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Comment Re:Note (Score 1) 148

Google Chrome actually has a big disclaimer when you start incognito (aka private) mode pointing out that it isn't actually "secure"; it just simply won't retain any cookies or or history from that private session after you close it, and that anyone observing your web traffic can see everything you are doing whether or not the session is "private"

Comment Re:What about Good Old Games (Score 1) 106

They are doing enhanced editions of some, but mostly they are tracking down rights to a lot of the games and doing the work necessary to get them running on modern systems when a simple DOSBox configuration doesn't cut it (as GOG usually does). Some of the games they have gotten rights to (such as System Shock) are on GOG because this company got the rights to them.

Comment Re: Balls? (Score 2) 234

I'm not sure exactly what material weight you would need if using a tarp, but using premium quality 10oz vinyl baseball fields tarp (170 feet by 170 feet at a weight of 2300 lbs) as a basis for calculation, you would need more than 300 tons of tarp to cover the 175 acre reservoir, which you would have to ship to the site, deploy over the water, and anchor down somehow. The anchoring would have to handle all weather and wind conditions, and since its on water, you can't just put weights on top, so either you have to install posts throughout the reservoir to attach the tarps (not cheap), or you have to attach actual anchors to the tarps with depth ropes set correctly so as not to drag the tarps under. You could also tie the tarps together but that could also cause bigger problems if a big windstorm got a handle on it, like those videos of storms lifting and flipping the tarp at baseball stadiums during deployment. Tarps lead to other problems too. Lets say you have to go out and make repairs on one of the posts or tarps in the middle of the reservoir; now you have to remove an entire series of tarps to get a boat to the needed area, and then redeploy those when you're done. If someone happens to fall into the water, the tarp would pretty much be a deathtrap, just like when someone falls into a covered pool. If someone falls in with the balls, its no big deal. The balls might cost slightly more than 175 acres of tarp in material costs, but cost of deployment and maintenance will be much lower. To deploy balls, all you really have to do is put them in, and they will spread out for you. To remove them, you just have a boat or equipment near that can scoop the balls up, or suck them out while putting the water back into the reservoir.

Comment Re:New Console Hardware (Score 2) 223

There are people running Batman: Arkham Knights on Titan cards with 12GB VRAM that are having problems maintaining 60 fps and other users with top of the line NVidia cards are getting frame rate drops into single digits. It reportedly runs even worse or not at all if you're using SLI. And there isn't any good explanation why the PC version doesn't even include high resolution textures, anisotropic filtering, ambient occlusion options, or any option for anti-aliasing other than On/Off, other than its a terrible port. Based on some reports, it seems that one of the biggest bottlenecks is streaming of data from the hard drive. Users with SSD are reporting less issues than users with HDD, so it seems to be severely lacking in some optimizations.

Comment Re:You're doing it wrong (Score 1) 93

I think most ThinkGeek users will continue to shop the website; the inventory there is too big to somehow fit it into really any GameStop store. This system actually makes sense, and provides a service for customers who can't do home delivery for some reason; for example, no secure package drop-off; or they are ordering a gift and want to keep it secret. Plus it bring a customer into the store where they might make an additional purchase.

Comment Not that surprising.... (Score 3, Insightful) 83

It really isn't surprising that the defense and intelligence communities would interact with the APA or at least with some group of psychologists. The defense and intelligence communities would have a vested interest in training their own members in how to deal with torture and interrogations in case they are ever captured. And unfortunately its hard to study and practice those defensive techniques without also learning how to actually conduct those techniques on your own detainees. The nature and tone of the discussions is somewhat relevant though - did they approach the APA asking how best to torture someone to get info, or did they go in asking for defensive techniques and training for their own agents?

Comment Re:Sharepoint (Score 1) 343

One big problem Sharepoint can have - If you open the document from Sharepoint and then your office application crashes out (which used to happen fairly often with some macro laden Excel spreadsheets my company has used), then you have two problems: 1) There usually any autosaved version to recover your changes from 2) The version you were working on from Sharepoint is locked out by "another user" and can't be reopened for editing. It's possible they've fixed these issues in the last few years, but I doubt it.

Comment Re:MUMPS! (Score 1) 242

Most of the "clever" M code I've seen is in that state due to limitations at the time it was written, such as the need to save as much space as possible due to storage/memory limitations. So comments are almost non-existent, variables are a single character, etc. Additionally, the original implementations of M didn't have a For loop command so a lot of old code is full of goto commands, with and without conditions, and the tags it goes to often have names that are 1 or 2 characters.

"Modern" M still has its oddities but at least now there's no legitimate excuse not to include internal documentation and more verbose names for your variables and tags.

As an aside, here's one of my favorite snippets of M code, even if all its good for is figuring out how deep the stack can go before it overflows
s x="x x" x x

Comment Re:Old News (Score 1) 172

Do you have a citation to back this up? I can't find anything indicating that blood banks (at least in the US) were ever entirely based on a system of personal credits. The first "blood depots" were setup in the UK during World War I to store blood for treatment of battlefield injuries, and "blood bank" now almost always means the storage are of the hospital or medical center where the blood is kept Most, if not all, American blood centers allow both replacement blood drives which can replace the units used by someone and put credits towards their hospital bill, and some allow you to get credits in advance for yourself if used within a short period (like 2-3 weeks). Additionally, many of them will allow you to make autologous donations, or to donate for a specific person in advance, but those cases both require doctor's orders and processing fees. Here's an example: http://www.thebloodcenter.org/...

Comment Re:$30,000 per year (Score 2) 1040

Plenty of adults are stuck working part time as well. They may be perfectly willing to work full time, but the new management style in retail and some other areas is to use software at the last minute to create the schedules and get the optimal number of employees on site at any given time without ever having any extra employees. As a result they will typically be scheduled with erratic schedules of 30 hours or less a week, and because they schedule is constantly changing, they can't easily schedule in a second job either. It's even worse for employees who need to juggle work schedule with arranging child care. And the argument of "they should find a better job" doesn't really hold water either. Depending on location, transport and the local job market, there may not be any other better jobs available. You can find plenty of articles about this over the last few years if you search for "just in time scheduling". Here's one representative article discussing the problems it causes for a significant portion of the workforce. http://www.labornotes.org/2012...

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