Yeah, except in this case Mann didn't rip off the State of Virginia specifically - if he had ripped anyone off, it would have been the university. If Mann had ripped off the university, the university should be the one responsible for investigating the ripoff - not the state Attorney General.
Your example doesn't hold, because what's going on here is more like this: a local company pays you* half a million dollars to engineer a thing. You engineer the thing, the company is satisfied with it, and everyone's happy. Then a couple of years later some random asshole decides that the thing you engineered sucks simply because it offends his personal beliefs, so he decides to sue you.
Normally it wouldn't even get to this point, because the random asshole wouldn't have standing to sue you in the first place and he'd be laughed out of court. Unfortunately, because Cuccinelli is the state AG and Mann worked for a state university, Cuccinelli does kinda vaguely have the ability to engage in this sort of frivolous investigation. Fortunately, he's still being laughed out of court.
*Keep in mind that it's not like Mann got the half a million all for himself - along with his salary, it would have gone towards the salaries of a couple of grad students as well as lab upkeep and maintenance and rent and all sorts of other things. Whenever people start bandying about how ridiculous it is that we pay scientists millions of dollars, just remember that a head researcher is basically running a small company that will never turn a material profit.
Oh god yes. I'm taking a stats course, and the professor was talking about the motivation behind transforming data sets - namely, that you'll frequently apply functions to charts so that they look like simpler random variables. He offhandedly gave the example that you'll often graph salaries on a log scale because that makes them look more like a normal distribution. What the fuck? Since when was it at all reasonable for the upper end of the salary scale to be two or three orders of magnitude higher than the middle?
It's sad but true - sometimes people just want to be reassured that someone who knows what they're doing is taking care of the problem, even if all it really is is some dude pressing "okay, update yourself" in the back room.
The comparison to national health care doesn't quite fit though, because the question there is whether the US federal government has lawful authority under the Constitution to order people to buy things.
The federal government clearly does have the authority to order people to buy things - after all, I don't remember willingly buying a couple of countries in the middle east, and the mortgage payments are killer. They aren't even in a nice neighborhood!
It's not about getting a CS degree, it's about getting their asses in college (like I said). Once you've been accepted to a reasonable institute of higher education, you can take all sorts of elective courses to figure out what you really want to do with your life. My wife, for instance, entered college as a Political Science major. It took her less than a quarter to realize that she hates people but loves rocks, at which point she switched over to a major in Geology. She's now getting a PhD in figuring out how old rocks are.
Thanks to all sorts of reasons, our K-12 educational system is absolute shit at helping people figure out what they want to do with their lives (besides never go to school again, of course). Your kid's best bet is to either figure out what they love on their own (a couple of guys I went to high school with did, they realized that they both loved and were really good at working with cars and so went on to become mechanics), or go to a college with a reasonable liberal arts program so you can kind of graze at the fields of human knowledge while working towards a degree in Communications or whatever the hell else as a fallback in case you don't find anything.
Also it says in TFA that this has been their policy for the past 20 years, so it's kind of hard to blame Obama for it; the only weird thing is that there don't seem to be reports of this having happened before. Maybe the media just didn't pick up on it last time?
Seriously, lie to the little suckers. If they're asking about what the best way to become a video game programmer is, they probably haven't actually done anything besides play video games. Lie to them and tell them that a full CS degree is the only way to go, because if nothing else it gets their ass in college at which point hopefully the cluebat will strike and they'll figure out what they really want to do.
The ones who are actually going to become good game devs are already making maps, mods, skins or even full-on games with their pirated version of Creative Suite 5.7.whatever, so you don't need to worry about them.
I used to get requests like that at work sometimes. Given a directory structure containing a couple thousand folders, with each folder containing a few files and/or subfolders, find me the most recent pdf file in any sub-sub folder that contains an excel file named something like "xyz[date]".
