I realize I embellished a little on the surgery and cooking thing, but it helped the illustrate the point.
Also, planning for day to day traffic is one thing. I'm guessing this site doesn't get that many page views on a given day. Planning for a Slashdotting is another thing entirely.
"This female surgeon can't even cook bacon and eggs, what makes the bitch think she can take out my kidney?
"This dork can't even find himself a single woman to have sex with him, what makes him think he can write software that will attract millions of users?"
You see, it is possible to be highly competent at one thing and be not very competent in another. Even if they have the loose relationship of being two things that geeks tend to think are pretty cool, such as Engineering Spaceships and developing web sites and maintaining a web server.
Obviously I have not been able to view the web page due to it being slashdotted, but it is a good possibility that they didn't put much thought or effort into it. They probably thought "Hey, why don't we just cobble together a small web presence in case anyone wants to donate any money or otherwise contribute to our project. Let's not spend much time on it though as our aim is space travel, not web development.
Building up the necessary technology and infrastructure is the problem. You are expecting private companies to invest tons and tons of money in hopes of a big payday what.....50 years from now at the least? A lot of companies these days have a hard time planting seeds for 5 years in the future, much less 50.
Maybe a privately held company funded by an extremely (read: Bill Gates) wealthy individual who is doing it to further mankind...as he is unlikely to get anywhere close to seeing the fruits of his investment bloom during his lifetime. Any company with Stockholders, rented CEO's, and all manner of executives trying to push up their bonus money every year is not going to sacrifice their present financial resources for nebulous distant future gains.
Oddly, my eyes must be a freak of nature or something. I've got "better than 20/20" vision and can read from an LCD screen for hours on end. My reading chair is one of those saucer shaped things (Papasan?) which I found very good for long term sitting on my ass sessions. By simply putting a clipboard under my laptop, heat becomes a non-issue. I also have a desk type thing rigged up that I can swing out in front of the chair in various positions.
I've gotten to the point where my prefered method of reading is on my laptop. Unlike a book, my hands are free to eat/smoke/whatever.
.....Or they are coming up with better things to do with that money. "Build sanitation", "Fund US Health care", "Administer IQ tests at birth, sterilize the stupid". Hey! Guess what? When you have $10 Billion that you want to give to society, you are free to choose the way in which you feel it would be best used.
I don't necessarily care for Bill Gates or some of his company's past (and present) practices. I'm guessing that if I spent an entire day with him, I'd feel compelled to punch him in the face on several occasions. Guess what? I still have to applaud him for doing something to try to change the world for the better. I have to wonder...this being Slashdot.....what would the comments be like if Linus Torvalds had donated a large sum of money to vaccinations?
IE 8 is better, but it is still annoying. With each increment you get to pile on more !--[if IE 6]!-- !--[if IE 7]!-- !--[if IE 8]!-- type stuff. It does have some decent features though. The "Developer Tools" built in are actually pretty decent. I can open it up and not be instantly hit by a malware drive by. I still avoid it in favor of Firefox unless I have absolutely no choice.
I'm usually for the privatization of things but Space Travel? I'm not so sure. It seems that a sizable initial investment is necessary to start delving into the business of space travel and it could be many years before it pays back....if it ever pays back. How many companies could afford to tell their share holders that they plan to sink $500 Million (start today) planning a 2020 flight to Mars which, if successful, COULD lead to space tourism by 2030. Most of those shareholders (And indeed most of the executives at the company) probably could care less if the company is turning a huge profit in 2030. They sure as heck will care about spending $500 Million starting today.
Just to draw a parallel from history (it seems somewhat relevant) the "New World" was discovered by Christopher Columbus (yeah yeah, Indigenous People, Leif Erickson...whatever). It wasn't a company at the time but a country that founded the efforts of exploration. Spain started throwing various types of people overseas to try to establish colonies, find stuff, trade with or kill and steal from Indians. Eventually, when it was shown that yes, it was possible to get overseas and start a little colony and/or make some cash you saw the Virginia Company sending out Settlers to create Jamestown. Heck, I think the Virginia Company was about to cut Jamestown loose before they stumbled upon tobacco.
The point is that the initial exploration was done by a kingdom and once proved to be profitable, moved onto private enterprise. I personally envisioned Space Travel following this general pattern. Unfortunately I don't think we are anywhere near profitable as far as space is concerned. I could be very wrong about that though.
Here is what I do for almost all of my purchases online.
I have a prepaid card from Netspend. I know of another company called Green Dot that is similar. I use Netspend because I can either load it through a bank transfer or by taking cash to a speedway gas station and load the card there. It costs $3 to load but I get a ton of "Speedy Reward Points". By the time I spend $15 loading the card, I usually have enough points for a $25 Speedway gift card. You can get unlimited transactions for $10/month or pay $1 per transaction. I just pay the $1 per transaction.
I keep a token amount of money (Somewhere between $20-$50) on my prepaid card for late night impulse buys. Other than that, when I want to make a purchase online I make the bank transfer/gas station deposit right before I am going to do the ordering. Heck, I even pay most of my online bills this way. Someone steals/cracks my netspend card? Unless it is in the extremely limited window between me loading the card and me using it...they'll get $20 tops. I close the card. I get a new one. Done. Heck of a lot better than someone getting a hold of one of my credit cards which have several thousands of dollars they can pilfer.
