Depends entirely on the tariff; pick the right one, and neither end pays anything per minute, as long as both parties are within the US or Canada. (e.g. Nextel for the cellphone, MCI 'Neighborhood' for the landline.) The wacky screw-neither-end method! The US system is flexible enough you can get a totally flat-rate tariff: no per-minute charges to call any phone, anywhere - mobile or landline. You can't get that in the UK: whatever tariff, you're stuck paying per-minute to call a cellphone. Yes, this means line rental is higher; I'd call that a fair price for not getting ass-raped with charges you can't control, if you ever want to call a cellphone...
Just to clarify: In the US land-lines typically don't pay anything for local calls it's all included in the monthly line charge. Depending on who you select for your long-distance carrier you can find deals where you pay a flat monthly fee for US and Canada long distance. For a US land-line customer there is no cost difference between calling a cell phone and a land line in the same area. While there is still some metered service here it is typically pay-per-call or a very low per-minute rate.
In the US cell phone customers typically pay both for making and recieving calls. Depending on your carrier and what plan you select you might have a certain amount of airtime included in the monthly charge, nights and weekends free, incoming calls free, or calls to phones on the same network free.
The worst case in the US is mobile to mobile and even then the airtime is usually coming out of the block included in the monthly charge or charged at a fairly low per-minute rate (roughly $0.15/minute on average).
In Europe it is rare for a 14 year old kid not to have a GSM. I understand that the situation in the US is quite different.
The US cell phone market is fairly competitive. While not every teenager here has a mobile its not that uncommon.
Basicly those who don't have mobile phones here mostly don't want one or don't see their need justifing the expense.
The US has a very cheap (local calls are flat-rate) and reliable land line network which is at least partly responsible for fewer people seeing the need for mobiles here. Also due to the size of the country and population density there are quite a few areas where service is spotty.
Ceren Ercen may be an anagram, but it is apparently the BSD babe's real name.
Parents sometimes have strange senses of humor when naming their kids. Besides neither name is all that uncommon in Turkey and she has said her ethinc background is part-Turkish.
How the hell are T-bills not "low risk"? If the US Treasury defaults on its debt there will be far bigger things to worry about than your investment portfolio.
Yes you are right about not being such a simple issue. But lets take things one step at a time. First Philip Morrise sells cigarettes among other things. Hence using them as an example is a REALLY bad idea.
Why not? Phillip Morris has been a very good investment over the last couple of years. Its current rate of return based on dividend payout alone is better than T-bills or Bonds.
While the growth prospects are somewhat limited the stock is undervalued by many measures. To some extent this is driven by fear of the various tobacco lawsuits Phillip Morris faces however the tobacco companies have been doing fairly well in court.
That would apply only if you're enough of an idiot to apply the flat tax to all income brackets. You could, for example, exempt the first $30,000 of everyone's income, applying the tax to all monies made beyond that initial income.
This would in essence keep lower-income folks from getting taxed at all, while still making it worthwhile for middle-income earners to make money beyond the exempt amount - and stick the rich with the most to pay (although at the same percentage as everyone else).
This is not nearly evil enough.
A widely held economic theory is if you want less of something you should tax it and if you want more of something you should reduce or eliminate taxes on it. According to this theory the bracketing system we have now discourages people from raising there income. A flat tax such as you describe would discourage people from rasing their incomes above the exemption amount. A true flat tax with no exemption would still offer no incentives for raising incomes.
The solution to this problem is obvious, your tax rate should be based on where you fall in income distribution. In other words if you were in the top 5% of all taxpayers your tax rate would be 5%, if you were in the top 95% you would pay 95% of your wages in taxes. Very simple and there's always an incentive to improve your income.
For what its worth IT management at telecom firms seems to be made up entirely of fucktards. The only ones who seem to have any fun are the router jockeys or those working at pure-play ISPs.
AT&T wireless services seemed to have clueful people in their IT department for a while but the fucktards have taken over there as well. Everyone I know who works at a telco or at a place where former telco managers have landed does nothing but complain about the cluelessness of the executives. For some reason anyone who's been in management at a telco seems to become endowed with a reverse midas touch.
If you are going to do in-house service find a company like a bank that doesn't fuck with the IT staff much or a company on the way up where IT is an essential component of the supply chain like Wal-mart or Costco. Universities, government, or research labs are also an option. One of the happiest IT people I know works for NOAA.
