You don't "upgrade" your CEO's PC. You buy a new one, you build it, you rip an image of his/her old PC, load it on a VM and copy what you need. You stop by his/her office the next morning and show them the new PC, introduce them to any new OS functionality they'll need to become familiar with, and ensure that all of their applications and data exist and work.
If anything goes wrong, you still have the VM of the old machine you can fire up on any box to keep them working till you fix the issue.
If you are running off with the CEO's PC for 20 hours (especially over business hours), you should fear for your job's security.
The Lord of the Rings is one story broken (almost abitrarily) into three segments.
You should really read the book some time. If you had, you would have known that it is actually 6 books, published in pairs.
Also, get a spell checker. It only takes a second to run, makes you look smarter, and after you've corrected the same word for the 15th time, you'll actually start to remember the correct spelling.
Which is still a poor point, as per your own example, 22+ years expired between the creation and the popularization of the invention. Even under modern patent law with a 20 year monopoly, the patent STILL would have expired before the could recoup the R&D costs.
The purpose of IP isn't to secure the long term viability of corporations, it is to give a short term market advantage to invetors in exchange for the knowledge to become part of the public domain. The goal at the end of the day is to increase the size of the public domain, not the pocket book.
No idea what your local issue is, but in Wisconsin I have never had an issue with using 911 from my cell. Even calling in debris in the road on interstate I'll get piped to the local county's 911 operator who forwarded me to the highway patrol, but I had the info passed on before I was more than a few miles down the road.
I'm all for Google getting Chrome on to vendor boxes, but it's not likely going to "end" IE. Nor should it! It should open up more competition and force MS (Chrome and Fire Fox too!) to improve their standards compliance though.
If Chrome manages to "end" IE's existence, how are we as consumers helped? We're stuck with Google overlords instead of MS overlords? Wow, that's a great improvement...
We are much better served by having multiple main stream browsers that all force each other to maintain tight adhesion to standards and to continue to push innovation.
I am not going to go out and buy W7 for either of my existing PCs, but I usually build a new rig every 2 or 3 years. When the 3Ghz i7 chips and DDR3 memory prices drop to a more reasonable price, I'll likely build a new PC with Windows 7 as the OS...
Although, Ubuntu has come a long way since I last ran it.
That's how I'm reading this as well. Pain in the ass employee that they just wanted to get rid of. I didn't catch the location, but if it was an at-will employment State, why not just give the usual "your services are no longer required by this organization" line, 2 weeks severance, and send her on her way?
No, an "external force" is an end user putting the device in an oven at 350 degrees, or driving a nail through the battery.
Damn it, I knew I shouldn't have brought my iPod with me on that framing job while wearing my Kiln pants. I accidentally put my iPod in the wrong pocket just before I accidentally shot myself with a nail gun. And then the damn iPod blew up!
I remember talking to the admin at one of the colleges I attended. We asked them how they did their scheduling. The rumor was that the Dean would lock himself in a hotel room with a map of the school, the student list, the course catalog, and the teacher list, and 3 bottles of whiskey for a long weekend.
After which, he would take a weeks vacation while everyone marveled over the new schedules.
HIPAA isn't an entity, and doesn't have "its own web site". You appear to be referring the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Civil Rights web site about HIPAA.
What is this, the second grade? You're going to go off on some completely unimportant minuscule semantic that holds no value in the topic of debate? What's next, you'll refuse to debate based on the presence of koodies on your opposition?
IME (and I work directly with HIPAA rules a lot) more people, including a disturbing number whose jobs are touched by HIPAA, think that the acronym pronounced 'Hi-pah' is spelled HIPPA and have no idea what any of the letters stand for.
IME (and I worked for a company dealing with specific health services) more people make assumptions about the privacy of their medical information with out knowing how it is protected, how it is shared, and who has access to it. I would venture a guess that the vast majority of the US population believes HIPAA provides them with more privacy and control than it actually does.
Which is exactly the point I made to the original poster. He expected that these individuals medical information would be protected by HIPAA. But the medical information in question was obtained by their employer, which tosses the privacy rule out the window.
