The last sentence in the summary is a repeat of the beginning of the paragraph. Further, the second-to-last sentence is unnecessary - the information there (that the previous quarterly patches were also on microsoft patch tuesday) can be easily added to the sentence before it.
Not that I expect well-written summaries here (and let's be honest, most people don't even read the summary in its entirety, much less TFA) but this is pretty bad.
I don't think the residents will ever go for such a thing. There's no way to convince people it's better to destroy stuff now rather than later, if you can even convince them it'll happen later anyway and will probably be worse (and the science is shaky enough at this point that it's tough for geologists even to agree on it).
And anyway, despite Walken's brilliant plan in A View to a Kill, the amount of energy involved in earthquakes is almost unimaginably huge - attempting to set one off in a controlled fashion would be incredibly difficult and expensive, and you wouldn't be sure if doing so made it worse than it might have been. For example, you may be able to determine where specifically the pressure is built up on the fault (and subduction zones are massive reverse faults) and set off a bomb there, but you can't tell if that pressure was naturally going to be released slowly over a series of small earthquakes or all at once.
It may seem reasonable to us, but politicians and the public will never understand and only see such a plan as designed to destroy a bunch of stuff that may or may not be destroyed in the future.
Chrome auto-updated itself on my Mac. Not sure exactly when it happened because I only use chrome occasionally and I didn't notice it updating, and it didn't use the system updater.
Funny thing is, on Macs, Chrome *does* have all the standard menus, because of the way the menus work. Still took me a while to find where the updater was, so apparently having the normal menus doesn't matter:)
Just a small comment, I don't think you can group Thailand with Iran when it comes to restricting/monitoring communications. They do block websites (trivial to get around if you want to) but they don't block dissent against the government in any way, and I'm guessing they monitor it less than the NSA monitors US citizens.
And that's beside the fact that you can get pre-paid mobile phones for the equivalent of $10 in cash with very cheap add-on minutes (also pay for those in cash) which for all practical purposes are untraceable, because if you're paranoid you can switch them around or whatever.
I'm defending Thailand because the foreign press has distorted what happened there recently quite a bit. It's nothing like Iran. People are free to protest the government, despite what it may seem after the violence recently in Bangkok.
I also use a safety razor that uses the cheap disposable blades. It's amazing how much better it works, and how much cheaper the blades are (I paid only a few dollars for the "handle" also).
Obviously you can't make much profit selling a packet of blades that'll last half a year for $1.50 these days. I guess they must have cost more back in 1901, perhaps similar to what the modern five-blade monstrosities cost now. Since they can't justify making the cheap blades that were perfected decades ago more expensive, they had to come up with something that doesn't work as well and try as hard as they could to eliminate the market for the old style product. Pretty despicable, I think.
Even better, get them printed from an online place (I like yorkphoto.com) and you can get 4x6 prints for ~6 cents each (wait for the frequent sales). The quality is better than at wal-mart, too, and you have a choice of paper types and so on (as well as all the other nonsense like coffee mugs, but that's easily ignored).
I would say I'm an "advanced amateur" and I use a Canon 40D and L-series lenses, and I've printed poster-sized prints on professional printers on expensive paper (which look fantastic, no doubt). I'm very critical about image quality. Wal-mart prints have tended to be the worst (the machines are often miscalibrated or damaged in some way, which can cause discoloration and artifacts in your prints), the Kodak ones at Target always seem to be set to "warm up" the colors of your picture way too much (meaning if you properly adjust your images ahead of time, they're going to be over-adjusted), and some pharmacies like CVS or Walgreens tend to be a little bit better in that regard for some reason, even if they use the same type of machine, so those are probably your best bet for local places. Online places still are the best, though - besides being cheapest as I already mentioned. I tried several and yorkphoto had the best color rendition and print quality, and at the time I checked (a few years ago) they were the cheapest online place. All were decent quality, at least as good (and mostly better) than local places. I don't get prints too often so I haven't bothered to see who else is in the business these days.
I agree that the other guy is nuts - first to recommend digital frames (which aren't really that bad, but as you say nowhere near as good as they should be at this point), and then to think you were referring to getting film developed. Somehow this guy has missed the digital printing kiosks that are in all the stores, I guess:) Anyway, prints can serve many different purposes besides just displaying in frames around the house.
Besides the fact that the link to the file in the summary didn't work, there are other potential problems if you click through to the source (on the forums, not the blog linked here).
The procedure that's linked to will get you to 2.2, but it won't be rooted even if you were rooted before.
I just did the classic "spend two hours trying to fix what you screwed up" routine trying to get it rooted again so that I could run the backup created by titanium backup, which requires root.
