We are talking about a grocery store here. People do need to eat; this wasn't people raiding an unlocked best buy. It would be interesting to know how many people left with a modest amount of groceries without paying vs how many left with "truck loads" of food. While certainly someone leaving with truck loads is likely taking (a lot) more than what they need, you may have also had some customers actually walking out with a gallon of milk or what not.
What is unfortunate is that is that for an equal amount of plastic as the jewel box, the design could have included putting the disc into a caddy
Some of us had caddy-loading CD-ROM drives. For that matter, some car CD changers still use caddies... Nonetheless, caddies came, and for the most part they went away. It ended up being just another thing to break, lose, etc. And the caddies themselves were annoyingly expensive without adding much value.
Ask for a number to return their call. If they cannot provide it, hang up.
What do you expect to accomplish with that? If you hang up, they'll just call you again later. If you get a number, you still won't be able to talk to Elvis, because it isn't his number; it belongs to his company and whoever is answering the phone doesn't know who is calling by that name this evening.
For that matter, they will call you at 2AM, which of course is not a time when they answer their own phones. So getting a call back number would not have done you any good because you would have zero chance of getting ahold of the person who called you at 2AM when you do call them back at a time when someone there is answering the phone.
I can tell you they hold all the cards. They can call as often as they want and say damned near anything they want. There is even a state law that specifically allows the people making the calls to use false names to identify themselves, as long as the company name is legit. One effect of this is that after you are called by "Elvis" or "Kirby Puckett" or any other bogus name, you try to call them at the number they left and you'll never get ahold of that person because whomever answers the phone won't know who used that false name.
They are suing the primary supplier of their LCDs. Sure there are others out there, but few that make panels as nice as Samsung, and Apple is known for having some of the best OEM displays on the market. If the lawsuit looks like it is swinging in Apple's favor, Samsung can exert pressure on Apple by either jacking up the LCD prices or threatening to no longer supply them at all. They certainly have plenty of other customers (and their own product lines) such that they could carry on without Apple.
But if next month Apple MacBooks all had crappy LCDs in them, that would hurt Apple significantly (even more so if their big external $3000 - $4000 displays went that way).
It's a shame that you didn't log in so your comment would (presumably) start at a score of 1 or better. Since this discussion is already old enough to have nearly fallen off the front page, your comment - which is very much on topic - will likely get very few views.
I think the larger point is that we keep trying to replace teachers with technology
There are several factors behind this. There's the "whiz-bangery" that you mention, and there are also political and even economic factors behind it too. Some people push for this because they feel it is a good investment (ignoring the fact that they may be trashing student-to-teacher ratios for it, also ignoring support and replacement costs for it). Some people push for it because they see teachers as being a great evil that needs to be "solved" any way possible. And there are even some people who push for it with good intentions in mind; they want kids to be familiar with new technology ASAP - they are basically going for technology immersion in the same way that language schools go for language immersion.
Sadly, and despite school policy (just about everywhere), kids have already replaced their teachers with cell phones in the classroom
Frankly I think schools should be repainted with anti-cellphone-signal paint to render phone useless in classrooms. Turn the wired phones back on - one per classroom - so they are equipped for an emergency and you won't need to worry about cell phones being important for such an event. Of course if little Johnny is playing games on his cell phone rather than texting all day that doesn't necessarily solve the problem but it does tackle one part of it.
That said, we all know where the real problem is - and you were going towards it but did not hit it directly. The problem is how little involvement most parents have in their kids' education. I wouldn't necessarily agree with the statement of
Parents are teaching their children how to mismanage money
Because a lot of parents aren't teaching their kids anything. They either aren't there for their kids at all, or they aren't doing anything for their kids when they are there. The parents might be gainfully employed and doing the best they can, but they aren't passing any kind of values on to their kids. (of course some of them aren't doing anything of value, but that is another problem)
These kids all think they're going to grow up and be the next [Jordan, LeBron, Kobe, et. al].
You forgot the "other option" that a lot of those kids think they will "fall back on". And I'm not talking about drugs or prostitution. I've heard a bewildering number of kids say "If I can't be the next LeBron, I'll be the next 50 cent".
For that matter few kids are idolizing Jordan these days, which is unfortunate. While he made tons of money he also lived a reasonably clean lifestyle and helped out the less fortunate while playing basketball. Some of the newest pro athletes don't give half a crap about the world beyond their own noses and spend all their money on "bling".
Hell there was a piece I heard on NPR last weekend where people pointed out even drug dealers lead more reasonable lifestyles back in the 80s and 90s.
simple [or so I thought] math problems that I have to use every day at work
Part of the problem there is that of course in this country we almost never idolize anyone with any real degree of intelligence (this is in part exacerbated by the fact that kids go straight from high school to pro sports with little to no time in college). A lot of parents know more about contestants on American Idol than they do about the teachers who are tasked with the upbringing of their children.
