By far the best usage of the Nintendo Powerglove... :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The glove comes out around 4:30 BUT honestly it's worth watching the whole thing if anything for the self-deprecation :-)

It sounds like with the new rules:

1) Confiscate
2) Confiscate
3) "Pretend" that it was never there in the first place and start shopping for a vacation...
4) Watch it drive away unless they are taking the person into custody in which case it goes to impound where the perp can get it back for a healthy Tow/Storage fee.

Honestly (that skill needs to be taught. While reading the novel of a post above where grade by grade counts of incorrect test questions were enumerated. Mention was made about "My 6th grade math and science teacher hated me because I had to point out the errors that she made on her exams." (there were others but that's the best quotable). Response: Well, duh! No one likes to be told they're wrong, especially teachers. I can read someone describing that they gently or respectfully pursued such action but in reality it was probably less than such. I've found plenty of errors on tests over the years and if you present the issue to your teacher correctly you get thanks for helping improve their test not trials of forced humiliation.

It's amazing how much you can accomplish with empathy instead of aggression.

I was a bit behind your curves but even in the 80's/90's computers were still pretty foreign to most educators. I and a few others who ended up in "Computer Lab Assistant" roles became the teachers. My "supervisors" were smart enough to get out of our way and let us explore. They were also smart enough to have the capability to restore each machine to image if things got messed up too much to fix by hand. (Of course we created those images and the process for restoring them)

If a teacher or administrator had issues with their office computers we were the ones they called. When a student had a hard question in computer class we were more likely able to answer it than the teacher and she was not dumb by any means (better at the machines than anyone else in the school save a couple exceptions in the math department) but she knew our value and how to gain from that while letting us gain from "play time"

I wish there were more teachers like that in the world.

In this case clearly [concept]-Bar!

"your"

Strong moment of geeky pride the day I answered a modem call from a friend of mine and was able to handshake at 9600 baud with my voice :-)

I'm curious.. he mentions nothing about performance issues just throttling when over heated. SO for example how is the performance when NOT over-clocked?

I ask because I am currently running a clone of our entire production environment in a VM on my Dell M6800 and Dell M4800 (Both with same top proc, 32GB ram, SSD) That is the full production DB2 instance and 3 apps over 2 WebSpheres running high intensity jobs. Meanwhile the system is running an overloaded Eclipse sucking down CPU and a bunch of other software while I play videos to distract me and have about 100 tabs open in 3 different browsers. My ability to develop and constantly compile is unhindered. My laptop is occasionally warm to the touch but never overheating and I'm getting plenty of performance.

SO: Are they overheating because they are overclocked (somewhat shitty but honestly not unexpected with these chips) OR is his workload really that intensive? "Code and run DB/Test Environment" doesn't begin to describe the workload as I'm doing that with flying colors (with bloated Eclipse and WebSphere included). I have better specs than most gaming laptops minus my video hardware (which is honestly pretty decent too) and a lot of pretty lights my last actual gaming laptop had.

In the future everything is Taco Bell.

I actually thought it was him when I was reading the summary... then I realized it wasn't long enough.

Also most all cars have that caveat on their range.

My last three cars have been far from fuel economical (Turbo, Turbo, W8) but the difference between driving them like my grandma and driving them like myself is a good 50-100 miles on a tank.

Even with myself the difference between City and Highway is significant. In my W8 I've gotten almost 370 on a purely highway trip but in the city I'm lucky to hit *260.

Your last point being the more important. A couple things:
1) Van Halen (by the time they had this rider at least) weren't playing smaller/mid-sized venues. Their production (not to mention the vast majority of this hospitality rider) wouldn't fit in one.
2) If they got the bowl of M&M's at all then the high person on the totem pole did their job. They ripped out the pages related to hospitality and handed them to the hospitality staff most likely without reading because at that point it's not their job. The lawyers job was to make sure they weren't agreeing to anything they shouldn't (like if the band had demanded a kilo of Cocaine delivered to the dressing room before performance time) and after that point it's hospitality's job to get the labor/purchasing done. (and supply chain if it's that big an operation). The tech crew never even saw this part of the rider unless they were curious.
3) These were incredibly large and complex stage productions (still are... they're not dead yet). There are systems issues that just can't be avoided. Gear fails. Cords get snagged. etc etc etc... chances are there were issues with every single performance but a good production crew makes those issues not ruin a show. The times when hospitality didn't do their jobs and the band started micromanaging just proved their point by inclusion NOT exclusion of the other shows.

Companies aren't importing those creme-de-la-creme programmers that we just must have in our country because we are apparently sorely lacking. They are importing labor that despite supposed protections is cheaper (and from what I've experienced socially easier to push around)

My big question is why are you so concerned with bringing them here? The average American corp seems to have no problem having the work done elsewhere anyway so what is the difference if they are sitting in an office here vs. an office in Hyderabad or Bangaluru?

I have no problem with immigration in-general but this whole "we need more h1bs to fill a dire need" BS is just utter hogwash.

I hate to be a spoil sport but I have a copy of their rider.

While their stated intention is true (well at least that they stated it) but the details are quite wrong. The M&M caveat was included in the Backstage Rider which is generally handled by hospitality staff (for such a large production at least). It is not "buried in countless technical specifications" as this article suggests. The terms are also not quite so stated: "M&M's (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES)." This being in a rider whose overriding terms stating that the contract "...may be voided by (Van Halen) unless fully executed..." the surrounding forfeiture of the show may occur but not with full payment (only possible forfeit of paid deposits, expenditures).

Mr. Roth may have had good intentions when he had that written into their rider BUT his prima donna nature was showing in his lack of understanding of how the show was actually being executed. Specifically those responsible for procuring and maintaining backstage hospitality have absolutely *nothing to do with anything technical what-so-ever and so correlating a brown M&M to an issue with the production was misguided more likely incidental.

Honestly I've found most of the conspiracy theorizing to be straight up comical. This movie has cost Sony $79 million. They made $1 million on opening day even with the fury because none of the major distributors would show it. They've lost far more with the early leaks of their other bigger budget films. If this really was a ploy to drive up viewership for this movie than it was a complete failure and as much as Sony makes some terrible decisions they haven't proven themselves to be quite this stupid in how they run their business.

My favorite comment in some article I read was this (paraphrasing): North Korea's guilt may be most telling in a certain absence: All of the movies stolen from Sony have made their way to the streets *except the one movie that North Korea doesn't want you to see. I have no proof and they may be completely innocent BUT there's a lot of good logic in that statement.

Anyway... I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. It's not an Academy Award winner by far but that is not what I watch a Seth Rogan film for. Toilet humor at its finest is what it is was and always shall be. They happen to highlight the atrocities of (and really piss off) a terrible totalitarian regime in the process with a heavy dose of reality thrown in it seems (more than their other movies) so props to the effort.