For those interested, the steps for a fool-proof upgrade if you're rooted are:
That was definitely a parody of cricket, but the point stands - fun movie:)
In Thailand one time I had a hotel with cable TV and at any time of day there were at least two or three channels showing cricket matches (mostly in India and Africa)... I just watched idly at first and then was curious what the heck was going on, so I looked up the rules online and tried to follow along with the game and definitely got more confused than when I started.
Then again, I'm an American male and I don't understand American football (not to mention most other team sports, which are much simpler), so I probably am not the best person to try to understand cricket:)
You make legitimate points about scalping, but read the parent's post again - the point is, the concert venue and the artist are trying to be benevolent and they want their fans to be able to go to their show. They realize charging hundreds - or thousands - of dollars as the scalpers do means that a lot of people won't be able to go, only rich people will.
From the artist's perspective, would you rather have your show packed with your greatest fans, or packed full of rich people who heard you were popular but don't really know much of the music?
Here are two anecdotes:
I grew up in Buffalo, NY and went to university in Rochester. These are more or less dying cities that not many big-name acts play in. Actually, I might say that *only* big name acts play in them, because smaller bands can't guarantee an audience. Of the big name acts, though, only a small percentage stop in Buffalo compared to those who stop in bigger cities. If you like concerts and live there, you're basically stuck driving two hours to Toronto for most things.
Imagine my surprise then when Neil Young - who I'm a huge fan of - announces a concert in Buffalo, not in the arena but in a famous small-ish theater. Ticket prices are higher than usual, but reasonable considering the more intimate venue. I'd seen him in Toronto previously in an arena and, well, arenas suck for concerts. So I'm at my computer shortly before tickets go on sale, knowing it will be tight. I'm refreshing every couple of seconds as time counts down... and then yes! Tickets are on sale! I click, click, click... nothing happens. I keep trying for ten minutes or so, never getting through, and then the tickets are all sold out.
OK, so did I just get beat by people with faster internet connections? I doubted it, I was on the university network which was usually blazing fast. Well, fuck. Check the ticket resale sites a few hours later, and there are *hundreds* of tickets (originally priced $50-100) on sale for $1000-3000. I later heard that one person I knew went, presumably by buying a $1000 ticket because he's sort of a rich douchebag.
Now, compare to another performer, Donovan. He's quite popular (though not as much as Neil Young) but apparently not a target for scalpers. I've seen him three times, once in a large-ish venue in Albany, once in a small-ish one in Buffalo, and once in a tiny cafe in NYC. Each time, the place was packed full of almost exclusively big fans (it's easy to tell this is the case in smaller venues). Perhaps this just means the demand isn't high outside of people who aren't big fans. In many ways, you're right. But the artists want as many people as possible to come, and they want people who actually like their music. The only way to achieve this is to have reasonably priced tickets, and the scalpers ruin the equation and make huge profits off of the artists while ripping off the fans - they contribute nothing and are scummy. I don't think it should be illegal - it's a legitimate free market practice - but anything artists and venues can do to limit their impact I highly welcome.
That all said, scalping electronic goods is ridiculously stupid (on the buyer's part, I mean). I definitely know the feeling of "having to have it" right away, but it will never harm you to wait a bit. Paying a slight premium (maybe 10% or less) is maybe not that outrageous if you can afford it and really want it right away, but how stupid are you going to feel if you pay twice as much as it costs at the store only to find out that the following week they're back in stock? As far as I know, ipad shortages didn't last very long and it shouldn't have been difficult to get one within the first couple of weeks. I guess something like the Wii is a little different, since it was nearly impossible to get one for a year or more after release, but even then it's not like it's anywhere near necessary to have one.
This technique was used at least as late as 1998... I remember it being used for the first Rainbow Six game. Of course, there was a lot more game data for that than games from 1993. As I recall (I was into modding it a bit at the time) the sound effects were all raw.wav files, and the music (there were only a few short cues as I recall) was CD audio that you could play in a CD player.
The same year also saw Half-Life, of course, whose game engine was quite a bit ahead of games like Rainbow Six and I guess ushered in the modern era, so Rainbow Six must be one of the last games to use CD audio.
Yes, to us native English speakers that matters, but, many languages do not feature such distinctions. You figure it out based on context, or through other means (and I suppose there are workarounds to describe the difference when necessary).
Somehow they get by. Think about how you would use those different sentences. They do all mean something different, but in use, in most cases only one would make sense - you understand because of the context.
Thus the parent's description of "the" may make more sense... it's a word to make English flow better to our ears. If you listen to the way non-European languages are spoken, the opposite is true - if you added in words like that it would sound stilted, just like English sounds when you don't use them.
Most smartphones (as far as I know) have such a feature - I have a Nexus One that does it, at least some of the other recent-model Android phones do as well, and the iphone/ipad/ipod touch do too.
Problem is, it's pretty annoying. Lighting the keys in the dark automatically is one thing (though I think the keypad light on the Razr was on all the time if you had it open - I had one of those too - you just can't see it in bright light), but a constantly shifting display brightness is really distracting.
