This is similar to all those people who show quicker learning times for learning how to fly after playing Microsoft Flight Simulator. There are a number of studies being done in the Air Force where high-end machines equipped with MSFS and a planes that match the ones that are used for actual in-air and simulator practice and they're noticing that the students that spend the time "gaming" are quicker to learn cockpit instrumentation locations, how to read the instruments and how to operate the controls.

It's a leg up over someone who goes in never having any sort of practice before entering flight school.

So it's not surprising. Some of those Wii party games require a pretty precise set of motions to achieve the game objectives. Which is again very similar to what they have to do once they get their hands on the laproscope controls and the additional practice gives them a leg up on someone going in bline with no practice on remote, precision movements.

They ought to start thinking on how to incorporate such game-like training into any training program that would benefit from such practice.

No really. I am.

Far too often we focus on the crime and the criminal and don't care one toss for rehabilitation or reintegration into society. Kevin managed to do something stupid 18 years ago, got his ass busted for it, paid his debt to society and now is taking his talents and managed to find a legit and legal way to utilize them.

Good on ya mate.

So I'm OK with this. He turned his life around and instead of sitting on his ass and complaining how unfair life is that he got caught, he kept his nose clean, got past his probation (which denied him access to computers), pulled himself up by his bootstraps and made something positive out of the situation.

Whether or not his company is competent to handle that sort of job? Well that's on him and the staff he has hired.

The bulk of my data is stored on redundant, external hard drives. Actually they're normally internal drives but I have the USB to HDD adapter...so they're as good as. Also I have a Media Center/Fileserver PC that has the third copy of all the important data. One of the drives is in a safe deposit box at the bank.

But while the data is on a couple of drives, I also have some of the data I'm actively using on several other sources.

Music for example is stored on the two drives but at the same time they're on my PC, my Wife's PC, the Media Center/Fileserrver PC and the laptop as well as a pair of iPod Classics.

Works in progress are saved on flash drives as well as on Google Drive. This gives me the advantage of working on them regardless of my access. I could be on a trip, have the taxi back over my laptop case, go and buy another one, access WiFi and I'm back in business once I've DL'd OpenOffice and the Google Drive for PC.

Then too I also have my PC's imaged on to DVD so I can do quick restores (important when kids DL viruses). 15 minutes to restore the image, another hour to pull data from the server PC or from the disks themselves...and I'm back in business.

This didn't come from any level of paranoia or anything. I just had the habit of keeping my data drives from older PC's that were retired. After a while I decided to consolidate them into a pair of 2TB drives that I had a coupon for.

Fuck the karma, I'll name 3 and you take your pick: Obama, Reid, or Pelosi.

Let's see: first re-elected by low information, single issue voters on the dole.

Second: Unions. So much so the AFL/CIO, et al said "We did this!"

Third: Well, it *is* California...no explanation besides "bat-shit insane" elects in kind.
And I lived there while serving, but I suppose I was insulated from the crazy.

I mean really, c'mon we re-elect one prez on another (Clinton) prez's record.

Wow, just fucking wow.

Maybe I should go down to the local gun store and buy the AK-47 I've wanted for a long time and *gasp* NOT kill anything with it, just use it for fun at the range.

  I suppose it is time to move down to Mexico, at least I can get weapons for cheap, courtesy of Fast and Furious' gun running fiasco.

First of all, unless the cell phone is being provided by my company I feel no obligation to do any work from it (apart from being available to be reached when I'm on call or in an emergency). So unless they provide the phone or subsidize my wireless bill...they're putting a phone in my desk.

Secondly I work in a hospital. We configure the patient call system and the heart monitors to ring to the assigned nurse's handset phone (which is an extension of the PBX system). So going phone-free would be a hardship to our facility.

We may be trending that way but I don't think that the end of the PBX Office Phone network is nigh

If passwords are getting cracked so quickly these days, what then is the answer? Authenticators are all well and good, but I don't have room on my keychain for one for Blizzard (I know about and have the one for my iPhone), one for Amazon, one for PayPal and eBay, one for Gmail, etc and so forth.

