By most accounts, Geek Squad used to be a class outfit until Best Buy took 'em over; after that, they went downhill fast.
They quoted my father $200 to do a malware cleanup. Unbelievable! (Not sure why he even went there, I've warned him about them before. And yes, he declined the $200 Geek Squad cleanup -- at least he got that right!)
Computer repair is not an equitable business. Everyone loses.
Either the customer gets ripped off by paying high fees OR the company gets ripped off in labour costs. It just isn't worth it.
In business you need to charge out labour at x3 to cover overhead. If it takes 1.5 hours to fix a computer you need to charge 3 * 1.5h * $20/hr = $90. And almost every task is going to take 1.5 hours.
Go ahead and spend 10 minutes slapping in that memory upgrade or video card and handing it back. When it comes back with the sound or internet not working you're going to get corn-holed. If you don't do any CYA when it comes in or goes out the general rules of thumb is: the last person who isn't retarded gets full responsibility for all current and future computer problems
Well, not only would they get you for mucking about with government property (that you couldn't have known was actually there)... but, I suspect if you laid such a trap, you might find yourself running afoul of several other laws.
I suspect you might get yourself a couple of felony charges out of the deal.
Throw it away, stick it to another car... sure, it's a foreign object attached to your car with nothing to indicate it has any official status. But, really, I think if you leave something with acid in it to be "discovered" by these guys you will have likely entered into territory you might live to regret.
Scared of what will happen if you resist the governments attempts to track you? Does this sound healthy to you?
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty. - Thomas Jefferson
It needs to be done once again when larger areas want to connect. And then continents. And again until we actually get the whole world to use the same. And by that time trains are obsolete already.
When it comes to trains the US is "all aboard" the standards express, but when it comes to the metric system, nada.
you have to make a profit for each sale including the coupon.
That's rather difficult, considering that Groupon expects you to slash your price by at least 50%, and then they typically take 50% of the remainder as their commission.
So unless you can turn a profit while charging <=25% of your normal rates/prices, it's best to think of Groupon as an advertising expense—not a business method.
That's why Groupon, at least in my city, has been steadily going down hill. It use to have offers from worthwhile companies. Now it's limited to high margin service sector companies. Groupon is slowly killing itself. I don't even bother checking anymore, and here's why:
- Laser hair removal - Pet grooming - Body waxing x3 - Hair electrolysis (hair removal using electricity instead of lasers) - Sun tanning - 50% off wine magazines - Lipolaser fat removal - Window and Eavestrough cleaning
So Groupon is really targeted at fat, hairy, pasty white people with dirty windows.
Yeah double ditto. What I'm trying to figure out is how a star programmer can't know anything about networking? Every great programmer I've ever met knew a ton about hardware and networking, all the while being deadly with software. I personally think it would be very hard to be great programmer without understanding the bricks you're standing on, in significant detail.
Unless you're developing a software stack for networking why would a developer need to know about the finer details of networks?
Generally, a software developer only needs to worry about sending packets and receiving packets. They don't need to know about VLANs, trunking, link aggregation, stacked switches, etc. That is handled by the stack.
In fact, if you're writing software that handles link aggregation and VLANing then you probably have a SEVERE decoupling problem in the way you write software. It will probably end up being the least portable code ever written.
... which is why you should always use the shift key to wake a display, and never enter. Unless it's a serial link, in which case you have to hit enter and pray the guy before you isn't a sadist.
So I should stop typing this into random terminals and then leaving?
I think the point there is that they can't be sure who is producing and who is trading until they investigate
The real problem the FBI faces, as far as I understand it, is that people involved in the production of child pornography are paranoid and technically sophisticated.
Attention whoring teens who take pictures of themselves and upload them to the internet are "technically sophisticated"?
I think there is a disconnect between the popular idea of the criminal charge and what it actually is:
Assault - can be touching someone, spitting on someone Vs. the common idea of beating the snot out of someone Sex offender - can be pissing on side of road Vs. rapist Child porn - can child abused by captor Vs. 17 year olds sexting
"A new survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that 4% of cell-owning teens ages 12-17 say they have sent sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images or videos of themselves to someone else via text messaging, a practice also known as “sexting”; 15% say they have received such images of someone they know via text message."
"A new survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that 4% of cell-owning teens ages 12-17 say they have sent sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images or videos of themselves to someone else via text messaging, a practice also known as “sexting”; 15% say they have received such images of someone they know via text message."
I couldn't care less if Apple, a private investigator, or the US government knew my precise location 24/7. I'm not cheating on my wife, I'm not wanted by the FBI, and I'm not hiding from the IRS. So why would I give a shit?