The really funny thing is that they probably had each of the players tested sign a HIPAA acknowledgment form.
Many organizations that have health information about you do not have to follow this law.
Examples of organizations that do not have to follow the Privacy Rule include:
* life insurers,
* employers,
* workers compensation carriers,
* many schools and school districts,
* many state agencies like child protective service agencies,
* many law enforcement agencies,
* many municipal offices.
Once your employer has your health information, they are not bound to the Privacy Rule.
I'm not saying HIPAA is all bad, but a lot of people have the misconception that the "P" in HIPAA stands for Privacy and that HIPAA is designed solely to protect them. Neither of which is true.
TL;DR version - old military lingo from the Marine Corps
Long version -
In the Marine Corps, you have different MOSs (Millitary Occupational Specialty). They are broken down into broad groups. In the Army/Airforce/Navy, you can get guaranteed placement in a specific MOS. In the Marine Corps you can only get a guaranteed Field.
MOS's are 4 digit codes, the first 2 digits are the field, the second two are the occupation. For instance, 03## is a grunt. Someone who is on the front lines, putting rounds down range. The second two numbers indicate if you are a basic rifleman, a machine gunner, armory, or any number of other specific jobs.
All things IT related used to be lumped into the 40## field. Whether you were an RPG coder, a DBA, a network admin, ADA flight systems coder, what ever. Just to get into the 40## you had to do pretty well on your ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) test. The ASVAB is broken into a bunch of different parts, the important one for the 40## field though, is the General Technical score. IIRC it ranges from 0-140 or 150. You need to get a high ASVAB score to get into the 40## field, but to get into the 4067 MOS (computer programmers) you needed to have a 110 GT score or better.
They system wasn't perfect, but it ruled out most of the square peg-round hole guys. Even so, you wound up with a handful of marines in the 4067 field that still couldn't handle basic programming logic event after a 12+ week training course. Those people, the guys and gals who just barely squeaked by, were referred to as the "110ers" (one-ten-ers). Implying that they had just enough intelligence to get in above their head.
All of this is defunct now as under the start of the Bush administration the 4067 field was scrapped, all programming duties was sold off to contractors, and the 40## field was merged down to the 06## field and almost all IT work was outsourced.
Ahh, I should have put that limitation on my post.
I have no distinct knowledge of New York state laws. But in the state of Wisconsin, the above statement would not meet the requirements for libel.
As I have learned first hand. Although, in my case, they phrase was "She couldn't teach a 2 year old to crap itself" in regards to a social studies teacher at Herzing College in Madison, WI.
Exception handling used for process control. Functions with 27 exit points. GUI threads running I/O. Databases with tens of thousands of tables with no referential integrity.
Odds are this guy is a 110'er. "Smart" enough to copy his code. Dumb enough to do it over the network.
"Rick, I think you're a retard," is opinion. "Hey everyone, Rick is a retard," is slander/libel/defamation (dependent on mode of delivery and jurisdiction). M'kay?
Not m'kay.
You saying, "Hey everyone, Rick is a retard" is not libel. For numerous reasons: 1) I am unharmed by your statement. My reputation and well being have not be damaged. There is no injury, so there is no libel. 2) The possible readers of this post have no reason to believe that you have any knowledge or standing to make such an assessment. You do not point out your authority, nor is the local readership likely to infer that you have any meaningful authority over my medical diagnosis. 3)/. threads are more akin to a discussion in a bar as opposed to a published editorial in a newspaper, which means that slander/libel laws are significantly less likely to be enforced.
All these reasons also apply to the original case. The Model had virtually no grounds for a libel lawsuit, that's why it got dropped. Why the judge allowed her to go after the speaker's identity with such a flimsy case is what bothers me.
Now, if I had said, "I work in the social services field and I have been helping Roger cope with his mental retardation for the last 5 years.*" After which point you suffered due to that statement, THEN we would be talking about defamation. Until then, I'd just be another a-hole on the internet.
-Rick
*to be clear: I am not a social service worker, and I have no knowledge of your mental status.
I too am in the "learn as you use" camp of classless gaming. But I would go further.
Especially given the lessons we can learn from WAR and other more PvP based games.