What would be a viable solution then?

Last year I succumbed to Facebook's nagging and I finally opted to raise my security to the HTTPS setting. Largely to shut it the @#$% up.

Nagging was worse than ad-supported software.

However once I did that my troubles began. None of the games I played would run under the HTTPS and instructed me to drop back to the HTTP security. However once I did that, Facebook was nagging me "Did I really want to do that?" and "Are you certain that this is wise? The higher security is better to protect your identity".

After several attempts I gave it up and left it at the HTTPS setting. Haven'y played a Facebook game or ran a Facebook app since.

So my question is...what's going to happen to all the people who are addicted to all the apps and games? Will they *finally* run under the higher security setting? Or are we going to hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth as people start going into withdrawal when they can't check on their farms to see if they got the magical macguffin of the week?

[I didn't notice that my comp was logged off of my account and posted it as an anon-coward]

It's been so long now that I honestly forgot what it is supposed to be. I mean I now know what it is thanks to the comments here and some research on my own, but all I can remember from the first time they announced it's creation was I was so disappointed that all I could see is a webpage with vague promises and platitudes and an email update feature that was not working. So from then till now, I honestly forgot what it was supposed to be.

For that matter I even forgot the name.

Actually I'd love to read up on the speech jammer. I've often had my cell phone do the very thing. Repeat my words with a slight delay and it is nearly impossible to hold a conversation while listening to myself a half second later.

is there a reliable way to change IE9 or 10 to look normal or like IE8 like I can do with firefox?

Particularly:
no unified buttons
menu bar
normal size address bar (not the tiny one IE9 has)

There's a few other minor things, but the 3 above have made me switch back because IE9+ just puts me off quickly....like the
longest I've tolerated it was an hour and a half.

I'm largely self taught, but instead of the programming route, I went more into networks, OS's, hardware, etc.

In '93 I had dreams of being EE (electrical engineer) after .mil service and being a damn good tech and teacher of fellow students.
Somewhere about calc2 that dream died and I discovered computers (mandatory for EE'ish people) and I was good with those
because I was doing things real UNIX admins were doing and students would see and say "You can do that!?"
(no surprise, a lot of that stuff is trivial and standard...now).

Anyway, a big part of my success was being able to communicate to the highers and lower ends of the tech spectrum, which
a lot of "CS" people could not do, and still have a difficult time doing even today.

But even ignoring that, IMO: CS is more than just programming because experience and constant reminders show this:
Excellent programmers, especially in CS/academia don't have a clue about their machines and what goes on behind the
scenes.

Case in point: a very good friend of mine was one of those clueless users, but a fantastic programmer whose pr0n surfing got
him a nasty bug on his laptop. He could not figure out how to get rid of it, much less easily do a nuke and reload w/o
backing up stuff he could not afford to lose.
Well, when he got a job doing embedded systems (he'd never dealt w/ hardware) he was worried about getting canned w/in
a month or less. My advice was "Dude, don't worry, you'll love it because it fits you perfectly and you'll do well".

That was over a year ago, and I was right because he has that anal retentive, laser like focus and over caffeinated mindset
that need control freaks w/ some creative leanings.

I say that, to say this: knowing that, he barely passed the intro to linux and windows class that I aced because of a lack of
experience and the class itself contained good material but was schizophrenic at worst and disorganized at best.

Sadly, very few profs will listen to those of us with experience IRL/exp/jobs because they are put in a box, and in most cases
have never seen the inside of a "box" (computer), have never run a network, but teach networking in a way that confounds
"CS" people but benefits computer engineers, as another poster alluded to.

So, the "is it worth it" question boils down to "yes" if you got the exp, drive and love of the field, because my future adviser
saw my resume when I was getting into school and asked, and I quote directly "why the hell are you going back to school".
Money and a degree, because I got in when the 'pendulum' swung from degree/certs to skill/exp and I wanted to cover both.