This is of course merely a software issue - it should take an average over 0.5-1 minutes or so before deciding to switch, rather than constantly adjusting when you put your finger over the sensor inadvertently.
The solution that works for me is a widget (the default nexus one widget that turns on/off various functions) that cycles through minimum brightness (good for when the lights are off completely), medium (controllable in the options; I set it at about 66% - good for normal indoors and general use), and maximum (only really necessary sometimes when outdoors in the sun). It should be obvious to most users that the ipad or whatever they're holding right in their face, in an otherwise dark room and set at full brightness, is way too bright - it's uncomfortable to look at. But if you don't make the automatic adjustments something that isn't annoying, most people will turn it off and will be too lazy to adjust the brightness as necessary.
How does one apply confidence towards getting hired, when their application is rejected before a real person even bothers to look at it because some software scanned their resume and determined it didn't have all the right key words? Or does confidence mean "exaggerating" in your resume, and packing it full of jargon, so that you can get through this filter?
Really, it's necessary to have a relevant degree to get an entry-level job these days. Once you have your foot in the door, sure, you can advance to better positions through hard work and "confidence". But it's a lot harder to get that foot in the door these days than it apparently was in the past.
Of my friends from high school and college - all of whom graduated with four-year degrees in 2008, many of them science BSs (including myself) - of those that aren't in grad/med school I would estimate about half have entry-level jobs (and not all in their career of choice) by now, and the rest are working shitty jobs and/or living at home until they can find something. And remember - this is *with* good, relevant degrees. If we can't get the jobs we were educated for, how will someone without those degrees? As the parent said, job listings say "degree in X or related field is required". Your resume will not be looked at if you don't have that.
Yes, but most people that go to college don't get BS degrees (or, they *do* get BS degrees if you use different words for the acronym) and as the parent said, they end up in low-ish paying jobs and never really get anywhere in life, and if they do, it's not because of their education.
A four-year degree is seen as essential by HR departments but outside of science, engineering, tech, and so on, no one cares what you did your degree in, and they don't care if you actually learned anything. It's not just University of Phoenix crap either - real colleges and universities are jam-packed full of people who a few decades ago would have entered the job market immediately after high school and would have ended up in the same positions that they'll end up in now, and they are not getting anything useful out of their education.
I'm reminded of Ron Howard's character in American Graffiti, set in the early 60's - at the end he decides not to leave town and go to college; instead he stays home to be with his girlfriend and he ends up becoming an insurance salesman (essentially, a randomly-chosen job that requires intelligence but not a lot of advanced education). These days, it would be hard to find an insurance salesman without a four-year degree or higher.
I'm a TA for geology 101 labs at a California state university, and most of the people who take my classes are not science majors. I'm not sure if the private university I did my BS in geology at is that much better of a school or if I just didn't know many non-science majors, but some of the students that take my class are astonishing to me, and not in a good way. They're not idiots - far from it - but higher education is really not doing them any good. Many of them work full-time at normal office jobs and need a degree to advance in the company... but the training and experience they get on the job is much more useful to them than their degree will be, and very few students at this university take classes just for fun.
...that's what the "dome" was, that they couldn't get to work - it was a funnel to contain the oil coming out, leading it to a pipe (where presumably it would be collected in a tanker).
Actually, there are keyboard shortcuts for almost everything in OS X, including stuff you weren't expecting (meaning a lot you'll probably never need to use) - but they aren't well documented officially, in my experience.
If you look around the internet trying to figure out how to do stuff in OS X - mostly simple stuff, I mean - you'll see a lot of answers from people telling you to use the keyboard shortcut. How they figured it out, who knows; I think the keyboard shortcuts are only passed on through message boards.
I don't tend to remember keyboard shortcuts very well so I don't use them often, but a few of them have really increased the speed at which I can get around the system, and there are many things that you can *only* do through keyboard shortcuts. Having to look them up each time because you forgot doesn't make it more efficient, of course:)
Yes, but in Southeast Asia you can get a pretty decent fake Coach purse around the corner from the mall for $5-10, the quality of which more than satisfies most people. Some probably think they're real, even, unless the label is misspelled. You can get fake Omegas and Rolexes for about the same price, too, though in that case the quality is usually visibly awful and (assuming it works in the first place) will last a couple weeks at most.
So who is going to be buying the real ones? Two groups of people: those who have enough money that the difference between $300 and $1000 is not terribly important, and tourists who think they're getting a great deal on everything simply because they're in SE Asia and haven't done their research. Of course, the tourists are more likely than locals to fit into the first group as well. This is ironic... more on that later.
