Ah! I didn't know it was a ranked percentile, heck it's been 6 or 7 years now. In that case, I likely did get more than one wrong, just less wrong than most others.
Those on their third try are bullet stoppers, as your friend pointed out.
That being said, I took the ASVAB in high school as well, it got me out of a couple classes, twice. The first time I got a call from the recruiter asking if I was kidding, because I got an 8% on the test. Seems either I put in the wrong grading key, or they graded it wrong. I took the test again the next year and scored 99%, and I knew the one question I got wrong.
Then the recruiter wouldn't stop calling me. He (or my file...) remembered me from the previous year getting an 8%.
I do remember the same dim bulbs taking it for the Nth time because they had gotten a 50% or whatever the time before. I felt really bad most of the time and simply told them I didn't remember my score. Sometimes for the real dipshits I would tell them, then close their jaw for them. (I assumed they had just forgotten how, since they got a 43% or whatever on that test.)
Perhaps they should have thought of that when they didn't lay last mile fiber.:)
I do understand though that it is a huge undertaking. The only reason our little podunk town got digital cable is they ripped half of it up to put a freeway through. While the earth was up verizon and ATT put in a shitton of fiber. I'm still waiting for it to reach my door, a mere 1/4 mile away.
The spammers pleaded with the court, "But we don't have two million dollars!" The court was wary and said, "Fine, we'll just charge you the full worth of your company" (which wipes them out, effectively "shutting them down") but it appears the judge added a provision that if the spammers are lying to weasel out of the fine, they will be held accountable.
We call that perjury in this country. I believe it is accompanied by lengthy jail sentences. I don't see the need for this at all, except perhaps making the ones who didn't perjur themselves pay while the other guy rots in prison.
Or buy a cheap, unlocked, SIM enabled phone off ebay and don't sign a contract at all. Your kids don't need a whiz bang phone, it's highly likely you don't either.:) Either way, you can get pretty much any phone unlocked from ebay so you don't have to worry about a contract, or even what carrier you're using. Take control of your cell phone, don't buy into prepaid.
At the current price listed of $0.12 per channel, I could buy my 10 niche channels for $5/month and still pay only $50. Thats ~41 times the price paid before, and I doubt it will lose 41 customers per region given a-la carte pricing. Many people will still stick with the "easy to use" plans. Lots of households are pandering to mom, dad, and the kid(s) when it comes to ordering cable.
These channels also benefit from much more accurate viewer information. It won't be neilson "in your living room" style, but the cable cos can say "hey, 500 people are subscribed to your channel, and most of them only have channels just like yours." The really niche channels will probably be able to tell their advertisers that eyeballs are up from previously bundled/averaged numbers.
Slashdot appeals to a niche group, nerds. Correct. You have shown you are willing to pay for this content (noting the asterisk next to your name). Who is to say that those small niche channels aren't worth it to the niche populations who watch them? I imagine my cable bill would be just about the same if it went a la carte. I would probably stick on the "local programming" package that would still exist, a couple choice history/medical channels, FX, scifi, and spike. To each their own, my tivo records out what I like on those channels as is, and most of the rest of them are disabled in the tivo. If I could pick and choose my channels with the cable company as easily as I do in my Tivo my cable bill would reflect it already.
That is a seriously unworkable solution. Between domain registration and misc dns propagation delays, plus websites which are managed by multiple people from different class c's, we would piss off a substantial portion of our customer base if we told them "hold on...". The other thing is a lot of these people sit on their accounts for a couple of days, it is likely their automated tools just make a sweep through the various systems and then go back to see what worked.
We have automated systems in place to try and detect fraudulent accounts and signups, but that can only be so effective. It catches more and more as the days go by but some will always slip through the cracks. Plus, many of our phishing accounts are exploited scripts with a/paypal/ directory or similar added. We deal with it how we can. Don't try to send email From: paypal.com, one of a pile of banks, or other accounts you have no business sending from and common misspellings and other obfuscations. Your email won't go anywhere and you won't get notification.
Not to mention, do *you* want every website you go to crossreferenced in some big Microsoft database?
I doubt this will be very effective. There are likely hundreds of live phishing sites at any given moment. At the webhosting place I work we get probably 5 or 6 new phishing sites daily, possibly more. It is a mix of fraudulent signups with stolen credit card or paypal information and simple exploited websites. We tend to get them removed in ~24 hours, but it only takes one person to put their info into one of these forms.