The problem with working in new product development is there are proportionaly less jobs out there and the jobs are much harder to get if you don't have embedded systems, OS kernel, or bleeding edge technology experience.
You may want to check out some contract shops as well. Its a good way to make top-dollar without having to get mired in the BS. Even if you have to work on broken-by-design systems at least you are well paid.
I'm not sure what part of the country you are in right now but it may be worth checking out other areas. Depending on your skills and interest you may find better pay and opportunities in another part of the country.
BTW if your skillset matches a job posting fairly closely except for experience consider applying anyway. A lot of times the minimum experience or degree requirements are BS. A friend of mine just got a job where she had only 1 year of experience in the key skill area where they had wanted 5 and no college degree even though they stated it was a requirement.
Another important thing to do is to take advantage of any contacts you may have. Most of my tech industry jobs I've gotten via contacts. For the two I didn't get this way only one was via sending a resume cold, the other one I was recruited via a resume I'd posted to the net.
But, I'm off on a tangent now, so I'll shut up:) But, the short story is that COFDM would have been a much better choice, and two corporations who didn't want to sacrifice about $15Mio between them together ruined over-the-air HDTV. I'm sure the cable industry probably had something to do with it, too...
There must have been something that made these companies decide to test with 8VSB. Was 8VSB transmission gear cheaper than COFDM? Did 8VSB have any advantages over COFDM for transmitting digital data? It does sound like 8VSB is very similar to data modems in modulation.
I do recall either AT&T or Zenith had something to do with the lobbying for 8VSB as well. So it is entirely possible the selection of 8VSB was for serving narrow commercial intrests.
I also remember there being big fights over square vs. rectangular pixels and progressive vs. interlaced scan.
He's still trying to take over HDTV and turn it into a Windows-only standard. His next goal is to have all televisions running WindowsCE.
WindowsCE seems to be doing about as well in television as elsewhere in the embedded market which is not very well at all. The embedded systems guys I know consider CE to be a joke and use linux when they don't use VXworks or QNX.
Surely there must be some merits to 8VSB or it wouldn't have been adopted or lobbied for. Even if those merits are lower equipment costs for the broadcaster or the ablity to cram more data down the channel.
If things really are as bad as you claim they are it is only a matter of time before it blows up in a way that's not going to be pretty for anyone inside the blast radius.
Worst case if management is clueless across the board is the company will go into a death spiral. Even if it is only your department or division fixing the problem will often result in all of the current employees losing their jobs.
Also its best to learn what average salaries are in your area for your level of experience and job classification. Unless it is otherwise a dream job or you are desperate don't take much less than the average salary. Anyone who can't or won't pay what you are worth is likely to screw you in any number of other ways.
I suppose there might be places where this isn't true, like I said. But I've always thought that there were more mainframes made for supporting users than there are for crunching numbers.
There are boxes out there that do primarily number crunching for applications like weather forcasting, climate modeling, oil and gas exploration, pharmacutical reasearch, etc. But these tend to mostly be massive cluster arrays.
Mainframes like the big IBM, Unisys, Tandem, Hitachi, or Fijitsu beasts are primarily used for transaction processing or running massive batch jobs. Things like banks, stock exchanges, airline reservation systems, printing welfare checks for the state of California are applications where you will find mainframes.
While you might find big Sun boxes doing some of these things now days they really aren't as well suited to transaction and batch processing as "traditonal" mainframes.
Sort of like a semi vs. a freight train, both are industrial strength but they solve different problems.
The U.S. has a horrible track record of going with non-standards in order to try to lock out foreign competition - or at least make them build a different widget just to sell in the U.S.
Not really, usually it is more of a problem of one or more countries, usually European who don't want to adopt the same standard as the US. This is usually done to help their own industry or just so they can be different from the US.
U.S - TV uses NTSC, the rest of the world uses PAL, so TV and VCR makers have to make a completely different product to sell here.
NTSC was developed before PAL. Part of the reason for the difference was 60Hz powerline frequency standard in the US vs. the 50Hz standard in Europe. Don't forget SECAM as used in France either, it is even more of a headache to deal with than PAL vs. NTSC issues. Also remember that at the time these standards were developed consumer electronics was a domestic rather than global industry. For what it's worth NTSC is used in Asia and other parts of the world as well, just not Europe.