And to drive the point of this article home: how long would your post have been if you'd had to describe how to do this through the GUI? Would it have even been possible without screenshots?
Yeah, but anyone in the bittorrent swarm can see what you're downloading (or, more importantly, that you're downloading). As another poster pointed out, whenever a patch for a remote exploit goes out someone could just sit on the torrent and be reasonably certain that anyone downloading the patch probably hasn't been patched yet.
There's more to security than the first thing you see; in order to be truly secure, you have to look at things from every single angle.
Given the extra time, most of them would probably spend it watching TV, going out to eat, or reading trashy novels.
So what you're saying is that your co-workers are more interested in figuring out how people work than computers? This is a fairly common orientation of priorities.
What's the point of encrypting these signals? I'm pretty certain you could derive enough of the information in them with a database of airline schedules, background knowledge of the routes airplanes take, and some on the spot information about the plane (which was was it heading? What time is it right now? What flights were delayed recently?) which is freely available stuff if you just crawl the airline websites. The airplanes only broadcast it to make things a bit easier for air traffic controllers; it's nothing a theoretical terrorist group couldn't figure out on their own.
Also, you can count on the fingers of one head the number of times a commercial airplane has been shot down with a missile in the USA, so basically this is a non-problem.
Yes, exactly. They have enough power to throw some sand into the process to sink large projects. Why? Because there is almost no political power behind those large projects. Why do you think those investors back out so easily? There's no political or financial power behind them. Nobody really cares about doing large-scale infrastructure in this country, so people with the political power of a VW Bug can set up effective roadblocks. If your opponents are kittens, you can deflect them even if all you have is a little ball of string.
America, as a country, has forgotten how to do large-scale infrastructure projects. We no longer have the willpower to see it through, because we've become so focused on tangible profits next year that we've lost sight of the benefit of less-tangible benefits five years from now.
The big computer retailers like Dell or HP have the low end of the market completely covered - a couple of years ago (and just now a couple of minutes ago, since I was curious if it had changed) I was trying to figure out how cheaply I could build a new, absolutely bare bones computer, and I just couldn't get the price significantly below Dell's lowest end equipment. Keep in mind that, if you're going to do a real comparison, you have to buy some version of Windows 7, which adds around $100 to your price tag. For instance, when I just priced out something equivalent to the cheapest Inspiron (about $400), I couldn't get my costs down significantly lower than that.
On the other hand, if you're going to be spending ~$1000 on a computer, it's totally worth building it yourself. Dell and HP and the others seriously rip you off on RAM* or don't spend enough money on other components (you can't even look at the specs or manufacturer on the power supply, for instance).
*They've gotten trickier about that; last time I was looking, HP was charging a lot more for RAM than was reasonable, but they were selling you, say, 2 GB as four 512 MB sticks - so if you bought the computer and upgraded the RAM on your own, you'd almost certainly waste all those sticks, which ends up making it more economical to buy more RAM from them.
You can get an iPhone keyboard if you really want one. ThinkGeek will be selling a special case that adds a flip out keyboard later this year, in fact.
Unfortunately it just flips out, it doesn't kill people.
Dude, did you completely miss the entire fucking point of the film? You don't realize that she looks older in the final scenes, she realizes that she is older. Her single goal this whole time was to find her dragon, and she was so subsumed in it that she didn't even notice the passage of time.
Seriously, if you didn't get that simple twist, there's got to be something wrong with you.
It's really funny that you said "30+ years" - if you'd said, oh, 60+ years, you would have found the root problem with their foreign relations: they nationalized the British oil company that (I believe) held a monopoly on Iranian oil operations, which directly led to the United States overthrowing the first democratically elected Iranian government. We then put a religious extremist who was (at the time) more amenable to our views in place.
Their current theocracy was put in place by the USA. Anything they do is our fault. Which includes all the stuff you just mentioned. So in fact, I would say that the Shah is among the stupid stuff that we Americans are responsible for, and thus includes all those things you just mentioned.
