The popularity of ROM sites shows how much money there is to be made by companies selling these titles again (along with of course the popularity of the new NES, SNES, Genesis, Atari, etc... consoles and the money Nintendo has made on virtual console). They just need to decide how they want to do it. If there is a way to buy these, I'll give them my money and I'll even agree with them on the lack of validity to the "victimless crime" argument. But if I can't buy a working copy of Battletoads (amongst many other titles) anywhere for any amount of money, then I will download it from a ROM site instead.
If they can't see me putting money in front of them - because their own heads are too far up their own asses - then I have no pity for them.
Basically I see democracy and collectivism as inevitable failures
That is one of the most honest political statements you've made in quite a while, roman. You forgot to mention that you want all democracies replaced with fascist governments led by theocratic lifetime absolute rulers, but you're getting closer to honesty. How did it feel to lie a little less in that statement?
And it makes it harder for you to explain why you want to pay more.
It's really not that hard with a ThinkPad to explain why I am willing to pay more*. First, it is the only laptop that is standard with a usable pointing device; the trackpoint is orders of magnitude better than any touchpad ever created by anyone, ever. Second, even to this day Lenovo has continued the IBM tradition of always making the field manuals available for every laptop they make, and they continue to be excellent documents. If I need to replace some minor part it will tell me every screw I need to remove to get to it, how long it is, what kind of threads it has, and how much torque to apply to properly tighten it back down. ThinkPads are still made to be serviced by any reasonably competent person, as opposed to most other consumer (or even business) laptops that want customers to send them in instead. And of course, if I really don't want to do it myself, their on-site warranty is great too.
*if you actually price them out, a ThinkPad is usually no more expensive than any other business caliber laptop. Toss out the junk that is sold at retail today as it isn't worth considering anyways.
I just had server 2012 forced on me (again) at work. I wanted to shove hot pokers into my eyes to relieve the pain of the default theme that we get with that terrible excuse for an operating system. Then I changed that and the mouse cursor no longer worked correctly (switching to being the vertical cursor that we usually see in a word processor, all the time). Why on earth is this acceptable? The colors are hideous and the sharp edges make it look like it belongs in Windows 2.0, for display on an EGA monitor. You don't have to remind me so blatantly that I am being forced to use a shitty operating system; please get the hell out of my way and let me do my job instead.
It does accomplish one thing, though. It makes the Fisher-Price color scheme that was default in XP seem modern and reasonable by comparison. Good job there, I guess.
The money has gone mostly to non-teaching administrative staff. And it can definitely be cut because those administrators didn't exist 30+ years ago, and nobody has complained about the quality of college education decreasing since then.
That is an oversimplification. In many universities, the way that professionals are categorized is the larger factor behind then growth of "administrative staff" than anything. Many researchers - particularly those with advanced degrees who are not looking to themselves become faculty - end up in this administrative staff category even though they are not really involved in administration. Hence schools that are doing a lot of research end up with these strange distributions between faculty and administrative staff as a result.
Not to say that some of these schools don't have an excess of VPs and executives, but it often isn't nearly as profane as it looks.
It's also worth noting that a research staff who are classified as "administrative staff" are often paid on grants and if you fired them all this afternoon it would not change tuition one dime as the money that pays their salary does not come from tuition or from the school internally, and cannot be allocated elsewhere.
And when you were working as a contractor you benefited from living in a country with single-payer health care, which is not a benefit that workers in the USA can enjoy. You had health care automatically taken care of for you (by way of taxes that you paid on your wages regardless of how many hours you worked) while in the USA most workers encounter significant obstacles to buying health care unless they work at least 40 hours per week. Couple that to the fact that American workers are now legally obligated to carry insurance and you see one of the problems that exist in this country to those who might want to try to be contractors without full time employers.
In other words, the government - that you so love to tell us how much you hate - made it possible for you to do that.
Yes, laptops with good performance exist. The problem is, there isn't a huge number of people willing to spend $5000 for a laptop.
$5k? I haven't seen a $5k laptop from anyone for a long time. Most users could get a laptop with more than adequate performance for their needs for half (or less) of that much. Of course this depends on what someone considers to be a user's performance "needs"; if Quake 7 (or whatever the kids are playing this week) is their priority then they may need to dig deeper into their pocketbook - or better yet consider a dekstop - to meet their "needs". If they are really doing what everyone used to say they were doing when they came in as customers to the brick & mortar store I worked at - "surfing the web", "spreadsheets", "word processing", "email" - then they would be just fine with a laptop that sells for $1,000 or perhaps even less.