U.S. - HDTV over the air uses 8VSB (because of political lobbying), an inferior modulation method to COFDM, which the rest of the world uses because of its technical merit.
Again the US was the first to come up with a digital HDTV standard, at the time 8VSB was chosen the rest of the world was using analog HDTV.
U.S. - drives on the wrong damn side of the road
To a Brit maybe. Most of the world drives on the right just like the US. Only the UK, some former Commonwealth countries and Japan drive on the left.
There also seem to be a lot of new housing developments that are set off from the rest of civilization, where surrounding forests are bulldozed and replaced by endless fields of grass and road just so that the houses can be set back 2 miles from the next nearest development. This is also unnecessary and absurd.
The trend I see around here is developments out in the middle of a rural area where all of the houses are 5000sf 'McMansions' with postage stamp yards. I'm sorry if I'm going to live 20 or more miles from anywhere the last thing I want is to have my neighbors right on top of me or a yard barely big enough for a lawn chair.
Your spamguard decoding skills are commendable. I'm guessing you are a product of one of the fine trade schools found outside the Northeast Corridor.
Man, you are an arrogant little shit aren't you. All proud of your Bahston education.
I hate to break it to you sparky but there are plenty of good or even excellent colleges and Universities outside the Northeast. Besides the Northeast has its share of shitty colleges and universities too. Any of the schools you linked to are arguably better Universities than your beloved UMass.
I guess there is a reason they call you guys Massholes.
And where will the centers of world finance be? Hint: the closest thing to a financial center in Redneckhickistan is Charlotte
Ever hear of the Chicago Board of Trade? How about Sand Hill Road?
Sorry I think we'll do fine without Wall Street.
It would be worth it anyway to get rid of you arrogant fucks in the Northeast who seem to be under the delusion that you are the only part of the country that counts for anything.
Plenty of intelligent life, culture, etc outside of the Northeast. Hell people outside the Northeast are probably smarter since we're not dumb enough to live there.
Tell ya what, we'll just take everything West of the Missippi, except Texas, you can keep Texas.
I predict settlement in five to seven months, $5 million from IBM, and maybe a $2 million follow-up suit against the likes of RedHat which will turn out to be much more difficult, bankrupting SCO, putting the UNIX trademark under control of a Chapter 11 court review, where it will probably be auctioned. The winning bidder will be IBM, barely outbidding RedHat.
IBM has a couple of different options: 1) File countersuit against SCO. There must be somehing in IBM's IP portfolio SCO is infringing on. SCO settles because IBM wining their countersuit would put them out of business. Also IBM may have a claim against SCO for attempting to scare customers away from AIX and Linux solutions. Likely outcome is SCO drops their lawsuit or settles on IBM's terms.
2) Drag the lawsuit out as long as possible. IBM can afford to pay its legal team for a LOOONG time. Can SCO? Again SCO drops the suit or settles on IBM's terms.
3) IBM buys SCO just to make the suit go away. I don't think this is likely as IBM probably doesn't want to set a precident of giving in to extortion.
In any case SCO will be made to go away.
This is akin to a sick old zebra walking up to the biggest meanest lion in the pride and biting him on the nose. The lion may get a bit bloodied but the response isn't going to be pretty for the zebra.
I did not realize that IRC could not auto-reconfigure its spanning trees. The algorithms for doing so aren't that hard. The Ethernet bridging spanning tree algorithm points the way. For maximum network efficiency, they should have a per-channel spanning tree that only encompasses nodes who have users on the channel.
Damn, where were you 13 years or so ago, the last time there was any real attempt to "fix" IRC?
Given the problems and discussions I was witness to back then I'm supprised IRC has managed to creak along with band-aids and patches until now.
Then again the code and protocol may be doing something like this now, it's been a while since I looked at either.
Ah, then point out the last armed riot in a developed country where there is more strict weapons control? See?
Hmm, how about the May Day riots in the UK or just about any time some country in Europe wins an international soccer tournement?
Oh, I guess those aren't "armed" riots, but they do look pretty violent to me. Shops burned, windows smashed, looting, etc. Sorry but if some fuckhead tries that on my block I want to make damn sure I've got a shotgun handy.
Also explain why in the US the cities and states with the least restrictive gun laws tend to have the lowest violent crime rates? Those with the most restrictive gun laws the highest violent crime rate? I know correlation does not inidcate causation, but it is an interesting correlation nonetheless.
