It's the same with the chiropractor not having a clue. How is this libel?"
"Norberg, who has a day job designing furniture, had no complaints about his medical care - only how much he was billed for it. In his original review, he wrote, "I don't think good business means charging people whatever you feel like hoping they'll pay without a fuss."
It's certainly no worse than what we see lawyers try to pull every day, padding their billing hours.
God greeted the lawyer at the pearly gates.
God: "Come on in, you're the oldest person up here."
Lawyer: "How's that? I'm only 43?"
God: "Not according to your hours billed records..."
... though a more apt comparison might be between chiropractors and scientologists... birds of a feather.
"Probably because the process of growing trees specifically to make paper, cutting them down, processing them, printing on them, and disposing of them uses a lot of energy and wastes land. "
And while these trees are growing, they're producing oxygen... you know, that stuff we need to live?
The energy costs to produce a piece of paper are probably less than booting up a computer that has enough "guts" to run Vista.
Now if you want to save energy, ban Vista. Or make people who use it pay a "carbon tax."
Then there's the cost involved if you ever have to dispute anything. What is a judge going to be more impressed with - the original bill printed out by your supplier, that you have a copy of, that shows you're right... or a pdf you printed up on your computer?
"If it's a financial document, a record that may have tax reporting ramifications, or some other substantial document, it should be available indefinitely."
Which is why you have them mail you a physical copy, instead of going paperless... then you pay via the net, and your bank MAILS you your monthly statement. You have all the physical copies you need.
Everyone keeps sending me these "switch to electronic billing" notices. They can go screw themselves. Not only are they NOT offering me an incentive - like, say $X off the bill each month - but I'll then have to pay for what I get for free now? Forget it.
Besides, the physical paper is doing my share for carbon sequestration:-)
Some of us got moved (there wasn't enough room for all of us in the project group) to an area with two foot high walls instead of full cubicles, which we share with half a dozen women from some other area of the company that requires them to be on the phone all day, or talking about their work, or talking anyway, and they have commercial radio on, and constant visitors.
Maybe it's time to start having phone sex during your breaks. LOUD phone sex. "Now meow like a cat. LOUDER, BITCH!" type phone sex.
Or pretend you're a devoted fan of Jebus Radio and play THAT all day. And through out a few "Praise Jesus, Fuck yeah!" every time they look at you oddly.
Then ask them if the voices in your head are too loud for them.
Planned maintenance. You know the lifespan of the tires, and plan accordingly. It's not like you're going to bust a tire by hitting a pothole, or running over a nail, in the subway system, or that you don't have other maintenance to do on the cars on a regular basis, like cleaning them out, inspections, etc.
"(Rubber-tired systems are less efficient, so there's more heat in the tunnels and more energy used. I don't know how quiet they are, it's a while since I was in Paris and I wasn't paying attention.)"
You can talk to the person next to you without raising your voice.
...because I still use an 80-character TTY terminal, you insensitive clod!
You have 80 characters AND a TTY? I'm still stuck with a 32x16 display on an old tv, with lowercase letters being uppercase letters, but green on black, instead of black on green, you insensitive clod!
The truth is that most people work in office buildings that are not that busy, and they only spend a tiny fraction of their day in a busy and distracting environment.
An office environment is not distracting? Have you ever heard of e-mail, youtube or slashdot?
Or shared cubicles. Or cubicles where you can hear EVERYTHING your coworkers are doing. Or the noise of dozens or hundreds of PCs.
Since the city is supposed to hurt the brain, can I get a doctors' note to go work in the country instead of the office?
Seriously, it's no wonder that I get more work done when I work from home than from the office.
It was no longer in their interest to keep people on a DOS-only platform once they got serious about pushing Windows and Excel. Remember, at one time Lotus had a larger market cap than Microsoft, and there was talk of them doing an LBO of Microsoft. This scared the SHIT out of Gates and Co.
That's the problem with the net - revisionist history. Go down to your library and do some research in books in print from the early '90s, and you'll find several references to it, with citations, including one where Bill Gates says "I hope we don't get into trouble with the DoJ over this."
"Congratulations to Nielsen on their fully accurate statistical analysis. Particularly obtaining data for predominantly offline consoles"
Remember, 87% of all statistics are pulled out of someone's ass. The use of a "fudge factor" comes into play here.