People who need a $5k laptop for gaming are actually pretty rare. People who need that much power in a laptop for non-gaming use are even more rare still.
There are companies who make proper performance laptops. The customers either don't make the effort to find them or are too interested in getting something pretty.
I first optimistically read it to mean that the original series was going to be released on HDR Blu-ray. Mentioning sooner that this refers to the original (ie, Tom Cruise) movies would be helpful.
There are free text editors available for windows that have spell check built in to them (and have for many years). I know it's not necessarily the driving point of notepad but it can be useful.
From the summary it seems that a regular complaint is still free, but now it will go straight to the company whose offense triggered a consumer to lodge a complaint. If they don't do anything to improve on the situation and the consumer wants to see something happen, the next option is the $225 formal complaint.
In other words it appears that if you want the FCC to do something other than just pass the complaint on and wash their hands of it, you will pay $225. If you're OK with that then you can still complain for free.
We see right through this one, slashdot. You haven't added features in a decade or more, but that doesn't mean that this site is popular or relevant because of it.
The article says it will make it more economical, but doesn't say a word about how. What aspect of the NASA testing addresses that? Another thread here mentions that engines are better now then they were when Concorde was designed - and undoubtedly they are - but the article implies that this testing for reduction of the sonic boom somehow makes supersonic travel more economical and it does not give any indication of why that would be true.
Last time a bunch of states declared their independence, a lot of Americans died.
And this is a life and death matter for millions of Americans. The SCOTUS will send us back into the dark ages of health care (amongst many other things) that will result in people dying. Workers' rights that took decades to accumulate will be wiped out. Equal representation in congress will go away as well.
that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes;
This is no more a light and transient cause than those that the 13 colonies declared independence for. This isn't about the idiot at 1600 Pennsylvania and his use of the constitution as toilet paper; this is about everything that his party stands for and how it is collectively shredding the rights that were established in this country over generations.
It's been around for decades. Practiced by both parties.
Previously we could challenge it in the courts. Now the SCOTUS has officially given their stamp of approval for this inversion of democracy. Voters might never again get to chose their own representative so much as the opposite.
The question is whether or not this will finally give the wealthy liberal states the cajones to declare independence so the conservative experiment can more quickly reach its own logical conclusion. If this happens in slow motion instead we are looking at the beginning of the end of the empire.
Will President Camacho's next executive order do away with the eagle as our national symbol (after all while awesome countries like Russia also have an eagle as their symbol it is also used by shithole countries like Germany and Mexico) and replace it with the honey badger? It would be a logical next step for the administration.
Gerrymandering has just been legalized. The SCOTUS is about to shift even further to the right and for a longer time frame. The only way net neutrality will happen for anyone who currently lives in the US is if they either move to another country or if their state leaves the country. The bill might as well be shredded tonight.
Since the government here would sooner annex Mexico than implement UBI, it is worth looking in to alternatives that would actually work here. One that they really need to look at is single-payer healthcare. Yes, I know it is grouped into the category of "evil *isms" in this country, but it could make a huge - and hugely positive - economic impact if it were actually implemented.
Take a moment to think about why so many people on the job market are waiting for FT work and why so many PT jobs go unfilled. The driving force behind that decision is health insurance. We tell people they need it, though in many cases PT jobs still are not required to offer it (or at least they are not required to offer it at a price that the employee could actually afford).
If we made even a base plan available to every man, woman, and child, then suddenly the workers who are turning down PT jobs in spite of interest in them (in particular this is a lot of parents of younger children, as well as retirees with poor benefits). could take those jobs. This opens up more FT jobs for people who can't get by on PT work alone.
And yes, single-payer from the government would cost money. It would be a tax, just like income tax. And a large number of people would find that tax would end up being less than what they pay to their insurance through their employer once everything is accounted for, it would just be handled differently.
We've had more than a couple reports of people actually being shot at work lately; this headline was in poor taste. When I see a headline here that starts with "shots fired" I expect it's likely to be followed with a body count.
Why would Reddit want to do that? Reddit is growing while Slashdot is shrinking. Reddit code is being developed while Slashdot - which has had over a decade to figure out unicode and still hasn't done so - is festering. They'd be better off buying the IP rights to compuserve or prodigy.
Slashdot Mirror
The popularity of ROM sites shows how much money there is to be made by companies selling these titles again (along with of course the popularity of the new NES, SNES, Genesis, Atari, etc ... consoles and the money Nintendo has made on virtual console). They just need to decide how they want to do it. If there is a way to buy these, I'll give them my money and I'll even agree with them on the lack of validity to the "victimless crime" argument. But if I can't buy a working copy of Battletoads (amongst many other titles) anywhere for any amount of money, then I will download it from a ROM site instead.