When you think of all abilities in all games, you can classify them as Healing, Damage, Cleansing, and Crowd Control. You also have 4 different deliveries: Point target, target AoE, point blank AoE, and front arc/directional. You also have a number of other effects like: Action time, energy consumption, critical change, range, chance to disrupt, penetration, cooldown, etc...
The biggie from every PvP game I've seen is the balancing of Crowd Control. IMO, you should never lose control of your character completely for more than 2 global cooldowns (3 seconds in most games). You should never lose the ability to move for more than 3 global cooldowns, you should never lose the ability to attack/cast for more than 4 global cooldowns, you should never be stuck with a movement debuff for more than 5-6 global cooldowns, etc...
All those numbers can be balanced, but you can classify them all down to: 1. Knock down - can not attack/cast/move 2. Snare - movement speed debuff only 3. Root - movement halted 4. Disarm/Silence - appropriate abilities are unusable 5. Knockback/Pull in - target is moved rapidly away from or closer to the caster
And you would have to have immunity timers built in based on the classification of the CC, not the specific CC ability nor as a blanket 'all CC' immunity.
My argument is to open it all up. Lets say you start out a new character. You find a "scroll of Lightning". You read it. You now have a very basic lightning spell. It does a small amount of damage to a point target with a small chance to crit, a long cast time, and little likelihood of penetrating armor/resists or causing a disruption. After casting it 10 times, you learn a bit more about the spell. You can then put a point in to damage, crit chance, cast time, etc. Or you can save your points up till you've cast it 30 times and spend 2 points to make it heal your friendly target at the same time it damages an enemy. Of course, each time you increase any effect of the spell, the cast time, cooldown and energy consumption will increase as well. So sure you can get a super powerful spell, but you'll have to get a 15 second window to queue that bad boy up and it'll drain every bit of energy you have. But honestly, if someone is sitting in range of your shot from hell for 15+ seconds, they probably deserve to get hit;)
It would be a completely dynamic system where you could have a melee attack that does a frontal cone knock down, or a bow shot that drains life from the target, or a blast of icy water that slows a target down.
At that point, the balancing become easier, IMO, as you have a set of abstract functions that you can adjust as needed. What would be the truly challenging part, would be a dynamic animation system that could generate the required graphics for the huge array of possible attacks.
Anyway, that's been rattling around in my head for a while now. Go find a developer crazy enough to try it with better production quality than Darkfall!
The sumary describes 2 different ways of getting a DNA match. The first being to get a tiny same. They second being to look at the target match and create a match by stringing together snippets that will show the same key factors.
The first is the one we want, the second is.
The solution would seem to be to treat testing locations like encryption. We should be storing genetic sequences in some type of hash so the would be testers don't know what the target is;)
Good as in good for me. A free lunch. That's what a fish sees in a baited hook.
And again, we get into moral relativism;)
Good and Evil are at their very core, thought crimes. You can do the greatest thing ever for the worst reasons and some will see you as good while others see you as evil.
In the case of the fish for instance: 1) By eating that food I will become stronger and able to mate with more fish to propagate my species. 2) Bob is going to go for that food, I better get it now or he'll get it instead. 3) Bob is starving, if I eat this food he will die and I will get to piss on his grave.
In all three cases, the fish did the exact same thing. But in each of the cases we would qualify the fish as either Good, Greedy, or Evil.
The dangers of a short term gain and a long term loss have much more to do with an educated consumer base that is well informed and aware of the repercussions of their acts. Because, in the case of the fish, whether he was good or evil, he was caught by the long term loss that he was unaware of.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't "upgrade" your CEO's PC. You buy a new one, you build it, you rip an image of his/her old PC, load it on a VM and copy what you need. You stop by his/her office the next morning and show them the new PC, introduce them to any new OS functionality they'll need to become familiar with, and ensure that all of their applications and data exist and work.
If anything goes wrong, you still have the VM of the old machine you can fire up on any box to keep them working till you fix the issue.
If you are running off with the CEO's PC for 20 hours (especially over business hours), you should fear for your job's security.
-Rick
The Lord of the Rings is one story broken (almost abitrarily) into three segments.
