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Comment: Re:Possibly better trained than me? (Score 1) 332

by cbciv (#38343850) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Is Your Data Safe In the Cloud?

But throwing my day-to-day operations and database to the cloud? I have no need, and I can provide the services to my company far cheaper than any external provider. Last time I priced it out, I could entirely re-do my entire computer infrastructure (Servers, desktops, switches, routers,etc) every 2 years for the extra cost of having it hosted for me. I'd be a fucking retard to do that.

Did you include the cost of administering those systems in your analysis? That's going to be a significant fraction of your budget.

Comment: Re:Not All Spankings Are The Same (Score 1) 948

by cbciv (#37969314) Attached to: No Charges For Child-Whipping Judge Caught On YouTube

If you're spanking your kids all it means is that you have failed in your role as a parent.

Bullshit. Kids vary widely in the sorts of things that they respond to. One of mine (we'll call him Bob) has always responded well to verbal remonstration and body language (the "look"). The other (Jim) does not. This has been the case for their entire lives. They're getting older now and removal of privileges usually suffices, but when they were little Jim could be punished by removal of toys, removal of privileges, removal of a desired activity and timeouts, but sometimes would just continue right on with the bad behavior. For him, attempting to exercise control over us by trying to make us angry was more important than avoiding punishment. When he really got up a head of steam, he became so single-minded that nothing would stop the behavior except a smack on the butt.

Now, you may be tempted to tell me that I didn't think of all of the alternatives, or that I didn't implement the ones that I tried correctly. The problem is that you don't know what you're talking about because you don't know my kid. I've talked to other parents who have kids like Jim, including some who know Jim, and they also hear this kind of nonsense all of the time. People assume that because they've been successful in using other techniques with their own children, that the success is due to the techniques. What they fail to comprehend is that the child's personality is a huge factor in which techniques actually work. This was a lesson that I had to learn the hard way. When Jim was little, I never thought that I'd spank him. We tried everything we could think of, including reading books, articles, blog posts, etc., getting advice from other parents, and experimenting with anything that we could think of. The bottom line was that none of it worked when he really got going.

As a contrast, Bob's bad behavior can usually be interrupted with a sharp word. In serious cases, raising our voices does the trick. Timeouts never fail to work with him, and he rarely takes it far enough to get one. Same parents, same gene pool, very, very different results.

My kid is probably an outlier in this regard, but he's not the only one that I know. If you've been able to find ways to discipline your kids without resorting to spanking, good for you. Don't be arrogant enough, however, to assume that your experience is representative of everyone else's.

Comment: Zappers (Score 1) 182

by cbciv (#33184922) Attached to: Google Testing an Airborne Camera Drone
This reminds me of a reference in a Shadow Run novel to people who ran around zapping any drones that they saw with the equivalent of a supercharged taser. This was in the context of a world where many such drones were seen daily, used by law enforcement, private companies, etc. If such usage becomes common in reality, might a section of the tin-foil hat crowd or "American Militia" movement behave similarly?

Comment: Re:Hundreds of Tabs? (Score 1) 570

by cbciv (#32178614) Attached to: Mozilla Reveals Firefox 4 Plans

It would be nice to say these 10 pages help me when working on project X, and these 7 on project Y, and these 12 on project Z, so let me assign a button to each group so I only have the relevant tabs running at any one time and can close the rest down without facing a nightmare when I need to restart them.

You can use the Session Manager add-on to do this by saving groups of tabs as named sessions. If you need multiple sets open at once, you can put each session into a separate window.

Comment: Re:Best Buy salesmen (Score 1) 504

by cbciv (#30682908) Attached to: Best Buy $39.95 "Optimization" At Best a Waste of Money

If there was another place I could get computer parts and electronics locally (for times when waiting three or four days for Newegg isn't an option) I would never set foot inside their doors.

That's why I make it a point to buy from my local mom and pop computer shop whenever practical. I want them to stay in business so that I can stay out of Best Buy.

Comment: Re:And if they had been using roundabouts... (Score 1) 483

by cbciv (#30005444) Attached to: Computer Failure Causes Gridlock In MD County

While the advantages you listed are true, traffic circles (what we call "roundabouts" here in the D.C. area) have cons as well.

We have quite a few of them in the District. I used to drive through Washington Circle (Google Map) every day on my way to work. They work well for areas with moderate traffic or where one of the streets has heavy traffic and the other(s) only light traffic. Unfortunately, that does not describe the traffic in the D.C. area, including Montgomery County. We have the second worst traffic in the country, after Los Angeles. We have traffic lights on some entry ramps for our highways to regulate entry so that the four and six lane highways don't get backed up as much. That's how bad it is.

Also, circles require more room than intersections. A lot of our major roads around here have three or four lanes going in each direction. A three or four lane circle would take up quite a bit of space and becomes more daunting to navigate.

Are circles better than unsynchronized traffic lights during a D.C. rush hour? Possibly. Are they better than synchronized traffic lights the other 360 days a year? I doubt it.

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