If they can't see me putting money in front of them - because their own heads are too far up their own asses - then I have no pity for them.
Basically I see democracy and collectivism as inevitable failures
That is one of the most honest political statements you've made in quite a while, roman. You forgot to mention that you want all democracies replaced with fascist governments led by theocratic lifetime absolute rulers, but you're getting closer to honesty. How did it feel to lie a little less in that statement?
And it makes it harder for you to explain why you want to pay more.
It's really not that hard with a ThinkPad to explain why I am willing to pay more*. First, it is the only laptop that is standard with a usable pointing device; the trackpoint is orders of magnitude better than any touchpad ever created by anyone, ever. Second, even to this day Lenovo has continued the IBM tradition of always making the field manuals available for every laptop they make, and they continue to be excellent documents. If I need to replace some minor part it will tell me every screw I need to remove to get to it, how long it is, what kind of threads it has, and how much torque to apply to properly tighten it back down. ThinkPads are still made to be serviced by any reasonably competent person, as opposed to most other consumer (or even business) laptops that want customers to send them in instead. And of course, if I really don't want to do it myself, their on-site warranty is great too.
*if you actually price them out, a ThinkPad is usually no more expensive than any other business caliber laptop. Toss out the junk that is sold at retail today as it isn't worth considering anyways.
I just had server 2012 forced on me (again) at work. I wanted to shove hot pokers into my eyes to relieve the pain of the default theme that we get with that terrible excuse for an operating system. Then I changed that and the mouse cursor no longer worked correctly (switching to being the vertical cursor that we usually see in a word processor, all the time). Why on earth is this acceptable? The colors are hideous and the sharp edges make it look like it belongs in Windows 2.0, for display on an EGA monitor. You don't have to remind me so blatantly that I am being forced to use a shitty operating system; please get the hell out of my way and let me do my job instead.
It does accomplish one thing, though. It makes the Fisher-Price color scheme that was default in XP seem modern and reasonable by comparison. Good job there, I guess.
The money has gone mostly to non-teaching administrative staff. And it can definitely be cut because those administrators didn't exist 30+ years ago, and nobody has complained about the quality of college education decreasing since then.
That is an oversimplification. In many universities, the way that professionals are categorized is the larger factor behind then growth of "administrative staff" than anything. Many researchers - particularly those with advanced degrees who are not looking to themselves become faculty - end up in this administrative staff category even though they are not really involved in administration. Hence schools that are doing a lot of research end up with these strange distributions between faculty and administrative staff as a result.
Not to say that some of these schools don't have an excess of VPs and executives, but it often isn't nearly as profane as it looks.
It's also worth noting that a research staff who are classified as "administrative staff" are often paid on grants and if you fired them all this afternoon it would not change tuition one dime as the money that pays their salary does not come from tuition or from the school internally, and cannot be allocated elsewhere.
Popular movie-ticked subscription service
Should be
Popular movie-ticket subscription service
Unless MoviePass has been causing such commotion that the movies themselves are now angry at the service.
And when you were working as a contractor you benefited from living in a country with single-payer health care, which is not a benefit that workers in the USA can enjoy. You had health care automatically taken care of for you (by way of taxes that you paid on your wages regardless of how many hours you worked) while in the USA most workers encounter significant obstacles to buying health care unless they work at least 40 hours per week. Couple that to the fact that American workers are now legally obligated to carry insurance and you see one of the problems that exist in this country to those who might want to try to be contractors without full time employers.
In other words, the government - that you so love to tell us how much you hate - made it possible for you to do that.
Yes, laptops with good performance exist. The problem is, there isn't a huge number of people willing to spend $5000 for a laptop.
$5k? I haven't seen a $5k laptop from anyone for a long time. Most users could get a laptop with more than adequate performance for their needs for half (or less) of that much. Of course this depends on what someone considers to be a user's performance "needs"; if Quake 7 (or whatever the kids are playing this week) is their priority then they may need to dig deeper into their pocketbook - or better yet consider a dekstop - to meet their "needs". If they are really doing what everyone used to say they were doing when they came in as customers to the brick & mortar store I worked at - "surfing the web", "spreadsheets", "word processing", "email" - then they would be just fine with a laptop that sells for $1,000 or perhaps even less.
People who need a $5k laptop for gaming are actually pretty rare. People who need that much power in a laptop for non-gaming use are even more rare still.
There are companies who make proper performance laptops. The customers either don't make the effort to find them or are too interested in getting something pretty.
This will go through this time. You might as well go shout at a river and tell it to run backwards.
