The friend who got me into WoW had an account on a PvP server, so I started out on that server. He was rarely around so I left and found a PvE server I could level on without getting jumped by some jackhole 40 levels higher than me.
At the time I compared the PVP server there (Along with the model in Eve and even Ultima Online) to a mall in which a gang would hang out and anally rape anyone who went to that mall. And they'd tell people, "If you don't want to be anally raped, go to a different mall!" And then they'd act confused when no one came to their mall.
Eve people say "Oh, well just join a corporation!" but there really aren't that many successful corporations out there. The stoner corp I was in forgot to refuel their wormhole POS and got it, the carrier they'd had defending the place, and a hundred million or so isk worth of battleships I'd parked out there in case anyone needed to do station defense blown up. And even though they were apparently stoners, they were STILL more successful than a lot of the corps in Eve.
I'd love to see an authentication method, which could probably be implemented with a kinect, where the computer starts playing some music and demands that you perform a sexy dance. It makes about equally as much sense, but would make work MUCH more funny!
Pretty much, yep. I have a call go to voice mail every couple months that appears to be a demand in Spanish for a ransom for a relative they've claimed to have kidnapped. You can set up VOIP and operate your scam with impunity in another country. Even if someone manages to track it down, they'll just bust a few call center operators. They're never actually going to catch the guys who are running the show.
So they can drop 100 million on controller design but can't be bothered to make a surveymonkey poll to find out that their users still want to be able to sell used games before they shoot their mouth off about it at the opening presentation? The only thing that was more fun than watching that train wreck is the anticipation for SONY somehow managing to fuck up the golden opportunity they've been handed. However they do it, I'm sure it'll be epic. I mean, they could NOT fuck it up, but it's SONY we're talking about here...
Having a couple cars catch on fire out of the number that are on the road is no big deal! Cars catch on fire every day! Why look at this Tesla right here, it's a masterpiOH GOD I'M BURNING! WHY?!
Number of terrorists caught by the TSA. Number of people killed by plastic guns in the last 10 years. Number of people killed on 9/11. Number of people killed by gun violence last year. Number of people killed in auto accidents last year. Number of people killed in household accidents last year.
Ooh here's an idea! Let's redirect a small percentage of the funds going to the TSA to enforcing safe driving and educating people on the dangers of poking things with sticks while standing on ladders. We'll save far more lives with far less effort. I guess a couple hundred thousand deaths a year isn't a big deal if some 24 hour news network isn't being hysterical about it.
After poking around in the comments it sounds like that was the case. Guy shoulda waited a couple hundred more jumps. Any time you turn you lose some altitude. They discourage you from turning basically at all under about 200 feet when you're training. You discover you can tweak it 10 to 20 degrees if you're heading for a tree or a pond or something. If you're heading toward power lines or a fence or something, you really should have thought of that above 200 feet.
Swooping is an advanced discipline of skydiving where you initiate a dive at a specific altitude and hopefully level out just above the ground. Quite a lot of the time you see "low turn" in a skydiver fatality, it's due to someone trying that and smacking themselves into the ground at 70+ mph. The first time I saw anyone do it was driving past the local dropzone on my way to work. Since there were buildings in the way I didn't see them land and was certain I was going to hear ambulances shortly. Apparently the local 911 dispatch gets so many calls from people on the road, they call the dropzone to verify their services are needed prior to sending anyone 'round.
So why would anyone do that, then? I guess for the same reason they jump out of airplanes in the first place. If you google on "Swooping is Awesome," you'll find a number of videos from their point of view. The control they have is pretty amazing -- last week someone posted one of a lady swooping into a moving convertable. It's not something I ever plan to get into. I enjoy the ride down and am not in a big hurry to get back to the ground.
Low turns kill most of us. Looks like he was fairly new, don't expect he'd have been into swooping yet. Though if he was, that would kind of explain it.
We all know the risks. The accident rate really isn't that high, around 1 jump in 100K results in a fatality. I feel safer jumping out of a plane than I do driving down to the city to train in the wind tunnel. The rewards are worth it. Everyone dies, not everyone really lives.
The one I use on my Android phone is Advanced Call Blocker. I found several similar apps, but this one does everything I'm looking for with a minimum of fuss. It's a paid app, but was only a couple of bucks and worth every penny. I think I'd have a hard time having a phone without this functionality now. I will disable it occasionally if I'm actually expecting a call from someone whose number I don't know, but I almost never do that.