The simple fact is if all private firearm ownership was banned in the US tomorrow only law-abiding citizens would turn in their weapons. Criminals would still have guns because they wouldn't turn theirs in. We would still have violent crime, and the murder rate would not drop.
I guess "white flight" is still a reality in Ft. Worth.
Many cities experience the phenomena of older suburbs turning into low-income neighborhoods with all of the resulting problems. Houston and now Ft. Worth are the only places where I've heard of it happening that fast. Most other parts of the country it is a slow process over 40-50 years.
One other factor that may contribute is the lack of any real geographic or zoning limits on sprawl for Ft. Worth or Houston.
My wife and I got swatted by our home owner's association for... (insert drum roll).. Parking in our driveway.
This is why I would think twice before buying a house in an area with a HOA.
I actually consider living in the city an advantage. As long as you follow the building codes and city ordinances you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want. Paint the house international orange with hot pink trim. Put your shitty rusted out car up on blocks in the driveway. Put a rock garden in for a front yard.
I might consider dealing with a HOA that stuck to concerning itself with maintaining common property and didn't get into parking cars in driveways or what shade of beige my house needs to be.
Before anyone says that "parents should be teaching these things" realize that many adults have problems with these tasks. I'm still figuring out #1 (advanced study, office politics), have blown #4 a couple of times, and mostly fake #8. I did get some exposure to #3, #5, #6 and #9 in high school mostly in senior social studies or the business law elective I took. Our senior social studies teacher also had us fill out the 1040EZ, 1040A, and 1040 (with attachments) IRS forms. Probably one of the most useful things I learned in high school.
Most of these topics provide a jumping off point to teaching the usual required subjects:
One of the big problems with many of these tests is many of them offer no or limited opportunity for a retake. If you are having an off day, allergies, or just didn't get enough sleep you don't pass to the next grade or graduate high-school.
This kind of nonsense and "teaching to the test" will probably lead me to put my kids in private schools.
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Depends entirely on the tariff; pick the right one, and neither end pays anything per minute, as long as both parties are within the US or Canada. (e.g. Nextel for the cellphone, MCI 'Neighborhood' for the landline.) The wacky screw-neither-end method! The US system is flexible enough you can get a totally flat-rate tariff: no per-minute charges to call any phone, anywhere - mobile or landline. You can't get that in the UK: whatever tariff, you're stuck paying per-minute to call a cellphone. Yes, this means line rental is higher; I'd call that a fair price for not getting ass-raped with charges you can't control, if you ever want to call a cellphone...
Just to clarify:
In the US land-lines typically don't pay anything for local calls it's all included in the monthly line charge. Depending on who you select for your long-distance carrier you can find deals where you pay a flat monthly fee for US and Canada long distance. For a US land-line customer there is no cost difference between calling a cell phone and a land line in the same area. While there is still some metered service here it is typically pay-per-call or a very low per-minute rate.
In the US cell phone customers typically pay both for making and recieving calls. Depending on your carrier and what plan you select you might have a certain amount of airtime included in the monthly charge, nights and weekends free, incoming calls free, or calls to phones on the same network free.
The worst case in the US is mobile to mobile and even then the airtime is usually coming out of the block included in the monthly charge or charged at a fairly low per-minute rate (roughly $0.15/minute on average).
You set up a home/factory/school someplace where you can't get a landline. More often that not that's just temporary.
I thought there were some parts of India where it can take forever to get a new land line installed? Including some of the major cities.
In Europe it is rare for a 14 year old kid not to have a GSM. I understand that the situation in the US is quite different.
The US cell phone market is fairly competitive. While not every teenager here has a mobile its not that uncommon.
Basicly those who don't have mobile phones here mostly don't want one or don't see their need justifing the expense.
The US has a very cheap (local calls are flat-rate) and reliable land line network which is at least partly responsible for fewer people seeing the need for mobiles here. Also due to the size of the country and population density there are quite a few areas where service is spotty.
Ceren Ercen is an angram..fool
Ceren Ercen may be an anagram, but it is apparently the BSD babe's real name.
Parents sometimes have strange senses of humor when naming their kids. Besides neither name is all that uncommon in Turkey and she has said her ethinc background is part-Turkish.
20 year treasury bills are hardly low risk.
How the hell are T-bills not "low risk"? If the US Treasury defaults on its debt there will be far bigger things to worry about than your investment portfolio.