You should really read the book some time. If you had, you would have known that it is actually 6 books, published in pairs.
Also, get a spell checker. It only takes a second to run, makes you look smarter, and after you've corrected the same word for the 15th time, you'll actually start to remember the correct spelling.
-Rick
Which is still a poor point, as per your own example, 22+ years expired between the creation and the popularization of the invention. Even under modern patent law with a 20 year monopoly, the patent STILL would have expired before the could recoup the R&D costs.
The purpose of IP isn't to secure the long term viability of corporations, it is to give a short term market advantage to invetors in exchange for the knowledge to become part of the public domain. The goal at the end of the day is to increase the size of the public domain, not the pocket book.
-Rick
No idea what your local issue is, but in Wisconsin I have never had an issue with using 911 from my cell. Even calling in debris in the road on interstate I'll get piped to the local county's 911 operator who forwarded me to the highway patrol, but I had the info passed on before I was more than a few miles down the road.
-Rick
The comment was rated funny because:
1) We assume that everyone here is intelligent
And
2) There isn't a "Dumber than horse shit" rating
-Rick
I was afraid they were Sarah Palin Volunteers!
-Rick
Error establishing a database connection
I'm all for Google getting Chrome on to vendor boxes, but it's not likely going to "end" IE. Nor should it! It should open up more competition and force MS (Chrome and Fire Fox too!) to improve their standards compliance though.
If Chrome manages to "end" IE's existence, how are we as consumers helped? We're stuck with Google overlords instead of MS overlords? Wow, that's a great improvement...
We are much better served by having multiple main stream browsers that all force each other to maintain tight adhesion to standards and to continue to push innovation.
-Rick
You have managed to tweak my interest in Twitter.
I am suddenly compelled to tweet about someone else's life. Since my life is infact boring.
I think I'll go tweet about using hypnosis to escape from a hungry tiger. That would be exciting!
-Rick
I am not going to go out and buy W7 for either of my existing PCs, but I usually build a new rig every 2 or 3 years. When the 3Ghz i7 chips and DDR3 memory prices drop to a more reasonable price, I'll likely build a new PC with Windows 7 as the OS...
Although, Ubuntu has come a long way since I last ran it.
-Rick
That's how I'm reading this as well. Pain in the ass employee that they just wanted to get rid of. I didn't catch the location, but if it was an at-will employment State, why not just give the usual "your services are no longer required by this organization" line, 2 weeks severance, and send her on her way?
-Rick
No, an "external force" is an end user putting the device in an oven at 350 degrees, or driving a nail through the battery.
Damn it, I knew I shouldn't have brought my iPod with me on that framing job while wearing my Kiln pants. I accidentally put my iPod in the wrong pocket just before I accidentally shot myself with a nail gun. And then the damn iPod blew up!
-Rick
I remember talking to the admin at one of the colleges I attended. We asked them how they did their scheduling. The rumor was that the Dean would lock himself in a hotel room with a map of the school, the student list, the course catalog, and the teacher list, and 3 bottles of whiskey for a long weekend.
After which, he would take a weeks vacation while everyone marveled over the new schedules.
-Rick
HIPAA isn't an entity, and doesn't have "its own web site". You appear to be referring the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Civil Rights web site about HIPAA.
What is this, the second grade? You're going to go off on some completely unimportant minuscule semantic that holds no value in the topic of debate? What's next, you'll refuse to debate based on the presence of koodies on your opposition?
IME (and I work directly with HIPAA rules a lot) more people, including a disturbing number whose jobs are touched by HIPAA, think that the acronym pronounced 'Hi-pah' is spelled HIPPA and have no idea what any of the letters stand for.
IME (and I worked for a company dealing with specific health services) more people make assumptions about the privacy of their medical information with out knowing how it is protected, how it is shared, and who has access to it. I would venture a guess that the vast majority of the US population believes HIPAA provides them with more privacy and control than it actually does.
Which is exactly the point I made to the original poster. He expected that these individuals medical information would be protected by HIPAA. But the medical information in question was obtained by their employer, which tosses the privacy rule out the window.