I have a T-Mobile sidekick2, and data-only costs me (well, work) something like $25/month for unlimited everything including taxes. I don't use SMS, I use E-Mail. The connections are laggy and slow, but I can use it to be "leashed" instead of "tied to a desk". Irssi even works over their terminal client relativly well. Danger seems to have it worked out with T-Mobile to suck up their GPRS data connections. They use some kind of remote proxy server to do the dirty work and just dump it into your cell phone.
From what I hear verizon's EVDO is pretty cool and affordable as well for unlimited data at high speeds.
I had to call them once. The guy was typing in the activation code to see why I had to call him and he said the server just crashed, so he wouldn't be able to activate my product and that I should call back. I politely told him this is why I shouldn't have to do this for software I purchased, and that I would kindly wait with him on the phone, for as long as it took. He didn't like this that much, and after 5 minutes of patiently waiting (I had other things I was doing) he spoke up and said "uhh look it came up!" and read me off an activation code. I never finished telling him my number to spout off my reason for calling, he just gave me a generic code.
Basically, I never do online activation, I *always* call. 800 numbers and humans all cost money, some mindless server does not, so I do not buy in to that. I tell them each time if the code comes up "in use" that I had Total Catastrophic Hardware Failure. Wether its the first time I'm activating or tenth for that license, same reason, most of the time it's true.
That is an interesting thing that Apple has done and you pointed out. When people consult with me for personal computer purchases I always tell them "Unless you have a specific need for a technology, pick a price, and buy whatever it is you can afford. Tomorrows technology is always just around the corner, so you will never have a $type_of_device if you always wait for the next big thing". With Apple now, with as little as $120 (tax, shipping, misc) you can be rocking it out with an iPod shuffle, all the way through their mega xServes with "optional xServe RAID" (I love how theres a $17,000~ checkbox with those...)
Something tells me if they opened a plant in an area that has to dispose of the waste they would not get paid to take it, as it now has value. You pay someone to haul away your trash, however, they pay you to take away your cans. (Pretend for a moment, however around here I can take aluminum cans and be paid per pound)
The instant there is a demand for that product it has attained a monetary value. It would be stupid to pay to have the waste removed at that point. I would bet the waste makers would either sell their waste cheap (how much to pay a trucker to haul it from farm A to plant B?) to free. What would likely happen is the plants would purchase the waste at a price that would match petroleum oil per barrel refined.
You're right, a possibly life saving procedure vs some software for a computer. Sure. I don't want to get in to this about the guy personally, but if you equate copying software to saving someones life you are far, far off.
Of course, I downloaded it once, put it on a fileserver, and put it on about 300+ work computers (and growing). I also downloaded it once at home and loaded it on 4 seperate computers, who have four seperate users. It is included as the default browser on any lab cloning images I make for students, along with hiding IE as much as possible. Shockingly, between that and restricting executables, these computers are spyware free now. If only we had Group Policy.
Even people who know nothing about computers want that mozilla thing!
Yeah, I was thinking along the lines of your second paragraph. Basically, taking it to the next level of all-electric vehicles, etc. They could also put a taxed meter on your cars power plug, but that would be hard to enforce. While many people would be afraid of toying with the N-amp circuit that their car plugs in to for a quick charge, many of us aren't.
I was thinking about the 5pound honda insight vs the 6wheel megatruck that JoeSixPack drives his kids to school in, which would make sense to do a factor of commercial vs. residential cars (under the theory that a construction truck would be loaded more often), and you could do the tax based upon avg weight per mile.
And yeah, what gives that Honda hasn't made anything more efficient than their early 90's cars?;-)
Also to answer you and some cowards, I was thinking more along the lines of shifting power (ft-lbs) to other sources, such as burning fuel for direct power, eletric power (e-), regenerative braking, and all electric cars.
The point behind this gas tax is that, on average, a N-ton vehicle burned X gallons of gas per mile. Now with hybrid cars shifting fuel burning to nuclear power plants (Dream world, sorry) THE MAN isn't getting their fair cut to maintain the roads. This GPS system would mean that there would be 0 state tax on the gas and you would pay directly for how many miles you drove. This doesn't show how they are going to solve problems such as people driving on toll-roads, private property, out of state, etc. Remember, GPS is best guess estimation to within a metre or two of where you are, I've seen plenty of farm roads going around crop fields which edge right up to public roads and freeways.
