a quarter mile away, and in a super-bike-friendly city. I now bike to work every day, and in addition I bike home for lunch (and a short-ish nap) as well. In the three weeks since I started, doing only 20 minutes of light biking per day, I've found myself with a huge burst in energy[1]. I go to bed at the same time but I wake up earlier (which is helpful in getting the time for the nap). In addition, since it takes more energy to go get fast food for lunch/dinner, either I save money and just don't get any, or I bike there and burn at least some of the extra calories I will take in doing that. Once I get my leg muscles up to speed I will be biking around town for the majority of my errands, as well. I'm sure that after a few months of this (assuming the winter doesn't completely destroy my ability to bike) I will have lost at least some weight without changing my other habits (I made soda a rarity months ago, at most I'll have one 20oz per week).
Not everyone can move that close to work like I did, but the point is that if you can increase the amount of energy you expend each day you will find that it will help you feel better and thus become even more motivated to work out more. After just two weeks I up and decided to just bike for a while when I left work. In the end I biked a mile or so--no great amount at all, even if I had been running, but that one bike ride was still more exercise than I had in the entire month of August (or between May and August, for that matter).
Try parking further away from work. If you have a bike and a bike rack on your car, drive most of the way and bike the rest (this will be handy if you have a crowded lot, little/expensive parking, or just want to save on gas). If you don't but have the money, seriously consider getting such a setup. Even doing errands, park as far away from the doors as you can (taking into account whatever you might buy). Use a hand basket instead of a cart when doing grocery shopping to both give your upper body a little extra work out and to force you to be more choosey in what you buy (since it's far harder to overload a basket than a cart.) On that note, make a list before you go shopping and buy only what's on that list--this is something else I did a while back and found myself doing a lot less junk food and impulse purchases (also make sure not to go grocery shopping while hungry).
There are a lot of little things like what I listed that can be done to make up to a larger goal (if you're a coder, think of it like taking a large function and breaking it into multiple, smaller functions that each do a simpler task.) If you go into weight loss thinking that you'll do a gym membership with daily lifting or jumping into P90X, you'll quickly find yourself overwhelmed and give up. You can do it! Just start by looking at the every day and asking how a task could be modified to help you with weight loss.
[1] Full disclosure, I've taken a huge downturn this week in energy and sleep pattern; however, I believe I am (successfully) fighting off either a cold or a severe seasonal allergy attack, so I don't consider it a failure of the changes I've made.