That said, you *will* get great deals on high-quality, non-counterfeit clothing and the like in SE Asia if you're smart about it. For example, in Chiang Mai, Thailand I picked up some incredibly nice dress shirts from a London label for around $15-20 from the clearance section (normally $30-40 which is still good). It was a bit of an impulse purchase and I didn't do any research regarding them until afterward, but it was obvious that they were good quality, nice-looking shirts, sold in a reputable high-end department store in a mall, and that compared to prices I'd seen for similar quality in the US it was obviously a steal. I looked up the company later and found the same shirts (the next season's version, anyway, which were basically the same) selling for $200-300 on the internet.
It's definitely hit or miss, though... certain overtly "designer" things like Coach purses, high-end electronics, etc - luxury goods, not just "nice" versions of everyday stuff - cost about the same, or more, in SE Asia and the US. That includes things like expensive watches, other than Omega apparently, as the parent described.
Now the ironic part - certainly a large percentage of people who are in a position to afford Omega watches and the like in these countries where they're sold more cheaply are foreigners, for the reason I described earlier. Dropping the price from $2000 to $1000 doesn't make much of a difference to the locals, but will entice a lot more foreign tourists to buy one - people who are fairly rich but who wouldn't have paid full price back home.
For most things, price disparity depending on the local economy makes a certain amount of sense. People have to be able to afford your product. But when you're selling a purely luxury product, the market doesn't really support such price disparity. Omega brought this upon themselves... they are severely hurting their image not just for the stupid lawsuit, but also by exposing the fact that they greatly discount in other countries. Personally, if I was ever in the position of being able to afford an expensive watch (likely never, to be fair), I would have gotten an Omega over anything else (partially due to James Bond product placement, but also because they look great anyway), but their status in my mind has now dropped considerably.
With a global market and the internet, luxury goods companies are in a lot of trouble.
That's a neat story - there must be all kinds of information like that from those days that no one remembers (or wrote down) regarding war engineering besides The Dam Busters.
I do wonder, though, about the tank story... what kind of manufacturing technology and skill was in use if tanks were being manufactured with such huge mistakes? In my mind, ending up with an exhaust port a couple of inches out of place is pretty huge and makes me wonder about the quality of construction going into the rest of the tank... even if the placement was measured manually with a ruler (which I assume it wasn't, probably a template was used) I don't see how they could have been *that* far off. Of course, if you're saying that exhaust ports that were only slightly more than 1/4" off were rejected it's a different story, but even that seems like a lot of error.
Who knows, I'm not an engineer (though I do understand tolerances) and I don't know what manufacturing was like back then:)
Be careful, I got an unlocked Nexus One (before the AT&T model was available) and used it with my previously existing AT&T plan, and they were able to detect right away that I was using a smartphone and I was informed via SMS that I needed to pay for the data plan.
You may or may not be able to actually stop the phone from trying to access mobile data - there isn't an option in the settings to disable it. I'm sure there is away around that, but it probably won't be simple and probably will require rooting it, not that you won't be doing that anyway (I rooted it, but there still isn't an easy option to disable mobile data as far as I can tell - didn't look too hard, to be fair).
I'm assuming you did your research to determine that this would be possible, but in case you didn't, let me be your warning that you might not be able to get away with it. I'm not a great data point because I was planning on getting the data plan anyway so I didn't try too hard to hide it from AT&T, but I did try to use it for about a day without the data plan, and as I said they detected it right away. Pretty sleazy on their part, I think, especially since I have the non-AT&T (who use 900 Mhz as opposed to everyone else's 850 Mhz) model and so am limited to 2G speed, but what do you expect.
In case you're wondering, though I sort of regret jumping the gun and getting it before the AT&T version was announced, the 850 Mhz frequency is much more useful to me than 900 Mhz if I travel (I'm spending most of the rest of the year in Thailand where 850 Mhz is used for 3G from the provider I already have a number with there), and someone else pays for my AT&T plan;)
This country is, funnily enough, actually called "The Gambia", not Gambia, and it's got a really funny shape that follows the course of the Gambia River. A pretty interesting place, actually.
I don't think it's clear that's the case, because they *did* have him in the locker in the alleyway... I think it was implied that initially they did have Muhammad (is that the generally accepted way of spelling it?) in the bear suit in the previous episode, but that they switched him out with Santa Claus when they were giving him to the gingers.
That's all and well, but I think there are a lot of us who suddenly aren't getting mod points when we used to be... and I, at least, haven't changed my reading or posting habits at all, and I don't think I was poorly meta-moderated. I haven't checked the disable advertising box (though I do have the option) so that's not it, either.
Slashdot Mirror
The last sentence in the summary is a repeat of the beginning of the paragraph. Further, the second-to-last sentence is unnecessary - the information there (that the previous quarterly patches were also on microsoft patch tuesday) can be easily added to the sentence before it.
Not that I expect well-written summaries here (and let's be honest, most people don't even read the summary in its entirety, much less TFA) but this is pretty bad.
