I applied for a position with the US State Dept(feeling adventurous? They have openings!) and got a CPO (Conditional position offer). They didn't have polygraphs, but they did do most of the rest of the deal, interviewing all your friends and neighbors from everywhere you lived the past 7-10 years. Bizzaro this is, the position was working on computer systems in embassies overseas. Lots of travel, hey, I've ALWAYS loved traveling to foreign countries and learning the languages and such. Bzzzt. Penalty. Strangely enough, people who have spent long periods of time overseas and could handle traveling alone to god-knows-where on a moment's notice are the ones who have the most difficulty getting through the security exam. (I had lived in Germany, Russia and China before that) They really want people who have never left their hometown, and have had the same friends and neighbors for the past 20 years. Two things really tripped me up: Credit report (clean it up BEFORE considering applying) and possibly my at the time fiancee who was chinese. Whoops. Well, they declined. But that took TWO YEARS to make a final decision. Interestingly, if you've ever been through the process, you can get all the paperwork they did on you through the Freedom of Information Act. Takes FOREVER thought. I got all my FoIA documents about two years after they declined me. The most interesting part of the whole escapade? In my file, among all the interview transcripts, there was a standard form (agency, location, what was reported, blah blah blah) that was COMPLETELY redacted. Talk about a freakout. What was it they know that I'm not allowed to know?!? Someday after the heebie-jeebies wear off, I think I'll frame that page and put it on my office wall.
I live in China. If you go to the electronics market, people practically drag you into their stores to buy DVDs and VCDs. All software you can possibly imagine, and movies usually 3 days out of the theater. Average price: USD$1 for a movie, up to $10 for a really big software set. And the chinese only sell things when they make money on them, of course. Don't give me that "communist" nonsense. Sure, the substructure of the country is commie, but at the street level and more it's free-wheeling capitalism. The reason it's so cheap is they are paying production costs ONLY, obviously. That's what pirates do. And absolutely NO-ONE in China will buy legit games if they are not only marginally more expensive than copies (like 10-15%)
Not sure where I'm going with this, but thought it might be interesting.
Nope. Still read-only, and zero sftp support. Tried that just yesterday. On the upside, it's MUCH more stable and doesn't hang when disconnecting or coming out of sleep.
From the help file:
To connect to FTP servers, type the DNS name or IP address for the server like this:
ftp://DNSname
Note: From the Finder you connect to FTP servers with read-only access. To copy files to an FTP server, use another program such as Safari.
That last one threw me for a loop. Safari? What the heck...?
I've been using it for about two weeks now, and I'll say that hands-down expose' is the best thing to have to get people's attention when you want to show off a computer. I'm in China, where Macs are a rare breed, and when I show people expose' their eyes practically pop out of their heads. It's worth it just for that.
By the way, how do I type the accent mark in a slashdot posting? Safari lets me enter it, but slashdot strips it.
Whoops, you're right. Strike "power-generating". What I meant was more along the lines of "a reactor that CAN be made to generate electricity", as opposed to electrostatic confinement fusors, which have fundamental problems with being used as a generation device.
I actually read quite a bit on these devices a few weeks ago when the cold fusion article came up on/.
One of the things I came across was Fusor, which is essentially a site for people who do this as a hobby. The most interesting thing I found was a link to the work of a gentleman named Eric Lerner. He actually has a workable, scalable, power-generating reactor. His is based on "dense plasma focus". Thing is, he's already got the thing to 1 billion degrees - and he's going for the big time - the aneutronic p-B11 reaction. That only generates alpha particles - which can be directly converted into electricity. No nasty turbines or steam! Pretty amazing.
Actually, I can think of one extremely interesting application for this idea - cryptography. It is actually highly intelligible, but definitely bound to give any code-breaking algorithims headaches when trying to correlate know words to patterns. I may have to try doing this to send messages to my friend in a chinese prison. I'm sure it would give the censors fits trying to translate it.
Quote from the article:
A North Carolina county prosecutor charged a man accused of running a methamphetamine lab with breaking a new state law barring the manufacture of chemical weapons. If convicted, Martin Dwayne Miller could get 12 years to life in prison for a crime that usually brings about six months.
Six months?!?!?? I think the drug laws are kinda whacked, but do you blame a prosecutor from trying to get a stronger sentence any way he can? The guy was manufacturing meth, fer gawd's sake. Not like he was smoking a doob or doing an occasional line.
Regardless of the data, a lot of people will only see this issue through the prism of their preconceived political agendas. I'm not against good data, far from it, but this is such a highly charged subject I'd like to know if they are going to be completely open about the data and the methods applied to it. That MIGHT help.
Exactly. I was the hardware/network guy for a startup that grew into about 50 people. 90% of our staff were salespeople on the phone all the time. Early in the operation I had one of the sales managers try out an iMac. He loved it. The boss loved it when someone opened an attachment on a computer that had somehow had the virus checking software frobbed, which brought all the windows machines on the network to their knees. That the guy on the Mac was the only one making sales that day was MORE than enough convincing the boss needed to let me convert the entire sales force over. Now we have an Xserve with networked directories, so the salespeople don't even get a break if their machine bursts into flames. Grab another seat, log in, it's all there. The lost productivity of one morning spent cleaning up a windows mess MORE than pays for that Xserve.