Yeah, people look at me like I'm some sort of Ghetto loser when I roll into a gas station and put $200 on my shitty prepaid card. Yeah, I have to take time to physically move money around (luckily my bank is near the gas station) and waste a decent amount of time in doing so. Whatever. The likelihood of any identity theft causing me any significant damage is a heck of a lot lower. I'm not constantly online checking because I'm worried some jackass maxed out my real credit cards.
And also, you can get single use Visa Card numbers with your crappy Netspend preloaded card...so if you don't even want the hassle of the prepaid account getting stolen you can use their numbers.
I was too, to some extent. Then I thought "Odds are they aren't anywhere near where I live. I doubt they are going to book a plane/train or drive a car hundreds of miles because I screwed them out of the cost of a UPS Red Package (though one guy sent it UPS Early morning Saturday....that had to hurt). I don't divulge any other real information. Fake name, fake Date of Birth, whatever.
Honestly, the money order scammers have gotten worse. The first ones I ever received were Postal Money orders. I showed a lot of my friends and family and though skeptical of why I had $5295 worth of money orders, they thought they were real. They even had a pretty convincing "Watermark". Lately I've been getting beat up looking Moneygram and Walmart Counterfeits. The ink is running all over the place by the time they get to me. I kind of wish I would have kept at least one from each scammer, but I'd hate to suddenly end up with the authorities at my door and a ton of counterfeit money orders.;)
I know a guy that was home schooled from something like 4th grade onward. I asked him some of the same types of questions. He was (as the OP went on to say about his kids) in extra activities like sports teams (Little League Baseball doesn't require attending school) and his parents had an agreement with the school that he would attend certain high school classes that really can't be done in a home environment. Namely Chemistry and Physics where lab is an important aspect of the class.
He has been pretty well adjusted socially since I met him when he was 24. I can't say anything about him prior to that time. His parents are hardcore Christians and he in turn is pretty hardcore Christian..however....he isn't the type to ignore the opinions of others or push his beliefs on them. We've held many heated discussions about Religion and Politics and I would have to say he is way more tolerant than most people I knew who went to 12 years of a private Catholic school.
When I am contacted about those "Emplomant oppertunitys" by some guy running the fake money order scam, I always go along with it. I think these guys pretty much know it, but they need to be attempting to counterfeit a certain amount of money (It is somewhere around $5500. I have not checked in awhile) before they are seriously pursued by the authorities. I just figure if they happen to screw up one time and send enough, I might get one put away. At the very least, they send the money orders UPS Red Overnight. That has to take a small chunk out of their scam fund.
I send money to other countries Western Union quite frequently to purchase certain goods like Medication (Not Narcotics, stuff for my grandparents, stuff that insurance doesn't want to touch like Provigil that is expensive here) and the occasional lot of stuff that I have a market to resell. For the record I've probably done business with 20 different people in other countries and never gotten burned.
Every single time I send money....even if I've sent it to the same receiver a dozen times....I get asked a bunch of questions by the Western Union or Moneygram rep. "Are you sure you aren't responding to an EMAIL about a business proposition? Are you sure that you know and trust this person? Are you familiar with 419 scams? You do realize we can't help you get your money back?"
I hate to say it, but I can't even begin to imagine the degree of stupid that someone must be to still go through with it when the Western Union rep is word for word describing their situation. These people HAVE been warned, they just don't care.
It also depends on what type of project it is. If it is indeed the CMS that someone posted up above, I would think that a community is going to be a definite priority. If it were an application like a Port Scanner or single player game, you wouldn't need a community boost.
If by some magical chance you were granted a large community just be releasing it, I don't even think a CMS would have to be very good. People would think up/develop ways around or eliminate the limitations of your software. If something was the best CMS ever written but was barred from forming a community (nonsensical, I know, but for the sake of argument) interest in it would not last.
It has been awhile, but I was once a Biochemist working in a gene therapy lab. We encased DNA in a polymer that had proteins that would cause the package to be delivered to the desired organ attached to the polymer with PEG. Once the package bonded to its target, the polymer had to be weak enough that it would break apart and release the DNA (of course, it had to be strong enough to get there....a very delicate balance that made this tricky.) We would pass it off where it was administered to lab rats and expression would be measured.
I may not be precise in my numbers here, but they are close enough to illustrate the point. Our target uptake percentage that would ensure expression was 5%, meaning if we could deliver to the target organ and have the DNA incorporate it into the lab animal's DNA in the target organ it would be sufficient for gene therapy to be successful. I did not highly research that number myself, but it was generally accepted to be the magic number. Anyway, to give a baseline, they periodically did control tests, where the lab rat would be administered just free floating DNA. This is where I reach my point. The expression in these control subjects was nearly 1%! Although this was under unrealistic circumstances (large quantities of a single gene injected into the target) it does go to show that the uptake of free floating DNA is probably quite common.