I don't think the residents will ever go for such a thing. There's no way to convince people it's better to destroy stuff now rather than later, if you can even convince them it'll happen later anyway and will probably be worse (and the science is shaky enough at this point that it's tough for geologists even to agree on it).
And anyway, despite Walken's brilliant plan in A View to a Kill, the amount of energy involved in earthquakes is almost unimaginably huge - attempting to set one off in a controlled fashion would be incredibly difficult and expensive, and you wouldn't be sure if doing so made it worse than it might have been. For example, you may be able to determine where specifically the pressure is built up on the fault (and subduction zones are massive reverse faults) and set off a bomb there, but you can't tell if that pressure was naturally going to be released slowly over a series of small earthquakes or all at once.
It may seem reasonable to us, but politicians and the public will never understand and only see such a plan as designed to destroy a bunch of stuff that may or may not be destroyed in the future.
Chrome auto-updated itself on my Mac. Not sure exactly when it happened because I only use chrome occasionally and I didn't notice it updating, and it didn't use the system updater.
Funny thing is, on Macs, Chrome *does* have all the standard menus, because of the way the menus work. Still took me a while to find where the updater was, so apparently having the normal menus doesn't matter :)
Just a small comment, I don't think you can group Thailand with Iran when it comes to restricting/monitoring communications. They do block websites (trivial to get around if you want to) but they don't block dissent against the government in any way, and I'm guessing they monitor it less than the NSA monitors US citizens.
And that's beside the fact that you can get pre-paid mobile phones for the equivalent of $10 in cash with very cheap add-on minutes (also pay for those in cash) which for all practical purposes are untraceable, because if you're paranoid you can switch them around or whatever.
I'm defending Thailand because the foreign press has distorted what happened there recently quite a bit. It's nothing like Iran. People are free to protest the government, despite what it may seem after the violence recently in Bangkok.
I also use a safety razor that uses the cheap disposable blades. It's amazing how much better it works, and how much cheaper the blades are (I paid only a few dollars for the "handle" also).
Obviously you can't make much profit selling a packet of blades that'll last half a year for $1.50 these days. I guess they must have cost more back in 1901, perhaps similar to what the modern five-blade monstrosities cost now. Since they can't justify making the cheap blades that were perfected decades ago more expensive, they had to come up with something that doesn't work as well and try as hard as they could to eliminate the market for the old style product. Pretty despicable, I think.
Even better, get them printed from an online place (I like yorkphoto.com) and you can get 4x6 prints for ~6 cents each (wait for the frequent sales). The quality is better than at wal-mart, too, and you have a choice of paper types and so on (as well as all the other nonsense like coffee mugs, but that's easily ignored).
I would say I'm an "advanced amateur" and I use a Canon 40D and L-series lenses, and I've printed poster-sized prints on professional printers on expensive paper (which look fantastic, no doubt). I'm very critical about image quality. Wal-mart prints have tended to be the worst (the machines are often miscalibrated or damaged in some way, which can cause discoloration and artifacts in your prints), the Kodak ones at Target always seem to be set to "warm up" the colors of your picture way too much (meaning if you properly adjust your images ahead of time, they're going to be over-adjusted), and some pharmacies like CVS or Walgreens tend to be a little bit better in that regard for some reason, even if they use the same type of machine, so those are probably your best bet for local places. Online places still are the best, though - besides being cheapest as I already mentioned. I tried several and yorkphoto had the best color rendition and print quality, and at the time I checked (a few years ago) they were the cheapest online place. All were decent quality, at least as good (and mostly better) than local places. I don't get prints too often so I haven't bothered to see who else is in the business these days.
I agree that the other guy is nuts - first to recommend digital frames (which aren't really that bad, but as you say nowhere near as good as they should be at this point), and then to think you were referring to getting film developed. Somehow this guy has missed the digital printing kiosks that are in all the stores, I guess :) Anyway, prints can serve many different purposes besides just displaying in frames around the house.
Besides the fact that the link to the file in the summary didn't work, there are other potential problems if you click through to the source (on the forums, not the blog linked here).
The procedure that's linked to will get you to 2.2, but it won't be rooted even if you were rooted before.
I just did the classic "spend two hours trying to fix what you screwed up" routine trying to get it rooted again so that I could run the backup created by titanium backup, which requires root.
For those interested, the steps for a fool-proof upgrade if you're rooted are:
-Do a full backup using titanium backup first, obviously
-Install Amon Ra 1.7 custom recovery loader: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=611829
-Use it to flash the zip file update-nexusone-FRF50-signed.zip from here: http://android.modaco.com/content/google-nexus-one-nexusone-modaco-com/309286/frf50-froyo-pre-rooted-update-zip/ - note that this wouldn't flash for me using the stock recovery loader (which requires renaming it to update.zip but it fails saying it's unsigned), hence the custom one above
-Use it again to flash froyo-rooter-signed.zip from here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=686627
-Restore your backup
That was definitely a parody of cricket, but the point stands - fun movie :)
In Thailand one time I had a hotel with cable TV and at any time of day there were at least two or three channels showing cricket matches (mostly in India and Africa)... I just watched idly at first and then was curious what the heck was going on, so I looked up the rules online and tried to follow along with the game and definitely got more confused than when I started.