On the landline side, I don't recall which SIP gateway I bought last. They're nifty little devices you plug into your landline and into your ethernet switch, and when a call comes in they convert the call to a VOIP call and initiate a session with a SIP server. The gateway I bought had a web-based config page and was pretty easy to set up. You could probably set up asterisk on a Raspberry PI or something that doesn't suck too much power. You just need a little space you can write to for a voice mail box. You can do some nifty tricks with a setup like that -- you could install sipdroid or some other sip client app on your cell phone and have the asterisk server try to ring that. If you're not within range of your wlan, you could have it fail over to your voicemail box immediately. I played around with having it dial back out via a VOIP account if the call was from someone on a whitelist, effectively transferring the call to my cell phone. I had some issues with call quality doing that, though -- I'm pretty sure I didn't have echo cancellation set up correctly somewhere in the loop.
You can also have asterisk do least-cost routing. I'd have it dial 800 and local numbers over the landline, try to find data address via enum with e164.org for other numbers and as a last resort dial long distance numbers using a voip account. Technically you don't need a landline in that mix, but at the time my bandwidth was severely limited and the landline was usually a cleaner connection.
There are already several apps for things like that. The one I use doesn't allow calls to reach my phone unless they're in my contacts list. It drops others into my voicemail. If they leave a voicemail, I'll check to see if they're someone I want to talk to. If they are, I'll add them to my contacts and call them back.
If you have a land-line, you can buy a SIP gateway, run asterisk and set up a similar system with asterisk. I've done that, too.
It's not so much that as it is fraud. Claiming someone's responsible for a clause they never actually agreed to, and billing them for it is fraud. Submitting that bill to a collections agency is fraud and harassment. There shouldn't be a lawsuit. The operator of that site should be arrested. And then there should be a lawsuit.
The problem is not the language. It's the attitudes of programmers. Lazy programmers don't want to have to think about the problem they're trying to solve, and they think the code is the end goal. Except the code is not the end goal. The code is a means for the company you're working for to achieve higher productivity with the same number of resources. In order to do that, specific problems within their business need to be solved faster. In order to achieve that goal, one must first understand the problems. And most of the terrible, terrible programmers that I've had to clean up after in the last couple decades would obviously go to any extreme to not have to understand the problem, much less figure out a reasonable way to solve it. Hell a few of them didn't even understand how to program, which is the problem you have to solve BEFORE you can solve the problem of helping your company be more efficient with its resources.
You can try to make things more simple all you want, but even if you could tell the computer what to do in plain English, you still have to completely understand what you're telling it to do! And on that side of things, most of the clients I've talked to generally failed to some extent (Sometimes miserably) as well. Most in-house business software and a fair bit of the stuff that's sold commercial is the result of not-very-articulate clients telling not-very-good-programmers what they want, and those not-very-good-programmers crapping out a steaming pile of code that has as much of a chance of harming the business as helping it.
It's very rare that I see a dev team throw something away, unless it's an entire project. Once something's written, people seem to treat it as carved in stone, and they never look at it again. I was looking at some code a while back that output a file full of numbers in a particular format. Over the years the format had changed a few times. Their solution for addressing that was to write a new piece of code that took the original output file, and reformatted it to the new output version. The next time a format change came along, they did the same thing again using the file their reformatter had output! There was a lot of other nonsense in there that was apparently written so that they'd never have to go back and change anything that had already been written. And that kind of mentality seems to be pervasive in the industry (though usually not to THAT extreme.)
So people bitch about that or business process and I tell them "Well if it's not working for you, FIX it! It doesn't HAVE to be this way, we could just do things differently!" And they look at me as if I'd just suggested the Earth is flat.
You're thinking his gun's made of plastic! It's going to explode the moment he pulls the trigger! Well to be honest I'm not really sure myself. So you should ask yourself... Do ya feel lucky, punk? WELL, DO YA?
I was helping a friend debug an assembly language function the other day. Now I haven't touched assembly in a couple of decades and in the course of helping him I remembered why, but that's another story. Anywhoo I took his function, googled on the gcc calling convention, added a few lines to pull parameters off the stack from a C call and wrote a C program to set the memory up and call it. After seeing that it segfaulted, I dropped the application into gdb and quickly found a couple of conditions he hadn't taken into account in a loop. This was causing memory pointers to go all over the place and subsequently be written to. I sent him back my notes on where his function was going wrong and the output of the C program. His response was something to the effect of "How did you do that?!"
This probably saved him a few hours of work. After I was done, I was reflecting on the quality of the tools at my disposal. Calling the assembly language function from C was significantly easier than it was on the last platform I tried it on, and even though gdb isn't particularly friendly it is an extremely useful debugging tool once you know your way around it. His IDE had crapped about 50 files into his project structure and had turned out to be a significantly less capable tool for all its vaunted "user friendliness." It probably took me less time to set up make with targets for the.c,.asm, executable and clean than it did for him to set the project up originally in his IDE, and I had no additional clutter in my project directory.