It does make more sense to tax per mile, always has, and before recently it was easy to do, everyone burned gas, and generally more per pound of the vehicle. Now, however, they are supplementing it with electricity, but it's still the same weight vehicle (roughly, pretend you added on an extra half litre displacement to compensate for the lead batteries). It's like putting marine fuel in your semitruck. No road taxes, big fines if found on public roads.
Little peices of clay actually, but no, I doubt they care. While they still have to account for the chips they can just leave the money in their investment accounts to earn a bit of interest on the side.
The thing is, say the show was no longer profitable from commercials, and we foot the overhead bill, now the commercials are pure profit. Say they only make a few million net profit (after they have paid everyone) on your average show per new episode. Don't think of shows like ER or Friends where they probably needed larger integer types to count the money, but just your day to day average show. Now, all the overhead is taken out, or even half, by fans. The new profit margins made off of commercials is nuts, plus the advertisers know exactly how many people they are buying with their ad.
$60million in commercials minus $50million paying everyone for a season, leaves $10million in the bank. But now the fans came in and add $30, 40, 50million to the pot and look how much money is left in the bank.
The world will change in TV, and the geeks are going to do it wether they like it or not. Again, we're trying to throw money at them, they would be fools not to take it, especially since it goes out over their precious airwaves not the evil internet. Soon we will all buy shares of the shows we watch and love instead of buying cable. Only we won't get any profit sharing or dividends, because why should they bother?
On another note, in my area we get pretty good Cingular signal, have for 6 years (Hello PacBell), except in my house, where you had to hunt for signal. ATT has always had spotty service at best, regardless of what the signal on your phone is, from LA to santa barbara. Now that they have merged, and theres a new tower up, I get full signal in and around my house on the ATT tower (Cingular Extended), but it is near useless to make a call on, with Cingular at least when you had a bar, it was signal, and you could talk clearly, with ATT you're lucky if your call goes through at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah! I didn't know it was a ranked percentile, heck it's been 6 or 7 years now. In that case, I likely did get more than one wrong, just less wrong than most others.
Those on their third try are bullet stoppers, as your friend pointed out.
That being said, I took the ASVAB in high school as well, it got me out of a couple classes, twice. The first time I got a call from the recruiter asking if I was kidding, because I got an 8% on the test. Seems either I put in the wrong grading key, or they graded it wrong. I took the test again the next year and scored 99%, and I knew the one question I got wrong.
Then the recruiter wouldn't stop calling me. He (or my file...) remembered me from the previous year getting an 8%.
I do remember the same dim bulbs taking it for the Nth time because they had gotten a 50% or whatever the time before. I felt really bad most of the time and simply told them I didn't remember my score. Sometimes for the real dipshits I would tell them, then close their jaw for them. (I assumed they had just forgotten how, since they got a 43% or whatever on that test.)
Perhaps they should have thought of that when they didn't lay last mile fiber. :)
I do understand though that it is a huge undertaking. The only reason our little podunk town got digital cable is they ripped half of it up to put a freeway through. While the earth was up verizon and ATT put in a shitton of fiber. I'm still waiting for it to reach my door, a mere 1/4 mile away.
The spammers pleaded with the court, "But we don't have two million dollars!" The court was wary and said, "Fine, we'll just charge you the full worth of your company" (which wipes them out, effectively "shutting them down") but it appears the judge added a provision that if the spammers are lying to weasel out of the fine, they will be held accountable.
We call that perjury in this country. I believe it is accompanied by lengthy jail sentences. I don't see the need for this at all, except perhaps making the ones who didn't perjur themselves pay while the other guy rots in prison.
Putting Bill Gates right on up there with Adolph Hitler. ;-)
2 ,00.html?internalid=ACV
http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,110139010
Or buy a cheap, unlocked, SIM enabled phone off ebay and don't sign a contract at all. Your kids don't need a whiz bang phone, it's highly likely you don't either. :) Either way, you can get pretty much any phone unlocked from ebay so you don't have to worry about a contract, or even what carrier you're using. Take control of your cell phone, don't buy into prepaid.
I don't seem to recall seeing this option. Elaborate? Or maybe it's better if the stations don't know how much Star Trek I watch...
At the current price listed of $0.12 per channel, I could buy my 10 niche channels for $5/month and still pay only $50. Thats ~41 times the price paid before, and I doubt it will lose 41 customers per region given a-la carte pricing. Many people will still stick with the "easy to use" plans. Lots of households are pandering to mom, dad, and the kid(s) when it comes to ordering cable.