Then again, I'm an American male and I don't understand American football (not to mention most other team sports, which are much simpler), so I probably am not the best person to try to understand cricket :)
You make legitimate points about scalping, but read the parent's post again - the point is, the concert venue and the artist are trying to be benevolent and they want their fans to be able to go to their show. They realize charging hundreds - or thousands - of dollars as the scalpers do means that a lot of people won't be able to go, only rich people will.
From the artist's perspective, would you rather have your show packed with your greatest fans, or packed full of rich people who heard you were popular but don't really know much of the music?
Here are two anecdotes:
I grew up in Buffalo, NY and went to university in Rochester. These are more or less dying cities that not many big-name acts play in. Actually, I might say that *only* big name acts play in them, because smaller bands can't guarantee an audience. Of the big name acts, though, only a small percentage stop in Buffalo compared to those who stop in bigger cities. If you like concerts and live there, you're basically stuck driving two hours to Toronto for most things.
Imagine my surprise then when Neil Young - who I'm a huge fan of - announces a concert in Buffalo, not in the arena but in a famous small-ish theater. Ticket prices are higher than usual, but reasonable considering the more intimate venue. I'd seen him in Toronto previously in an arena and, well, arenas suck for concerts. So I'm at my computer shortly before tickets go on sale, knowing it will be tight. I'm refreshing every couple of seconds as time counts down... and then yes! Tickets are on sale! I click, click, click... nothing happens. I keep trying for ten minutes or so, never getting through, and then the tickets are all sold out.
OK, so did I just get beat by people with faster internet connections? I doubted it, I was on the university network which was usually blazing fast. Well, fuck. Check the ticket resale sites a few hours later, and there are *hundreds* of tickets (originally priced $50-100) on sale for $1000-3000. I later heard that one person I knew went, presumably by buying a $1000 ticket because he's sort of a rich douchebag.
Now, compare to another performer, Donovan. He's quite popular (though not as much as Neil Young) but apparently not a target for scalpers. I've seen him three times, once in a large-ish venue in Albany, once in a small-ish one in Buffalo, and once in a tiny cafe in NYC. Each time, the place was packed full of almost exclusively big fans (it's easy to tell this is the case in smaller venues). Perhaps this just means the demand isn't high outside of people who aren't big fans. In many ways, you're right. But the artists want as many people as possible to come, and they want people who actually like their music. The only way to achieve this is to have reasonably priced tickets, and the scalpers ruin the equation and make huge profits off of the artists while ripping off the fans - they contribute nothing and are scummy. I don't think it should be illegal - it's a legitimate free market practice - but anything artists and venues can do to limit their impact I highly welcome.
That all said, scalping electronic goods is ridiculously stupid (on the buyer's part, I mean). I definitely know the feeling of "having to have it" right away, but it will never harm you to wait a bit. Paying a slight premium (maybe 10% or less) is maybe not that outrageous if you can afford it and really want it right away, but how stupid are you going to feel if you pay twice as much as it costs at the store only to find out that the following week they're back in stock? As far as I know, ipad shortages didn't last very long and it shouldn't have been difficult to get one within the first couple of weeks. I guess something like the Wii is a little different, since it was nearly impossible to get one for a year or more after release, but even then it's not like it's anywhere near necessary to have one.
This technique was used at least as late as 1998... I remember it being used for the first Rainbow Six game. Of course, there was a lot more game data for that than games from 1993. As I recall (I was into modding it a bit at the time) the sound effects were all raw .wav files, and the music (there were only a few short cues as I recall) was CD audio that you could play in a CD player.
The same year also saw Half-Life, of course, whose game engine was quite a bit ahead of games like Rainbow Six and I guess ushered in the modern era, so Rainbow Six must be one of the last games to use CD audio.
Yes, to us native English speakers that matters, but, many languages do not feature such distinctions. You figure it out based on context, or through other means (and I suppose there are workarounds to describe the difference when necessary).
Somehow they get by. Think about how you would use those different sentences. They do all mean something different, but in use, in most cases only one would make sense - you understand because of the context.
Thus the parent's description of "the" may make more sense... it's a word to make English flow better to our ears. If you listen to the way non-European languages are spoken, the opposite is true - if you added in words like that it would sound stilted, just like English sounds when you don't use them.
Dilbert: keyboard face
Most smartphones (as far as I know) have such a feature - I have a Nexus One that does it, at least some of the other recent-model Android phones do as well, and the iphone/ipad/ipod touch do too.
