Not even vaguely true. The law regarding felons and voting varies from state to state. Here in Missouri, any convicted felon who has served his term and is no longer on probation or parole is automatically restored to the voter rolls. The one exception, here in Missouri, is a very good one, and it has nothing to do with felonies: if you are convicted of a voting-related crime, you permanently lose your right to vote in Missouri, whether the crime was a felony or a misdemeanor. (I think that's rather generous, myself. I'd prefer to see people convicted of voting-related crimes given 72 hours to exit the country and stay out, and marked to be shot on sight if seen within the country's borders after that.) ObDisclaimer: IANAL.
ObDisclaimer: I've been out of the industry for 10 years. And even then, I wasn't an official spokesperson for my employer. If you want to know what they think, ask them.
I was working at MasterCard International (not one of the issuing banks, the actual membership organization that the banks belong to) when they first rolled out what was then called Maestro, their PIN-based real-time debit card that would work over the standard MasterCard credit card authorization network. And in those first few years of rollout, several stores and several PIN-pad manufacturers lost their licenses to accept MasterCard transactions because of violations of exactly this rule. It was written into their contracts that under no circumstance were they allowed to retain the PIN once the transaction had been authorized or denied.
I don't know Visa's rules, I never did. But assuming they're similar, whoever designed those systems should be in big trouble with Visa. If memory serves (and it might not, but I think this is what I remember), if this had been a MasterCard issue back when I was there, the manufacturer who violated that rule not only would no longer be allowed to put their terminals on the MasterCard network, they would have been contractually liable for all resulting losses.
Directive-based security can work, more or less, under these circumstances, because the companies that are involved in processing these transactions have to be in this business; if they lose one of their four or five only real suppliers (MasterCard, Visa, Discover, American Express, and maybe JCB), they're effectively out of business. They can't afford to seriously offend even one of them, especially one of the big two brands, or they'll lose everything.
As someone who bought the game on Day 1: ALL of them. OK, some of the play balance tweaks in the first few patches were needed, and I'm not asking them to take out vehicles or mounts, but other than that virtually every game systems change was for the worse.
And next time? (A) Enforce the (expletive deleted) Terms of Service, and (B) whenever someone insists that you make it more like Everquest, tell them to go play Everquest.
A spot of background: Wycliff Bible Translators is a charity that has set out to provide a translation of the Christian Bible in every language on Earth. This includes, of course, thousands of languages that have no written form, so part of their work involves volunteer linguists traveling to remote parts of the planet to create written languages for tribes and teaching them literacy in their own tongue.
Back in the late 1970s, I did some volunteer programming for them. At the time, translation support ran on a PDP 11/40 that was installed in the cargo hold of this aging steamship that they owned; they'd sail to the port nearest to the next tribe they were working for, teams would collect dictionary words, create orthographic phonetic spellings for them, and send them back to the ship to be collated for the dictionary, then printed out and sent back out to the teachers and translators. The rest of the ship had no air conditioning, so they built a climate-controlled computer room below decks, with orders to people that they were only to enter on the rare occasions that a magnetic tape needed to be changed.
Unbeknownst to them, the air conditioning failed as soon as they left port and never actually turned on. When they went in to change a tape while docked in Rio de Janeiro, they found that the temperature in the computer room had risen to somewhere in the close vicinity of 180F... and the PDP 11/40 was still chugging along, happy as can be. Now, obviously they panicked and got the air conditioning fixed as quickly as possible. But they did prove that at least this one PDP 11 could run for at least a week at temperatures in the 160F to 180F range.
But then, what can I say about 1970s DEC hardware? The original VT-100 was top-rack dishwasher safe. No, really - that was the standard DEC repair instructions in case someone spilled something into a keyboard. Place the keyboard key-side down on the top rack of a dishwasher, normal wash cycle, air dry.
Computers may have been expensive back then, and huge, and we thought that 128k of RAM was a lot, but boy could they take a beating, at least if you bought them from Digital Equipment Corporation.
Yahoo's official Linux client, ymessenger 1.0.4-1, doesn't work either and they haven't updated it on their web page yet as of 11:52 am CDT, 24 Jun 2004. So much for this being about 3rd party applications, so far as I can tell.
It's not malice. It's just yet another poorly implemented version upgrade. And Lord knows the software industry has never seen one of those before.