The really funny thing is that they probably had each of the players tested sign a HIPAA acknowledgment form.
-Rick
On the Privacy rule, from HIPAA's own web site:
Who Is Not Required to Follow This Law
Many organizations that have health information about you do not have to follow this law.
Examples of organizations that do not have to follow the Privacy Rule include:
* life insurers,
* employers,
* workers compensation carriers,
* many schools and school districts,
* many state agencies like child protective service agencies,
* many law enforcement agencies,
* many municipal offices.
Once your employer has your health information, they are not bound to the Privacy Rule.
I'm not saying HIPAA is all bad, but a lot of people have the misconception that the "P" in HIPAA stands for Privacy and that HIPAA is designed solely to protect them. Neither of which is true.
-Rick
The "P" in HIPAA stands for Portability, not Privacy.
-Rick
TL;DR version - old military lingo from the Marine Corps
Long version -
In the Marine Corps, you have different MOSs (Millitary Occupational Specialty). They are broken down into broad groups. In the Army/Airforce/Navy, you can get guaranteed placement in a specific MOS. In the Marine Corps you can only get a guaranteed Field.
MOS's are 4 digit codes, the first 2 digits are the field, the second two are the occupation. For instance, 03## is a grunt. Someone who is on the front lines, putting rounds down range. The second two numbers indicate if you are a basic rifleman, a machine gunner, armory, or any number of other specific jobs.
All things IT related used to be lumped into the 40## field. Whether you were an RPG coder, a DBA, a network admin, ADA flight systems coder, what ever. Just to get into the 40## you had to do pretty well on your ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) test. The ASVAB is broken into a bunch of different parts, the important one for the 40## field though, is the General Technical score. IIRC it ranges from 0-140 or 150. You need to get a high ASVAB score to get into the 40## field, but to get into the 4067 MOS (computer programmers) you needed to have a 110 GT score or better.
They system wasn't perfect, but it ruled out most of the square peg-round hole guys. Even so, you wound up with a handful of marines in the 4067 field that still couldn't handle basic programming logic event after a 12+ week training course. Those people, the guys and gals who just barely squeaked by, were referred to as the "110ers" (one-ten-ers). Implying that they had just enough intelligence to get in above their head.
All of this is defunct now as under the start of the Bush administration the 4067 field was scrapped, all programming duties was sold off to contractors, and the 40## field was merged down to the 06## field and almost all IT work was outsourced.
-Rick
Ahh, I should have put that limitation on my post.
I have no distinct knowledge of New York state laws. But in the state of Wisconsin, the above statement would not meet the requirements for libel.
As I have learned first hand. Although, in my case, they phrase was "She couldn't teach a 2 year old to crap itself" in regards to a social studies teacher at Herzing College in Madison, WI.
-Rick
I have proof!
Exception handling used for process control.
Functions with 27 exit points.
GUI threads running I/O.
Databases with tens of thousands of tables with no referential integrity.
Odds are this guy is a 110'er. "Smart" enough to copy his code. Dumb enough to do it over the network.
-Rick
"Rick, I think you're a retard," is opinion. "Hey everyone, Rick is a retard," is slander/libel/defamation (dependent on mode of delivery and jurisdiction). M'kay?
Not m'kay.
You saying, "Hey everyone, Rick is a retard" is not libel. For numerous reasons: /. threads are more akin to a discussion in a bar as opposed to a published editorial in a newspaper, which means that slander/libel laws are significantly less likely to be enforced.
1) I am unharmed by your statement. My reputation and well being have not be damaged. There is no injury, so there is no libel.
2) The possible readers of this post have no reason to believe that you have any knowledge or standing to make such an assessment. You do not point out your authority, nor is the local readership likely to infer that you have any meaningful authority over my medical diagnosis.
3)
All these reasons also apply to the original case. The Model had virtually no grounds for a libel lawsuit, that's why it got dropped. Why the judge allowed her to go after the speaker's identity with such a flimsy case is what bothers me.
Now, if I had said, "I work in the social services field and I have been helping Roger cope with his mental retardation for the last 5 years.*" After which point you suffered due to that statement, THEN we would be talking about defamation. Until then, I'd just be another a-hole on the internet.