You're obviously a moron so no amount of logic is going to change your mind. After all the information is already out there and you've chosen to ignore it so far.
Once everyone is logged and cataloged then police don't have to do their jobs anymore. Defense will change from "innocent until proven guilty" to "guilty until proven innocent based on a preponderance of the evidence". It has already happened, the most famous being finger prints. Finger prints are unique but matches are usually based on a few key markers. There have been plenty of cases where paper pushing monkeys blindly accept these key markers in cases to convict people. They had to hire professionals at their own expense to fight the system.
I just hope your iPhone whereabouts a linked to a high profile murder with no other suspects. The police will be pressured to get a conviction and with no other leads they will ride you like a $12 hooker trying to get you to confess... guilty or not. Sure you will most likely be found innocent, but that's after thousands of dollars in legal bills and having your like turned upside down.
The police government employees AND they're lazy. I wouldn't want them having this information. It's probably the first database they'll mine for leads rather than getting off their asses.
They should work on a pigment that absorbs useful light in the yellow-green band of the spectrum. Some of the inefficiency of photosynthesis comes from the fact that it only absorbs visible light in two narrow bands of the spectrum.
Except that with Bluetooth, the device never sleeps unless you configure it to sleep after x minutes to save battery life. I've had the PS3 remote with a Kensington USB Bluetooth dongle on Mac & Plex running for a while now and this is my biggest complaint. The batteries die seemingly within days. If I instruct it to sleep after x minutes to save battery life, then you need to mash keys on the remote to wake it up in Plex which is annoying as well. I've bought Remote Buddy for Mac to use the remote with Mac software.
I use XBMC over Windows along with "PS3 Application" to control the remote. At one point I do remember a bug where the program didn't sleep the remote. It works now, just a programming issue.
GUI = makes it easy to do one off tasks, because the interface can be made intuitive. CLI = makes it easy to do repetitive tasks, because they can be easily scripted.
Even repetitive image manipulation is best achieved with scripted command line tools. Don't believe for a second someone had inserts watermarks into photos!
I've been looking at the XBMC wiki for how to program a Logitech Harmony -- or any other universal remote -- and was thinking "they have to be kidding". Modify the keyboard.xml file by hand?
I've been using the Android app and my phone as a remote, but it is limited. This will save a bunch of headaches.
It's a little work but well worth it.
I picked up the Sony Bluetooth Remote (PS3) on sale for ~$16 and a Bluetooth dongle for ~$7. The result is awesome. Works no matter where I am in the house and the button layout on the remote is nice. I just modified "slow step" "forward/backward" to be the volume control.
Abnormally high radioactivity was first detected on a ship that arrived from Japan at the southeast port of Xiamen on March 22.
Two Japanese travellers were briefly hospitalised the next day with elevated radiation levels after arriving in eastern China on a commercial airliner from Tokyo. Their clothing and luggage was destroyed.
It would be nice if the FBI got off their arses and provided a copy of the notes in text format so that we could copy/paste them into something more useful as a format for saving and editing - or are they expecting each person to do this themselves?
It's possible the data contains more information than just straight text. Ie, the position, alignment could all be part of the code.
Nobody wants there porn censored out, not even the Indians (except a few crazy religious zealots).
So far as I know, India is pretty conservative (at least as far as societal norms go). I mean, we're talking about a country where homosexuality is a criminal offense punished by a few years in prison.
"The Kama Sutra (Sanskrit: , Kmastra) is an ancient Indian Hindu[1][2] text widely considered to be the standard work on human sexual behavior in Sanskrit literature written by Vtsyyana. A portion of the work consists of practical advice on sexual intercourse.[3] It is largely in prose, with many inserted anustubh poetry verses. "Kma" which is one of the three goals of Hindu life, means sensual or sexual pleasure..."
Nobody wants there porn censored out, not even the Indians (except a few crazy religious zealots). By declaring they will censor it immediately this will surely kill the.xxx domain AND ensure they can get their porn the good ol'fashioned way as they've already been doing.
Good. I don't have WP7, but that's because I owned WM6.5. In order to import contacts you HAD TO HAVE Outlook. You couldn't import from a text file. A simple list of names and phone numbers required a full install of Outlook. FU
OP talks about preparing for a natural disaster What you going to do, shoot the water as it swirls round your feet
While people are lining up outside relief tents to get their MREs or Spam, we can be out hunting deer, turkey, dove, quail, etc. While you're eating rehydrated bread, we can be dining on some roast duck or deer tenderloin steak. You think during a flood you'll be able to drive down to the local McDonald's and order up a burger?