It may be different in your part of the world, but where I live the teachers' unions have been willingly negotiating on benefits with their school districts in the name of keeping their jobs. No teachers' union that I've ever heard of has a permanent contract; they always have to renegotiate on it at some point.
Although if you really want to find waste in the system, you need to start at the top. Look at what the administrators - who often never work with the students at all - are paid, and how many administrators there are in some districts. Look at the parking lot at your local elementary school, then look at the parking lot at the central office for the same school district; you'll likely find more cars in the elementary school lot but more total value in vehicles in the central office lot.
Would not the money spent on 685 iPads be more productively spent by hiring teachers, even if it were just one additional teacher?
How much do you think teachers are paid (even at magnet schools)? Ipads start at $500 each - we can probably assume that the educational discount is negated by the support costs, so we'll say the school still pays $500 each in the end if they're doing base iPads. $500 times 685 iPads is $342,500. Teachers start at around $30k or less per year; hence you could likely hire one new additional teacher for each grade taught at that school for that amount of money and still have money left over to spend on supplies.
I have a Big TV. I want to be able to put 8 people to connect.
I'm not aware of a system that can do that now, from any manufacturer. People complain endlessly about how badly they hate multiplayer anything on the Wii, but for such a complaint to mean much it should at least be based on what other systems can do...
Really, I think the multiplayer Mario Kart on the Wii works very well. Its easy to get going, keeps the options appropriate for a wide variety of audiences, and works very well. Sure not every Wii game supports multiplayer, but seeing what it can do, what else do you need it to do?
Activision, like so many others, is milking the hell out of subpar franchises while the best and most promising end up neglected with minimal attention and generally no sequels.
Personally, I'm still waiting for a sequel to ET. I want to fall into wells in high def.
Because I'm a married man. My wife could certainly learn how to use a streaming setup (she already uses Netflix on our Wii and on our Blu-ray plaeyer), but it really doesn't cover all of what we want. We also have playon.tv, which gets a few more things for almost no money, which is OK.
But in the end, cable TV is just more convenient. It works consistently and if something is wrong you know what to do immediately.
Although on top of that, where we live cable TV is the only option for high speed internet. So if we switched to streaming-only, we'd still be paying a monthly fee to the cable company.
Why does the US cling to a broken for-profit health care system? We're the only industrialized country that does that, as well. Sometimes we seem to take pride in being different, even when there is nothing better about it.
Isn't nearly as easy to do as it is to say. The human race has sought out barriers to erect for as long as humans have been around. Even when people can't see one another physically, they will still seek out people with similar ideas and personality characteristics. You can force them into a large group of vary dissimilar people and in the end you'll find that group will still tend to segregate on some metric you didn't consider before.
I'm not endorsing that kind of action, but it is how we behave as a species.
There are plenty of people around the world who would prefer to be refugees than be in their current situation, but they are held back by economic factors. You can't claim refugee status while you are still in your birth country, and you can't leave your country if you don't have the financial means to leave. There are plenty of areas where climate shift has had detrimental effects on peoples' ways of life, but some of those same places are under other circumstances of economic repression at the same time, making it impossible for the people who live their to actually leave and become refugees somewhere else.
Awww now I miss the the stupid things the government did before 9/11 turned them into wholesale Constitution tramplers.
You're new here, I see - or at least newer than me. Let me clue you in on something; slashdot is a pro-conservative site.
If you want to be up-modded, just praise Bush, Reagan, and all the greatness that came immediately after 9/11, when the government was working in your best interest. Further, calling the current POTUS the great socialist satan will accomplish similar results. You are daring to suggest that what happened immediately after 9/11 might not have been done with everyone's best interests in mind - prepare to be moderated "troll".
I'm thinking 9/9/99 isn't the article's real date.
Well, it turns out that day did happen in history; I tend to remember it fairly well for reasons that aren't important here. Although it is interesting numerically...
Nonetheless, it does read "New York Times Archives", so even if the date may be wrong it is not likely a recent story.
Part of the music industry (OK, a rather small part now) is about producing a physical product - actual albums. Google really doesn't have experience in that; the most significant physical product they ever made was a phone and it was a bomb. If they took the music industry and then abandoned the practice of making albums in favor of making all new music download-only, they would only further disenfranchise certain types of listeners.
And few companies are worse at recognizing the significance in customer differences than google...
Slashdot Mirror
We are talking about a grocery store here. People do need to eat; this wasn't people raiding an unlocked best buy. It would be interesting to know how many people left with a modest amount of groceries without paying vs how many left with "truck loads" of food. While certainly someone leaving with truck loads is likely taking (a lot) more than what they need, you may have also had some customers actually walking out with a gallon of milk or what not.