Yes you are right about not being such a simple issue. But lets take things one step at a time. First Philip Morrise sells cigarettes among other things. Hence using them as an example is a REALLY bad idea.
Why not? Phillip Morris has been a very good investment over the last couple of years. Its current rate of return based on dividend payout alone is better than T-bills or Bonds.
While the growth prospects are somewhat limited the stock is undervalued by many measures. To some extent this is driven by fear of the various tobacco lawsuits Phillip Morris faces however the tobacco companies have been doing fairly well in court.
That would apply only if you're enough of an idiot to apply the flat tax to all income brackets. You could, for example, exempt the first $30,000 of everyone's income, applying the tax to all monies made beyond that initial income.
This would in essence keep lower-income folks from getting taxed at all, while still making it worthwhile for middle-income earners to make money beyond the exempt amount - and stick the rich with the most to pay (although at the same percentage as everyone else).
This is not nearly evil enough.
A widely held economic theory is if you want less of something you should tax it and if you want more of something you should reduce or eliminate taxes on it. According to this theory the bracketing system we have now discourages people from raising there income. A flat tax such as you describe would discourage people from rasing their incomes above the exemption amount. A true flat tax with no exemption would still offer no incentives for raising incomes.
The solution to this problem is obvious, your tax rate should be based on where you fall in income distribution. In other words if you were in the top 5% of all taxpayers your tax rate would be 5%, if you were in the top 95% you would pay 95% of your wages in taxes. Very simple and there's always an incentive to improve your income.
For what its worth IT management at telecom firms seems to be made up entirely of fucktards. The only ones who seem to have any fun are the router jockeys or those working at pure-play ISPs.
AT&T wireless services seemed to have clueful people in their IT department for a while but the fucktards have taken over there as well. Everyone I know who works at a telco or at a place where former telco managers have landed does nothing but complain about the cluelessness of the executives. For some reason anyone who's been in management at a telco seems to become endowed with a reverse midas touch.
If you are going to do in-house service find a company like a bank that doesn't fuck with the IT staff much or a company on the way up where IT is an essential component of the supply chain like Wal-mart or Costco. Universities, government, or research labs are also an option. One of the happiest IT people I know works for NOAA.
The problem with working in new product development is there are proportionaly less jobs out there and the jobs are much harder to get if you don't have embedded systems, OS kernel, or bleeding edge technology experience.
You may want to check out some contract shops as well. Its a good way to make top-dollar without having to get mired in the BS. Even if you have to work on broken-by-design systems at least you are well paid.
I'm not sure what part of the country you are in right now but it may be worth checking out other areas. Depending on your skills and interest you may find better pay and opportunities in another part of the country.
BTW if your skillset matches a job posting fairly closely except for experience consider applying anyway. A lot of times the minimum experience or degree requirements are BS. A friend of mine just got a job where she had only 1 year of experience in the key skill area where they had wanted 5 and no college degree even though they stated it was a requirement.
Another important thing to do is to take advantage of any contacts you may have. Most of my tech industry jobs I've gotten via contacts. For the two I didn't get this way only one was via sending a resume cold, the other one I was recruited via a resume I'd posted to the net.
But, I'm off on a tangent now, so I'll shut up :) But, the short story is that COFDM would have been a much better choice, and two corporations who didn't want to sacrifice about $15Mio between them together ruined over-the-air HDTV. I'm sure the cable industry probably had something to do with it, too...
There must have been something that made these companies decide to test with 8VSB. Was 8VSB transmission gear cheaper than COFDM? Did 8VSB have any advantages over COFDM for transmitting digital data? It does sound like 8VSB is very similar to data modems in modulation.
I do recall either AT&T or Zenith had something to do with the lobbying for 8VSB as well. So it is entirely possible the selection of 8VSB was for serving narrow commercial intrests.
I also remember there being big fights over square vs. rectangular pixels and progressive vs. interlaced scan.
He's still trying to take over HDTV and turn it into a Windows-only standard. His next goal is to have all televisions running WindowsCE.
WindowsCE seems to be doing about as well in television as elsewhere in the embedded market which is not very well at all. The embedded systems guys I know consider CE to be a joke and use linux when they don't use VXworks or QNX.
