A more appropriate analogy to this case: An actress is naked on private property a few feet from a public sidewalk while she's being photographed by a professional. These photographs are intended for unrestricted online publication. You, walking on the sidewalk, take a picture of her while this is happening and post it on your blog. She sues you and proceeds to show up naked to the hearing.
In a town where you can rent a 2 bedroom house for less than $500/month, living on $11/hour isn't all that difficult. Have you ever been more than 50 miles from a major city?
I have to wonder what Amazon was thinking, building such a labor-intensive operation four hours from the nearest major labor pool.
Distribution centers are often located way out in the middle of nowhere because that's where the cheapest land is. They don't need to be near a major population center unless they are looking to staff the place with skilled labor, which they aren't. After all, the Coffeyville area certainly does seem to have enough of a population base to support Amazon's operations most of the year.
My previous employer overpaid quite a few people a few years back, and the worst that happened to people who didn't offer to return the money was that they had to pay income taxes on it. Although the total amount was about $80k, it was divided among so many employees that taking legal action against any one employee was not worth it.
What're some actual examples of tracking that these privacy groups are complaining about? The article certainly doesn't provide any details. I mean, yeah, Doubleclick leaves a cookie on my computer and some ads use my IP to determine my general location, but is that really what everyone is so worried about?
My experience has been that, for most people, the biggest problem with Vista is that the interesting features require a real graphics card, something that cheap laptops generally lack. Too bad it's probably going to be another few years before the average 7 lb $500 laptop comes with anything beyond crappy integrated graphics
People may claim that expensive products are better, but when they vote with their dollar, Two-Buck Chuck and Yellow Tail far outsell top-shelf Burgundy. Giffen goods are a myth.
A few years ago, you could walk into a Best Buy store and find any of several boxed Linux install kits in the $75-$100 range sitting next to the $75-$100 Windows XP upgrades.
Did charging money for Linux do anything to spread it to the masses? Well, SUSE was purchased by Novell, Mandrake nearly went bust, and Red Hat canned its end-user distribution and replaced it with Fedora. So much for that idea.
Revenue is meaningless if we don't know how much it cost them to produce, promote, and distribute the album. Unless they have substantially cut recording costs, selling In Rainbows for $5 a download probably doesn't net Radiohead any more profit than releasing it through a label.
Even from the newspaper ads I remember it being perfectly clear that they weren't just giving you a $300 rebate (or coupon or whatever) for free, they were giving it to you in exchange for signing up for three years of MSN. Heck, the ads even tell you how much it costs to sign up for the MSN contract.
On the other hand, I really hated this promotion because they advertised everything using the price after the "rebate" rather than the actual price of the item. Pay $700 to get $300 in return? Such a deal!
For most people, going from Office 2003 to OpenOffice is worse than going from Office 2003 to Office 2007. OpenOffice looks just like (an uglier version of) Office but all of the menus and dialogs are just different enough that you waste a lot of time expecting things to behave like they do in Office even though they don't. Yuck.
How is Windows XP anything at all like 911 service, handicap access, or having a bathroom at a restaurant? Do tell. Just because the government tries to order around some business doesn't mean the US is a communist dictatorship.
Re:how about an affordable one instead.
on
$90,000 103in HDTV
·
· Score: 1
A ~35" flatscreen isn't really that much more expensive than a ~35" CRT was a few years ago. It's not like a $200 27" CRT you get at WalMart is going to be good anyway.
There really is a shortage of engineers, but it's only because companies are too cheap to offer decent salaries. Offer better salaries and you can hire more/better people. It's not at all complicated, but good luck explaining that to the drones in HR.
Here in Anchorage, Alaska the starting salary is around $35,000. This is about $5k-$10k/year less than the starting salary of an accountant, but do keep in mind that the accountant works 12 months/year while the teacher only works 9.
When the teachers union was whining about salaries a few years ago, there was an editorial in the paper claiming that the starting salary isn't quite sufficient to afford a two-bedroom apartment. Although I looked for the explaination as to why one person should be entitled to two bedrooms, I was unable to find it. Maybe a lot of local teachers are single parents?
I bought a plasma TV in October when they were doing a zero-interest deal. They rang it up for the store price of $1,739, so I told them that the website was showing $1,619 as the price. The clerk went over to talk to the manager and, sure enough, they gave me the $1,619 price without protest.
A week later the print ad showed the TV at $1,499 and they happily gave me a price adjustment when I asked for one. Fun times.