There just isn't anything harder to do than to hire a good employee, period. Harvard's business school did a well-funded study not that long ago that showed that interviewing job candidates selects for worse candidates than if you chose people at random from the incoming resume file. Why? Because what you're selecting for when you interview employees is for people whose primary job skill is being interviewed. Similarly, unless you're hiring people to take multiple-choice tests all day, hiring them based on their ability to pass multiple-choice tests is likely to produce worst results than hiring people at random. But you don't see any company in the world hiring entirely at random, do you?
Anybody who's in the position of making hiring decisions knows that no matter how careful they are, some percentage of the people they hire aren't going to work out. That's unavoidable. So for them, vendor certifications serve an all-important purpose. Certifications shift the blame for bad employees onto the certifying authority. "You said that the new guy you hired would be competent in Technology X, and he's a total idiot!" "I didn't say that he was competent in Technology X, the company that certified him said that he was. How was I supposed to know that they were wrong?"
I got stuck on a Gnome box for about a week and a half, right after this version of Gnome came out. Spatial navigation was not at the top of the list of reasons I hated it, though. However, it was symptomatic of an attitude that drove me absolutely stark raving apoplectic.
For almost every program the Gnome team has decided, for good or ill, what preferences are the ones that novice users should be using. And if you don't want to use those preferences, then browse the filesystem to find the correct preference file, decode the syntax of that preference file in a text editor, and change what you want. Or fire up gconf (which is not documented), dig around in it until you find the right preference setting, decode its syntax, and change it. Or better yet, download the source code, change the make file parameters, and compile a version that works the way you want it to.
As best as I can tell, if you can't do those things (or don't want to for any other reason), then you're not considered "elite" enough to be allowed to choose your own preferences in Gnome.
Given how many of the floater ads depend on DHTML, what the heck good is it, anyway? If I had an option in my browser to turn it off, other than a few more ads going away would I even notice afterwards that I had done so?
What you're talking about is what used to be called photic stimulation with EEG biofeedback, the products were called light and sound mind machines with EEG biofeedback.
They were briefly huge in the New Age community, in particular, the Shaman by AlphaLabs, which would do just what you say at what was, for such equipment 10 years ago, a very reasonable price, about $550.
I've been interested in the technology for years, and spent a couple of years selling them for religious use (meditation aids) and entertainment (for the entoptic hallucinations generated by mind machine usage). I also went out of my way to keep up with the research, as I rather highly value my honesty and objectivity. I used to edit the web's Mind Machine FAQ, you'll see me listed there under my real name, J. Brad Hicks.
Let me tell you right now that as a man who used to sell these, and still would if the business model were right, because I do actually like the technology... any medical claims made for this technology should be considered very dubious.
The industry hesitantly touts a handful of university studies. I say "hesitantly" because any manufacturer who gets caught making an actual medical claim for one gets shut down, hard, by the FTC or the FDA, for making unverified medical claims. The few studies there are all involve very small samples, generally have not produced reproducable results, have very questionable methodology (I have yet to see one that even tried to test for the placebo effect), and have never to my knowledge been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
In short, I think it's a quack nostrum, a pseudo-scientific medical fraud, right up there with magentic mattress pads and radionic "bio-circuits."
Now, I had a handful of customers who insisted on wanting to try this technology for medical reasons of various kinds, and yes, ADHD was frequently mentioned. After I told them all of the above, what I told them was to ask their doctor, and if the physician agrees to the experiment, then it might be worth trying, but only under a doctor's supervision, and never as a substitute for actual medical treatment.
I thought it was "movies, microcode, and 30-minute pizza delivery?"
I've been having this discussion a lot lately. I jumped ship from the IT industry a long time ago, about seven and a half years, having had my fill of working for managers who had no idea what I was doing for a living. Seven and a half years later, I'm still trying to find a comfortable career.
Now the dot-com bubble has burst, and all of the people I knew who thought they could make good money writing plain HTML and doing simple graphics in Photoshop are unemployed or making about what a cashier makes at WalMart.
And among the real programmers and network engineers I still know, this outsourcing thing is scaring the heck out of them. It's also scaring not a few accountants I know - for over a year now, at least one of the famous tax accounting companies has been outsourcing nearly all of their work to India, as well. And everybody I knew "knew" that if all else failed, they could fall back on telemarketing or call center work... hah hah. Those jobs started going over to India long before the real jobs did.