I first optimistically read it to mean that the original series was going to be released on HDR Blu-ray. Mentioning sooner that this refers to the original (ie, Tom Cruise) movies would be helpful.
There are free text editors available for windows that have spell check built in to them (and have for many years). I know it's not necessarily the driving point of notepad but it can be useful.
From the summary it seems that a regular complaint is still free, but now it will go straight to the company whose offense triggered a consumer to lodge a complaint. If they don't do anything to improve on the situation and the consumer wants to see something happen, the next option is the $225 formal complaint.
In other words it appears that if you want the FCC to do something other than just pass the complaint on and wash their hands of it, you will pay $225. If you're OK with that then you can still complain for free.
I'm 90% sure that was from an APK impersonator, but it was still damned funny. If I could I'd give it a +1 for that.
We see right through this one, slashdot. You haven't added features in a decade or more, but that doesn't mean that this site is popular or relevant because of it.
The article says it will make it more economical, but doesn't say a word about how. What aspect of the NASA testing addresses that? Another thread here mentions that engines are better now then they were when Concorde was designed - and undoubtedly they are - but the article implies that this testing for reduction of the sonic boom somehow makes supersonic travel more economical and it does not give any indication of why that would be true.
I want you to find one person who pays taxes voluntarily and show me this ultra-rare individual, I have so many questions.
Right here. I pay my taxes voluntarily as I acknowledge that the government does some things much better than I ever could on my own.
The government is much better at maintaining roads than I could ever be.
The government is much better at educating children than I could ever be.
The government is much better at law enforcement and application of the law than I could ever be.
The government is much better at funding critical research than I could ever be.
I could go on with this list if you want.
Last time a bunch of states declared their independence, a lot of Americans died.
And this is a life and death matter for millions of Americans. The SCOTUS will send us back into the dark ages of health care (amongst many other things) that will result in people dying. Workers' rights that took decades to accumulate will be wiped out. Equal representation in congress will go away as well.
that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes;
This is no more a light and transient cause than those that the 13 colonies declared independence for. This isn't about the idiot at 1600 Pennsylvania and his use of the constitution as toilet paper; this is about everything that his party stands for and how it is collectively shredding the rights that were established in this country over generations.
Gerrymandering has just been legalized.
It's been around for decades. Practiced by both parties.
Previously we could challenge it in the courts. Now the SCOTUS has officially given their stamp of approval for this inversion of democracy. Voters might never again get to chose their own representative so much as the opposite.
The question is whether or not this will finally give the wealthy liberal states the cajones to declare independence so the conservative experiment can more quickly reach its own logical conclusion. If this happens in slow motion instead we are looking at the beginning of the end of the empire.
Will President Camacho's next executive order do away with the eagle as our national symbol (after all while awesome countries like Russia also have an eagle as their symbol it is also used by shithole countries like Germany and Mexico) and replace it with the honey badger? It would be a logical next step for the administration.
Gerrymandering has just been legalized. The SCOTUS is about to shift even further to the right and for a longer time frame. The only way net neutrality will happen for anyone who currently lives in the US is if they either move to another country or if their state leaves the country. The bill might as well be shredded tonight.
What else can it be?
Since the government here would sooner annex Mexico than implement UBI, it is worth looking in to alternatives that would actually work here. One that they really need to look at is single-payer healthcare. Yes, I know it is grouped into the category of "evil *isms" in this country, but it could make a huge - and hugely positive - economic impact if it were actually implemented.
Take a moment to think about why so many people on the job market are waiting for FT work and why so many PT jobs go unfilled. The driving force behind that decision is health insurance. We tell people they need it, though in many cases PT jobs still are not required to offer it (or at least they are not required to offer it at a price that the employee could actually afford).
If we made even a base plan available to every man, woman, and child, then suddenly the workers who are turning down PT jobs in spite of interest in them (in particular this is a lot of parents of younger children, as well as retirees with poor benefits). could take those jobs. This opens up more FT jobs for people who can't get by on PT work alone.
And yes, single-payer from the government would cost money. It would be a tax, just like income tax. And a large number of people would find that tax would end up being less than what they pay to their insurance through their employer once everything is accounted for, it would just be handled differently.
We've had more than a couple reports of people actually being shot at work lately; this headline was in poor taste. When I see a headline here that starts with "shots fired" I expect it's likely to be followed with a body count.
And when does Reddit buy Slashdot?
Why would Reddit want to do that? Reddit is growing while Slashdot is shrinking. Reddit code is being developed while Slashdot - which has had over a decade to figure out unicode and still hasn't done so - is festering. They'd be better off buying the IP rights to compuserve or prodigy.