Buy your coffee already roasted???

*yech*

hawk

>Not everybody's cats are as dumb as mine

Yes they are.

It is a Statistical Mystery as to how 99% of cats are it the bottom quartile of intelligence.

It may have to do with having a brain the size of a walnut . . .

hawk

> I can make an adapter for a Gillette razor if I
> wanted to without breaking any DMCA laws.

When I was in college, Safeway's generic/house brand used the same head.

I bought those, and pulled off the heads to snap on to the better handle . . .

(these were made with nice hard metal, unlike the bic disposables which would cut my face the first time I used them)

hawk

One of my partners bought one of these for the office.

Then we found reusable filter canisters that we could load with better coffee.

Then it broke.

Our staff makes better coffee without having to clean several of those a day.

hawk

Not just obvious, but prior art.

Just about any market does this; the change of price brings other players in, or causes them to leave.

I wrote code for a simulation in '95 or so that had the simulated merchants applying a quadratic equation to the amount that their sales missed the sell-out quantity. It was trivial to cause markets to clear, on just that one piece of information. (In fact, at one point, due to a coding error, the product was a "bad" rather than a "good"--and it still cleared at a negative price.

The algorithm for Uber would be trivial: once the wait time goes above or below its usual band, the price adjusts by some portion per time unit (e.g., 1%/minute) until the wait time is normal. Or include lagged time periods to damp oscillations.

This is just plain trivial. I, or any other computational economist, could sit around all day kicking out new algorithms for this.

It's really pretty simple: if you sell out to quickly, or can't service all your customers, raise your prices; if you have excess, lower them. Doing it by algorithm is nothing new; the trick to patentability would be to find an algorithm that not only hasn't been done before, but is actually better than the other trivially reachable algorithms.

I drove the demand in that model various ways, whether constant, sine waves, stochastic, saw tooth, and probably others I'm not recalling off-hand. A rather simple genetic algorithm rapidly converged in all cases. Mathematically, that method was probably mathematically equivalent to large classes, possibly all, other second order and lower and lower methods or solutions--and the method rather clearly could be extended to nth order . . . (second order methods tend to be sufficient for most things).

hawk

It's not the hyphens.

*ANYTHING* that cuts another vampire/zombie/werewolf book needs to be viewed as a goodthing . . .

hawk

Anyone who refers to Star Trek by a three letter acronym is just plain not the target audience.

(Unless, perhaps, it's TRO, for "The Real One")

Star Trek and its spinoffs have a minimal amount in common.

hawk

>Seriously. I just went through a stack of 5 Seagate
>HDDs, from different customers, with a sledge
>hammer. They all died with S.M.A.R.T. failures.

I've got to admire a firmware that can report

Error 215: Struck with sledge hammer.

hawk

That's why modern drives use helium instead of protons . . .

That sequel went straight to video. Other than watching him become Darth Squeaky after it got torpedoed, there was really nothing worth watching.

hawk

>Don't forget the original Hack on which Nethack is based - (basically) the same game, but on ASCII terminals (yes, I'm that old).

"tiles" is not nethack . . .

*proper* nethack is ascii only.

It was too easy to escape a two-doored shop in hack . . .

(and to this day, the "graphical" variants on nethack are gaming the ascii-based underpinnings)

hawk

Yeah, but you fell for a troll.

"one of the . . ."

who would fall for that???

nethack is the *only* game that *matters*

hawk

+1 to CISSP, I had essentially the same experience as the OP, and decided that IS manager tedious. I went and wrote my CISSP, got 'lucky' a couple of times with breach issues and poof, 5 yrs later I'm a Sr Infosec Manager.

While it doesn't have a practical component, I've met very few people who honestly say they left the exam knowing if they passed or failed. Most nerve wracking test I've ever sat for anyways. And most of infosec (absent specialties such as pentest, and even then arguably) is 90% thinking anyways. Very seldom is it important to know what command to type. Much more important to know the theory like the back of your hand.

All that having been said, if you don't like handling people, infosec is likely a poor fit. You'll top out soon if you can't have a coherent argument with someone that doesn't degenerate into "Because I said so".

Min

Min

I've hired people with misdemeanors before.

Be honest about the crime, don't have it be a surprise that I find out during the background check part of the hiring process.

I also know other managers who've done the same. Its tough to find good people. A drug offense 5 yrs ago, with proof of a completed drug treatment program for instance isn't going to stop me from hiring a good IT worker.

Min

Not only that, but as the probe has approached, it discovered . . .

They're right. That's no planet . . . it's a fully armed battle station!

Get us out of here . . .

Unfortunately, the minimal fuel reserves are no match for a tractor beams, and our little friends are going to die . . .

hawk

machines are more like people than we thought . . .

next, someone needs to write, Of iPod Bondage.

hawk