So people keep asking me at parties (as if I knew) what jobs there are in the US that are going to stay in the US and still pay a decent wage? I can only come up with a few:
Amateur Pornography. What can I say? The whole world is crazy about American amateur and semi-pro pornography. Even the Taliban guys were trading cheepo DVDs like trading cards.
Home Repair. My late father kept telling me I'd be better off as a plumber or a locksmith. I wish I'd listened to him. "No matter how the economy turns out, no matter what gets invented, people are still going to stop up their toilets and they are still going to lock themselves out of their cars."
Military. No matter what the cost advantages, for as long as the US is still enthused about invading other countries, we're not going to outsource those invasions. On the contrary, as the Saudis and Kuwaitis did during Gulf War I, we're the country that other countries outsource their wars to.
Finally, a subject I know well enough to get me up off of my metaphorical behind and create a SlashDot account.
I only skimmed the highest rated comments, but there are a few things you could stand to hear, I think, that I didn't see posted.
Most importantly, you will never fully kick any addictive drug (or other habit) as long as you want to keep using it. You got addicted to caffeine because you perceived caffeine, and even caffeine addiction, was providing you with certain benefits. You will never fully kick your caffeine habit until you stop wanting those benefits.
I know, easier said than done. But basically, what you need to do is to audit those benefits, and ask yourself two questions: (1) Am I actually receiving the benefits that I thought I was? (2) Are the benefits I am receiving what it's costing me?
Now, if you conclude that the answers are "yes" and "yes," then you're not going to quit caffeine, period. But let me suggest that most programmers and other IT types who think that caffeine is providing them with benefits are deceiving themselves. Caffeine enables you to spend more hours at the keyboard. Caffeine enables you to write more lines of code per hour (for example). But after a while, between the sleep dep and the shortness of attention that comes with caffeine buzz, it's garbage code. Which costs you more hours in debugging than the caffeine gave you back in the first place.
On a simpler, more practical note: Long-duration over-the-counter pain killers will help, but only in the very short term. If you use them longer than the indicated time, you can end up just as addicted to them as you are/were to the caffeine. That's where a lot of migraines come from, from people who have to have some form of COx inhibitor or NSAID just to vasodilate enough to partly stave off the withdrawl symptoms, while being so habituated that they no longer get the pain-killer benefit. I know, that's where my ex-wife's migraines were coming from.
Slashdot Mirror
> Did you know felons can't vote?
Not even vaguely true. The law regarding felons and voting varies from state to state. Here in Missouri, any convicted felon who has served his term and is no longer on probation or parole is automatically restored to the voter rolls. The one exception, here in Missouri, is a very good one, and it has nothing to do with felonies: if you are convicted of a voting-related crime, you permanently lose your right to vote in Missouri, whether the crime was a felony or a misdemeanor. (I think that's rather generous, myself. I'd prefer to see people convicted of voting-related crimes given 72 hours to exit the country and stay out, and marked to be shot on sight if seen within the country's borders after that.) ObDisclaimer: IANAL.
ObDisclaimer: I've been out of the industry for 10 years. And even then, I wasn't an official spokesperson for my employer. If you want to know what they think, ask them.
I was working at MasterCard International (not one of the issuing banks, the actual membership organization that the banks belong to) when they first rolled out what was then called Maestro, their PIN-based real-time debit card that would work over the standard MasterCard credit card authorization network. And in those first few years of rollout, several stores and several PIN-pad manufacturers lost their licenses to accept MasterCard transactions because of violations of exactly this rule. It was written into their contracts that under no circumstance were they allowed to retain the PIN once the transaction had been authorized or denied.
I don't know Visa's rules, I never did. But assuming they're similar, whoever designed those systems should be in big trouble with Visa. If memory serves (and it might not, but I think this is what I remember), if this had been a MasterCard issue back when I was there, the manufacturer who violated that rule not only would no longer be allowed to put their terminals on the MasterCard network, they would have been contractually liable for all resulting losses.
Directive-based security can work, more or less, under these circumstances, because the companies that are involved in processing these transactions have to be in this business; if they lose one of their four or five only real suppliers (MasterCard, Visa, Discover, American Express, and maybe JCB), they're effectively out of business. They can't afford to seriously offend even one of them, especially one of the big two brands, or they'll lose everything.
As someone who bought the game on Day 1: ALL of them. OK, some of the play balance tweaks in the first few patches were needed, and I'm not asking them to take out vehicles or mounts, but other than that virtually every game systems change was for the worse.