These channels also benefit from much more accurate viewer information. It won't be neilson "in your living room" style, but the cable cos can say "hey, 500 people are subscribed to your channel, and most of them only have channels just like yours." The really niche channels will probably be able to tell their advertisers that eyeballs are up from previously bundled/averaged numbers.
Slashdot appeals to a niche group, nerds. Correct. You have shown you are willing to pay for this content (noting the asterisk next to your name). Who is to say that those small niche channels aren't worth it to the niche populations who watch them? I imagine my cable bill would be just about the same if it went a la carte. I would probably stick on the "local programming" package that would still exist, a couple choice history/medical channels, FX, scifi, and spike. To each their own, my tivo records out what I like on those channels as is, and most of the rest of them are disabled in the tivo. If I could pick and choose my channels with the cable company as easily as I do in my Tivo my cable bill would reflect it already.
That is a seriously unworkable solution. Between domain registration and misc dns propagation delays, plus websites which are managed by multiple people from different class c's, we would piss off a substantial portion of our customer base if we told them "hold on...". The other thing is a lot of these people sit on their accounts for a couple of days, it is likely their automated tools just make a sweep through the various systems and then go back to see what worked.
/paypal/ directory or similar added. We deal with it how we can. Don't try to send email From: paypal.com, one of a pile of banks, or other accounts you have no business sending from and common misspellings and other obfuscations. Your email won't go anywhere and you won't get notification.
We have automated systems in place to try and detect fraudulent accounts and signups, but that can only be so effective. It catches more and more as the days go by but some will always slip through the cracks. Plus, many of our phishing accounts are exploited scripts with a
Not to mention, do *you* want every website you go to crossreferenced in some big Microsoft database?
Is that in megabytes? kilobytes? bytes? Neato parameter. I have trouble with firefox at work on my mac after leaving it up for a day or two.
I doubt this will be very effective. There are likely hundreds of live phishing sites at any given moment. At the webhosting place I work we get probably 5 or 6 new phishing sites daily, possibly more. It is a mix of fraudulent signups with stolen credit card or paypal information and simple exploited websites. We tend to get them removed in ~24 hours, but it only takes one person to put their info into one of these forms.
I don't know if "thanking" Covad is really something anyone does. ;-)
(Sorry, a bit bitter about how they're handling our 2 DSL connections to our office. We're about to bail on them.)
I have a T-Mobile sidekick2, and data-only costs me (well, work) something like $25/month for unlimited everything including taxes. I don't use SMS, I use E-Mail. The connections are laggy and slow, but I can use it to be "leashed" instead of "tied to a desk". Irssi even works over their terminal client relativly well. Danger seems to have it worked out with T-Mobile to suck up their GPRS data connections. They use some kind of remote proxy server to do the dirty work and just dump it into your cell phone.
From what I hear verizon's EVDO is pretty cool and affordable as well for unlimited data at high speeds.
I had to call them once. The guy was typing in the activation code to see why I had to call him and he said the server just crashed, so he wouldn't be able to activate my product and that I should call back. I politely told him this is why I shouldn't have to do this for software I purchased, and that I would kindly wait with him on the phone, for as long as it took. He didn't like this that much, and after 5 minutes of patiently waiting (I had other things I was doing) he spoke up and said "uhh look it came up!" and read me off an activation code. I never finished telling him my number to spout off my reason for calling, he just gave me a generic code.
Basically, I never do online activation, I *always* call. 800 numbers and humans all cost money, some mindless server does not, so I do not buy in to that. I tell them each time if the code comes up "in use" that I had Total Catastrophic Hardware Failure. Wether its the first time I'm activating or tenth for that license, same reason, most of the time it's true.
That is an interesting thing that Apple has done and you pointed out. When people consult with me for personal computer purchases I always tell them "Unless you have a specific need for a technology, pick a price, and buy whatever it is you can afford. Tomorrows technology is always just around the corner, so you will never have a $type_of_device if you always wait for the next big thing". With Apple now, with as little as $120 (tax, shipping, misc) you can be rocking it out with an iPod shuffle, all the way through their mega xServes with "optional xServe RAID" (I love how theres a $17,000~ checkbox with those...)