The clients that have the external hard drives are guys that are Regional Sales Managers and work out of their homes. They come to the office proper MAYBE twice a year. They spend most of their week traveling to different distributors doing whatever sales reps do. If someone breaks into their home and steals a crappy 120 GB passport drive...fine. They really don't have data that they don't want leaking out. They do however, have data they don't want to lose. One copy on their machine, one copy on a hard drive at home is just fine. And yes, we are a small company.
To some extent, yes, but I think the A+ is a nice little course....or at least it was a decade or so ago when I took it.
Learning about the history of processors and such is good. You get to start with primitive 8086 (possibly earlier...I don't remember) level chips and see how and why they progressed to the levels that they are today. A lot of people I know who are "Computer Technicians" or "Network Admins" are sorely deficient in their knowledge of what is going on with hardware, what a bus is, what the clock speed is, what a multiplier is. No doubt if I were hiring an entry level tech with 1 year of experience and had the choice between interviewing an A+ Certified and a non A+ certified candidate, I'd interview the one with the certification.
A+ isn't some big fancy thing, but having the certification indicates that the person at least has some interest in computers and some drive to learn about them.
I am with you as far as the confusion. You they asking all the laptop users to hand their laptops over at certain intervals to be backed up, reformatted, and reallocated? That sounds like the definition of fail, and if I was in charge I would not put up with it.
Here are my simple tips for discussing backup with people who are generally "too busy" to bother with backups.
Advise them to keep all their data on the server. When they are working in the office, this should be easy. Word, Excel, or whatever should have the default save to directory be the directory they would save things to on the network. They might say that the data is too important to share with anyone. Create them a network share that only they (and the account used for backing stuff up) can access. When they work away from the Office, ask them just to copy the stuff they did over to the network. They will probably do it anyway after they get sick of having data in two places. Note that this is for the people who are typically in the office.
For people who are out of office/in satellite offices, create a system that is simple and doesn't require much effort on their part. I bought western digital passport drives and set up their software to automatically backup/sync whenever it is plugged in. I had a talk with these guys and told them to keep in on their desk and plug it in every monday morning if possible. They didn't believe me that their stuff was backed up that easily. You can do this for internal users who refuse to use the network, as well.
I personally will send out E-Mail messages every two months or so asking those with laptops to "Make sure they have plugged in their backup drives" and "Do a quick check to see if your Antivirus says it is up to date" because there is a virus coming around that could be very deadly. Sometimes it is a little white lie. Sometimes it is the truth. Whatever. The fear of a possible virus seems like a scarier and more immediate threat than a random hard drive crash so they take action. I usually get a response from most of them that gives me an overview "I plugged in my drive last Monday and my virus definitions say they are from today....I'm safe, right?"
In summary, just do what you can to automate the process and make it simple for users. Don't make them hand over their laptops for several precious hours/days of business. The less effort they have to put forth, the more likely they are to do it.
This is probably especially true in terms of the Slashdot crowd. When you get a call from your boss/coworker/client/relative/friend who has some major computer catastrophe they will be relieved to have gotten through to you and usually blurt out their issue about as frantic as they possibly can. It usually isn't "Hello. I'm having a problem. Do you have a moment?" It is usually "THANK FUCKING GOD YOU ANSWERED MY PRINTER DOESN'T WORK AND IT WORKED THIS MORNING AND I NEED TO GET THESE REPORTS OUT AND I TRIED REBOOTING MY PROCESSOR AND DELETING MY PRINT DRIVER AND CHANGING THE INK IN THE PRINTER AND IT STILL ISN'T WORKING"
Naturally, trying to parse information being delivered that way is going to be pretty distracting. I usually don't get people I am walking with go into that kind of frantic mode.
I really have no right to judge you or your ideas on your own faith....but if you've received the relevant sacraments you probably should have a pretty good idea if it is your "thing" or not. You must know at least the foundation of beliefs. Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark, Moses and the 10 Commandments, the Golden Rule, Christ Dying for our Sins, that sort of thing. Do you believe in these things? If you aren't sure, I find it unlikely that monotonous Catholic masses are suddenly going to make you have faith in them.
I think if you have prior knowledge of the basic tenets of Catholicism...you are probably better off sitting down and giving yourself some time to think (or feel) your way through them than you are just starting to go to church or reading a Priest's blog.
I actually think it can make things worse for them. Here is why I believe this. Not all Catholic Priests have precisely the same beliefs. You have some of the more liberal ones who are willing to amend interpretations of religious texts to align with new scientific evidence that pops up. On the other hand you have the rather closed minded and conservative "Bible is literal, Earth was created in 2000 BC, Evolution is not real, etc."
Obviously these differences will become readily apparent in their blogs. For the most part unique views of unique Priests aren't going to make it into the typical Mass. A typical mass leaves very little time for the priest to express his individual ideas. You have a general outline of what the priest says, what the followers say in return, what prayers are said, when it is time for communion, etc. The only real differences are in the three readings (which of course, eventually repeat themselves as the Bible has finite passages....some much more popular and better in a church setting than others) and finally...the preachers 5 minute homily where he may be able to bring his own unique views into things. The masses I have attended (unfortunately a reasonably high number) have never had the preacher spouting off about how Evolution is Bullshit or anything like that.