Of course for a good decade I was never unemployed for more than 3 weeks because of skill, exp, and reputation that I'd build
over that period.

A degree is worth it in most cases whether you do it forwards or bassackwards like I did, but you have to like/love it and learn
the field and not get boxed totally into one mindset, namely "just programming".

(yeah, programming is a good chunk, but is not the 'end-all-be-all' when you are faced with: building a webserver, network,
custom workstation for X, Y, Z task, explaining why things work, how they work and at what cost an such, when a specialist
in programming will just say "Ummmm...."
Fun moments of a_non_moose: Prof: "what'll you do when a problem you can only solve by programming comes about?"
'moose: "Hire, or have hired someone who knows what the fuck they are doing more that I do, like twice in my career, so far" .
Two or three times I've been asked that, and answered the same. The looks of satisfaction and/or astonishment of the best
answer I think they've ever gotten is still priceless)

Got an Asus G73JH whose boot time was in the 2 minute range (from bios menu to desktop plus another
30+ seconds to be usable once on the desktop...ack) on a > 1.5 year old windows7 install.

If I were not in .edu, wipe and reload...as is, did a system image (had to fight that, too)

Pure SSD was still too pricey and storage too small, so I tried a hybrid drive (8G SSD attached).

One word: "Wow".

Fresh install of win7, 20 seconds flat and ready to go.

Restored image as mentioned above: 45 seconds +/- 10 sec and off to the races.

Now, granted I could have gotten a cheap and small SSD and put it in the second bay, but until I
can get a 750G+ SSD for less than $200 *aaaand* boot in 20 seconds, I'll likely stick with
straight mechanical but I'm really liking the hybrid route.

A hybrid with enough room for a complete OS (128G or so?) would more than give me what I seek
if done right.

I've far too gorram many movies that already lock me out of the controls until I am forced to watch the government warnings, the anti-piracy commercials, the advertisements for the Blu-Ray format and how spiffy it is, the coming features...

I have one disk that literally forces me to sit there for 15 minutes before I can get to the menu, another 20 seconds of the menu's fancy-dancy artwork to finish, then another 15 seconds of the studio's bullcrap.

And they wonder why people go to piracy?

In my case I found a nice way to get around it. Quasi-legally in fact. And the idea came from the DVD/Blu-Ray Piracy software sector. When I found out that the software to defeat the copy-protection and the region encoding also defeated the control lockouts, I did my research and found one that was cheap and works. I went with Slysoft's AnyDVD software.

Now when I built my Media Center PC with the Blu-Ray drive, I have that program running. *If* I were to be pirating the movies, this program allows the next program (a ripper/compression/burner) to do its job. But as a nice side effect it deactivates the lock-outs and allows me to load a disk, bring up my DVD Software (VLC) and go straight to the menu. The only wait I have now is if there is the studio promo but I can tolerate 5-15 seconds as long as I'm not forced to watch 20 minutes of crap.

And this is why it's not going to make much of a difference. Either they're going to go up against people like us who are tech-savvy enough to do the same thing that I did and tell them to slag off, or they're going to up against pirates who are going to rent the movies from Blockbuster/Netflix/Redbox and burn copies (assuming that they just don't download .ISO's from The Pirate Bay).

Or they're going to shoot themselves in the foot by pissing people off to the point where they stop getting DVD's altogether and start using the online streaming providers. Between Netflix and Blockbuster's streaming services...I can get most of the movies and shows I want without having to worry about DVD lockouts and government warnings.

And there is the added benefit of watching over and over again and not having to worry about a physical disk to get scratched.

If they want to price storage out of the hands of the end users and thus cripple themselves then more power to them.

A tax like that is not going to do a damn thing for them because people won't be able to afford them and will either do without (and we get to read many MANY articles about how their aging tech running their government goes "tits up" on them) causing the government to not get any money or they find ways to smuggle the hard drives in on the black market also denying the government their tax money.

Either way this will be of vast amusement to us here on /.

Digital monkeys flinging digital poo at us.

Oh well. It would still be better than Trade Chat in World of Warcraft.