BTW, let's put it into perspective. The Wii is a lot more demanding, physically, so you're not going to have those 12-hour marathon gaming sessions on your Wii Fit (if you can find a store that has one in stock).
"It's easy to imagine such software in a general computing environment, especially in the financial and insurance arenas where people might be taking a long term view or processing historical data, but in a single purpose consumer electronics product?"
The single purpose of the Zune is to make its' owners look stupid. The leap year problem is therefore both a feature AND a bug.
"
Worse yet: this bug affects every Windows CE device carrying this driver.
"
So who volunteers to "fix" this driver so that it implements this "feature" every day, and also "works" on all Windows platforms?
Better yet, anyone want to bet that Microsoft will do something like this (purposefully break Windows) in an update, to force people to adopt Windows7?
I get the feeling that the system he's got outlined will take a lot of time to get used to and still require the occasional glance at the phone.
Blind. He's blind. He can't see. The man developing this is unable to look at the phone.
That's okay. In Soviet Amerika, phone looks at YOU!
Also, being legally blind doesn't mean being completely sightless.
If he makes a mistake, he can erase a digit simply by shaking the phone, which can detect motion.
Old technology. See Etch-a-Sketch.
Look, this might be a great help for him, but it's no more an "invention" in the patent office sense of the word than any other software "patent" is inventive.
30 years ago, this would have been "WOW", but so was Pong.
So Merriam Webster doesn't have the same definition as the patent office. Big deal.
Also, this is not a "new idea", not a "new method", and by itself is not a "new device", so it fails.
This is no more innovative than my grabbing a seat at random in a restaurant and having the staff serve my meal at that particular table instead of another one. They will then place everything (knife, fork, plates, meal) in the same relative starting position, just that the starting position is changed based on which table I sit at.
Call me when there's TRUE innovation, TRUE inventiveness, not something obvious that can be implemented in a few lines of code.
Slashdot Mirror
"Norberg, who has a day job designing furniture, had no complaints about his medical care - only how much he was billed for it. In his original review, he wrote, "I don't think good business means charging people whatever you feel like hoping they'll pay without a fuss."
It's certainly no worse than what we see lawyers try to pull every day, padding their billing hours.
God greeted the lawyer at the pearly gates.
God: "Come on in, you're the oldest person up here."
Lawyer: "How's that? I'm only 43?"
God: "Not according to your hours billed records ..."
I'd trust a veterinarian to treat me before I'd trust one of those fraud artists.
"I bet most the supposedly hardcore RIAA-hater nutjobs don't even realise SD has the built in DRM."
The term "Secure" in "Secure Digital" should have been a clue :-/
"Probably because the process of growing trees specifically to make paper, cutting them down, processing them, printing on them, and disposing of them uses a lot of energy and wastes land. "
And while these trees are growing, they're producing oxygen ... you know, that stuff we need to live?
The energy costs to produce a piece of paper are probably less than booting up a computer that has enough "guts" to run Vista.
Now if you want to save energy, ban Vista. Or make people who use it pay a "carbon tax."
3 months, or as long as there is is any balance (debit or credit), whichever is longer, would be the absolute minimum that would be workable.
Then there's the cost involved if you ever have to dispute anything. What is a judge going to be more impressed with - the original bill printed out by your supplier, that you have a copy of, that shows you're right ... or a pdf you printed up on your computer?
The three rules:
Ignore these rules at your own risk.
"If it's a financial document, a record that may have tax reporting ramifications, or some other substantial document, it should be available indefinitely."
Which is why you have them mail you a physical copy, instead of going paperless ... then you pay via the net, and your bank MAILS you your monthly statement. You have all the physical copies you need.
Everyone keeps sending me these "switch to electronic billing" notices. They can go screw themselves. Not only are they NOT offering me an incentive - like, say $X off the bill each month - but I'll then have to pay for what I get for free now? Forget it.
Besides, the physical paper is doing my share for carbon sequestration :-)
"Sorry, but R is not relatively new, it's been around for at least 10 years"
FTFA: "whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models."
So we can the financial crisis on idiots who don't understand that GIGO applies in EVERY computer language?
"The brownsnout spookfish in the Pacific is the first known vertebrate to use mirrors to focus light into its eyes"
We've been using mirrors for telescopes for a lot longer than we've known about the spookfish.
Maybe it's time to start having phone sex during your breaks. LOUD phone sex. "Now meow like a cat. LOUDER, BITCH!" type phone sex.