Chinese? You must be joking! I've been in China since last December, and the coverage here was ridiculously slanted. One would have thought the Americans had invented some sort of smart bomb that only targeted old women, children and puppies by the kind of coverage they had here. Whereas the reality was, they went out of their way NOT to target civilian populations.
Can we PLEASE get the "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." with just straight reporting and not put editorial/opinion comments DIRECTLY in the lead? That's what the comments are for.
Check out Lemo for endplugs (warning: flash). They make the best, hands-down. I once soldered up a patch panel with 1200 of these things...it was a work of art.
Perhaps they should have just included CueCat barcodes....[ducks thrown objects]
Solves the Catch-22
on
Mac OS X Hints
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I for one love the website. But I'd also love to buy the book, being that occasionally I'll run up against a knotty problem that prevents me from getting online to check to see if there is a solution. The site tends to have a lot of really neat obscure things you won't find easily anywhere else.(yes, in true geek fashion, I have multiple machines, they just aren't always available)
So what if 50% of the nation plows with oxen and washes clothes by hand? With appropriate and judicious distribution of resources, with effective management, with proper education, I daresay that people will live longer and more happily in such a nation.
Gosh that sounds like....Communism. Sure worked great for the first 35 years of new China. Only 30 million dead, what's that all in the name of "judicious distribution of resources"?
I'm a westerner living here in China for some time. It could be that the Chinese just want to get things done. They have an enourmous bureaucracy, but all in all, they just plan stuff, and THEN DO IT. Hell, I come from the Wash DC/Baltimore corridor, and in less time it takes them to do studies on "Why not?" the chinese planned and built a maglev of approximately the same scale as they are planning in that area. Yes, China is a crazy place, but they have one hell of a "can-do" attitude. It's a messy process, but it's a LOT cleaner here than it was in 1995. Progress will do that. And to anyone who's experienced the air pollution here, they NEED more non-air polluting power sources in China.
Violent obsessions?!? All I can say is that trailer is going to give me more NIGHTMARES than violent outbursts. I doubt I'd ever sleep again if I played the whole thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I applied for a position with the US State Dept(feeling adventurous? They have openings!) and got a CPO (Conditional position offer). They didn't have polygraphs, but they did do most of the rest of the deal, interviewing all your friends and neighbors from everywhere you lived the past 7-10 years. Bizzaro this is, the position was working on computer systems in embassies overseas. Lots of travel, hey, I've ALWAYS loved traveling to foreign countries and learning the languages and such. Bzzzt. Penalty. Strangely enough, people who have spent long periods of time overseas and could handle traveling alone to god-knows-where on a moment's notice are the ones who have the most difficulty getting through the security exam. (I had lived in Germany, Russia and China before that) They really want people who have never left their hometown, and have had the same friends and neighbors for the past 20 years. Two things really tripped me up: Credit report (clean it up BEFORE considering applying) and possibly my at the time fiancee who was chinese. Whoops. Well, they declined. But that took TWO YEARS to make a final decision.
Interestingly, if you've ever been through the process, you can get all the paperwork they did on you through the Freedom of Information Act. Takes FOREVER thought. I got all my FoIA documents about two years after they declined me. The most interesting part of the whole escapade? In my file, among all the interview transcripts, there was a standard form (agency, location, what was reported, blah blah blah) that was COMPLETELY redacted. Talk about a freakout. What was it they know that I'm not allowed to know?!? Someday after the heebie-jeebies wear off, I think I'll frame that page and put it on my office wall.
I live in China. If you go to the electronics market, people practically drag you into their stores to buy DVDs and VCDs. All software you can possibly imagine, and movies usually 3 days out of the theater. Average price: USD$1 for a movie, up to $10 for a really big software set. And the chinese only sell things when they make money on them, of course. Don't give me that "communist" nonsense. Sure, the substructure of the country is commie, but at the street level and more it's free-wheeling capitalism. The reason it's so cheap is they are paying production costs ONLY, obviously. That's what pirates do. And absolutely NO-ONE in China will buy legit games if they are not only marginally more expensive than copies (like 10-15%)
Not sure where I'm going with this, but thought it might be interesting.
Cripes, now global warming is causing more severe storms in SPACE also!
Nope. Still read-only, and zero sftp support. Tried that just yesterday. On the upside, it's MUCH more stable and doesn't hang when disconnecting or coming out of sleep.
From the help file:
To connect to FTP servers, type the DNS name or IP address for the server like this:
ftp://DNSname
Note: From the Finder you connect to FTP servers with read-only access. To copy files to an FTP server, use another program such as Safari.
That last one threw me for a loop. Safari? What the heck...?
I've been using it for about two weeks now, and I'll say that hands-down expose' is the best thing to have to get people's attention when you want to show off a computer. I'm in China, where Macs are a rare breed, and when I show people expose' their eyes practically pop out of their heads. It's worth it just for that.
By the way, how do I type the accent mark in a slashdot posting? Safari lets me enter it, but slashdot strips it.