And next time? (A) Enforce the (expletive deleted) Terms of Service, and (B) whenever someone insists that you make it more like Everquest, tell them to go play Everquest.
A spot of background: Wycliff Bible Translators is a charity that has set out to provide a translation of the Christian Bible in every language on Earth. This includes, of course, thousands of languages that have no written form, so part of their work involves volunteer linguists traveling to remote parts of the planet to create written languages for tribes and teaching them literacy in their own tongue.
... and the PDP 11/40 was still chugging along, happy as can be. Now, obviously they panicked and got the air conditioning fixed as quickly as possible. But they did prove that at least this one PDP 11 could run for at least a week at temperatures in the 160F to 180F range.
Back in the late 1970s, I did some volunteer programming for them. At the time, translation support ran on a PDP 11/40 that was installed in the cargo hold of this aging steamship that they owned; they'd sail to the port nearest to the next tribe they were working for, teams would collect dictionary words, create orthographic phonetic spellings for them, and send them back to the ship to be collated for the dictionary, then printed out and sent back out to the teachers and translators. The rest of the ship had no air conditioning, so they built a climate-controlled computer room below decks, with orders to people that they were only to enter on the rare occasions that a magnetic tape needed to be changed.
Unbeknownst to them, the air conditioning failed as soon as they left port and never actually turned on. When they went in to change a tape while docked in Rio de Janeiro, they found that the temperature in the computer room had risen to somewhere in the close vicinity of 180F
But then, what can I say about 1970s DEC hardware? The original VT-100 was top-rack dishwasher safe. No, really - that was the standard DEC repair instructions in case someone spilled something into a keyboard. Place the keyboard key-side down on the top rack of a dishwasher, normal wash cycle, air dry.
Computers may have been expensive back then, and huge, and we thought that 128k of RAM was a lot, but boy could they take a beating, at least if you bought them from Digital Equipment Corporation.
Yahoo's official Linux client, ymessenger 1.0.4-1, doesn't work either and they haven't updated it on their web page yet as of 11:52 am CDT, 24 Jun 2004. So much for this being about 3rd party applications, so far as I can tell.
It's not malice. It's just yet another poorly implemented version upgrade. And Lord knows the software industry has never seen one of those before.
Except that oddly enough, their Linux client doesn't have ads.
There just isn't anything harder to do than to hire a good employee, period. Harvard's business school did a well-funded study not that long ago that showed that interviewing job candidates selects for worse candidates than if you chose people at random from the incoming resume file. Why? Because what you're selecting for when you interview employees is for people whose primary job skill is being interviewed. Similarly, unless you're hiring people to take multiple-choice tests all day, hiring them based on their ability to pass multiple-choice tests is likely to produce worst results than hiring people at random. But you don't see any company in the world hiring entirely at random, do you?
Anybody who's in the position of making hiring decisions knows that no matter how careful they are, some percentage of the people they hire aren't going to work out. That's unavoidable. So for them, vendor certifications serve an all-important purpose. Certifications shift the blame for bad employees onto the certifying authority. "You said that the new guy you hired would be competent in Technology X, and he's a total idiot!" "I didn't say that he was competent in Technology X, the company that certified him said that he was. How was I supposed to know that they were wrong?"
I got stuck on a Gnome box for about a week and a half, right after this version of Gnome came out. Spatial navigation was not at the top of the list of reasons I hated it, though. However, it was symptomatic of an attitude that drove me absolutely stark raving apoplectic.
For almost every program the Gnome team has decided, for good or ill, what preferences are the ones that novice users should be using. And if you don't want to use those preferences, then browse the filesystem to find the correct preference file, decode the syntax of that preference file in a text editor, and change what you want. Or fire up gconf (which is not documented), dig around in it until you find the right preference setting, decode its syntax, and change it. Or better yet, download the source code, change the make file parameters, and compile a version that works the way you want it to.
As best as I can tell, if you can't do those things (or don't want to for any other reason), then you're not considered "elite" enough to be allowed to choose your own preferences in Gnome.
Given how many of the floater ads depend on DHTML, what the heck good is it, anyway? If I had an option in my browser to turn it off, other than a few more ads going away would I even notice afterwards that I had done so?
What you're talking about is what used to be called photic stimulation with EEG biofeedback, the products were called light and sound mind machines with EEG biofeedback.
... any medical claims made for this technology should be considered very dubious.
They were briefly huge in the New Age community, in particular, the Shaman by AlphaLabs, which would do just what you say at what was, for such equipment 10 years ago, a very reasonable price, about $550.