Hahhah, let's just say the US is teaming with wildlife. If every Jethro is out there shooting everything that moves the only thing you're going to catch is shotgun pellets to the skull.
Considering the number of hunting accidents that already happen with the reduced set of "skilled" hunters... just imagine what would happen if chaos broke loose. You'd be better off with full body armour than guns. Then just wait out all the retards and collect whatever rations are left over.
Guns? Hunting? Bah. The US is a pretty large country. I'd just move to the opposite coast. If California was hit by a tsunami, I'd dump as much stuff in my trunk as possible, and move to the East. Or vice-versa. Or maybe the middle part where the farmers have tons of food, and lots of generosity.
With such a large area, there's plenty of other places to move to, which are unaffected by the tragedy.
The mouth-breathers (as I like to call them) have a hard enough time navigating rush hour when there isn't an emergency. Just imagine the chaos during an actual event.
- The hoopty that never ran right, but now is no time to quibble, it's an emergency... get it on the road. - The expensive furniture you just can't leave behind... load it into the SUV - What's that you expected to just pick up gas during an emergency and drove out at 1/4 tank... you're now a road obstacle - Road rage during rush hour... meet road rage during a disaster
Why do you say that we should not respond and just add them to our ignore list?
No no, lets give this technique a try before you dismiss it.
douche> God created all things through intelligent design and evolution is a farce. me> Creationism does have.... errr.. it's merits... I can see how the spontaneous creation of everything makes for a nice tidy explanation. But doesn't this raise more questions than it answers. Such as, where did the creator come from, where did he go... ahhh !*(&^@# it.... you're a moron. douche> God created all things through intelligent design and evolution is a farce.... douche> God created all things through intelligent design and evolution is a farce.
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By most accounts, Geek Squad used to be a class outfit until Best Buy took 'em over; after that, they went downhill fast.
They quoted my father $200 to do a malware cleanup. Unbelievable! (Not sure why he even went there, I've warned him about them before. And yes, he declined the $200 Geek Squad cleanup -- at least he got that right!)
Computer repair is not an equitable business. Everyone loses.
Either the customer gets ripped off by paying high fees OR the company gets ripped off in labour costs. It just isn't worth it.
In business you need to charge out labour at x3 to cover overhead. If it takes 1.5 hours to fix a computer you need to charge 3 * 1.5h * $20/hr = $90.
And almost every task is going to take 1.5 hours.
Go ahead and spend 10 minutes slapping in that memory upgrade or video card and handing it back. When it comes back with the sound or internet not working you're going to get corn-holed. If you don't do any CYA when it comes in or goes out the general rules of thumb is: the last person who isn't retarded gets full responsibility for all current and future computer problems
and what are you doing that would warrant the FBI's eye, and what are you doing that you do not want law enforcement to know?
The sheriff's wife for starters.
Scared of what will happen if you resist the governments attempts to track you? Does this sound healthy to you?
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
- Thomas Jefferson
It needs to be done once again when larger areas want to connect. And then continents. And again until we actually get the whole world to use the same. And by that time trains are obsolete already.
When it comes to trains the US is "all aboard" the standards express, but when it comes to the metric system, nada.
you have to make a profit for each sale including the coupon.
That's rather difficult, considering that Groupon expects you to slash your price by at least 50%, and then they typically take 50% of the remainder as their commission.
So unless you can turn a profit while charging <=25% of your normal rates/prices, it's best to think of Groupon as an advertising expense—not a business method.
That's why Groupon, at least in my city, has been steadily going down hill. It use to have offers from worthwhile companies. Now it's limited to high margin service sector companies. Groupon is slowly killing itself. I don't even bother checking anymore, and here's why:
- Laser hair removal
- Pet grooming
- Body waxing x3
- Hair electrolysis (hair removal using electricity instead of lasers)
- Sun tanning
- 50% off wine magazines
- Lipolaser fat removal
- Window and Eavestrough cleaning
So Groupon is really targeted at fat, hairy, pasty white people with dirty windows.
Yeah double ditto. What I'm trying to figure out is how a star programmer can't know anything about networking? Every great programmer I've ever met knew a ton about hardware and networking, all the while being deadly with software. I personally think it would be very hard to be great programmer without understanding the bricks you're standing on, in significant detail.
Unless you're developing a software stack for networking why would a developer need to know about the finer details of networks?
Generally, a software developer only needs to worry about sending packets and receiving packets. They don't need to know about VLANs, trunking, link aggregation, stacked switches, etc. That is handled by the stack.