Whoops, you're right. Strike "power-generating". What I meant was more along the lines of "a reactor that CAN be made to generate electricity", as opposed to electrostatic confinement fusors, which have fundamental problems with being used as a generation device.
I actually read quite a bit on these devices a few weeks ago when the cold fusion article came up on /.
One of the things I came across was Fusor, which is essentially a site for people who do this as a hobby.
The most interesting thing I found was a link to the work of a gentleman named Eric Lerner. He actually has a workable, scalable, power-generating reactor. His is based on "dense plasma focus". Thing is, he's already got the thing to 1 billion degrees - and he's going for the big time - the aneutronic p-B11 reaction. That only generates alpha particles - which can be directly converted into electricity. No nasty turbines or steam! Pretty amazing.
Actually, I can think of one extremely interesting application for this idea - cryptography. It is actually highly intelligible, but definitely bound to give any code-breaking algorithims headaches when trying to correlate know words to patterns. I may have to try doing this to send messages to my friend in a chinese prison. I'm sure it would give the censors fits trying to translate it.
Quote from the article:
A North Carolina county prosecutor charged a man accused of running a methamphetamine lab with breaking a new state law barring the manufacture of chemical weapons. If convicted, Martin Dwayne Miller could get 12 years to life in prison for a crime that usually brings about six months.
Six months?!?!?? I think the drug laws are kinda whacked, but do you blame a prosecutor from trying to get a stronger sentence any way he can? The guy was manufacturing meth, fer gawd's sake. Not like he was smoking a doob or doing an occasional line.
Regardless of the data, a lot of people will only see this issue through the prism of their preconceived political agendas. I'm not against good data, far from it, but this is such a highly charged subject I'd like to know if they are going to be completely open about the data and the methods applied to it. That MIGHT help.
Anybody know where I can get a list of those China proxy addresses? They aren't on Anonymizer's website, and I'd sure like to use one.
Best way to travel in a war zone?
Try Robert Young Pelton's website....lots of fun going to The World's Most Dangerous Places
Exactly. I was the hardware/network guy for a startup that grew into about 50 people. 90% of our staff were salespeople on the phone all the time. Early in the operation I had one of the sales managers try out an iMac. He loved it. The boss loved it when someone opened an attachment on a computer that had somehow had the virus checking software frobbed, which brought all the windows machines on the network to their knees. That the guy on the Mac was the only one making sales that day was MORE than enough convincing the boss needed to let me convert the entire sales force over. Now we have an Xserve with networked directories, so the salespeople don't even get a break if their machine bursts into flames. Grab another seat, log in, it's all there. The lost productivity of one morning spent cleaning up a windows mess MORE than pays for that Xserve.
Chinese? You must be joking! I've been in China since last December, and the coverage here was ridiculously slanted. One would have thought the Americans had invented some sort of smart bomb that only targeted old women, children and puppies by the kind of coverage they had here. Whereas the reality was, they went out of their way NOT to target civilian populations.
Can we PLEASE get the "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." with just straight reporting and not put editorial/opinion comments DIRECTLY in the lead? That's what the comments are for.
When a Nimitz carrier shows up off a foreign shore, everyone understands that America ``cares enough to send the best.''
Check out Lemo for endplugs (warning: flash). They make the best, hands-down. I once soldered up a patch panel with 1200 of these things...it was a work of art.
Perhaps they should have just included CueCat barcodes....[ducks thrown objects]
I for one love the website. But I'd also love to buy the book, being that occasionally I'll run up against a knotty problem that prevents me from getting online to check to see if there is a solution. The site tends to have a lot of really neat obscure things you won't find easily anywhere else.(yes, in true geek fashion, I have multiple machines, they just aren't always available)
So what if 50% of the nation plows with oxen and washes clothes by hand? With appropriate and judicious distribution of resources, with effective management, with proper education, I daresay that people will live longer and more happily in such a nation.
Gosh that sounds like....Communism. Sure worked great for the first 35 years of new China. Only 30 million dead, what's that all in the name of "judicious distribution of resources"?
I'm a westerner living here in China for some time. It could be that the Chinese just want to get things done. They have an enourmous bureaucracy, but all in all, they just plan stuff, and THEN DO IT. Hell, I come from the Wash DC/Baltimore corridor, and in less time it takes them to do studies on "Why not?" the chinese planned and built a maglev of approximately the same scale as they are planning in that area. Yes, China is a crazy place, but they have one hell of a "can-do" attitude. It's a messy process, but it's a LOT cleaner here than it was in 1995. Progress will do that. And to anyone who's experienced the air pollution here, they NEED more non-air polluting power sources in China.
Hot damn you can! (in the rush to a meaningful first post attempt, I didn't look)
Tiny Tanks!
Yes, but can I control those tiny tanks that were spammed to death last christmas?
Hey! You're right! Wasn't Taco Bell the only restaurant left after the fast food wars...oh, wait a second...wrong dystopian future.
Violent obsessions?!? All I can say is that trailer is going to give me more NIGHTMARES than violent outbursts.
I doubt I'd ever sleep again if I played the whole thing.