I've shared an office with folks whose opinion I trust, who have worked alongside Dimon. The guy is a full-on sociopath. Even if I was a member of the same party as he is, I wouldn't want him anywhere where he could reach the executive branch with a 10 foot pole. Dimon has screwed enough folks over from his position(s) of power in the finance industry. Do you REALLY want somebody like that running a nation?

I figured it would be something like that. I've got an AD domain already and enough experience with configuring it to be dangerous although that's an area where I wouldn't claim to be an expert. I wonder if the group policy settings for updates will continue to apply to win10? I guess I'll just test it on the tablet. If it works and keeps updates the way I want, THEN I'll think about the gaming box.

...over which updates are installed and when, then I'll consider upgrading the gaming machine. Forcing auto-update is probably ok for grandma, but I'm an IT professional that actively maintains my machines and as such I do not want to give up that control. Every patch Tuesday I look through the list of updates and decide if I want to exclude any, then schedule their installation at my convenience. The ONLY thing that updates automatically on that machine is the definitions for my anti-malware stuff. Everything else is "notify me and let me schedule it" The win8 tablet that I use to display musical scores can be updated because that's got a limited role and something going sideways on that won't inconvenience me much. The other devices are all linux or android anyway.

Some may be but not all. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The studies mostly just haven't been done, or if they were done they were internal to companies like Monsanto and were not published in a peer-reviewed journal. If you're introducing a gene for a foreign protein that the parent crop could never produce then that should be treated like any other food additive and should require testing for safety and the results of that testing to be part of the public record. Since corporatist governments will never go that far, at least label the suckers so those of us that frankly do not trust companies like Monsanto to operate in the publics best interest can avoid 'em. I'm NOT saying GMOs in the food chain is a bad thing per se, they can be a huge benefit in terms of agricultural productivity and can advance the business of food production by leaps that were inconceivable to previous generations. But as long as we're dependent on a big corporation saying "Trust us, they're fine. Eat up!" I'll be saying "No, thanks!"

Frankly, that's a bogus argument. Selective breeding requires that the "parent" stock CAN interbreed. Introducing genes that code for some foreign protein that is derived from a totally different species is a different kettle of fish entirely. Speaking as a (former) molecular biologist I want that stuff labelled.

So suppose this works as described and we have a functional method of initiating pulses of controlled fusion in a rocket engine that when vented out the nozzle produces usable thrust. Let's make that nozzle thinner and a bit more tubular than conical - a few hefty magnets around to to keep all that fusing stuff in a nice thin stream. While we're at it lets anchor the other end of the rocket to something HUGE that the thrust isn't going to have a prayer of shifting. Except here we call it recoil, because if you have made a fusion rocket you have also created the other staple of grand space opera... A plasma cannon :)

I too have made the jump into that industry, and I would tell the OP that the key is looking for a position within it that needs the knowledge and analytical thought skills they have already developed. The finance industry is, in many ways, somewhat balkanized - there are developers and architects who speak a totally different language to bankers, accountants and fund managers and they in their turn are dealing with industry regulations that were written by lawyers rather than financial professionals. A good software guy who can learn to be as fluent in the language of business and finance as they are in the language of IT folks is well suited to take on an analysts role, taking business needs and turning them into formal sets of software requirements. Particularly with the current chaotic state of financial regulation in the world economy there's a very high level of churn in the regulations the finance industry is operating under and in-house tool-sets are needing a LOT of updates right now. Software developers and QA folks are fairly common but folks who have the ability to take business logic defined (naturally so) in the language of that business and produce detailed requirements that tell a developer EXACTLY how the code they are writing is to behave are rarer.One just has to remember that one is not actually responsible for coding it any more and stick to telling the dev teams WHAT it must do in sufficient detail that they can properly design HOW it does it :)

Exercise a little google-fu and check out the Best Buy corporate HQ near the Minneapolis/St Paul airport... When they built that it seemed so appropriate and in line with their corporate attitude that they'd be headquartered in a bunch of sandcrawlers. We try to avoid buying from them but if we're running out of options, somebody in the family will always say "well, in the last resort we could go look what the Jawas have got... "

When they started introducing the post-nuke flash-sideways stuff I said to myself "oh $#!+, they are going to do a damn ghost whisperer/jacobs ladder/riverworld saccharine-fest at the end of this."