Surely there must be some merits to 8VSB or it wouldn't have been adopted or lobbied for. Even if those merits are lower equipment costs for the broadcaster or the ablity to cram more data down the channel.
Tell me to find another job. I dare ya.
Um, find another job and quit?
If things really are as bad as you claim they are it is only a matter of time before it blows up in a way that's not going to be pretty for anyone inside the blast radius.
Worst case if management is clueless across the board is the company will go into a death spiral. Even if it is only your department or division fixing the problem will often result in all of the current employees losing their jobs.
Also its best to learn what average salaries are in your area for your level of experience and job classification. Unless it is otherwise a dream job or you are desperate don't take much less than the average salary. Anyone who can't or won't pay what you are worth is likely to screw you in any number of other ways.
I suppose there might be places where this isn't true, like I said. But I've always thought that there were more mainframes made for supporting users than there are for crunching numbers.
There are boxes out there that do primarily number crunching for applications like weather forcasting, climate modeling, oil and gas exploration, pharmacutical reasearch, etc. But these tend to mostly be massive cluster arrays.
Mainframes like the big IBM, Unisys, Tandem, Hitachi, or Fijitsu beasts are primarily used for transaction processing or running massive batch jobs. Things like banks, stock exchanges, airline reservation systems, printing welfare checks for the state of California are applications where you will find mainframes.
While you might find big Sun boxes doing some of these things now days they really aren't as well suited to transaction and batch processing as "traditonal" mainframes.
Sort of like a semi vs. a freight train, both are industrial strength but they solve different problems.
The U.S. has a horrible track record of going with non-standards in order to try to lock out foreign competition - or at least make them build a different widget just to sell in the U.S.
Not really, usually it is more of a problem of one or more countries, usually European who don't want to adopt the same standard as the US. This is usually done to help their own industry or just so they can be different from the US.
U.S - TV uses NTSC, the rest of the world uses PAL, so TV and VCR makers have to make a completely different product to sell here.
NTSC was developed before PAL. Part of the reason for the difference was 60Hz powerline frequency standard in the US vs. the 50Hz standard in Europe. Don't forget SECAM as used in France either, it is even more of a headache to deal with than PAL vs. NTSC issues. Also remember that at the time these standards were developed consumer electronics was a domestic rather than global industry. For what it's worth NTSC is used in Asia and other parts of the world as well, just not Europe.
U.S. - HDTV over the air uses 8VSB (because of political lobbying), an inferior modulation method to COFDM, which the rest of the world uses because of its technical merit.
Again the US was the first to come up with a digital HDTV standard, at the time 8VSB was chosen the rest of the world was using analog HDTV.
U.S. - drives on the wrong damn side of the road
To a Brit maybe. Most of the world drives on the right just like the US. Only the UK, some former Commonwealth countries and Japan drive on the left.
There also seem to be a lot of new housing developments that are set off from the rest of civilization, where surrounding forests are bulldozed and replaced by endless fields of grass and road just so that the houses can be set back 2 miles from the next nearest development. This is also unnecessary and absurd.
The trend I see around here is developments out in the middle of a rural area where all of the houses are 5000sf 'McMansions' with postage stamp yards. I'm sorry if I'm going to live 20 or more miles from anywhere the last thing I want is to have my neighbors right on top of me or a yard barely big enough for a lawn chair.
If you discover illegal goodies on a machine, what should you do about it?
The policy at my employer is for us to tell our boss who then tells the VP HR.
In every case I know of the employee was fired and in one case where child porn was found the employee was arrested on the spot.
The right call at most companies is to punt the situation to HR and let them deal with it.
Your spamguard decoding skills are commendable. I'm guessing you are a product of one of the fine trade schools found outside the Northeast Corridor.
Man, you are an arrogant little shit aren't you. All proud of your Bahston education.
I hate to break it to you sparky but there are plenty of good or even excellent colleges and Universities outside the Northeast. Besides the Northeast has its share of shitty colleges and universities too. Any of the schools you linked to are arguably better Universities than your beloved UMass.
I guess there is a reason they call you guys Massholes.
And where will the centers of world finance be? Hint: the closest thing to a financial center in Redneckhickistan is Charlotte
Ever hear of the Chicago Board of Trade? How about Sand Hill Road?
Sorry I think we'll do fine without Wall Street.
It would be worth it anyway to get rid of you arrogant fucks in the Northeast who seem to be under the delusion that you are the only part of the country that counts for anything.