Although I'm sure this suit is pretty low on the merit-scale (wow, a Vista Home Premium upgrade costs a whole $20 more than the latest OS X), it sets a great precedent.
I can download Linux for $0. It is a full-fledged operating system. If Linux can cost $0, so should Windows and Mac OS X. Never that Linux is free mostly because the developers are volunteers, it's obvious that this is high time for a suit against both Apple and Microsoft. Whee!
I've watched more videos from that Speed Demos Archive site than I'd care to admit. Most of them are boring as can be, but some games are a blast to watch even when the person playing isn't within earshot of your taunts and inane suggestions.
General qualities of a good spectator game: the observer is familiar with the game, there're multiple ways to reach the goal (whether or not this is as intended), and there's a substantial difference between the performance of an average player and of a great player. Sometimes it's obvious that a game doesn't require skill so much as it just requires you to play it over and over again until you memorize all the obstacles. Where's the fun in that?
How is it a bad thing that the nominal price of a CD is the same now as it was almost 25 years ago? Hint: a $12/hour wage is chump change now, whereas in 1983 it was a lot of money.
Seriously though, TFA is so far off the mark it's not even funny. We all know that the cost of producing the actual CD is only a small portion of the price, so even if the production costs of the physical media have decreased by, say, 75% since 1983, it's only a drop in the bucket compared to everything else that goes into getting an album into your hands.
A real RIAA=great satan economic analysis should go something like this: "The nominal difference between the price of a CD and the cost of production is not too much greater now than it was in 1983. If we assume that the band and recording staff are receiving about the same percentage of the revenues now as they were in 1983, this necessarily means that in real terms the band makes significantly less per CD in 2003 as they did in 1983. Won't somebody please think of the rock musicians?"
Latent craziness is inversely related to musical taste, or at least obscurity of musical taste. Look at the general lyrical ideas:
Pop: "Something sad happened but I didn't let it get me down" Country: "Something sad happened but I'll get over it" Indie rock: "Something sad happened and I want to kill myself" Metal: "Something sad happened and I want to kill you"
There's plenty of sad bastard country out there, but it's not what most people have in mind when they ask "what kind of music do you like?"
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A more appropriate analogy to this case: An actress is naked on private property a few feet from a public sidewalk while she's being photographed by a professional. These photographs are intended for unrestricted online publication. You, walking on the sidewalk, take a picture of her while this is happening and post it on your blog. She sues you and proceeds to show up naked to the hearing.
In a town where you can rent a 2 bedroom house for less than $500/month, living on $11/hour isn't all that difficult. Have you ever been more than 50 miles from a major city?
Distribution centers are often located way out in the middle of nowhere because that's where the cheapest land is. They don't need to be near a major population center unless they are looking to staff the place with skilled labor, which they aren't. After all, the Coffeyville area certainly does seem to have enough of a population base to support Amazon's operations most of the year.
The relative risk was 1.8. They may have put a lot of time and money into this study, but the result they found is almost meaningless.
My previous employer overpaid quite a few people a few years back, and the worst that happened to people who didn't offer to return the money was that they had to pay income taxes on it. Although the total amount was about $80k, it was divided among so many employees that taking legal action against any one employee was not worth it.
What're some actual examples of tracking that these privacy groups are complaining about? The article certainly doesn't provide any details. I mean, yeah, Doubleclick leaves a cookie on my computer and some ads use my IP to determine my general location, but is that really what everyone is so worried about?
My experience has been that, for most people, the biggest problem with Vista is that the interesting features require a real graphics card, something that cheap laptops generally lack. Too bad it's probably going to be another few years before the average 7 lb $500 laptop comes with anything beyond crappy integrated graphics
People may claim that expensive products are better, but when they vote with their dollar, Two-Buck Chuck and Yellow Tail far outsell top-shelf Burgundy. Giffen goods are a myth.
A few years ago, you could walk into a Best Buy store and find any of several boxed Linux install kits in the $75-$100 range sitting next to the $75-$100 Windows XP upgrades.
Did charging money for Linux do anything to spread it to the masses? Well, SUSE was purchased by Novell, Mandrake nearly went bust, and Red Hat canned its end-user distribution and replaced it with Fedora. So much for that idea.
Revenue is meaningless if we don't know how much it cost them to produce, promote, and distribute the album. Unless they have substantially cut recording costs, selling In Rainbows for $5 a download probably doesn't net Radiohead any more profit than releasing it through a label.
Even from the newspaper ads I remember it being perfectly clear that they weren't just giving you a $300 rebate (or coupon or whatever) for free, they were giving it to you in exchange for signing up for three years of MSN. Heck, the ads even tell you how much it costs to sign up for the MSN contract.