The series would have stood on its own without the ENTIRE sideways arc and its preachy-teachy allegory. The sideways arc just detracted from the main "really happened" island story. Maybe it wouldnt have if it had actually been an alternate timeline and the writers had come up with an interesting way to recombine them, but the "now you're all dead and its time to go to the light" stuff?

*puke*

Just skip over every single bit of the flash-sides when you watch it on DVD.. That superfluous allegory in the metaphysical swamp just chews the legs off the story and isnt worth your time.

You are very much mistaken about the state of multiple monitor support on Linux.

I probably am, all I know of it is what I've read. I don't have first hand experience with multiple monitors in Linux. I do have first hand experience with the double monitors at work, under Windows. By afternoon, alt-tab stops working. I don't know if thet's Microsoft's fault or the video card's fault, as they're using the software that comes with the card.

When they first installed the second monitor, Windows thought there were three of them. I had to go in and remove a driver to make it work.

I don't believe you. Hardware updates are optional

I had it set to automatic update, and went through hell trying to find out why I couldn't get on the internet. I thought the cat had broken the modem (it was on the floor the morning it broke), the ISP saw the modem and thought it was the network card. I thought maybe a cable, and had I not reinstalled Windows because XP had disabled the software that came with my CD burner, informed me of it with one of those annoying balloons on every boot, and wouldn't let me uninstall it I would have bought a new networks card.

I stopped letting it update automatically after that, of course.

If you load a help option in a Linux program, more often than not it launches your web browser and takes you to a site with some documentation with chapters listed in the ToC but whose contents are "This chapter has not been written yet."

Yes, I've run across that.

THERE IS NO FUCKING EXCUSE for a browser not to follow web standards. If it fails to do so it should be promptly uninstalled. Anyone compelling to do otherwise should be shot. The end.

Well, I DO have a background in genetics and to be honest I probably wouldnt need a sequencing machine to create something evil.

Give me the enzymes and nucleotide stocks, some e coli and some M13 bacteriophage. a couple glass plates and some acrylamide I'm quite capable of sequencing without one, thank you very much!

Not that much sequencing would be required, Monsanto have already done that work and have kindly provided a template with a known target sequence (the gene for the thuringensis toxin) already under the control of a highly active promoter. So lets start our hypothetical experiment with a sample of BT corn.

Ideally we'd look for a single-peptide toxin and recent research has provided a much "better" payload than either ricin or any other plant or bacterially derived peptide toxin and again much of the required preliminary work has already been done. We're going to replace the gene for thuringensis toxin with PRP and make sure, by site directed mutagenesis, which requires the same reagents and skills as sequencing, that as many as possible of the polymorphisms that encourage the refolding of this protein into the PRP-Sc form are present. Sure it will take time and persistence, but the techniques are no challenge.

Theres your upwind "pollen bomb." Mad Corn Disease, anyone?

I am a farmer and I will say I do NOT trust corporate big ag business (nor ag college academia that relies on the same big business for funding and has tame scientists in and out of the same big business) to be self regulating as to safety concerns nor do I trust the governmental regulators because of the revolving door "jobs" aspect that occur. (exactly the same as occurs with Wall Street/Federal Reserve/Treasury/SEC revolving door jobs).

I'm an ex-molecular biologist and I dont trust 'em either. Modern genetic techniques do indeed have the potential to bring tremendous benefits and I'll even go so far as to say the profit motive has a role in driving the deployment of some of those benefits but thats only with the most rigorous and transparent testing and verification. THAT is what we dont have, instead we have regulators willing to take the word of the guys who stand to make a huge pile from a favorable result of the testing. The end result of this will indeed be, as you predict at the end of your comment, that some minor factor which in testing was argued away as insignificant or negligible will become significant when the product is deployed on such scales as are applicable to food production.

I hope we're both wrong, but I dont believe we are.