Do you.. do you really think that the reason why we're not building more hydroelectric dams is because of the Greens?
You realize that they have almost exactly zero political power, right? The reason why we're not spending money on infrastructure like green energy (or even just fixing up the energy sources we currently have) is pretty clearly explained here. And if you don't believe me, just look at our budget - actions (or in this case, budget allocations) speak louder than words.
Yeah that poor embryo, you're destroying it in order to extract some stem cells. Pity it won't go on to live the long and fruitful life in a biohazard disposal bin that was originally planned for it.
Or did you think that we make embryos specifically to extract stem cells from them? They come entirely from fertility clinic leftovers that would otherwise be thrown away.
What part of "early on in WOW's development" did you not understand? I was clearly not talking about the released game, otherwise I wouldn't have used the word "development", which (in this context) means "before the game was released". I was not making a dig at WoW in particular, I was talking about how people can be appeased just by playing tricks with wording.
I like how this is almost exactly what Blizzard did early on in WOW's development. IIRC, As an anti-poopsocking measure, they would start giving you XP penalties as time went on; you'd start out earning 100% XP, but then if you played for long enough you would slowly get penalties until you were only earning 50% XP. You had to log off and wait a couple of hours to get back to earning 100% XP.
Gamers were outraged. How dare you punish us for playing the game! etcetera.
So what did Blizzard do? Well, whenever you started a fresh session, you'd have a 200% XP earned bonus! This would gradually wear off until you were only earning 100% XP. If you logged off and waited a few hours, you'd get the 200% XP bonus again!
Gamers were pacified, because apparently the ones who really cared about this couldn't do math. Blizzard didn't actually make any changes, they just started calling the first part a 200% XP gain bonus, instead of calling the last part a 50% XP gain penalty.
It's funny how stupid people are. It's still the Taliban, you're still only earning half XP after a few hours of play - they're just calling it something else so you'll stop bitching.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, except in this case Mann didn't rip off the State of Virginia specifically - if he had ripped anyone off, it would have been the university. If Mann had ripped off the university, the university should be the one responsible for investigating the ripoff - not the state Attorney General.
Your example doesn't hold, because what's going on here is more like this: a local company pays you* half a million dollars to engineer a thing. You engineer the thing, the company is satisfied with it, and everyone's happy. Then a couple of years later some random asshole decides that the thing you engineered sucks simply because it offends his personal beliefs, so he decides to sue you.
Normally it wouldn't even get to this point, because the random asshole wouldn't have standing to sue you in the first place and he'd be laughed out of court. Unfortunately, because Cuccinelli is the state AG and Mann worked for a state university, Cuccinelli does kinda vaguely have the ability to engage in this sort of frivolous investigation. Fortunately, he's still being laughed out of court.
*Keep in mind that it's not like Mann got the half a million all for himself - along with his salary, it would have gone towards the salaries of a couple of grad students as well as lab upkeep and maintenance and rent and all sorts of other things. Whenever people start bandying about how ridiculous it is that we pay scientists millions of dollars, just remember that a head researcher is basically running a small company that will never turn a material profit.
Oh god yes. I'm taking a stats course, and the professor was talking about the motivation behind transforming data sets - namely, that you'll frequently apply functions to charts so that they look like simpler random variables. He offhandedly gave the example that you'll often graph salaries on a log scale because that makes them look more like a normal distribution. What the fuck? Since when was it at all reasonable for the upper end of the salary scale to be two or three orders of magnitude higher than the middle?
It's sad but true - sometimes people just want to be reassured that someone who knows what they're doing is taking care of the problem, even if all it really is is some dude pressing "okay, update yourself" in the back room.
Sweet, so the better version is cheaper? I love it when they do that.
The federal government clearly does have the authority to order people to buy things - after all, I don't remember willingly buying a couple of countries in the middle east, and the mortgage payments are killer. They aren't even in a nice neighborhood!