What is unfortunate is that is that for an equal amount of plastic as the jewel box, the design could have included putting the disc into a caddy
Some of us had caddy-loading CD-ROM drives. For that matter, some car CD changers still use caddies... Nonetheless, caddies came, and for the most part they went away. It ended up being just another thing to break, lose, etc. And the caddies themselves were annoyingly expensive without adding much value.
Ask for a number to return their call. If they cannot provide it, hang up.
What do you expect to accomplish with that? If you hang up, they'll just call you again later. If you get a number, you still won't be able to talk to Elvis, because it isn't his number; it belongs to his company and whoever is answering the phone doesn't know who is calling by that name this evening.
For that matter, they will call you at 2AM, which of course is not a time when they answer their own phones. So getting a call back number would not have done you any good because you would have zero chance of getting ahold of the person who called you at 2AM when you do call them back at a time when someone there is answering the phone.
And proof there is some intelligence around /. - at least in terms of politics!
I am not familiar with this strange new meaning of intelligence you are using...
Mac User
Older
More conservative than anything you've ever heard on radio or seen elected to office anywhere
I can tell you they hold all the cards. They can call as often as they want and say damned near anything they want. There is even a state law that specifically allows the people making the calls to use false names to identify themselves, as long as the company name is legit. One effect of this is that after you are called by "Elvis" or "Kirby Puckett" or any other bogus name, you try to call them at the number they left and you'll never get ahold of that person because whomever answers the phone won't know who used that false name.
They are suing the primary supplier of their LCDs. Sure there are others out there, but few that make panels as nice as Samsung, and Apple is known for having some of the best OEM displays on the market. If the lawsuit looks like it is swinging in Apple's favor, Samsung can exert pressure on Apple by either jacking up the LCD prices or threatening to no longer supply them at all. They certainly have plenty of other customers (and their own product lines) such that they could carry on without Apple.
But if next month Apple MacBooks all had crappy LCDs in them, that would hurt Apple significantly (even more so if their big external $3000 - $4000 displays went that way).
I think the larger point is that we keep trying to replace teachers with technology
There are several factors behind this. There's the "whiz-bangery" that you mention, and there are also political and even economic factors behind it too. Some people push for this because they feel it is a good investment (ignoring the fact that they may be trashing student-to-teacher ratios for it, also ignoring support and replacement costs for it). Some people push for it because they see teachers as being a great evil that needs to be "solved" any way possible. And there are even some people who push for it with good intentions in mind; they want kids to be familiar with new technology ASAP - they are basically going for technology immersion in the same way that language schools go for language immersion.
Sadly, and despite school policy (just about everywhere), kids have already replaced their teachers with cell phones in the classroom
Frankly I think schools should be repainted with anti-cellphone-signal paint to render phone useless in classrooms. Turn the wired phones back on - one per classroom - so they are equipped for an emergency and you won't need to worry about cell phones being important for such an event. Of course if little Johnny is playing games on his cell phone rather than texting all day that doesn't necessarily solve the problem but it does tackle one part of it.
That said, we all know where the real problem is - and you were going towards it but did not hit it directly. The problem is how little involvement most parents have in their kids' education. I wouldn't necessarily agree with the statement of
Parents are teaching their children how to mismanage money
Because a lot of parents aren't teaching their kids anything. They either aren't there for their kids at all, or they aren't doing anything for their kids when they are there. The parents might be gainfully employed and doing the best they can, but they aren't passing any kind of values on to their kids. (of course some of them aren't doing anything of value, but that is another problem)
These kids all think they're going to grow up and be the next [Jordan, LeBron, Kobe, et. al].
You forgot the "other option" that a lot of those kids think they will "fall back on". And I'm not talking about drugs or prostitution. I've heard a bewildering number of kids say "If I can't be the next LeBron, I'll be the next 50 cent".
For that matter few kids are idolizing Jordan these days, which is unfortunate. While he made tons of money he also lived a reasonably clean lifestyle and helped out the less fortunate while playing basketball. Some of the newest pro athletes don't give half a crap about the world beyond their own noses and spend all their money on "bling".
Hell there was a piece I heard on NPR last weekend where people pointed out even drug dealers lead more reasonable lifestyles back in the 80s and 90s.
simple [or so I thought] math problems that I have to use every day at work
Part of the problem there is that of course in this country we almost never idolize anyone with any real degree of intelligence (this is in part exacerbated by the fact that kids go straight from high school to pro sports with little to no time in college). A lot of parents know more about contestants on American Idol than they do about the teachers who are tasked with the upbringing of their children.