A blog changes everything. Suddenly the priest has as much time as he wants to spout off his crazy (or sane) ideas. Eventually people are going to notice the drastic differences between the ideas of Priests. I can't see this leading to anything other than the splintering of the Catholic faith into groups of people who belong to the "Faith in God and Faith in Reality" types and the "Faith in God, to hell with Reality" groups. Those with moderate opinions will be treated suspiciously by both sides. The Church ends up having another Schism which weakens it as a whole.
This is probably the thing I hate most about those CSI type shows. Everyone seems to think that any still/moving picture that they have created with their digital camera/webcam/camcorder/security camera can just be zoomed in on by 20x while losing absolutely no quality. I've had dozens of people ask me if I could do something like that for them. About 20 seconds into the explanation about pixels/resolution they go into blank stare mode, zoning out thinking about who else they know is good with computer because they KNOW it can be done.
If people were able to understand that, I'd be fine with Movies and TV shows enhancing the picture. If it serves the plot, fine. It is fiction. If technology is crazy advanced beyond what they should have available...that is fine. It serves a purpose in their story.
It is pretty funny watching movies with my wife. I'm a Chemist/Tech geek and she is a history geek. She rolls her eyes when I point out things that are technically impossible. "It is just a movie" she says. When someone in a movie makes a statement that isn't historically accurate, she flips out and hates the movie. Alexander, 10,000 BC, various others....I thought she was going to smash the DVD's to bits.
I actually was a little bit disappointed by this article. With the devices used, it has the feel of a "Look how awesome my iPhone is". It is probably just because the guy doing this happened to have those devices laying around...but a Treo 650? Really? Compared to keyboards on Smart Phones like the HTC Touch Pro or the Motorola Droid, Treo keyboards are quite difficult to type on.
Speaking of typing, what is up with the "Chiclet" style keyboards that are popping up on various laptop/netbook devices? Please please please don't tell me this is going to become the standard. I despise those types of keyboards with every fiber of my being. They sucked back during the PCjr days, they suck now, and they will suck forever. I could probably rant about them, tossing out vague insults, but since anyone sensible probably stopped reading this post already...i'll let it go.
I'm not a real developer. I'll readily admit that. I'm mostly a Network guy that happens to have written some stuff in C++, C#, VB, pHp, VBscript, Javascript, and Java. In the last four years, I've worked mainly in Windows environments and have been mostly using C++ or C#.
My foray into using eclipse came when I needed to develop an application on an Embedded board my company wanted to use in its project. The boards that were decided on supported only Java so I grabbed Eclipse and went to work on it. I wasn't very good at Java in the first place so when I found that the IDE had a far steeper learning curve than Visual Studio...I knew I had my work cut out for me.
There were plenty of forums and such with people giving offering advice on using Eclipse but a lot of it was "Use this plugin", "No, use this plugin instead" to the point where I had so many different plugins Eclipse became slow and I was just confused at times.
Somehow, I kept managing to blow up the built in web servers that are there for testing, to the point where I couldn't test my applications. I had to do a bunch of crazy stuff to get it to work again.
The Application I was developing relied on creating a GUI that allowed you to get and put information over a network from a serial port. I expected that dealing with the serial port commands to take a lot of time and effort. What I didn't expect was how difficult it was to lay out the damn GUI compared to how it is in Visual Studio.
Again, this was a first attempt at using Eclipse, I was using a language I wasn't terribly familiar with, and I was writing an application of a sort that I had never really written before. All that probably figured into my not so great experience with Eclipse. The project turned out great in the end though. It just took waaay more time than I expected.
You are spot on. Kids are so stupid. Think of the variety of things kids from different upbringings do. Play video games, ride bicycles, participate in team sports, go fishing, go skateboarding, listen to "Rock and Roll Music", hang out with their friends "talking" (if you can call it talking....99.9% of the time they are discussing some stupid social stuff), go shopping, maybe even drink or do some drugs. All that time wasted obsessing over stupid little things like "oh, I can't throw a ball through a hoop" or "oh, I want to interact on a social level". Don't they know that there is Calculus to do? History to learn? Computers to be programmed? Fucking lazy motherfuckers think they can get away with not learning 18 hours a day. Hell, most of them aren't even awake 18 hours a day. Weaklings.
And we wonder why society is going to hell. Children these days don't commit all of their time preparing for adulthood. Enough of that "Let them be kids" bullshit. I say if we catch them playing one of these "Dragon Dungeon" thingies, we should take them out to a rock quarry and have them pound stone with sledgehammers all day, as that is the only type of work they'll be suited to if they spend their free....er...valuable learning time doing something that they find enjoyable. Maybe for every hour they spend playing one of these so called RPG's we should keep them awake Clockwork Orange style, showing them historical documentaries to make up for the time they wasted.
Dude...seriously....maybe you need to hit up some RPG sessions again. You obviously are taking yourself way too fucking seriously. Back in middle/high school I played AD&D with a rotating group of about 10 people. I've done reasonably well for myself thus far but I must say....out of the 10 in that group I'm probably about the 8th or 9th most successful.
Slashdot Mirror
I realize I embellished a little on the surgery and cooking thing, but it helped the illustrate the point.