Problem is, it's pretty annoying. Lighting the keys in the dark automatically is one thing (though I think the keypad light on the Razr was on all the time if you had it open - I had one of those too - you just can't see it in bright light), but a constantly shifting display brightness is really distracting.
This is of course merely a software issue - it should take an average over 0.5-1 minutes or so before deciding to switch, rather than constantly adjusting when you put your finger over the sensor inadvertently.
The solution that works for me is a widget (the default nexus one widget that turns on/off various functions) that cycles through minimum brightness (good for when the lights are off completely), medium (controllable in the options; I set it at about 66% - good for normal indoors and general use), and maximum (only really necessary sometimes when outdoors in the sun). It should be obvious to most users that the ipad or whatever they're holding right in their face, in an otherwise dark room and set at full brightness, is way too bright - it's uncomfortable to look at. But if you don't make the automatic adjustments something that isn't annoying, most people will turn it off and will be too lazy to adjust the brightness as necessary.
How does one apply confidence towards getting hired, when their application is rejected before a real person even bothers to look at it because some software scanned their resume and determined it didn't have all the right key words? Or does confidence mean "exaggerating" in your resume, and packing it full of jargon, so that you can get through this filter?
Really, it's necessary to have a relevant degree to get an entry-level job these days. Once you have your foot in the door, sure, you can advance to better positions through hard work and "confidence". But it's a lot harder to get that foot in the door these days than it apparently was in the past.
Of my friends from high school and college - all of whom graduated with four-year degrees in 2008, many of them science BSs (including myself) - of those that aren't in grad/med school I would estimate about half have entry-level jobs (and not all in their career of choice) by now, and the rest are working shitty jobs and/or living at home until they can find something. And remember - this is *with* good, relevant degrees. If we can't get the jobs we were educated for, how will someone without those degrees? As the parent said, job listings say "degree in X or related field is required". Your resume will not be looked at if you don't have that.
Yes, but most people that go to college don't get BS degrees (or, they *do* get BS degrees if you use different words for the acronym) and as the parent said, they end up in low-ish paying jobs and never really get anywhere in life, and if they do, it's not because of their education.
A four-year degree is seen as essential by HR departments but outside of science, engineering, tech, and so on, no one cares what you did your degree in, and they don't care if you actually learned anything. It's not just University of Phoenix crap either - real colleges and universities are jam-packed full of people who a few decades ago would have entered the job market immediately after high school and would have ended up in the same positions that they'll end up in now, and they are not getting anything useful out of their education.
I'm reminded of Ron Howard's character in American Graffiti, set in the early 60's - at the end he decides not to leave town and go to college; instead he stays home to be with his girlfriend and he ends up becoming an insurance salesman (essentially, a randomly-chosen job that requires intelligence but not a lot of advanced education). These days, it would be hard to find an insurance salesman without a four-year degree or higher.
I'm a TA for geology 101 labs at a California state university, and most of the people who take my classes are not science majors. I'm not sure if the private university I did my BS in geology at is that much better of a school or if I just didn't know many non-science majors, but some of the students that take my class are astonishing to me, and not in a good way. They're not idiots - far from it - but higher education is really not doing them any good. Many of them work full-time at normal office jobs and need a degree to advance in the company... but the training and experience they get on the job is much more useful to them than their degree will be, and very few students at this university take classes just for fun.
...that's what the "dome" was, that they couldn't get to work - it was a funnel to contain the oil coming out, leading it to a pipe (where presumably it would be collected in a tanker).
Actually, there are keyboard shortcuts for almost everything in OS X, including stuff you weren't expecting (meaning a lot you'll probably never need to use) - but they aren't well documented officially, in my experience.
If you look around the internet trying to figure out how to do stuff in OS X - mostly simple stuff, I mean - you'll see a lot of answers from people telling you to use the keyboard shortcut. How they figured it out, who knows; I think the keyboard shortcuts are only passed on through message boards.
I don't tend to remember keyboard shortcuts very well so I don't use them often, but a few of them have really increased the speed at which I can get around the system, and there are many things that you can *only* do through keyboard shortcuts. Having to look them up each time because you forgot doesn't make it more efficient, of course :)
Yes, but in Southeast Asia you can get a pretty decent fake Coach purse around the corner from the mall for $5-10, the quality of which more than satisfies most people. Some probably think they're real, even, unless the label is misspelled. You can get fake Omegas and Rolexes for about the same price, too, though in that case the quality is usually visibly awful and (assuming it works in the first place) will last a couple weeks at most.
So who is going to be buying the real ones? Two groups of people: those who have enough money that the difference between $300 and $1000 is not terribly important, and tourists who think they're getting a great deal on everything simply because they're in SE Asia and haven't done their research. Of course, the tourists are more likely than locals to fit into the first group as well. This is ironic... more on that later.
