Why is this modded funny? I learned on Slackware 3, and to this date, I am generally more proficient in Linux development and sysadmin duties than anyone I've ever met in my age/pay bracket.

"Learn Redhat, know Redhat. Learn Slackware, know Linux".

Can I opt for additional cameras with mics facing out of the front driver and passenger windows with a "Stream to YouTube + Private Media Server" button so the next time an abusive cop pulls me over and says "Your word vs mine, who do you think the judge will believe" he can choke on his words in court? Seems like a reasonable safety feature.

I have played video games most of my life and I have six pack abs and only nine percent body fat. I also exercise one hour per day. The two activities aren't mutually exclusive.

http://xkcd.com/566/

It was enjoyable at best, but I was still happy to see another movie in the series. Kind of like the joke in Big Bang Theory on an episode about seeing all 6 Star Wars movies in a movie marathon.

"So, 1-3, then 4-6, or 4-6, 1-3, classic style?"

"Isn't it obvious? 4-6 first. I prefer to be disappointed in the order in which George intended us to be."

I'm sure a lot of fellow /.'ers have heard of scambaiting (ie: scamming the scammers, but it usually is for fun or to make a point, rather than make money off the scammers).

The link won't load at this moment sadly, but here is an interesting story from the BBC a few years back where one guy works as a professional scambaiter. I would NOT recommend this kind of thing in general, as you end up being on the shitlist for some less than reputable people, to say the least.

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3887493.stm

In short, the guy convinces the scammers that he has no money, but he can steal some expensive stuff from his employer and send it to them if they pay for shipping and give him $50. So, he convinces them he's shipping tens of thousands of dollars worth of stolen Cisco equipment, when he's really shipping them e-waste, used electronics, old monitors, broken microwave ovens, and stuff that you typically have to pay to recycle or drop off at the dump. Pretty funny actually. I think his record is $80,000 of garbage recycled for free so far, including shipping costs.

Simple solution: Don't give them any to take home. Make them come over to the clinic for their daily dose. Or use some simple syringe device with a counter built into it with replaceable needles that they can take home, but eventually have to return to the clinic. You don't finish the course in a country like France, you get fined a couple grand. In a place where fines wouldn't work, just don't give them the next course of drugs when they get sick again. Should remedy the situation rather quickly.

Stupid and irresponsible people make the world difficult to live in. Please stop with your irrational behavior.

That's a fair analogy, I must admit.

I know this comes across as a tirade, and it is a little bit, but no matter how comfortable I've been in a past job, I've always focused on learning new things. In a primarily Windows-based IT job, I was teaching myself Unix sysadmin materials in my spare time while also studying engineering, and it saved my arse a few times. I don't think that avoiding learning new things is an acceptable course of action, save for the possible exception of a company replacing an industry standard tool with some esoteric proprietary POS and requiring staff to pay for there own training. Fortunately that would also count as constructive dismissal in some cases.

If only I mod points left. Insightful.

As for TFA: Oh no, my company changed products - I miss my old Thunderbird e-mail client, and Outlook is just too much to endure, so I'm switching jobs. If you have a family and kids that depend on you, I'd say your significant other has every reason to call you a completely unreliable moron. People change jobs due to poor working conditions, unethical company practices, or simply a desire for better pay. Changing products? Seriously?

Don't you mean RAID 0 in this case (ie: striping; performance boost at the cost of increased probability of data loss assuming drive failure rate P is independent from drive to drive)?

Or, are you referring to a faulty RAID 1 (mirroring) configuration where two disks are cloned (for the most part, say, 99.999%), but there is somehow a file on one of the two disks that is not on the other? That must be a pretty shoddy RAID controller if that is the case. I've only ever seen such an outcome with the cheap Dell NAS units that did RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 5, and X-RAID. They don't do real hardware RAID, just Linux LVM partitioning to accomplish software RAID. When I found this out, I was kind of choked considering how expensive they were, but I figured so long as I have redundant data, who cares about performance for a device that isn't used much.