Also, planning for day to day traffic is one thing. I'm guessing this site doesn't get that many page views on a given day. Planning for a Slashdotting is another thing entirely.
"This female surgeon can't even cook bacon and eggs, what makes the bitch think she can take out my kidney?
"This dork can't even find himself a single woman to have sex with him, what makes him think he can write software that will attract millions of users?"
You see, it is possible to be highly competent at one thing and be not very competent in another. Even if they have the loose relationship of being two things that geeks tend to think are pretty cool, such as Engineering Spaceships and developing web sites and maintaining a web server.
Obviously I have not been able to view the web page due to it being slashdotted, but it is a good possibility that they didn't put much thought or effort into it. They probably thought "Hey, why don't we just cobble together a small web presence in case anyone wants to donate any money or otherwise contribute to our project. Let's not spend much time on it though as our aim is space travel, not web development.
Building up the necessary technology and infrastructure is the problem. You are expecting private companies to invest tons and tons of money in hopes of a big payday what.....50 years from now at the least? A lot of companies these days have a hard time planting seeds for 5 years in the future, much less 50.
Maybe a privately held company funded by an extremely (read: Bill Gates) wealthy individual who is doing it to further mankind...as he is unlikely to get anywhere close to seeing the fruits of his investment bloom during his lifetime. Any company with Stockholders, rented CEO's, and all manner of executives trying to push up their bonus money every year is not going to sacrifice their present financial resources for nebulous distant future gains.
Oddly, my eyes must be a freak of nature or something. I've got "better than 20/20" vision and can read from an LCD screen for hours on end. My reading chair is one of those saucer shaped things (Papasan?) which I found very good for long term sitting on my ass sessions. By simply putting a clipboard under my laptop, heat becomes a non-issue. I also have a desk type thing rigged up that I can swing out in front of the chair in various positions.
I've gotten to the point where my prefered method of reading is on my laptop. Unlike a book, my hands are free to eat/smoke/whatever.
.....Or they are coming up with better things to do with that money. "Build sanitation", "Fund US Health care", "Administer IQ tests at birth, sterilize the stupid". Hey! Guess what? When you have $10 Billion that you want to give to society, you are free to choose the way in which you feel it would be best used.
I don't necessarily care for Bill Gates or some of his company's past (and present) practices. I'm guessing that if I spent an entire day with him, I'd feel compelled to punch him in the face on several occasions. Guess what? I still have to applaud him for doing something to try to change the world for the better. I have to wonder...this being Slashdot.....what would the comments be like if Linus Torvalds had donated a large sum of money to vaccinations?
IE 8 is better, but it is still annoying. With each increment you get to pile on more !--[if IE 6]!-- !--[if IE 7]!-- !--[if IE 8]!-- type stuff. It does have some decent features though. The "Developer Tools" built in are actually pretty decent. I can open it up and not be instantly hit by a malware drive by. I still avoid it in favor of Firefox unless I have absolutely no choice.
I'm usually for the privatization of things but Space Travel? I'm not so sure. It seems that a sizable initial investment is necessary to start delving into the business of space travel and it could be many years before it pays back....if it ever pays back. How many companies could afford to tell their share holders that they plan to sink $500 Million (start today) planning a 2020 flight to Mars which, if successful, COULD lead to space tourism by 2030. Most of those shareholders (And indeed most of the executives at the company) probably could care less if the company is turning a huge profit in 2030. They sure as heck will care about spending $500 Million starting today.
Just to draw a parallel from history (it seems somewhat relevant) the "New World" was discovered by Christopher Columbus (yeah yeah, Indigenous People, Leif Erickson...whatever). It wasn't a company at the time but a country that founded the efforts of exploration. Spain started throwing various types of people overseas to try to establish colonies, find stuff, trade with or kill and steal from Indians. Eventually, when it was shown that yes, it was possible to get overseas and start a little colony and/or make some cash you saw the Virginia Company sending out Settlers to create Jamestown. Heck, I think the Virginia Company was about to cut Jamestown loose before they stumbled upon tobacco.
The point is that the initial exploration was done by a kingdom and once proved to be profitable, moved onto private enterprise. I personally envisioned Space Travel following this general pattern. Unfortunately I don't think we are anywhere near profitable as far as space is concerned. I could be very wrong about that though.
Here is what I do for almost all of my purchases online.
I have a prepaid card from Netspend. I know of another company called Green Dot that is similar. I use Netspend because I can either load it through a bank transfer or by taking cash to a speedway gas station and load the card there. It costs $3 to load but I get a ton of "Speedy Reward Points". By the time I spend $15 loading the card, I usually have enough points for a $25 Speedway gift card. You can get unlimited transactions for $10/month or pay $1 per transaction. I just pay the $1 per transaction.
I keep a token amount of money (Somewhere between $20-$50) on my prepaid card for late night impulse buys. Other than that, when I want to make a purchase online I make the bank transfer/gas station deposit right before I am going to do the ordering. Heck, I even pay most of my online bills this way. Someone steals/cracks my netspend card? Unless it is in the extremely limited window between me loading the card and me using it...they'll get $20 tops. I close the card. I get a new one. Done. Heck of a lot better than someone getting a hold of one of my credit cards which have several thousands of dollars they can pilfer.