That said, you *will* get great deals on high-quality, non-counterfeit clothing and the like in SE Asia if you're smart about it. For example, in Chiang Mai, Thailand I picked up some incredibly nice dress shirts from a London label for around $15-20 from the clearance section (normally $30-40 which is still good). It was a bit of an impulse purchase and I didn't do any research regarding them until afterward, but it was obvious that they were good quality, nice-looking shirts, sold in a reputable high-end department store in a mall, and that compared to prices I'd seen for similar quality in the US it was obviously a steal. I looked up the company later and found the same shirts (the next season's version, anyway, which were basically the same) selling for $200-300 on the internet.
It's definitely hit or miss, though... certain overtly "designer" things like Coach purses, high-end electronics, etc - luxury goods, not just "nice" versions of everyday stuff - cost about the same, or more, in SE Asia and the US. That includes things like expensive watches, other than Omega apparently, as the parent described.
Now the ironic part - certainly a large percentage of people who are in a position to afford Omega watches and the like in these countries where they're sold more cheaply are foreigners, for the reason I described earlier. Dropping the price from $2000 to $1000 doesn't make much of a difference to the locals, but will entice a lot more foreign tourists to buy one - people who are fairly rich but who wouldn't have paid full price back home.
For most things, price disparity depending on the local economy makes a certain amount of sense. People have to be able to afford your product. But when you're selling a purely luxury product, the market doesn't really support such price disparity. Omega brought this upon themselves... they are severely hurting their image not just for the stupid lawsuit, but also by exposing the fact that they greatly discount in other countries. Personally, if I was ever in the position of being able to afford an expensive watch (likely never, to be fair), I would have gotten an Omega over anything else (partially due to James Bond product placement, but also because they look great anyway), but their status in my mind has now dropped considerably.
With a global market and the internet, luxury goods companies are in a lot of trouble.
That's a neat story - there must be all kinds of information like that from those days that no one remembers (or wrote down) regarding war engineering besides The Dam Busters.
I do wonder, though, about the tank story... what kind of manufacturing technology and skill was in use if tanks were being manufactured with such huge mistakes? In my mind, ending up with an exhaust port a couple of inches out of place is pretty huge and makes me wonder about the quality of construction going into the rest of the tank... even if the placement was measured manually with a ruler (which I assume it wasn't, probably a template was used) I don't see how they could have been *that* far off. Of course, if you're saying that exhaust ports that were only slightly more than 1/4" off were rejected it's a different story, but even that seems like a lot of error.
Who knows, I'm not an engineer (though I do understand tolerances) and I don't know what manufacturing was like back then :)
Be careful, I got an unlocked Nexus One (before the AT&T model was available) and used it with my previously existing AT&T plan, and they were able to detect right away that I was using a smartphone and I was informed via SMS that I needed to pay for the data plan.
You may or may not be able to actually stop the phone from trying to access mobile data - there isn't an option in the settings to disable it. I'm sure there is away around that, but it probably won't be simple and probably will require rooting it, not that you won't be doing that anyway (I rooted it, but there still isn't an easy option to disable mobile data as far as I can tell - didn't look too hard, to be fair).
I'm assuming you did your research to determine that this would be possible, but in case you didn't, let me be your warning that you might not be able to get away with it. I'm not a great data point because I was planning on getting the data plan anyway so I didn't try too hard to hide it from AT&T, but I did try to use it for about a day without the data plan, and as I said they detected it right away. Pretty sleazy on their part, I think, especially since I have the non-AT&T (who use 900 Mhz as opposed to everyone else's 850 Mhz) model and so am limited to 2G speed, but what do you expect.
In case you're wondering, though I sort of regret jumping the gun and getting it before the AT&T version was announced, the 850 Mhz frequency is much more useful to me than 900 Mhz if I travel (I'm spending most of the rest of the year in Thailand where 850 Mhz is used for 3G from the provider I already have a number with there), and someone else pays for my AT&T plan ;)
This country is, funnily enough, actually called "The Gambia", not Gambia, and it's got a really funny shape that follows the course of the Gambia River. A pretty interesting place, actually.
I don't think it's clear that's the case, because they *did* have him in the locker in the alleyway... I think it was implied that initially they did have Muhammad (is that the generally accepted way of spelling it?) in the bear suit in the previous episode, but that they switched him out with Santa Claus when they were giving him to the gingers.
That's all and well, but I think there are a lot of us who suddenly aren't getting mod points when we used to be... and I, at least, haven't changed my reading or posting habits at all, and I don't think I was poorly meta-moderated. I haven't checked the disable advertising box (though I do have the option) so that's not it, either.
As a side note, mentioning your app worked... I would like to play it. I don't have an ipod or iphone, though - are you planning an android version?