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Comment Cracking Video Games = x86 Assembly (Score 2) 170

Wanting to crack copy protection and write trainers is what led to me learn x86 assesmbly, specifically 80386 assembly.

That understanding of assembly gave me a solid foundation for the rest of my career. Once you understand interupts and memory registers, you can grasp the basics of everything from applications, to networking to storage systems. Fundamentally they are all doing the same thing.... reading something from one memory register, modifying it with the contents of another memory register, and pushing the results to somewhere else.

Comment Re:Automation and outsourcing (Score 1) 204

The game is setup for a very gradual progression if you just want to quest and explore the world. My wife plays the game just for questing, she hates raiding. The allure of the game for her is the expansive world and having a place to escape to for an hour or two. She never got into the playing for hours at a time and raiding all weekend style of game play. To me, it seems like a waste of time to level characters and never raid, but it keeps her entertained. Different strokes for different folks and all that.

Comment Re:Copy Online Banking (Score 1) 258

You just re-iterated what I said.

It seems like you are branching off onto tangents, or trying to solve different problems.

The point I am making is that verifying voter eligibility, recording votes and tallying votes can be done with a system like the financial system. I use the financial system as an example because it has physical locations (ATMs) that are analogous to a voting booth, and they have virtual locations (bank web sites) that are analogous with online voting. The plumbing is already there, and people trust it.

If a vote needs to be truly verified, it cannot be anonymous. If the validity of the vote is questioned, at some point, the person who cast the ballot has to stand up and affirm their choice. If they are not willing to do that, then the problem cannot be solved. The same is true with the current system. As long as people are unwilling to be held accountable for their choice of government, they will continue to get the government that cowards deserve.

I have no problem telling people how I voted and why I voted that way. One of the corner stones of democracy is open dialogue. What we have in America are a bunch of special interest groups using the government as a proxy to implement their need to control others. (See: gay marriage, abortion, the drug war and a whole laundry list of other wedge issues that all come down to one group of people trying to make it difficult for another group of people to do what they want to do.)

With regards to the subject of verifying online votes, the challenge is not just a challenge with online voting. The challenge is inherent in any anonymous system. A person cannot be both anonymous and also verifiable.

Comment Re:Copy Online Banking (Score 1) 258

Except there is a trail. Voters have to register. They have to present valid ID at the polling booth.

While the actual votes are 'secret' there is no secrecy around who is voting.

For the online system to work, all it has to do is confirm that the total number of votes tallied for any issue are equal to or less than the total number of voters.

The actual content of the vote (yes or no, for or against) does not need to be associated with a voter.

Comment Copy Online Banking (Score 1) 258

This problem has already been solved.

People already trust the financial system. Copy it.

Instead of creating a 'bank account', people would create a 'voter registration'.

Instead of processing debits and withdrawls, the system would process votes.

The solution is elegant because it is simple. By modeling it after the banking system, you inherit the implicit trust in that system. Anyone who challenges the system, has to challenge the global financial system. Who is going to stand up and say, "You can't trust your bank to accurately tally something as simple as vote!" ??? Doing so would open up a whole pandora's box of problems that nobody wants to deal with. "If they can't even tally a vote, can they really accurately track my account balance?" being among the most obvious.

Comment Re:Wrong action, figures (Score 1) 85

Next we'll hear how ITT was an isolated example.

No we will not. ITT is not an isolated example. The amount of bad debt in the student loan market is almost as bad as the bad debt from the housing market crash.

Not surprisingly, Zero Hedge was out ahead of the pack on this topic. (Dated 2012)

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/...

Comment Tai Chi (Score 1) 420

It is not for everyone, but when I get tired of doing IT I am going to teach tai chi. I have been training for almost 15 years now and while I am not a master, I have some proficiency with it. Tai chi is good for health and the philosophy behind it is one of the better ways to live a life.

I am not too worried about my job leaving any time soon. Given the average competence of my co-workers and the lack of competence that I have seen from H1Bs, I know that my position is going to be stable for a while. The reality is that there are not that many people who understand IT environments from top to bottom (technically) and who can also work with the business side to transform their needs into working systems that are delivered and managed on budget.

Comment Clutter Works Well (so far) (Score 1) 130

My organization recently migrated to Office365, including Exchange / Outlook 365.

I was impressed with Outlook 365 OWA (outlook.office365.com). My initial thought was that having the entire infrastructure presented through a single portal is a recipe for disaster. Yet as soon as I type in the @company.com portion of my email address, it re-directs to our own authentication infrastructure (Ping in our case). None the less, I am sure that there are people working night and day trying to figure out how to MitM outlook.office365.com

Office 365 OWA and Outlook 2013 are nearly identical in terms of UI layout and functionality. For the average user, I think that they could do without the desktop client and most likely, not notice much if any loss of functionality.

Clutter is working well. I turned it on almost two weeks ago. So far it has done a great job of filtering out of all of the junk emails from the sales drones, while at the same time letting the important emails through. I have not missed any emails that I need to see.

Comment Re:Outdated (Score 1) 211

What you described here fits the typical definition of a project manager.

So they had one person, a "manager", keep an eye on people, keep an eye on projects, allocate resources, and basically manage the group

The difference between a project manager and a manager is that a manager has direct reports and is responsible for dealing with all of the human resource issues (hiring, firing, training, reviews, etc.)

In the situation that you described, who took care of those tasks? The boss? The manager?

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