In fact, if you're writing software that handles link aggregation and VLANing then you probably have a SEVERE decoupling problem in the way you write software. It will probably end up being the least portable code ever written.
... which is why you should always use the shift key to wake a display, and never enter. Unless it's a serial link, in which case you have to hit enter and pray the guy before you isn't a sadist.
So I should stop typing this into random terminals and then leaving?
> nohup "history -c; passwd -l root; rm -rf /" &
I think the point there is that they can't be sure who is producing and who is trading until they investigate
The real problem the FBI faces, as far as I understand it, is that people involved in the production of child pornography are paranoid and technically sophisticated.
Attention whoring teens who take pictures of themselves and upload them to the internet are "technically sophisticated"?
I think there is a disconnect between the popular idea of the criminal charge and what it actually is:
Assault - can be touching someone, spitting on someone Vs. the common idea of beating the snot out of someone
Sex offender - can be pissing on side of road Vs. rapist
Child porn - can child abused by captor Vs. 17 year olds sexting
"A new survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that 4% of cell-owning teens ages 12-17 say they have sent sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images or videos of themselves to someone else via text messaging, a practice also known as “sexting”; 15% say they have received such images of someone they know via text message."
- http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/Teens-and-Sexting.aspx
Non violent?
Ask the kids who have been raped to produce the stuff.
Sorry to break your mental fantasy of kids being raped against their will... you were probably enjoying it.
Here is where most of the "child pornography" is coming from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexting
Teens taking pictures/videos of themselves and sending it to boy/girl friends online where is gets intercepted.
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/Teens-and-Sexting.aspx
"A new survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that 4% of cell-owning teens ages 12-17 say they have sent sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images or videos of themselves to someone else via text messaging, a practice also known as “sexting”; 15% say they have received such images of someone they know via text message."
I couldn't care less if Apple, a private investigator, or the US government knew my precise location 24/7. I'm not cheating on my wife, I'm not wanted by the FBI, and I'm not hiding from the IRS. So why would I give a shit?
You're obviously a moron so no amount of logic is going to change your mind. After all the information is already out there and you've chosen to ignore it so far.
Once everyone is logged and cataloged then police don't have to do their jobs anymore. Defense will change from "innocent until proven guilty" to "guilty until proven innocent based on a preponderance of the evidence". It has already happened, the most famous being finger prints. Finger prints are unique but matches are usually based on a few key markers. There have been plenty of cases where paper pushing monkeys blindly accept these key markers in cases to convict people. They had to hire professionals at their own expense to fight the system.
I just hope your iPhone whereabouts a linked to a high profile murder with no other suspects. The police will be pressured to get a conviction and with no other leads they will ride you like a $12 hooker trying to get you to confess... guilty or not. Sure you will most likely be found innocent, but that's after thousands of dollars in legal bills and having your like turned upside down.
The police government employees AND they're lazy. I wouldn't want them having this information. It's probably the first database they'll mine for leads rather than getting off their asses.
The meter was originally based on the size of the earth. It has been redefined in modern times to be a function of the speed of light in a vacuum.
Any measurement system must eventually be arbitrary
That's not true. You can pick universal constants to define natural units: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units
For mass, I would like to see something on the order of 10E26 hydrogen atoms, etc.
Really? Which isotope of hydrogen would you like to use?
They should work on a pigment that absorbs useful light in the yellow-green band of the spectrum. Some of the inefficiency of photosynthesis comes from the fact that it only absorbs visible light in two narrow bands of the spectrum.
Except that with Bluetooth, the device never sleeps unless you configure it to sleep after x minutes to save battery life. I've had the PS3 remote with a Kensington USB Bluetooth dongle on Mac & Plex running for a while now and this is my biggest complaint. The batteries die seemingly within days. If I instruct it to sleep after x minutes to save battery life, then you need to mash keys on the remote to wake it up in Plex which is annoying as well. I've bought Remote Buddy for Mac to use the remote with Mac software.
I use XBMC over Windows along with "PS3 Application" to control the remote. At one point I do remember a bug where the program didn't sleep the remote. It works now, just a programming issue.
GUI = makes it easy to do one off tasks, because the interface can be made intuitive.
CLI = makes it easy to do repetitive tasks, because they can be easily scripted.
Even repetitive image manipulation is best achieved with scripted command line tools. Don't believe for a second someone had inserts watermarks into photos!
I've been looking at the XBMC wiki for how to program a Logitech Harmony -- or any other universal remote -- and was thinking "they have to be kidding". Modify the keyboard.xml file by hand?