It's not about getting a CS degree, it's about getting their asses in college (like I said). Once you've been accepted to a reasonable institute of higher education, you can take all sorts of elective courses to figure out what you really want to do with your life. My wife, for instance, entered college as a Political Science major. It took her less than a quarter to realize that she hates people but loves rocks, at which point she switched over to a major in Geology. She's now getting a PhD in figuring out how old rocks are.
Thanks to all sorts of reasons, our K-12 educational system is absolute shit at helping people figure out what they want to do with their lives (besides never go to school again, of course). Your kid's best bet is to either figure out what they love on their own (a couple of guys I went to high school with did, they realized that they both loved and were really good at working with cars and so went on to become mechanics), or go to a college with a reasonable liberal arts program so you can kind of graze at the fields of human knowledge while working towards a degree in Communications or whatever the hell else as a fallback in case you don't find anything.
Also it says in TFA that this has been their policy for the past 20 years, so it's kind of hard to blame Obama for it; the only weird thing is that there don't seem to be reports of this having happened before. Maybe the media just didn't pick up on it last time?
Seriously, lie to the little suckers. If they're asking about what the best way to become a video game programmer is, they probably haven't actually done anything besides play video games. Lie to them and tell them that a full CS degree is the only way to go, because if nothing else it gets their ass in college at which point hopefully the cluebat will strike and they'll figure out what they really want to do.
The ones who are actually going to become good game devs are already making maps, mods, skins or even full-on games with their pirated version of Creative Suite 5.7.whatever, so you don't need to worry about them.
How, pray tell, do you export that to a CSV file?
I used to get requests like that at work sometimes. Given a directory structure containing a couple thousand folders, with each folder containing a few files and/or subfolders, find me the most recent pdf file in any sub-sub folder that contains an excel file named something like "xyz[date]".
Put that in your GUI and suck it.
And to drive the point of this article home: how long would your post have been if you'd had to describe how to do this through the GUI? Would it have even been possible without screenshots?
Then an intern mashed out half of it. Geez, do I have to do all the work around here?
Yeah, but anyone in the bittorrent swarm can see what you're downloading (or, more importantly, that you're downloading). As another poster pointed out, whenever a patch for a remote exploit goes out someone could just sit on the torrent and be reasonably certain that anyone downloading the patch probably hasn't been patched yet.
There's more to security than the first thing you see; in order to be truly secure, you have to look at things from every single angle.
So what you're saying is that your co-workers are more interested in figuring out how people work than computers? This is a fairly common orientation of priorities.
What's the point of encrypting these signals? I'm pretty certain you could derive enough of the information in them with a database of airline schedules, background knowledge of the routes airplanes take, and some on the spot information about the plane (which was was it heading? What time is it right now? What flights were delayed recently?) which is freely available stuff if you just crawl the airline websites. The airplanes only broadcast it to make things a bit easier for air traffic controllers; it's nothing a theoretical terrorist group couldn't figure out on their own.
Also, you can count on the fingers of one head the number of times a commercial airplane has been shot down with a missile in the USA, so basically this is a non-problem.
Yes, exactly. They have enough power to throw some sand into the process to sink large projects. Why? Because there is almost no political power behind those large projects. Why do you think those investors back out so easily? There's no political or financial power behind them. Nobody really cares about doing large-scale infrastructure in this country, so people with the political power of a VW Bug can set up effective roadblocks. If your opponents are kittens, you can deflect them even if all you have is a little ball of string.
America, as a country, has forgotten how to do large-scale infrastructure projects. We no longer have the willpower to see it through, because we've become so focused on tangible profits next year that we've lost sight of the benefit of less-tangible benefits five years from now.