Programmers and marketroids these days are far too enamored of shiny geegaws that don't add anything useful to their application. I have on several occasions witnessed a team throwing framework after framework at their application in the hopes that doing so would fix their program. It never seemed to occur to them to just sit down and actually understand the problem they were trying to solve. Occasionally I'll hear an excuse like "Waah, writing an SQL join is TOO HARD!" To which my response is, "It's still the most efficient way to do this, and IT'S YOUR FUCKING JOB!" If you don't think about the structure of your data, you're going to have a bad time. Nothing is a suitable replacement for knowing your tools, knowing your data and knowing the business process you're trying to automate with your program. Pff, kids these days.
I'm pretty sure you could put together a damned fancy chat system for a lot less than 3 billion dollars. Assuming you didn't just want to throw together an IRC or jabber server. Of course, they're more after the established user base, which they will start alienating as soon as they acquire the company. It'd be a bit harder to jam advertisements down the throats of users on IRC or Jabber.
I'm also pretty sure you could buy a number of companies with actual tangible assets and much more interesting IP for a lot less than 3 billion dollars, too.
It's not like the space program or any other technological advancement stands in isolation. A lot of problems that need to be solved to launch manned and unmanned missions can be applied at home, and new materials and technological jobs will benefit a wider range of the population. It's not like we were a bastion of economic success when we launched the moon missions either. As I recall, a good chunk of the 70s were spent in a recession, and a large part of our space program was designed to distract the population while frightening Russia with our prowess in rocketry. We've certainly benefited directly and indirectly from the things we learned doing that, too.
It's good to see other nations step up as the people of the USA lose sight of the long term benefits that continuing exploration brings. While we gut our economy and research apparatus for short-term political and economic gains, other nations can continue to grow. At least someone is pushing us forward.
Slashdot Mirror
At the time I compared the PVP server there (Along with the model in Eve and even Ultima Online) to a mall in which a gang would hang out and anally rape anyone who went to that mall. And they'd tell people, "If you don't want to be anally raped, go to a different mall!" And then they'd act confused when no one came to their mall.
Eve people say "Oh, well just join a corporation!" but there really aren't that many successful corporations out there. The stoner corp I was in forgot to refuel their wormhole POS and got it, the carrier they'd had defending the place, and a hundred million or so isk worth of battleships I'd parked out there in case anyone needed to do station defense blown up. And even though they were apparently stoners, they were STILL more successful than a lot of the corps in Eve.
I'd love to see an authentication method, which could probably be implemented with a kinect, where the computer starts playing some music and demands that you perform a sexy dance. It makes about equally as much sense, but would make work MUCH more funny!
Or you can't log in to anything while browsing with two...
Pretty much, yep. I have a call go to voice mail every couple months that appears to be a demand in Spanish for a ransom for a relative they've claimed to have kidnapped. You can set up VOIP and operate your scam with impunity in another country. Even if someone manages to track it down, they'll just bust a few call center operators. They're never actually going to catch the guys who are running the show.
So they can drop 100 million on controller design but can't be bothered to make a surveymonkey poll to find out that their users still want to be able to sell used games before they shoot their mouth off about it at the opening presentation? The only thing that was more fun than watching that train wreck is the anticipation for SONY somehow managing to fuck up the golden opportunity they've been handed. However they do it, I'm sure it'll be epic. I mean, they could NOT fuck it up, but it's SONY we're talking about here...
Having a couple cars catch on fire out of the number that are on the road is no big deal! Cars catch on fire every day! Why look at this Tesla right here, it's a masterpiOH GOD I'M BURNING! WHY?!
I do all my taxes on monkeybagel.com. Monkeybagels will do your taxes in about an hour! Tax-doing monkeybagels!
Ooh here's an idea! Let's redirect a small percentage of the funds going to the TSA to enforcing safe driving and educating people on the dangers of poking things with sticks while standing on ladders. We'll save far more lives with far less effort. I guess a couple hundred thousand deaths a year isn't a big deal if some 24 hour news network isn't being hysterical about it.
Swooping is an advanced discipline of skydiving where you initiate a dive at a specific altitude and hopefully level out just above the ground. Quite a lot of the time you see "low turn" in a skydiver fatality, it's due to someone trying that and smacking themselves into the ground at 70+ mph. The first time I saw anyone do it was driving past the local dropzone on my way to work. Since there were buildings in the way I didn't see them land and was certain I was going to hear ambulances shortly. Apparently the local 911 dispatch gets so many calls from people on the road, they call the dropzone to verify their services are needed prior to sending anyone 'round.
So why would anyone do that, then? I guess for the same reason they jump out of airplanes in the first place. If you google on "Swooping is Awesome," you'll find a number of videos from their point of view. The control they have is pretty amazing -- last week someone posted one of a lady swooping into a moving convertable. It's not something I ever plan to get into. I enjoy the ride down and am not in a big hurry to get back to the ground.
