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Comment Re: This sewer of hate is not about gender (Score 1) 779

Before you flame... I know that they aren't threatening to take funding away, they are giving funding to those who do fit. The thought remains the same, but I have no problem with passing money out - it's your money do what you want. But I don't appreciate when they take that money from places that do have students who just happen to be white males.

Comment Re: This sewer of hate is not about gender (Score 3, Insightful) 779

Along the same lines I can point out 2 good reasons boys are generally driven in that direction.
1. Boys are into video games - for the very same reason that big gaming is targeted at boys and that the majority of players are male. Those gamers are into computers and the possibility of coding future games, so they go into computer science. Girl gamers are starting to become a little more common, and their representation in computer science might increase organically if everyone just left it alone.
2. Boys like to build things - along the lines of Lego, blocks, and carpentry. Boys dominate "shop class", but I don't recall any big push to change that. OK, the shop class I had in high school did have a fair amount of girls in it, so maybe that's not a big concern. The building enjoyment flows into programming because the program that comes out at the end was "built" by you.

There are some toys aimed at getting girls into building things, so that's a good thing as well. I don't know that threatening funding is the best plan. That puts all of the pressure on the teacher or school to try to drive girls in that direction (and makes me think that down the road "unwillingly" isn't out of the question, or granting a passing grade for sub-par work just to keep the numbers up). Games that girls are interested in and getting girls into "building things" at an earlier age is where the attention needs to be. So that lies more in the parents, and asking parents to make their daughters good little cogs isn't likely to garner much traction...which is why nothing has worked so far.

Comment Re:Try this (Score 1) 263

I have a Panasonic similar to this one
I was able to figure out the link that would essentially give me the picture the camera sees right now (ie, take a picture mode). Then I wrote a c# program to grab that photo, compare that to the prior image and save it with a time stamp if it was sufficiently different. That "compare" part was never fully fleshed out so I just saved everything. I think I had it going every 15 seconds so it chewed up some disk space. But I digress.

If you can grab the current picture from the web cam you can roll your own "grab the picture, upload to site" script. Both of those should need credentials, so their are security implications. I believe my cam had it in the URL like an FTP user@host configuration. It also had a PTZ (pan,tilt,zoom) control via web page. So getting the right angle from the mount may be easier with that.

Comment Re:Does It Matter? (Score 2) 288

I'm not sure what you're asking by "auto deploy" but you can run a Win 8.1 guest or Win 10 preview guest in VirtualBox. Windows 10 preview broke the ability to run VirtualBox inside it after version x.12 (I think it was x.18 or 20 at the time), but that may be resolved now. You could uninstall and install x.12 to run like normal.

I restored my surface back to 8.1 so I'm not sure about later developments.

Comment Re:Hope the trend continues. (Score 1, Insightful) 263

I'd rather that the 90 day clock have a snooze for 30 days option, so it's not disclosed to everyone. I'd rather that the developer (even MS) have time to fix it right rather than rush a fix that needs a later fix or a fix that breaks something else.

Some times you need to dig through code and figure out what the hell's going on so you can figure out why it's broken and fix it. And it's not like Google is the only one submitting bugs.

Comment Re:Curiously familiar (Score 1) 248

I'm kind of wondering if they could put some arms on the platform to reach out and grab it at that point. I had wondered how they intend to "manage" it once it does land. A big pole on a boat is one wave away from falling over, so they have to have some plan to "strap it down". If they had 4 claws come up from each corner to stabilize it they may have been able to recover from this landing.

Then your complex part is terrestrial, where it's not offsetting potential payload and easier to maintain.

I know it sounds simple on paper - the rocket's still moving and you don't want to damage it. But it's worth thinking about. If your claws end in horseshoe-shaped claws and those claws have rollers (so the rocket can move up and down with little friction - think jerking off the rocket if that helps), then those rollers could be locked in place after landing.

Comment Re:Gotta love Valve (Score 1) 329

A friend of mine had something similar happen with another game company. I think it was Sierra, but I don't remember. They would default their games to install to a C:\Program Files\Sierra\ directory. He would change those to C:\Games\. When he told the last game to uninstall he had the option to remove the "management app" (you know how game companies like those). When he did that it simply went up one folder and nuked everything. So his whole Games folder just disappeared. That's not as bad as losing everything your user owns below / , but he wasn't pleased.

Comment Re:Breaking old cards (Score 3, Interesting) 160

My 4 year old Sager laptop has a GPU module (or slot, so it's essentially like RAM and can be replaced). When the graphic card decided to flip out a few weeks ago I searched around and they were around $230 shipping from China. Even though everything said to me that the problem was just the video card I decided to spend $1600 on a new Sager laptop. Since the old one was now disposable I decided to do the "bake the video card" trick (375 degrees for 10 minutes, in case you're interested - just remove all screws, heat sinks, and thermal paste). I let it cool, applied thermal paste, and gave it a shot - bam, worked like new. Since the new laptop was already in "processing" I decided to let it come anyhow.

The old one is an ATI (HD 6990M). It handles linux gaming alright, it really depends on the game. Windows gaming it's great at - I just don't boot window often. The new laptop has an nvidia because I do feel that the nvidia drivers will be better in linux. Over the past 20 years I've given both companies some love.

Comment Re:Only iOS? (Score 1) 70

I use Ting. It's a smaller service that piggybacks on Sprints network. They seem really good. I haven't dug to this level to make sure they don't do anything screwy, but if nothing else they aren't charging what Verizon does. You don't need to pick service levels, you only pay for as much as you use. I could have 3 phones on Ting and pay 1/2 of what I'd pay for 1 phone on Verizon.

Comment Re:Easy fix (Score 2) 70

Only if you're request is going through Verizon. If it were a Firefox Addon I would be sending these fake headers from my PC which isn't going through Verizon.

You may say "why do I care if I don't use Verizon?" and I'll respond with "and first they came for the Jews". If you think that's a big jump, well maybe it is, but you need to protect rights for all of the people or you don't deserve the rights you have.

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