On the other hand, I really hated this promotion because they advertised everything using the price after the "rebate" rather than the actual price of the item. Pay $700 to get $300 in return? Such a deal!
For most people, going from Office 2003 to OpenOffice is worse than going from Office 2003 to Office 2007. OpenOffice looks just like (an uglier version of) Office but all of the menus and dialogs are just different enough that you waste a lot of time expecting things to behave like they do in Office even though they don't. Yuck.
You are wondeful; don't ever change.
How is Windows XP anything at all like 911 service, handicap access, or having a bathroom at a restaurant? Do tell. Just because the government tries to order around some business doesn't mean the US is a communist dictatorship.
A ~35" flatscreen isn't really that much more expensive than a ~35" CRT was a few years ago. It's not like a $200 27" CRT you get at WalMart is going to be good anyway.
There really is a shortage of engineers, but it's only because companies are too cheap to offer decent salaries. Offer better salaries and you can hire more/better people. It's not at all complicated, but good luck explaining that to the drones in HR.
Well, there was that one episode where Picard controlled the Enterprise with a joystick because it was somehow more precise than the digital controls.
Here in Anchorage, Alaska the starting salary is around $35,000. This is about $5k-$10k/year less than the starting salary of an accountant, but do keep in mind that the accountant works 12 months/year while the teacher only works 9.
When the teachers union was whining about salaries a few years ago, there was an editorial in the paper claiming that the starting salary isn't quite sufficient to afford a two-bedroom apartment. Although I looked for the explaination as to why one person should be entitled to two bedrooms, I was unable to find it. Maybe a lot of local teachers are single parents?
I bought a plasma TV in October when they were doing a zero-interest deal. They rang it up for the store price of $1,739, so I told them that the website was showing $1,619 as the price. The clerk went over to talk to the manager and, sure enough, they gave me the $1,619 price without protest.
A week later the print ad showed the TV at $1,499 and they happily gave me a price adjustment when I asked for one. Fun times.
Although I'm sure this suit is pretty low on the merit-scale (wow, a Vista Home Premium upgrade costs a whole $20 more than the latest OS X), it sets a great precedent.
I can download Linux for $0. It is a full-fledged operating system. If Linux can cost $0, so should Windows and Mac OS X. Never that Linux is free mostly because the developers are volunteers, it's obvious that this is high time for a suit against both Apple and Microsoft. Whee!
Does the EU actually do anything these days aside from suing American companies for daring to do business in Europe?
Oh, wait, that's because harassing American companies is about the only thing all the members are ever able to agree on. Duh.
I've watched more videos from that Speed Demos Archive site than I'd care to admit. Most of them are boring as can be, but some games are a blast to watch even when the person playing isn't within earshot of your taunts and inane suggestions.
General qualities of a good spectator game: the observer is familiar with the game, there're multiple ways to reach the goal (whether or not this is as intended), and there's a substantial difference between the performance of an average player and of a great player. Sometimes it's obvious that a game doesn't require skill so much as it just requires you to play it over and over again until you memorize all the obstacles. Where's the fun in that?
How is it a bad thing that the nominal price of a CD is the same now as it was almost 25 years ago? Hint: a $12/hour wage is chump change now, whereas in 1983 it was a lot of money.
Seriously though, TFA is so far off the mark it's not even funny. We all know that the cost of producing the actual CD is only a small portion of the price, so even if the production costs of the physical media have decreased by, say, 75% since 1983, it's only a drop in the bucket compared to everything else that goes into getting an album into your hands.
A real RIAA=great satan economic analysis should go something like this:
"The nominal difference between the price of a CD and the cost of production is not too much greater now than it was in 1983. If we assume that the band and recording staff are receiving about the same percentage of the revenues now as they were in 1983, this necessarily means that in real terms the band makes significantly less per CD in 2003 as they did in 1983. Won't somebody please think of the rock musicians?"
Latent craziness is inversely related to musical taste, or at least obscurity of musical taste. Look at the general lyrical ideas:
Pop: "Something sad happened but I didn't let it get me down"
Country: "Something sad happened but I'll get over it"
Indie rock: "Something sad happened and I want to kill myself"
Metal: "Something sad happened and I want to kill you"
There's plenty of sad bastard country out there, but it's not what most people have in mind when they ask "what kind of music do you like?"
You are missing the chance to stir up trouble in the hope of luring people over to your Flickr knockoff site, that's what you're missing.