Yeah, people look at me like I'm some sort of Ghetto loser when I roll into a gas station and put $200 on my shitty prepaid card. Yeah, I have to take time to physically move money around (luckily my bank is near the gas station) and waste a decent amount of time in doing so. Whatever. The likelihood of any identity theft causing me any significant damage is a heck of a lot lower. I'm not constantly online checking because I'm worried some jackass maxed out my real credit cards.
And also, you can get single use Visa Card numbers with your crappy Netspend preloaded card...so if you don't even want the hassle of the prepaid account getting stolen you can use their numbers.
I was too, to some extent. Then I thought "Odds are they aren't anywhere near where I live. I doubt they are going to book a plane/train or drive a car hundreds of miles because I screwed them out of the cost of a UPS Red Package (though one guy sent it UPS Early morning Saturday....that had to hurt). I don't divulge any other real information. Fake name, fake Date of Birth, whatever.
Honestly, the money order scammers have gotten worse. The first ones I ever received were Postal Money orders. I showed a lot of my friends and family and though skeptical of why I had $5295 worth of money orders, they thought they were real. They even had a pretty convincing "Watermark". Lately I've been getting beat up looking Moneygram and Walmart Counterfeits. The ink is running all over the place by the time they get to me. I kind of wish I would have kept at least one from each scammer, but I'd hate to suddenly end up with the authorities at my door and a ton of counterfeit money orders. ;)
I know a guy that was home schooled from something like 4th grade onward. I asked him some of the same types of questions. He was (as the OP went on to say about his kids) in extra activities like sports teams (Little League Baseball doesn't require attending school) and his parents had an agreement with the school that he would attend certain high school classes that really can't be done in a home environment. Namely Chemistry and Physics where lab is an important aspect of the class.
He has been pretty well adjusted socially since I met him when he was 24. I can't say anything about him prior to that time. His parents are hardcore Christians and he in turn is pretty hardcore Christian..however....he isn't the type to ignore the opinions of others or push his beliefs on them. We've held many heated discussions about Religion and Politics and I would have to say he is way more tolerant than most people I knew who went to 12 years of a private Catholic school.
Probably. Mostly I just wanted to make the point that your step #2 has pretty much been implemented and has been for a few years.
When I am contacted about those "Emplomant oppertunitys" by some guy running the fake money order scam, I always go along with it. I think these guys pretty much know it, but they need to be attempting to counterfeit a certain amount of money (It is somewhere around $5500. I have not checked in awhile) before they are seriously pursued by the authorities. I just figure if they happen to screw up one time and send enough, I might get one put away. At the very least, they send the money orders UPS Red Overnight. That has to take a small chunk out of their scam fund.
I send money to other countries Western Union quite frequently to purchase certain goods like Medication (Not Narcotics, stuff for my grandparents, stuff that insurance doesn't want to touch like Provigil that is expensive here) and the occasional lot of stuff that I have a market to resell. For the record I've probably done business with 20 different people in other countries and never gotten burned.
Every single time I send money....even if I've sent it to the same receiver a dozen times....I get asked a bunch of questions by the Western Union or Moneygram rep. "Are you sure you aren't responding to an EMAIL about a business proposition? Are you sure that you know and trust this person? Are you familiar with 419 scams? You do realize we can't help you get your money back?"
I hate to say it, but I can't even begin to imagine the degree of stupid that someone must be to still go through with it when the Western Union rep is word for word describing their situation. These people HAVE been warned, they just don't care.
It also depends on what type of project it is. If it is indeed the CMS that someone posted up above, I would think that a community is going to be a definite priority. If it were an application like a Port Scanner or single player game, you wouldn't need a community boost.
If by some magical chance you were granted a large community just be releasing it, I don't even think a CMS would have to be very good. People would think up/develop ways around or eliminate the limitations of your software. If something was the best CMS ever written but was barred from forming a community (nonsensical, I know, but for the sake of argument) interest in it would not last.
It has been awhile, but I was once a Biochemist working in a gene therapy lab. We encased DNA in a polymer that had proteins that would cause the package to be delivered to the desired organ attached to the polymer with PEG. Once the package bonded to its target, the polymer had to be weak enough that it would break apart and release the DNA (of course, it had to be strong enough to get there....a very delicate balance that made this tricky.) We would pass it off where it was administered to lab rats and expression would be measured.
I may not be precise in my numbers here, but they are close enough to illustrate the point. Our target uptake percentage that would ensure expression was 5%, meaning if we could deliver to the target organ and have the DNA incorporate it into the lab animal's DNA in the target organ it would be sufficient for gene therapy to be successful. I did not highly research that number myself, but it was generally accepted to be the magic number. Anyway, to give a baseline, they periodically did control tests, where the lab rat would be administered just free floating DNA. This is where I reach my point. The expression in these control subjects was nearly 1%! Although this was under unrealistic circumstances (large quantities of a single gene injected into the target) it does go to show that the uptake of free floating DNA is probably quite common.