I've been interested in the technology for years, and spent a couple of years selling them for religious use (meditation aids) and entertainment (for the entoptic hallucinations generated by mind machine usage). I also went out of my way to keep up with the research, as I rather highly value my honesty and objectivity. I used to edit the web's Mind Machine FAQ, you'll see me listed there under my real name, J. Brad Hicks.
Let me tell you right now that as a man who used to sell these, and still would if the business model were right, because I do actually like the technology
The industry hesitantly touts a handful of university studies. I say "hesitantly" because any manufacturer who gets caught making an actual medical claim for one gets shut down, hard, by the FTC or the FDA, for making unverified medical claims. The few studies there are all involve very small samples, generally have not produced reproducable results, have very questionable methodology (I have yet to see one that even tried to test for the placebo effect), and have never to my knowledge been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
In short, I think it's a quack nostrum, a pseudo-scientific medical fraud, right up there with magentic mattress pads and radionic "bio-circuits."
Now, I had a handful of customers who insisted on wanting to try this technology for medical reasons of various kinds, and yes, ADHD was frequently mentioned. After I told them all of the above, what I told them was to ask their doctor, and if the physician agrees to the experiment, then it might be worth trying, but only under a doctor's supervision, and never as a substitute for actual medical treatment.
I've been having this discussion a lot lately. I jumped ship from the IT industry a long time ago, about seven and a half years, having had my fill of working for managers who had no idea what I was doing for a living. Seven and a half years later, I'm still trying to find a comfortable career.
Now the dot-com bubble has burst, and all of the people I knew who thought they could make good money writing plain HTML and doing simple graphics in Photoshop are unemployed or making about what a cashier makes at WalMart.
And among the real programmers and network engineers I still know, this outsourcing thing is scaring the heck out of them. It's also scaring not a few accountants I know - for over a year now, at least one of the famous tax accounting companies has been outsourcing nearly all of their work to India, as well. And everybody I knew "knew" that if all else failed, they could fall back on telemarketing or call center work
So people keep asking me at parties (as if I knew) what jobs there are in the US that are going to stay in the US and still pay a decent wage? I can only come up with a few:
- Amateur Pornography. What can I say? The whole world is crazy about American amateur and semi-pro pornography. Even the Taliban guys were trading cheepo DVDs like trading cards.
- Home Repair. My late father kept telling me I'd be better off as a plumber or a locksmith. I wish I'd listened to him. "No matter how the economy turns out, no matter what gets invented, people are still going to stop up their toilets and they are still going to lock themselves out of their cars."
- Military. No matter what the cost advantages, for as long as the US is still enthused about invading other countries, we're not going to outsource those invasions. On the contrary, as the Saudis and Kuwaitis did during Gulf War I, we're the country that other countries outsource their wars to.
I can't think of another one yet, though.Finally, a subject I know well enough to get me up off of my metaphorical behind and create a SlashDot account.
I only skimmed the highest rated comments, but there are a few things you could stand to hear, I think, that I didn't see posted.
Most importantly, you will never fully kick any addictive drug (or other habit) as long as you want to keep using it. You got addicted to caffeine because you perceived caffeine, and even caffeine addiction, was providing you with certain benefits. You will never fully kick your caffeine habit until you stop wanting those benefits.
I know, easier said than done. But basically, what you need to do is to audit those benefits, and ask yourself two questions: (1) Am I actually receiving the benefits that I thought I was? (2) Are the benefits I am receiving what it's costing me?
Now, if you conclude that the answers are "yes" and "yes," then you're not going to quit caffeine, period. But let me suggest that most programmers and other IT types who think that caffeine is providing them with benefits are deceiving themselves. Caffeine enables you to spend more hours at the keyboard. Caffeine enables you to write more lines of code per hour (for example). But after a while, between the sleep dep and the shortness of attention that comes with caffeine buzz, it's garbage code. Which costs you more hours in debugging than the caffeine gave you back in the first place.
On a simpler, more practical note: Long-duration over-the-counter pain killers will help, but only in the very short term. If you use them longer than the indicated time, you can end up just as addicted to them as you are/were to the caffeine. That's where a lot of migraines come from, from people who have to have some form of COx inhibitor or NSAID just to vasodilate enough to partly stave off the withdrawl symptoms, while being so habituated that they no longer get the pain-killer benefit. I know, that's where my ex-wife's migraines were coming from.