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Comment KILL THE CAMERA, KILL THE NERDYNESS (Score 0) 324

1) If you point a camera at everything, you are just an paparazzi douchebag begging to be punched. It doesn't matter that cameras have become de-rigeur on other technology, this isn't other technology.

2) Make it look like a REGULAR pair of glasses. Don't try to make it all Apple-chiq. There is a difference between a signature piece of technology that you take out to be cool, and something you are wearing all/most of the time. The first wearable tech should be unassuming and blend in, not stick out like a sore thumb.

Now for the stuff you should add in that only a face worn PDA can/should have. A) Project to both eyes for real 3D displays

B) Monitor your eyes. Not only should blinking be a command, but a solid camera pointed at your eyeball should be able to detect health issues.

Comment Schools? No. Cops, yes? (Score 4, Insightful) 323

Schools are not law enforcement agencies. Worse, they have repeatedly proven they are not trustworthy - even worse than cops. They are VERY easy for rather small minded, viscous people to take over, as repeatedly shown in Texas and other states. School boards are elected, not appointed, in small elections where most people simply don't care. This lets highly motivated fanatics take them over.

A prime example is how many school boards illegally try to harass black students in the 60s and homosexual students today.

Schools jobs are education, not law enforcement.

They can in no way be trusted with passwords.

The real problem is that people expect the schools to deal with the bullying. NO. Bullying is a criminal matter and the cops need to get involved. If the child in question is a severe bully, arrest and charge him.

If not, have social workers take over - and let the social worker assigned to the case have access to the password, not some school board.

Comment Result of the Glengary Speech . (Score 1) 271

If you haven't seen it, Alec Baldwin gives an incredible good performance in a one shot scene in Glengary Glen Ross. The speech itself is just an incredible mastery of art. Too bad it's also evil. The key line is "Coffee is for closers." which means that only winners get perks.

In that scene, he effectively preaches what I call "douchebag capitalism". The heart of his speech is that people should only be rewarded for success, not for trying. It is based on the false belief that success is entirely based on your innate nature, rather than on the tools you are given or the environment you are in.

So if you are a "Coffee is for Closers" person, then you fire all the people that are not closers. Then you hire a bunch of new people, hoping to get at least one 'closer'. Repeat Ad Nauseum.

The problem is it is based on a false world view. In reality, success is far more often built on the work of others. Whether any individual does well is usually mostly dependent on three things:

1) Have you been given the powers and tools necessary to do your job in your current environment (i.e. has your boss screwed up? - are you trying to sell gold plated crap in a recession? )

2) Your social skills. Can you make friends with your fellow employees and customers? Do they like AND trust you?

3) How hard you tried.

As proof, I will tell you what every HR person in the world knows - when you advertise most jobs you are generally flooded with resumes of people - all of whom on paper are competent to do the job. You are not looking for the one person that can do the job, but instead the person that fits into your corporate culture the best. Someone you will get along with, not someone that will miraculously solve all your problems.

Finally, and most importantly - how hard you tried is often determined on whether you are properly incentived for things BESIDES total success. It's not enough to give coffee to the winners, you also have to give it to the second placers.

Frankly, if an employee has not tried hard enough that usually means the BOSS has screwed up, not the employee.

Comment Definitely needs help (Score 1) 238

I called my mail order pharmacy today to deal with two separate issues:

1)My prescription had not arrived. When I asked why, they said my insurance company told them my service was 'term" as in terminated. I have no idea why the customer service person felt it was important to tell me the status code for terminated was "term", but she did. But I wasn't terminated. Had to call up the insurance company and get them to tell the pharmacy division (same company, but they can't talk to each other) that I had insurances. Apparently there was some kind of major problem and lots of people had the same issue, but most were fixed before they realized the problem existed.

2) I owed them $7. Apparently my insurance back in August only paid them partially for a prescription. But when they sent me a bill, they just said I owed them $7, rather than telling me what it was for. As I am not an idiot, I don't send money to people unless they tell me why I owe them. They promised to send me an itemized bill.

Clearly, the insurance industry (and the pharmacy division) are run by extremely competent monkeys. Or by extremely incompetent people. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference.

Comment Re:Planet X / Nibiru !!! (Score 1) 170

We've explored more of this rock than any other. That's the "mostly".

Finding the lost airliner isn't a matter of lack of exploration. That is, we can't recheck an entire ocean in a short period to see if the airliner is there now. I believe that part of the ocean was already mapped, so it has already been "explored".