The clients that have the external hard drives are guys that are Regional Sales Managers and work out of their homes. They come to the office proper MAYBE twice a year. They spend most of their week traveling to different distributors doing whatever sales reps do. If someone breaks into their home and steals a crappy 120 GB passport drive...fine. They really don't have data that they don't want leaking out. They do however, have data they don't want to lose. One copy on their machine, one copy on a hard drive at home is just fine. And yes, we are a small company.
To some extent, yes, but I think the A+ is a nice little course....or at least it was a decade or so ago when I took it.
Learning about the history of processors and such is good. You get to start with primitive 8086 (possibly earlier...I don't remember) level chips and see how and why they progressed to the levels that they are today. A lot of people I know who are "Computer Technicians" or "Network Admins" are sorely deficient in their knowledge of what is going on with hardware, what a bus is, what the clock speed is, what a multiplier is. No doubt if I were hiring an entry level tech with 1 year of experience and had the choice between interviewing an A+ Certified and a non A+ certified candidate, I'd interview the one with the certification.
A+ isn't some big fancy thing, but having the certification indicates that the person at least has some interest in computers and some drive to learn about them.
I am with you as far as the confusion. You they asking all the laptop users to hand their laptops over at certain intervals to be backed up, reformatted, and reallocated? That sounds like the definition of fail, and if I was in charge I would not put up with it.
Here are my simple tips for discussing backup with people who are generally "too busy" to bother with backups.
Advise them to keep all their data on the server. When they are working in the office, this should be easy. Word, Excel, or whatever should have the default save to directory be the directory they would save things to on the network. They might say that the data is too important to share with anyone. Create them a network share that only they (and the account used for backing stuff up) can access. When they work away from the Office, ask them just to copy the stuff they did over to the network. They will probably do it anyway after they get sick of having data in two places. Note that this is for the people who are typically in the office.
For people who are out of office/in satellite offices, create a system that is simple and doesn't require much effort on their part. I bought western digital passport drives and set up their software to automatically backup/sync whenever it is plugged in. I had a talk with these guys and told them to keep in on their desk and plug it in every monday morning if possible. They didn't believe me that their stuff was backed up that easily. You can do this for internal users who refuse to use the network, as well.
I personally will send out E-Mail messages every two months or so asking those with laptops to "Make sure they have plugged in their backup drives" and "Do a quick check to see if your Antivirus says it is up to date" because there is a virus coming around that could be very deadly. Sometimes it is a little white lie. Sometimes it is the truth. Whatever. The fear of a possible virus seems like a scarier and more immediate threat than a random hard drive crash so they take action. I usually get a response from most of them that gives me an overview "I plugged in my drive last Monday and my virus definitions say they are from today....I'm safe, right?"
In summary, just do what you can to automate the process and make it simple for users. Don't make them hand over their laptops for several precious hours/days of business. The less effort they have to put forth, the more likely they are to do it.
This is probably especially true in terms of the Slashdot crowd. When you get a call from your boss/coworker/client/relative/friend who has some major computer catastrophe they will be relieved to have gotten through to you and usually blurt out their issue about as frantic as they possibly can. It usually isn't "Hello. I'm having a problem. Do you have a moment?" It is usually "THANK FUCKING GOD YOU ANSWERED MY PRINTER DOESN'T WORK AND IT WORKED THIS MORNING AND I NEED TO GET THESE REPORTS OUT AND I TRIED REBOOTING MY PROCESSOR AND DELETING MY PRINT DRIVER AND CHANGING THE INK IN THE PRINTER AND IT STILL ISN'T WORKING"
Naturally, trying to parse information being delivered that way is going to be pretty distracting. I usually don't get people I am walking with go into that kind of frantic mode.
I really have no right to judge you or your ideas on your own faith....but if you've received the relevant sacraments you probably should have a pretty good idea if it is your "thing" or not. You must know at least the foundation of beliefs. Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark, Moses and the 10 Commandments, the Golden Rule, Christ Dying for our Sins, that sort of thing. Do you believe in these things? If you aren't sure, I find it unlikely that monotonous Catholic masses are suddenly going to make you have faith in them.
I think if you have prior knowledge of the basic tenets of Catholicism...you are probably better off sitting down and giving yourself some time to think (or feel) your way through them than you are just starting to go to church or reading a Priest's blog.
I actually think it can make things worse for them. Here is why I believe this. Not all Catholic Priests have precisely the same beliefs. You have some of the more liberal ones who are willing to amend interpretations of religious texts to align with new scientific evidence that pops up. On the other hand you have the rather closed minded and conservative "Bible is literal, Earth was created in 2000 BC, Evolution is not real, etc."
Obviously these differences will become readily apparent in their blogs. For the most part unique views of unique Priests aren't going to make it into the typical Mass. A typical mass leaves very little time for the priest to express his individual ideas. You have a general outline of what the priest says, what the followers say in return, what prayers are said, when it is time for communion, etc. The only real differences are in the three readings (which of course, eventually repeat themselves as the Bible has finite passages....some much more popular and better in a church setting than others) and finally...the preachers 5 minute homily where he may be able to bring his own unique views into things. The masses I have attended (unfortunately a reasonably high number) have never had the preacher spouting off about how Evolution is Bullshit or anything like that.