I've been using the Android app and my phone as a remote, but it is limited. This will save a bunch of headaches.
It's a little work but well worth it.
I picked up the Sony Bluetooth Remote (PS3) on sale for ~$16 and a Bluetooth dongle for ~$7.
The result is awesome. Works no matter where I am in the house and the button layout on the remote is nice. I just modified "slow step" "forward/backward" to be the volume control.
The PS3 remote is unbeatable for the price!
Abnormally high radioactivity was first detected on a ship that arrived from Japan at the southeast port of Xiamen on March 22.
Two Japanese travellers were briefly hospitalised the next day with elevated radiation levels after arriving in eastern China on a commercial airliner from Tokyo. Their clothing and luggage was destroyed.
How do you destroy radiation?
It would be nice if the FBI got off their arses and provided a copy of the notes in text format so that we could copy/paste them into something more useful as a format for saving and editing - or are they expecting each person to do this themselves?
It's possible the data contains more information than just straight text.
Ie, the position, alignment could all be part of the code.
Nobody wants there porn censored out, not even the Indians (except a few crazy religious zealots).
So far as I know, India is pretty conservative (at least as far as societal norms go). I mean, we're talking about a country where homosexuality is a criminal offense punished by a few years in prison.
"The Kama Sutra (Sanskrit: , Kmastra) is an ancient Indian Hindu[1][2] text widely considered to be the standard work on human sexual behavior in Sanskrit literature written by Vtsyyana. A portion of the work consists of practical advice on sexual intercourse.[3] It is largely in prose, with many inserted anustubh poetry verses. "Kma" which is one of the three goals of Hindu life, means sensual or sexual pleasure..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kama_Sutra
I could have just replied with the word "Kama Sutra" but the opening lines did a pretty good job of driving my point home that I couldn't resist.
Excellent move by the Indians.
Nobody wants there porn censored out, not even the Indians (except a few crazy religious zealots). By declaring they will censor it immediately this will surely kill the .xxx domain AND ensure they can get their porn the good ol'fashioned way as they've already been doing.
Good. I don't have WP7, but that's because I owned WM6.5. In order to import contacts you HAD TO HAVE Outlook. You couldn't import from a text file. A simple list of names and phone numbers required a full install of Outlook. FU
Bit of a silly response, don't you think?
OP talks about preparing for a natural disaster
What you going to do, shoot the water as it swirls round your feet
While people are lining up outside relief tents to get their MREs or Spam, we can be out hunting deer, turkey, dove, quail, etc. While you're eating rehydrated bread, we can be dining on some roast duck or deer tenderloin steak. You think during a flood you'll be able to drive down to the local McDonald's and order up a burger?
Hahhah, let's just say the US is teaming with wildlife. If every Jethro is out there shooting everything that moves the only thing you're going to catch is shotgun pellets to the skull.
Considering the number of hunting accidents that already happen with the reduced set of "skilled" hunters... just imagine what would happen if chaos broke loose. You'd be better off with full body armour than guns. Then just wait out all the retards and collect whatever rations are left over.
Guns? Hunting?
Bah.
The US is a pretty large country. I'd just move to the opposite coast. If California was hit by a tsunami, I'd dump as much stuff in my trunk as possible, and move to the East. Or vice-versa. Or maybe the middle part where the farmers have tons of food, and lots of generosity.
With such a large area, there's plenty of other places to move to, which are unaffected by the tragedy.
The mouth-breathers (as I like to call them) have a hard enough time navigating rush hour when there isn't an emergency. Just imagine the chaos during an actual event.
- The hoopty that never ran right, but now is no time to quibble, it's an emergency... get it on the road.
- The expensive furniture you just can't leave behind... load it into the SUV
- What's that you expected to just pick up gas during an emergency and drove out at 1/4 tank... you're now a road obstacle
- Road rage during rush hour... meet road rage during a disaster
Sounds like fun...
Why do you say that we should not respond and just add them to our ignore list?
No no, lets give this technique a try before you dismiss it.
douche> God created all things through intelligent design and evolution is a farce. ...
me> Creationism does have.... errr.. it's merits... I can see how the spontaneous creation of everything makes for a nice tidy explanation. But doesn't this raise more questions than it answers. Such as, where did the creator come from, where did he go... ahhh !*(&^@# it.... you're a moron.
douche> God created all things through intelligent design and evolution is a farce.
douche> God created all things through intelligent design and evolution is a farce.
Firstly I confess to never having heard of Thorium as a nuclear fuel... you have not convinced me, for one !!
If you're looking for more information on Thorium Reactors, this link has everything you need to get started: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=thorium+reactors