-Rick
*to be clear: I am not a social service worker, and I have no knowledge of your mental status.
Insults are not defamation. They are matters of opinion.
-Rick
I too am in the "learn as you use" camp of classless gaming. But I would go further.
Especially given the lessons we can learn from WAR and other more PvP based games.
When you think of all abilities in all games, you can classify them as Healing, Damage, Cleansing, and Crowd Control.
You also have 4 different deliveries: Point target, target AoE, point blank AoE, and front arc/directional.
You also have a number of other effects like: Action time, energy consumption, critical change, range, chance to disrupt, penetration, cooldown, etc...
The biggie from every PvP game I've seen is the balancing of Crowd Control. IMO, you should never lose control of your character completely for more than 2 global cooldowns (3 seconds in most games). You should never lose the ability to move for more than 3 global cooldowns, you should never lose the ability to attack/cast for more than 4 global cooldowns, you should never be stuck with a movement debuff for more than 5-6 global cooldowns, etc...
All those numbers can be balanced, but you can classify them all down to:
1. Knock down - can not attack/cast/move
2. Snare - movement speed debuff only
3. Root - movement halted
4. Disarm/Silence - appropriate abilities are unusable
5. Knockback/Pull in - target is moved rapidly away from or closer to the caster
And you would have to have immunity timers built in based on the classification of the CC, not the specific CC ability nor as a blanket 'all CC' immunity.
My argument is to open it all up. Lets say you start out a new character. You find a "scroll of Lightning". You read it. You now have a very basic lightning spell. It does a small amount of damage to a point target with a small chance to crit, a long cast time, and little likelihood of penetrating armor/resists or causing a disruption. After casting it 10 times, you learn a bit more about the spell. You can then put a point in to damage, crit chance, cast time, etc. Or you can save your points up till you've cast it 30 times and spend 2 points to make it heal your friendly target at the same time it damages an enemy. Of course, each time you increase any effect of the spell, the cast time, cooldown and energy consumption will increase as well. So sure you can get a super powerful spell, but you'll have to get a 15 second window to queue that bad boy up and it'll drain every bit of energy you have. But honestly, if someone is sitting in range of your shot from hell for 15+ seconds, they probably deserve to get hit ;)
It would be a completely dynamic system where you could have a melee attack that does a frontal cone knock down, or a bow shot that drains life from the target, or a blast of icy water that slows a target down.
At that point, the balancing become easier, IMO, as you have a set of abstract functions that you can adjust as needed. What would be the truly challenging part, would be a dynamic animation system that could generate the required graphics for the huge array of possible attacks.
Anyway, that's been rattling around in my head for a while now. Go find a developer crazy enough to try it with better production quality than Darkfall!
-Rick
The sumary describes 2 different ways of getting a DNA match. The first being to get a tiny same. They second being to look at the target match and create a match by stringing together snippets that will show the same key factors.
The first is the one we want, the second is.
The solution would seem to be to treat testing locations like encryption. We should be storing genetic sequences in some type of hash so the would be testers don't know what the target is ;)
-Rick
This protects students from radiation that cell phones emit, they do NOT block calls, text messages, etc.
So it blocks the radiation, but it does not block the radiation?
Sounds like a great investment, IMO!
-Rick
Good as in good for me. A free lunch. That's what a fish sees in a baited hook.
And again, we get into moral relativism ;)
Good and Evil are at their very core, thought crimes. You can do the greatest thing ever for the worst reasons and some will see you as good while others see you as evil.
In the case of the fish for instance:
1) By eating that food I will become stronger and able to mate with more fish to propagate my species.
2) Bob is going to go for that food, I better get it now or he'll get it instead.
3) Bob is starving, if I eat this food he will die and I will get to piss on his grave.
In all three cases, the fish did the exact same thing. But in each of the cases we would qualify the fish as either Good, Greedy, or Evil.
The dangers of a short term gain and a long term loss have much more to do with an educated consumer base that is well informed and aware of the repercussions of their acts. Because, in the case of the fish, whether he was good or evil, he was caught by the long term loss that he was unaware of.
-Rick