goodness

It's inexplicable:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B-K4NGo2HE&NR=1

True, it is slightly similar in that you didn't directly commit the crime. Though you do have to have an active role, for example, storing the money after a bank robbery. Another one like this is "accessory after the fact." However, there again, you actually have to take an active role in helping someone you know committed a crime.

The difference with something like the "condoning" rules is that they essentially take away the right to remain silent from the 5th amendment. Of course, they can get away with it because they are just rules at a school.

Schools can be really bad on this. One college I went to charged people with "condoning" if they were aware that someone else was breaking the rules and didn't report it. I think this is actually pretty common among private colleges in the US.

Imagine how badly that would be abused if it were a law.

Man, a lot of those sound familiar. A lot of hard-coded path problems are especially annoying since the official Django documentation often tells you to do it that way.

On a semi-related topic - I have an old 0.96 Django app that was using an old database migration framework that isn't supported in the newer versions of Django. For that framework I wrote the Django migrations in manually generated SQL. Anyone know how I could update to django-evolution or South with this hand coded SQL and still preserve my existing data?

The documentation for django-evolution says:

> Django Evolution imposes one important restriction on your development process: If you intend to make a change to your database, you must do it through Django Evolution. If you modify the database outside of Django and the Django Evolution framework, you're on your own.

Which makes me think I can't use that.

Did this just change or something? Earlier today I did a search and copied the URL and it was something like http://www.google.com/url?url=http%3A%2F%2F... But just now when I tried to duplicate it, I didn't get that. Weird.

This is a common problem that I have heard many folks describe with tools like PowerPoint and Word Processing software. People tend to putz around with formatting and layout and get distracted from the actual content.

This even goes back to tools as early as the hypertext tool Notecards. I remember they had a qualitative study where they found that people got really sidetracked trying to think of the name for a Notecard. I think the title of the paper with the study was "Reflections on NoteCards: seven issues for the next generation of hypermedia systems". I can't seem to find an electronic copy online.

Anyway, I have found a similar thing with the naming in my own programming. It is very hard to break habits with stuff like this. For example, for writing tasks, I finally had to switch to something like Notepad to write the first draft so I wouldn't be tempted to muck with formatting, spell check, grammar check, etc.

Man, I was sure I was going to have a shot at some of this money by helping you get it out of Nigeria.

The simulation hypothesis actually becomes more likely, though still not proven, if we get to the point where we can run our own simulated universe.

We might also demonstrate that we were in a simulation if we found an exploit to take over the simulator's webcam (assuming the simulator didn't patch and revert). Universal buffer overflow!

Well, almost. Not everyone on the field is eligible to receive. Two of the guys on the line aren't eligible. However, it isn't revealed who the eligible receivers are until just before the play starts.

Also some similarities with the Nuke Anything extension.

The first I saw this feature was in a 1992 paper:

http://smg.media.mit.edu/classes/SocialVis03/editWear.pdf

Not quite in the scrollbar. But beside it.

Well, the thing they didn't say in the article is that height matters. For a 7 foot guy with an additional 3 foot reach (like Shaq) the underhand shot makes a huge difference in terms of the angle the ball approaches the basket. For a 6 foot guy with a 2 foot reach, the benefit of this shooting style is much smaller.

The slo-mo replay is brilliant

In the case of the linux desktop, I have to say that I think it is a lot closer than 8 years ago. I have tried installing Linux at many points over the last 8 years or so. I have always abandoned it because configuring hardware took too much work. I recently installed Ubuntu 8.04 on 3 different machines, including a brand new Dell laptop, and the install worked flawlessly on each. Most importantly, every piece of hardware I've tried worked with basically no configuration - sound card, internal microphone, wireless, and graphics card. I did install a new driver for the Nvidia graphics card, but this was mostly optional. Also, when I've needed to tweak settings or install the new driver for the video card, I've done it through a GUI rather than the command line and various cryptic config files.

Installing software through Synaptic is also awesome. This is one place where Linux now actually excels over Windows. Of course, I haven't actually needed to install anything that's not in synaptic yet.

> At Wal-Mart, we had the belief that we only roll forward, never back.

What about Mr. Smiley?!!

There was a paper about this at CHI 2008:

http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~echi/papers/2008-CHI2008/2008-0...

Check out the Wikipedia article on speed reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading

Even if rapid serial visual presentation improves reading speed (which is dubious), it has enough negative aspects to counteract any benefits. For example, going back or doing any controlled skimming is difficult. You also lose all the contextual and landmark cues of page layout.