Something tells me if they opened a plant in an area that has to dispose of the waste they would not get paid to take it, as it now has value. You pay someone to haul away your trash, however, they pay you to take away your cans. (Pretend for a moment, however around here I can take aluminum cans and be paid per pound)
The instant there is a demand for that product it has attained a monetary value. It would be stupid to pay to have the waste removed at that point. I would bet the waste makers would either sell their waste cheap (how much to pay a trucker to haul it from farm A to plant B?) to free. What would likely happen is the plants would purchase the waste at a price that would match petroleum oil per barrel refined.
You're right, a possibly life saving procedure vs some software for a computer. Sure. I don't want to get in to this about the guy personally, but if you equate copying software to saving someones life you are far, far off.
Of course, I downloaded it once, put it on a fileserver, and put it on about 300+ work computers (and growing). I also downloaded it once at home and loaded it on 4 seperate computers, who have four seperate users. It is included as the default browser on any lab cloning images I make for students, along with hiding IE as much as possible. Shockingly, between that and restricting executables, these computers are spyware free now. If only we had Group Policy.
Even people who know nothing about computers want that mozilla thing!
Yeah, I was thinking along the lines of your second paragraph. Basically, taking it to the next level of all-electric vehicles, etc. They could also put a taxed meter on your cars power plug, but that would be hard to enforce. While many people would be afraid of toying with the N-amp circuit that their car plugs in to for a quick charge, many of us aren't.
I was thinking about the 5pound honda insight vs the 6wheel megatruck that JoeSixPack drives his kids to school in, which would make sense to do a factor of commercial vs. residential cars (under the theory that a construction truck would be loaded more often), and you could do the tax based upon avg weight per mile.
;-)
And yeah, what gives that Honda hasn't made anything more efficient than their early 90's cars?
Also to answer you and some cowards, I was thinking more along the lines of shifting power (ft-lbs) to other sources, such as burning fuel for direct power, eletric power (e-), regenerative braking, and all electric cars.
The point behind this gas tax is that, on average, a N-ton vehicle burned X gallons of gas per mile. Now with hybrid cars shifting fuel burning to nuclear power plants (Dream world, sorry) THE MAN isn't getting their fair cut to maintain the roads. This GPS system would mean that there would be 0 state tax on the gas and you would pay directly for how many miles you drove. This doesn't show how they are going to solve problems such as people driving on toll-roads, private property, out of state, etc. Remember, GPS is best guess estimation to within a metre or two of where you are, I've seen plenty of farm roads going around crop fields which edge right up to public roads and freeways.
It does make more sense to tax per mile, always has, and before recently it was easy to do, everyone burned gas, and generally more per pound of the vehicle. Now, however, they are supplementing it with electricity, but it's still the same weight vehicle (roughly, pretend you added on an extra half litre displacement to compensate for the lead batteries). It's like putting marine fuel in your semitruck. No road taxes, big fines if found on public roads.
Little peices of clay actually, but no, I doubt they care. While they still have to account for the chips they can just leave the money in their investment accounts to earn a bit of interest on the side.
The thing is, say the show was no longer profitable from commercials, and we foot the overhead bill, now the commercials are pure profit. Say they only make a few million net profit (after they have paid everyone) on your average show per new episode. Don't think of shows like ER or Friends where they probably needed larger integer types to count the money, but just your day to day average show. Now, all the overhead is taken out, or even half, by fans. The new profit margins made off of commercials is nuts, plus the advertisers know exactly how many people they are buying with their ad.
$60million in commercials minus $50million paying everyone for a season, leaves $10million in the bank. But now the fans came in and add $30, 40, 50million to the pot and look how much money is left in the bank.
The world will change in TV, and the geeks are going to do it wether they like it or not. Again, we're trying to throw money at them, they would be fools not to take it, especially since it goes out over their precious airwaves not the evil internet. Soon we will all buy shares of the shows we watch and love instead of buying cable. Only we won't get any profit sharing or dividends, because why should they bother?
On another note, in my area we get pretty good Cingular signal, have for 6 years (Hello PacBell), except in my house, where you had to hunt for signal. ATT has always had spotty service at best, regardless of what the signal on your phone is, from LA to santa barbara. Now that they have merged, and theres a new tower up, I get full signal in and around my house on the ATT tower (Cingular Extended), but it is near useless to make a call on, with Cingular at least when you had a bar, it was signal, and you could talk clearly, with ATT you're lucky if your call goes through at all.