One of the ways I always did homework and still use today is by pretending I am teaching someone else. This method works great for logical subjects like math or science where there are proofs, facts and well defined theories, less so for more disorganized and subjective material where rote memorization is required but it can work there too if I can get into the "story". It never fails to bring up, those "wait a minute" and "what now" and "why do it like that" questions I hated having on test day. At least in school, when I got to the point I could "teach" myself, I always made an A+.

Better or Worse, getting more credit and using it responsibly is the key to getting even more credit, particularly the more difficult products like lines of credits, construction loans, restoration loans, business loans and so forth. It's also the key to getting higher balances on new and existing cards. After totally destroying my credit during college, the first card I got again had a $500 limit. 5 year later, I had three cards and about $20K and needed it all to pay for a European business trip that ultimately would be reimbursed by my employer.

A few more years, I had six cards and close to $100K. I also had a $220K mortgage on and $400K house. A builder was preparing to replace a beautiful field beside my house with 60 town homes. I knew I would hate it but that I could also rent my house out for much more than the payments, so I did and bought another $350K historic house with a $260K mortgage while keeping the other. Being almost 100 years old, it needed nearly $120K in work. I paid part in cash and got a line of credit for $60K to finish the job. Done and 8 months later, I refinance the $60K back into the first but the house was now worth $550K, so I made nearly 80K on the deal. I then closed the line of credit. I still have the six cards.

Yes, I've been fortunate but I make an average IT salary. Many can do much more, some may do less at first, but anyone can find a smart ways to use their credit and it pays to develop it. There are three basic rules: One, always pay on time. Two, try to show some but 1% utilization. Three, never close old credit. You can still pay off your cards and avoid interest on rule 2 by letting the statement cut and then paying. For rule 3, with time and a good record, you can probably get your provider to upgrade your card without changing it, so it never has to be closed.

One might assume some 35 years after the advent of PC revolution, there are more than a few grey hairs running around like me with infinitely more knowledge on how to secure a computer than some smart mouth tweener. Having spent years securing their computers, I would not trust any child of mine to do a better job than I would and it's time to put the tired meme that kids know tech better than their parents to bed where it belongs.

No one knows the actual origin of the term "cloud computing" and what it means can legitimately be different depending on who you ask making the effectiveness of the term fairly useless. The only reason non-IT folk latch onto it is because there's a component of "I don't know what's going on" that they can understand and it makes it seem friendly. The op was merely pointing out why it's not.

BTW, the cloud symbol was most often used in the 90's on network diagrams to indicate frame-relay links between sites back before dedicated Internet access was common. There was an aspect of "don't know" associated with it because it used shared links, did not guarantee delivery and frequently had service interruptions. Wikipedia sites this as a possible origin of the term but I think it is the origin of the term having seen how suits quickly latched onto it when it was shown in demos and presentations. Not understanding was something they could grasp.

Institutions wouldn’t get this information straight from Facebook but would instead use one of the many smaller credit reporting agencies and if they make a negative decision based on this, they are required by the Fair Credit Reporting Act to disclose this to you. If that happens, the CRA is then required to provide you a copy of the report provided to the given company. They could try to lie and make up some other excuse but they wouldn’t get away with it many times before a pattern would emerge and they would open themselves up to huge lawsuits should they be caught doing it. It’s worth noting a lot of the smaller CRA’s have the same annual reporting requirements as do the big three and you can request a free report from them. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau has a PDF that lists many of the smaller CRA’s and how you can contact them.

That said, I think that trying to plumb social networking information and deny credit is on par with redlining. It’s only started happening and I’ve heard of no legal challenges and I doubt the connections on any random social network can be completely separated from any of the factors that can’t be used to make credit decisions - race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, or age. IANAL, but it would seem just looking at it could greatly increase your risk for an ECOA lawsuit.

Posted by Unknown Lamer on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @03:11AM

ME: Having heart attack, frantically searches for second episode of final season to torrent since I must have missed it only to realize this is Slashdot, where editors can't be bothered with facts, such as the second episode won't air until Sunday, August 18th .

For an interesting take on why the telegraph led in part to the modern computer and how both work, read Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold. He argues all the ideas needed to build a modern computer were known around the time telegraph use took off, and he uses those ideas to describe logic gates and put them together into a working computer.

In short, the relay was invented in 1835 as a way to extend telegraph runs further without requiring operators. Morse code, as the primary way to communicate, happened to also be a binary code that mapped letters to the equivalent of ones and zeros, dots and dashes. In 1854, George Boole published “An Investigation of the Laws of Thought”. Petzold stops there and essentially uses only those ideas to build his modern computer. It wasn’t recognized formally by anyone until 1937 when Claude Shannon published “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits”. Even Charles Babbage had known of Boole’s work and the telegraph but did not see how it could have been better used to build his Difference Engine.

Here's the VisualEditor FAQ which states:

• 24 June: A/B test on the English Wikipedia. VisualEditor is released by default to 50% of newly registered accounts.
• 1 July: Deployment of the VisualEditor to the English Wikipedia, available for all logged-in users.
• 8 July: Deployment of the VisualEditor to the English Wikipedia, available for anonymous and logged-in users.
• 15 July: Deployment of the VisualEditor to most large Wikipedia wikis, available for all users. Which wikis are in this list is still to be determined, but will definitely include Wikipedia in German, French and Italian.
• 29 July: Deployment of the VisualEditor to all other Wikipedia wikis, available for all users, minus a few wikis (such as the Chinese Wikipedia) where the VisualEditor does not yet work.