Plenty of intelligent life, culture, etc outside of the Northeast. Hell people outside the Northeast are probably smarter since we're not dumb enough to live there.
Tell ya what, we'll just take everything West of the Missippi, except Texas, you can keep Texas.
I predict settlement in five to seven months, $5 million from IBM, and maybe a $2 million follow-up suit against the likes of RedHat which will turn out to be much more difficult, bankrupting SCO, putting the UNIX trademark under control of a Chapter 11 court review, where it will probably be auctioned. The winning bidder will be IBM, barely outbidding RedHat.
IBM has a couple of different options:
1) File countersuit against SCO. There must be somehing in IBM's IP portfolio SCO is infringing on. SCO settles because IBM wining their countersuit would put them out of business. Also IBM may have a claim against SCO for attempting to scare customers away from AIX and Linux solutions. Likely outcome is SCO drops their lawsuit or settles on IBM's terms.
2) Drag the lawsuit out as long as possible. IBM can afford to pay its legal team for a LOOONG time. Can SCO? Again SCO drops the suit or settles on IBM's terms.
3) IBM buys SCO just to make the suit go away. I don't think this is likely as IBM probably doesn't want to set a precident of giving in to extortion.
In any case SCO will be made to go away.
This is akin to a sick old zebra walking up to the biggest meanest lion in the pride and biting him on the nose. The lion may get a bit bloodied but the response isn't going to be pretty for the zebra.
I did not realize that IRC could not auto-reconfigure its spanning trees. The algorithms for doing so aren't that hard. The Ethernet bridging spanning tree algorithm points the way. For maximum network efficiency, they should have a per-channel spanning tree that only encompasses nodes who have users on the channel.
Damn, where were you 13 years or so ago, the last time there was any real attempt to "fix" IRC?
Given the problems and discussions I was witness to back then I'm supprised IRC has managed to creak along with band-aids and patches until now.
Then again the code and protocol may be doing something like this now, it's been a while since I looked at either.
Ah, then point out the last armed riot in a developed country where there is more strict weapons control? See?
Hmm, how about the May Day riots in the UK or just about any time some country in Europe wins an international soccer tournement?
Oh, I guess those aren't "armed" riots, but they do look pretty violent to me. Shops burned, windows smashed, looting, etc. Sorry but if some fuckhead tries that on my block I want to make damn sure I've got a shotgun handy.
Also explain why in the US the cities and states with the least restrictive gun laws tend to have the lowest violent crime rates? Those with the most restrictive gun laws the highest violent crime rate? I know correlation does not inidcate causation, but it is an interesting correlation nonetheless.
The simple fact is if all private firearm ownership was banned in the US tomorrow only law-abiding citizens would turn in their weapons. Criminals would still have guns because they wouldn't turn theirs in. We would still have violent crime, and the murder rate would not drop.
Fortunately for Michael, Seth comes across as completely insane.
While I think sometimes Michael needs to grow up, Seth needs to seek professional help.
Amazing.
I guess "white flight" is still a reality in Ft. Worth.
Many cities experience the phenomena of older suburbs turning into low-income neighborhoods with all of the resulting problems. Houston and now Ft. Worth are the only places where I've heard of it happening that fast. Most other parts of the country it is a slow process over 40-50 years.
One other factor that may contribute is the lack of any real geographic or zoning limits on sprawl for Ft. Worth or Houston.
My wife and I got swatted by our home owner's association for... (insert drum roll).. Parking in our driveway.
This is why I would think twice before buying a house in an area with a HOA.
I actually consider living in the city an advantage. As long as you follow the building codes and city ordinances you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want. Paint the house international orange with hot pink trim. Put your shitty rusted out car up on blocks in the driveway. Put a rock garden in for a front yard.
I might consider dealing with a HOA that stuck to concerning itself with maintaining common property and didn't get into parking cars in driveways or what shade of beige my house needs to be.
Most of these topics provide a jumping off point to teaching the usual required subjects:
Most of these also provide an opportunity for things like a research paper or project.
Other useful things that can lead to teaching traditional subjects as well:
One of the big problems with many of these tests is many of them offer no or limited opportunity for a retake. If you are having an off day, allergies, or just didn't get enough sleep you don't pass to the next grade or graduate high-school.
This kind of nonsense and "teaching to the test" will probably lead me to put my kids in private schools.