Wait 60 years and see if you still think so.
2014 is just a month and a half away, and you can compile 4.9 now from the dev branch of their subversion tree.
We all know the risks. The accident rate really isn't that high, around 1 jump in 100K results in a fatality. I feel safer jumping out of a plane than I do driving down to the city to train in the wind tunnel. The rewards are worth it. Everyone dies, not everyone really lives.
On the landline side, I don't recall which SIP gateway I bought last. They're nifty little devices you plug into your landline and into your ethernet switch, and when a call comes in they convert the call to a VOIP call and initiate a session with a SIP server. The gateway I bought had a web-based config page and was pretty easy to set up. You could probably set up asterisk on a Raspberry PI or something that doesn't suck too much power. You just need a little space you can write to for a voice mail box. You can do some nifty tricks with a setup like that -- you could install sipdroid or some other sip client app on your cell phone and have the asterisk server try to ring that. If you're not within range of your wlan, you could have it fail over to your voicemail box immediately. I played around with having it dial back out via a VOIP account if the call was from someone on a whitelist, effectively transferring the call to my cell phone. I had some issues with call quality doing that, though -- I'm pretty sure I didn't have echo cancellation set up correctly somewhere in the loop.
You can also have asterisk do least-cost routing. I'd have it dial 800 and local numbers over the landline, try to find data address via enum with e164.org for other numbers and as a last resort dial long distance numbers using a voip account. Technically you don't need a landline in that mix, but at the time my bandwidth was severely limited and the landline was usually a cleaner connection.
If you have a land-line, you can buy a SIP gateway, run asterisk and set up a similar system with asterisk. I've done that, too.
That would explain the absence of a couple of co-workers at work today. I thought the excuse "24 hour AIDs" was a little suspicious.
It's not so much that as it is fraud. Claiming someone's responsible for a clause they never actually agreed to, and billing them for it is fraud. Submitting that bill to a collections agency is fraud and harassment. There shouldn't be a lawsuit. The operator of that site should be arrested. And then there should be a lawsuit.
Perhaps you should reconsider the quality of the people you associate with. Just sayin'
You can try to make things more simple all you want, but even if you could tell the computer what to do in plain English, you still have to completely understand what you're telling it to do! And on that side of things, most of the clients I've talked to generally failed to some extent (Sometimes miserably) as well. Most in-house business software and a fair bit of the stuff that's sold commercial is the result of not-very-articulate clients telling not-very-good-programmers what they want, and those not-very-good-programmers crapping out a steaming pile of code that has as much of a chance of harming the business as helping it.
So people bitch about that or business process and I tell them "Well if it's not working for you, FIX it! It doesn't HAVE to be this way, we could just do things differently!" And they look at me as if I'd just suggested the Earth is flat.
He was delicious.
I nixed the bad actors by putting all my projects on github.
You're thinking his gun's made of plastic! It's going to explode the moment he pulls the trigger! Well to be honest I'm not really sure myself. So you should ask yourself... Do ya feel lucky, punk? WELL, DO YA?
This probably saved him a few hours of work. After I was done, I was reflecting on the quality of the tools at my disposal. Calling the assembly language function from C was significantly easier than it was on the last platform I tried it on, and even though gdb isn't particularly friendly it is an extremely useful debugging tool once you know your way around it. His IDE had crapped about 50 files into his project structure and had turned out to be a significantly less capable tool for all its vaunted "user friendliness." It probably took me less time to set up make with targets for the .c, .asm, executable and clean than it did for him to set the project up originally in his IDE, and I had no additional clutter in my project directory.
Programmers and marketroids these days are far too enamored of shiny geegaws that don't add anything useful to their application. I have on several occasions witnessed a team throwing framework after framework at their application in the hopes that doing so would fix their program. It never seemed to occur to them to just sit down and actually understand the problem they were trying to solve. Occasionally I'll hear an excuse like "Waah, writing an SQL join is TOO HARD!" To which my response is, "It's still the most efficient way to do this, and IT'S YOUR FUCKING JOB!" If you don't think about the structure of your data, you're going to have a bad time. Nothing is a suitable replacement for knowing your tools, knowing your data and knowing the business process you're trying to automate with your program. Pff, kids these days.
I'm also pretty sure you could buy a number of companies with actual tangible assets and much more interesting IP for a lot less than 3 billion dollars, too.
It's good to see other nations step up as the people of the USA lose sight of the long term benefits that continuing exploration brings. While we gut our economy and research apparatus for short-term political and economic gains, other nations can continue to grow. At least someone is pushing us forward.