Or pretend you're a devoted fan of Jebus Radio and play THAT all day. And through out a few "Praise Jesus, Fuck yeah!" every time they look at you oddly.
Then ask them if the voices in your head are too loud for them.
Planned maintenance. You know the lifespan of the tires, and plan accordingly. It's not like you're going to bust a tire by hitting a pothole, or running over a nail, in the subway system, or that you don't have other maintenance to do on the cars on a regular basis, like cleaning them out, inspections, etc.
"(Rubber-tired systems are less efficient, so there's more heat in the tunnels and more energy used. I don't know how quiet they are, it's a while since I was in Paris and I wasn't paying attention.)"
You can talk to the person next to you without raising your voice.
You seem to have spent the last year in a coma. Let me bring you up to date. Financial market crashed. Banks bailed out. Wall Street decimated.
It's also noisy. Maybe they should do some maintenance, and switch over to a rubber-tired system.
Must be all those pollutants in the river. Maybe they've permanently altered your taste buds.
Seriously, the air absolutely stinks and the streets are filthy. About the only thing going for it is it ISN'T New Jersey.
You have 80 characters AND a TTY? I'm still stuck with a 32x16 display on an old tv, with lowercase letters being uppercase letters, but green on black, instead of black on green, you insensitive clod!
Or shared cubicles. Or cubicles where you can hear EVERYTHING your coworkers are doing. Or the noise of dozens or hundreds of PCs.
Since the city is supposed to hurt the brain, can I get a doctors' note to go work in the country instead of the office?
Seriously, it's no wonder that I get more work done when I work from home than from the office.
Try counting. Mine came in without my even noticing, except for the last one, when I noticed that my jaw ached a bit when I yawned.
It was no longer in their interest to keep people on a DOS-only platform once they got serious about pushing Windows and Excel. Remember, at one time Lotus had a larger market cap than Microsoft, and there was talk of them doing an LBO of Microsoft. This scared the SHIT out of Gates and Co.
That's the problem with the net - revisionist history. Go down to your library and do some research in books in print from the early '90s, and you'll find several references to it, with citations, including one where Bill Gates says "I hope we don't get into trouble with the DoJ over this."
"Congratulations to Nielsen on their fully accurate statistical analysis. Particularly obtaining data for predominantly offline consoles"
Remember, 87% of all statistics are pulled out of someone's ass. The use of a "fudge factor" comes into play here.
BTW, let's put it into perspective. The Wii is a lot more demanding, physically, so you're not going to have those 12-hour marathon gaming sessions on your Wii Fit (if you can find a store that has one in stock).
"When has Microsoft ever actually done that?"
Search for "DOS ain't done until lotus won't run." - purposefully introducing incompatibilities in the OS, just like Apple with jailbroken iPhones.
"You proceed from a false assumption... that Microsoft ever really had a QA team in the first place."
They do - it's called "customers."
"It's easy to imagine such software in a general computing environment, especially in the financial and insurance arenas where people might be taking a long term view or processing historical data, but in a single purpose consumer electronics product?"
The single purpose of the Zune is to make its' owners look stupid. The leap year problem is therefore both a feature AND a bug.
" Worse yet: this bug affects every Windows CE device carrying this driver. "
So who volunteers to "fix" this driver so that it implements this "feature" every day, and also "works" on all Windows platforms?
Better yet, anyone want to bet that Microsoft will do something like this (purposefully break Windows) in an update, to force people to adopt Windows7?
That's okay. In Soviet Amerika, phone looks at YOU!
Also, being legally blind doesn't mean being completely sightless.
Old technology. See Etch-a-Sketch.
Look, this might be a great help for him, but it's no more an "invention" in the patent office sense of the word than any other software "patent" is inventive.
30 years ago, this would have been "WOW", but so was Pong.
So Merriam Webster doesn't have the same definition as the patent office. Big deal.
Also, this is not a "new idea", not a "new method", and by itself is not a "new device", so it fails.
This is no more innovative than my grabbing a seat at random in a restaurant and having the staff serve my meal at that particular table instead of another one. They will then place everything (knife, fork, plates, meal) in the same relative starting position, just that the starting position is changed based on which table I sit at.
Call me when there's TRUE innovation, TRUE inventiveness, not something obvious that can be implemented in a few lines of code.