It may be different in your part of the world, but where I live the teachers' unions have been willingly negotiating on benefits with their school districts in the name of keeping their jobs. No teachers' union that I've ever heard of has a permanent contract; they always have to renegotiate on it at some point.
Although if you really want to find waste in the system, you need to start at the top. Look at what the administrators - who often never work with the students at all - are paid, and how many administrators there are in some districts. Look at the parking lot at your local elementary school, then look at the parking lot at the central office for the same school district; you'll likely find more cars in the elementary school lot but more total value in vehicles in the central office lot.
Would not the money spent on 685 iPads be more productively spent by hiring teachers, even if it were just one additional teacher?
How much do you think teachers are paid (even at magnet schools)? Ipads start at $500 each - we can probably assume that the educational discount is negated by the support costs, so we'll say the school still pays $500 each in the end if they're doing base iPads. $500 times 685 iPads is $342,500. Teachers start at around $30k or less per year; hence you could likely hire one new additional teacher for each grade taught at that school for that amount of money and still have money left over to spend on supplies.
I have a Big TV. I want to be able to put 8 people to connect.
I'm not aware of a system that can do that now, from any manufacturer. People complain endlessly about how badly they hate multiplayer anything on the Wii, but for such a complaint to mean much it should at least be based on what other systems can do...
Really, I think the multiplayer Mario Kart on the Wii works very well. Its easy to get going, keeps the options appropriate for a wide variety of audiences, and works very well. Sure not every Wii game supports multiplayer, but seeing what it can do, what else do you need it to do?
Activision, like so many others, is milking the hell out of subpar franchises while the best and most promising end up neglected with minimal attention and generally no sequels.
Personally, I'm still waiting for a sequel to ET. I want to fall into wells in high def.
Because I'm a married man. My wife could certainly learn how to use a streaming setup (she already uses Netflix on our Wii and on our Blu-ray plaeyer), but it really doesn't cover all of what we want. We also have playon.tv, which gets a few more things for almost no money, which is OK.
But in the end, cable TV is just more convenient. It works consistently and if something is wrong you know what to do immediately.
Although on top of that, where we live cable TV is the only option for high speed internet. So if we switched to streaming-only, we'd still be paying a monthly fee to the cable company.
Why does the US cling to a broken for-profit health care system? We're the only industrialized country that does that, as well. Sometimes we seem to take pride in being different, even when there is nothing better about it.
Isn't nearly as easy to do as it is to say. The human race has sought out barriers to erect for as long as humans have been around. Even when people can't see one another physically, they will still seek out people with similar ideas and personality characteristics. You can force them into a large group of vary dissimilar people and in the end you'll find that group will still tend to segregate on some metric you didn't consider before.
I'm not endorsing that kind of action, but it is how we behave as a species.
Why business intelligence matters in 2011
Because apparently, business intelligence did not matter prior to 2011.
"uses a similar rectangular design with rounded corners, similar black border"
We want triangles!
There are plenty of people around the world who would prefer to be refugees than be in their current situation, but they are held back by economic factors. You can't claim refugee status while you are still in your birth country, and you can't leave your country if you don't have the financial means to leave. There are plenty of areas where climate shift has had detrimental effects on peoples' ways of life, but some of those same places are under other circumstances of economic repression at the same time, making it impossible for the people who live their to actually leave and become refugees somewhere else.
I presume the "you must be new here" part was the funny element...
Awww now I miss the the stupid things the government did before 9/11 turned them into wholesale Constitution tramplers.
You're new here, I see - or at least newer than me. Let me clue you in on something; slashdot is a pro-conservative site.
If you want to be up-modded, just praise Bush, Reagan, and all the greatness that came immediately after 9/11, when the government was working in your best interest. Further, calling the current POTUS the great socialist satan will accomplish similar results. You are daring to suggest that what happened immediately after 9/11 might not have been done with everyone's best interests in mind - prepare to be moderated "troll".
I'm thinking 9/9/99 isn't the article's real date.
Well, it turns out that day did happen in history; I tend to remember it fairly well for reasons that aren't important here. Although it is interesting numerically...
Nonetheless, it does read "New York Times Archives", so even if the date may be wrong it is not likely a recent story.
Published: September 09, 1999
This happened almost twelve years ago...
That's OK, nothing else runs on Vista, either.
Part of the music industry (OK, a rather small part now) is about producing a physical product - actual albums. Google really doesn't have experience in that; the most significant physical product they ever made was a phone and it was a bomb. If they took the music industry and then abandoned the practice of making albums in favor of making all new music download-only, they would only further disenfranchise certain types of listeners.
And few companies are worse at recognizing the significance in customer differences than google...