Your airplane argument would be like saying you haven't explored your back yard, if someone tossed a beer can over the fence yesterday, and you didn't know about it.

BTW, I tossed a beer can over your fence yesterday, you should go clean it up, your yard is a mess.

Comment Re:Planet X / Nibiru !!! (Score 1) 170

Dude, it's from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I picked it on purpose, just to show that I wasn't totally serious. Damn, you'd think an obvious landmark from an extremely popular science fiction movie would be a hint to some people.

I'm not saying that it's an alien spacecraft. What I'm saying is, we wouldn't necessarily know if we saw one. Hell, people find all kinds of "lost" things in their own back yards. In the last year, someone found a viking burial site. Someone else literally found buried gold. Would you know if there was an ancient spacecraft buried 20 feet under your house?

I wasn't even trying to propose that alien spacecraft do have rock shielding. What I'm saying is there's a lot we *don't* know. Short of seeing a spacecraft that looks like a spacecraft as we'd expect it, we could easily overlook it.

Comment Re:Planet X / Nibiru !!! (Score 4, Interesting) 170

Everywhere is relative. There are an estimated 5 trillion habitable planets in the known universe. We've mostly explored one. On our closest neighbors, we've done roughly the equivalent of checking your back yard and saying "There are no whales". Well, unless you happen to have whales in your yard, then we'll say "... no elephants". :)

If there is/was life on other planets, it is very likely not to be in our solar system. Even if there was an species that achieved space travel, and spent millions of years settling on millions of planets, it's *still* not very likely they'd be found on one in our solar system.

Even if we found one, would we know what we're looking at? Since rock seems to be pretty abundant in the tiny speck of space that we've explored, a sand and rock covered hull of a spacecraft would be reasonable. That would help protect from micro-meteors and other hazards. If one crashed on a neighboring planet even 10,000 years ago, would just look like rock. Heck, if one crashed on Earth, it would still look like a rock.

Is this space craft remains, or a natural formation?

No, I don't believe it's a crashed spaceship. It's just a rock. But since we don't exactly do thorough core samples on every large rock on the planet (and under the surface), we wouldn't know if it was.

Comment Punish those that do not readily condemn?!?! (Score 2) 219

That sounds like a clear abuse of power.

"Yes, you called the terrorists evil, damn, evil S.O.B.S. But you paused before you said evil. Take him away BOYS."

It's bad enough to punish those that use their freedom of speech to praise criminals, but to go that far pushes you beyond the bar of reason and into tyranny.

If we used this in America, I think Obama could arrest the entire cast of Fox News for praising Putin. That is just plain wrong. Fox news should be laughed at, not arrested.

Comment Re:"Engineer" (Score 1) 78

An actual engineer would have at least figured out a way to make 1 optical drive read discs from both systems.

They're both SATA Blu-Ray drives. Seems like it should be possible, but would need a SATA data splitter (which doesn't exist), or a switch to flip all of the data pins between each motherboard. In SATA, that's only really 4 pins, since the other three are ground, so a 4-pole 2-way switch should do it... but you'd be killing the shielding, common mode noise rejection between pairs, etc. at the switch. So, while theoretically, it might work, in practice it may just spit out drive errors. At least one advantage is that the SATA spec includes up to a 1m cable length, and you'd only need about 10 centimeters, tops.

Comment There are certain appliances that this works for (Score 1) 172

Chief among them are the Dish washer and laundry machine.

But to be honest, 90% of the time, a simple mechanical clock works better than the crap they suggest.

Yes, you can save a small percentage by setting certain equipment, including your heater and refrigerator to switch to low power mode when power is expensive. Basically this expands the range by a couple of degrees. But the amount of money saved is not worth the HUGE invasion of privacy.

Especially not when simply improving your insulation will save your more money.

Submission + - Holder Severely limits Civil Forfeiture (washingtonpost.com)

gurps_npc writes: As most people know, the US has for quite some time let police steal pretty much anything they wanted to, forcing you to (expensively) go to court to get back your stuff. Most of the problems came about because the Federal government let the local cops keep most of what they took.
Eric Holder, the US Attorney General, has changed the rules of that program, making it more difficult for the police to do it under the federal program. They can still use local state programs, but that accounts for only about 57% of the cash taken. Note he did not end the program entirely, he left in some excepts that amounted to about 1% of the current federal program. Still with this action he will have struck a serious blow to a despicable practice that serious newspapers and comedy TV shows decried as nothing more than legalized theft.

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