A blog changes everything. Suddenly the priest has as much time as he wants to spout off his crazy (or sane) ideas. Eventually people are going to notice the drastic differences between the ideas of Priests. I can't see this leading to anything other than the splintering of the Catholic faith into groups of people who belong to the "Faith in God and Faith in Reality" types and the "Faith in God, to hell with Reality" groups. Those with moderate opinions will be treated suspiciously by both sides. The Church ends up having another Schism which weakens it as a whole.
This is probably the thing I hate most about those CSI type shows. Everyone seems to think that any still/moving picture that they have created with their digital camera/webcam/camcorder/security camera can just be zoomed in on by 20x while losing absolutely no quality. I've had dozens of people ask me if I could do something like that for them. About 20 seconds into the explanation about pixels/resolution they go into blank stare mode, zoning out thinking about who else they know is good with computer because they KNOW it can be done.
If people were able to understand that, I'd be fine with Movies and TV shows enhancing the picture. If it serves the plot, fine. It is fiction. If technology is crazy advanced beyond what they should have available...that is fine. It serves a purpose in their story.
It is pretty funny watching movies with my wife. I'm a Chemist/Tech geek and she is a history geek. She rolls her eyes when I point out things that are technically impossible. "It is just a movie" she says. When someone in a movie makes a statement that isn't historically accurate, she flips out and hates the movie. Alexander, 10,000 BC, various others....I thought she was going to smash the DVD's to bits.
I actually was a little bit disappointed by this article. With the devices used, it has the feel of a "Look how awesome my iPhone is". It is probably just because the guy doing this happened to have those devices laying around...but a Treo 650? Really? Compared to keyboards on Smart Phones like the HTC Touch Pro or the Motorola Droid, Treo keyboards are quite difficult to type on.
Speaking of typing, what is up with the "Chiclet" style keyboards that are popping up on various laptop/netbook devices? Please please please don't tell me this is going to become the standard. I despise those types of keyboards with every fiber of my being. They sucked back during the PCjr days, they suck now, and they will suck forever. I could probably rant about them, tossing out vague insults, but since anyone sensible probably stopped reading this post already...i'll let it go.
I'm not a real developer. I'll readily admit that. I'm mostly a Network guy that happens to have written some stuff in C++, C#, VB, pHp, VBscript, Javascript, and Java. In the last four years, I've worked mainly in Windows environments and have been mostly using C++ or C#.
My foray into using eclipse came when I needed to develop an application on an Embedded board my company wanted to use in its project. The boards that were decided on supported only Java so I grabbed Eclipse and went to work on it. I wasn't very good at Java in the first place so when I found that the IDE had a far steeper learning curve than Visual Studio...I knew I had my work cut out for me.
There were plenty of forums and such with people giving offering advice on using Eclipse but a lot of it was "Use this plugin", "No, use this plugin instead" to the point where I had so many different plugins Eclipse became slow and I was just confused at times.
Somehow, I kept managing to blow up the built in web servers that are there for testing, to the point where I couldn't test my applications. I had to do a bunch of crazy stuff to get it to work again.
The Application I was developing relied on creating a GUI that allowed you to get and put information over a network from a serial port. I expected that dealing with the serial port commands to take a lot of time and effort. What I didn't expect was how difficult it was to lay out the damn GUI compared to how it is in Visual Studio.
Again, this was a first attempt at using Eclipse, I was using a language I wasn't terribly familiar with, and I was writing an application of a sort that I had never really written before. All that probably figured into my not so great experience with Eclipse. The project turned out great in the end though. It just took waaay more time than I expected.
You are spot on. Kids are so stupid. Think of the variety of things kids from different upbringings do. Play video games, ride bicycles, participate in team sports, go fishing, go skateboarding, listen to "Rock and Roll Music", hang out with their friends "talking" (if you can call it talking....99.9% of the time they are discussing some stupid social stuff), go shopping, maybe even drink or do some drugs. All that time wasted obsessing over stupid little things like "oh, I can't throw a ball through a hoop" or "oh, I want to interact on a social level". Don't they know that there is Calculus to do? History to learn? Computers to be programmed? Fucking lazy motherfuckers think they can get away with not learning 18 hours a day. Hell, most of them aren't even awake 18 hours a day. Weaklings.
And we wonder why society is going to hell. Children these days don't commit all of their time preparing for adulthood. Enough of that "Let them be kids" bullshit. I say if we catch them playing one of these "Dragon Dungeon" thingies, we should take them out to a rock quarry and have them pound stone with sledgehammers all day, as that is the only type of work they'll be suited to if they spend their free....er...valuable learning time doing something that they find enjoyable. Maybe for every hour they spend playing one of these so called RPG's we should keep them awake Clockwork Orange style, showing them historical documentaries to make up for the time they wasted.
Dude...seriously....maybe you need to hit up some RPG sessions again. You obviously are taking yourself way too fucking seriously. Back in middle/high school I played AD&D with a rotating group of about 10 people. I've done reasonably well for myself thus far but I must say....out of the 10 in that group I'm probably about the 8th or 9th most successful.