The big computer retailers like Dell or HP have the low end of the market completely covered - a couple of years ago (and just now a couple of minutes ago, since I was curious if it had changed) I was trying to figure out how cheaply I could build a new, absolutely bare bones computer, and I just couldn't get the price significantly below Dell's lowest end equipment. Keep in mind that, if you're going to do a real comparison, you have to buy some version of Windows 7, which adds around $100 to your price tag. For instance, when I just priced out something equivalent to the cheapest Inspiron (about $400), I couldn't get my costs down significantly lower than that.
On the other hand, if you're going to be spending ~$1000 on a computer, it's totally worth building it yourself. Dell and HP and the others seriously rip you off on RAM* or don't spend enough money on other components (you can't even look at the specs or manufacturer on the power supply, for instance).
*They've gotten trickier about that; last time I was looking, HP was charging a lot more for RAM than was reasonable, but they were selling you, say, 2 GB as four 512 MB sticks - so if you bought the computer and upgraded the RAM on your own, you'd almost certainly waste all those sticks, which ends up making it more economical to buy more RAM from them.
You can get an iPhone keyboard if you really want one. ThinkGeek will be selling a special case that adds a flip out keyboard later this year, in fact.
Unfortunately it just flips out, it doesn't kill people.
Dude, did you completely miss the entire fucking point of the film? You don't realize that she looks older in the final scenes, she realizes that she is older. Her single goal this whole time was to find her dragon, and she was so subsumed in it that she didn't even notice the passage of time.
Seriously, if you didn't get that simple twist, there's got to be something wrong with you.
It's really funny that you said "30+ years" - if you'd said, oh, 60+ years, you would have found the root problem with their foreign relations: they nationalized the British oil company that (I believe) held a monopoly on Iranian oil operations, which directly led to the United States overthrowing the first democratically elected Iranian government. We then put a religious extremist who was (at the time) more amenable to our views in place.
Their current theocracy was put in place by the USA. Anything they do is our fault. Which includes all the stuff you just mentioned. So in fact, I would say that the Shah is among the stupid stuff that we Americans are responsible for, and thus includes all those things you just mentioned.
Do you.. do you really think that the reason why we're not building more hydroelectric dams is because of the Greens?
You realize that they have almost exactly zero political power, right? The reason why we're not spending money on infrastructure like green energy (or even just fixing up the energy sources we currently have) is pretty clearly explained here. And if you don't believe me, just look at our budget - actions (or in this case, budget allocations) speak louder than words.
Given the way the economy collapsed recently? You'd most likely have lost quite a lot.
Yeah that poor embryo, you're destroying it in order to extract some stem cells. Pity it won't go on to live the long and fruitful life in a biohazard disposal bin that was originally planned for it.
Or did you think that we make embryos specifically to extract stem cells from them? They come entirely from fertility clinic leftovers that would otherwise be thrown away.
What part of "early on in WOW's development" did you not understand? I was clearly not talking about the released game, otherwise I wouldn't have used the word "development", which (in this context) means "before the game was released". I was not making a dig at WoW in particular, I was talking about how people can be appeased just by playing tricks with wording.
I like how this is almost exactly what Blizzard did early on in WOW's development. IIRC, As an anti-poopsocking measure, they would start giving you XP penalties as time went on; you'd start out earning 100% XP, but then if you played for long enough you would slowly get penalties until you were only earning 50% XP. You had to log off and wait a couple of hours to get back to earning 100% XP.
Gamers were outraged. How dare you punish us for playing the game! etcetera.
So what did Blizzard do? Well, whenever you started a fresh session, you'd have a 200% XP earned bonus! This would gradually wear off until you were only earning 100% XP. If you logged off and waited a few hours, you'd get the 200% XP bonus again!
Gamers were pacified, because apparently the ones who really cared about this couldn't do math. Blizzard didn't actually make any changes, they just started calling the first part a 200% XP gain bonus, instead of calling the last part a 50% XP gain penalty.
It's funny how stupid people are. It's still the Taliban, you're still only earning half XP after a few hours of play - they're just calling it something else so you'll stop bitching.