Then it loses information on the LVM partition setup and I have to manually recover over the course of two days with a Slackware Linux machine built for tech tasks. What a nightmare. Although this is not the same error you encountered, I can sympathize with someone who has had to deal with cut-rate RAID controllers.

Compulsory licensing agreements exist in the United States in a number of industries. Just a few include "West Publishing citations to court opinions", "U.S. v. 3D Systems", "US v. Miller Industries", "Dell Corporation VL Bus patents".

These compulsory licenses were put in place to prevent extremely anti-competitive behavior. Just like Motorola's latest suit against Apple, demanding 2.25% of all iPad sales. Motorola can't just demand a billion dollars per patent infringement case and clean out Apple by setting absurdly high values. In the US, it is very much possible for anti-trust lawyers to step in and force a deal for a "reasonable" patent pricing deal.

If a submarine patent were written that would effectively block every single phone manufacturer from producing phones unless they pay exorbitant fees, the average consumer would suffer considerably. These compulsory licensing deals are put in place to prevent established companies from being forced out of the market due to a single patent.

Why does nobody on /. consider the option of self teaching? I taught myself C and assembly in elementary school, calculus in high school, and flew through my undergrad studies in record time. It is very much possible for a disciplined kid with the right encouragement to become interested in expanding his/her skill set at an early age, and still be a "jock" (soccer, wrestling) in high school at the same time as being a class brain/nerd (chess club, challenge math club) and having a social life (football team, dance team). Also had to work 30 hours per week at a crummy minimum wage job.

Face it, some people just really won't amount to much due to a lack of natural ability, encouragement, and motivation. That is quite a bit to consider, even before considering the shortcomings of the public school system. Does it really matter that everyone can't be PhD material or at the very least a natural genius? But I guess then there is the expectation that everyone with a high school diploma can somehow buy a house and afford to have five children while working as an unskilled laborer.

And before you go any further, there is always the "problem" with engineers making a pitiful salary compared to sales/marketing/business gurus. The millionaire banker/lawyer/manager paradox, for the most part, is either a rarity or a misconception that Scott Adam's comics are a perfect representation of real life. I've known engineering and physics majors straight out of undergrad making $80k and above. Mind you, those are the people I've known to publish a half-dozen distinct papers during their undergrad studies, and found their own cooperative education jobs rather than waiting for their guidance counselor to find one on their behalf.

Make the most of your own education, and you can do just about anything. This is coming from someone who worked 2-4 shitty minimum-wage jobs at a time to pay tuition and sleeping 6 hours per night for years to get through college, so the "rich kid" analogy does not apply here. I think I've covered most of the typical assumptions used to summarily discard a /. comment that makes a call for personal responsibility.

Although it is useful in medical instruments (eg: scalpels, handles, etc), and is also used in artificial heart values, the nickel components of certain types of medical/surgical stainless steel are quite reactive within the body.

Some people also naturally have considerable sensitivity to nickel outside the body too. Some people get terrible hives, rashes, and even permanent burns when wearing cheap jewelry (ie: silver plated jewelry which is made of nickel/rhodium alloys). Given such a damaging reaction when exposed to damp skin, having this inside the body could be dangerous.

Good question. Cheers! :)

New Avengers, assemble!!!

Failing that, we still have Bruce Willis, Steve Buscemi, and Aerosmith.

But what about the inverse FFT? So I can FFT something quicker, but what about when I want to go the other way? ;)

The bigger problem is working around the requirement by (ab)using the principles of the psycho-acoustic modelling of sound, like with A-weighting and equal-loudness contours.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contours

Essentially, the human ear's perceived intensity at different volumes is frequency dependent. One trick is using an auto-tuner to "shift" audio to nearby frequencies so that the overall loudness (as measured by an ideal microphone) is within the acceptable limits in the proposal, but the human ear "hears" them as if they are louder than they really are.