Also of interest from that FAQ is that the VisualEditor can be installed on any MediaWiki installation, including personal wikis. As a MediaWiki user at home, I've found it a cool way to journal and track a lot of personal projects but the limit to using it has always been remembering wiki markup. This will go a long way to eliminating that problem.

You are being disingenuous. Both gun control and social welfare are most closely associated with liberals, not conservatives. Things that would help - equal access to education, social programs for at-risk youth, legalizing drugs, treatment instead of prison - where do you suppose they stand on those issues?

This tech was discussed there. It. was created by a guy in his garage using harvested mobile phone cameras and is already being tested in drones by Homeland Security. Per the show, the actual level of detail is classified but they did show an example where the were able to monitor dozens of city blocks at the same time grid style and then choose any point on the grid and zoom in hi-def and see full detail of people walking on the ground, all using a single lens array.

location data != communication data.

Anonymous coward is right. So far, the courts are pretty much saying that police have the right to use location data from electronic devices to track criminals without a warrant. In this case, police appear to be using the mobile tower as only a way to find the exact location of the suspect. Per the article, he was immobile which means the police would not have a precise fix on where he was without forcing his phone to switch communication to at least one other tower. So long as that's all the police did, the courts would probably have no problem with it.

If it doesn't work for you, find another solution. If it does work, then why bother ? No one has ever put up AA to be the cure.

Philandering ? Maybe. Scan artist... He was a stock market prior to the Great Depression but it's all about as relevant as the state of the nation was to Clinton getting a blowjob.

There are no priests, no compunction to believe in a god, no churches, no tax breaks, and no privileged conversation. How is that a religion ?

Can you cite one example where it stopped progress ? It's not a perfect solution but it's helped a great many people who would have died otherwise. That some still do while tragic, isn't a sensible reason to stop using it as the tool it is, any more than ignoring the possibilities this vaccine could have. It's easy to see though with this vaccine, it could lead to worse addictions (relatively speaking) as people compensate for the loss of alcohol by using harder drugs.

From Herbert Spencer: “There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation”.

Alright, I'll bite and even post under my id since heck, you still don't have a clue who I am. It's obvious either yourself or someone you know was "forced" into AA and hatted it. Tha's fine. Some like me, do like it and I credit it with helping me to stay sober over 14 years.

I agree no one should be forced by the courts to attend AA, however, that's a problem with the court system itself. No one in AA is asking for it. Judges probably use it as an alternative to other measures because out of all the options, it's the one most readily available. The average American city has over a thousand meetings each week spread all over the calendar.

No, the general dogma is that you will die (sooner) from alcoholism if you don't quit drinking. Of course, no one can say what will happen to any one individual any more than one can say smoking will cause you to get cancer so many in AA prefer to say "jails, institutions or death" which is more to the point. At the very least, continued use very, very rarely has a positive outcome.

No one has found a viable scientific way to determine the efficacy of AA. Some people never stay sober. Others do. Of those that do, many move on. Some decide they hate AA and find other ways to quit. More power to them. What AA does offer is a very large group of alcoholics who have remained sober for extended periods.

A self help group for drunks tries to help drunks. That's the way it works. Proselytization suggests someone is trying to convert you to their belief with the particular idea that it's the one, true way. No one in AA will ever tell you that, at least the ones following the principles. The traditions state "we are a program of attraction, not promotion." In AA, we share our stories and anyone is free to pick and choose which parts if any they find useful and leave the rest behind. As far as the free part, you argue that ???

I get it. You hate AA. Like most haters, it's because of the "God" factor. No doubt your familiar "god of your own understanding" and "higher power" part and while Penn and Teller's rock and tree schtick is funny, most atheists, anti-theists, or agnostics choose Group Of Drunks. Religious people tend to choose whatever deity fits their religion. I went to AA because I was not able to quite on my own. People also hate the "powerless over alcohol" part but the previous self-truth pretty much defines that. AA offers the support of many other drunks who have overcome their addiction, all of whom at the point I went in had better ideas about how to stay sober than I did. Total self-reliance to quit would imply that I never so much as even considered any other ideas about quitting drinking let alone took any anabuse, naltrexone or this vaccine, should it become available. As you pointed out, I would have had to spontaneously quit on my own, something at the point I was at would not have happened.

Like it or not, you can't deny their are people who stay sober using AA. It's never been offered up as a solution to the physical aspect of craving nor any of it's causes nor put forth as a medicine to cure drunks and as such can't be called quakery. It's obviously involves beliefs that you do not espouse, but there are plenty who do and stay sober by them.

I assume you pulled this last bit of derisiveness out of your ass. AA has never tried to stand in the way of scientific progress related to finding a cure for alcoholism, nor have they advocated one not use any available medicine to help them overcome their addiction. What you do is between your doctor and you. AA is there to help alcoholics, period. That's why tradition ten states "Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A.name ought never be drawn into public controversy.". That also applies to religion as well as politics, in case you are misinformed.

You can't even say that for sure here. I've played with a cigarette lighter before and the one thing I recall is I quickly rubbed my thumb raw. Needless to say, a lot of DNA came off in the process. If the girl did use the lighter after him, that could easily explain his DNA embedded in her fingers, but the fact it would have ended up on her fingers could explain it ending up a lot of other places too. Ever rub your eyes, blow your nose, scratch your crotch or wipe your ... well, you get the idea. Who knows what the girl did with the lighter or what she did afterwards either.

Add to that, the guy is 44 years old and has never committed a crime nor even been a suspect until now. Granted, he was 31 when the crime occurred but he was quite old even for the type of behavior required to commit such a brutal crime to come to the surface. The fact nothing is known of him since would make it even more unusual.