That makes it doubly unenforcable. Not only are they on tenuous legal ground to begin with, but at no point did you actually agree to be bound by that clause.
Remember that there is no such thing as a "license to use" a copyrighted work. There are contracts which may govern usage, and software vendors are quite fond of calling them licenses, but they are still just contracts and thus need to play by the rules of contract law, like for example one must be able to read the full terms of the contract before entering into it. If what you say is indeed true, it fails the most basic test of a legally valid contract.
Other key points are negotiability and quid pro quo. Obviously, if you can't see the terms until after you're supposedly bound by them, there's no chance to negotiate. It fails quid pro quo as well, since it doesn't give you anything in return for the rights it attempts to take away. The common arguement there is that what you're getting is the right to use the software, but according to copyright law you already had that right, so long as you didn't break any other laws in obtaining your copy and getting it installed, which in this case you clearly haven't.
Given id's history, I think it's safe to assume there will be one. Besides, even though there hasn't been an official announcement regarding a Linux client, it has been strongly suggested, like for example Carmack saying that innitial developement would be done on Linux, and mentioning various options for distributing the Linux client in a way that suggested that was the only decision to be made.
It's interesting to note that the Linux version of UT2004 does not have this 'feature' while the Windows one does.
IIRC ut2k3 didn't do cd-check on Linux either.
Myself and everyone I know usually have to install cracks or patches just to play our legally bought games without having to keep bring out the disks. Sometimes the CD checks are so badly writtin that even with the disks we cannot play them - so we *have* to install the patchs.
The worst was Diablo 2. I swore never to buy another Blizzard game after that. It's one thing to have some copy protection, and I can even respect that, but it's quite another when your copy protection causes enough problems that you have an entry in the FAQ about it, and yet you refuse to do anything to fix the problem. Between that and the bnetd thing, I decided to give my money to companies that at least pretend to care about their customers.
The fact is, SCO doesn't prove much of anything because SCO is failing at what they are doing.
Bzzzt! Wrong!
SCO proves my point: that the GPL is no protection from the kind of thing SCO is doing.
You claimed that Novell wouldn't/couldn't do the same because they own Suse and Ximian. Well, SCO owns OpenLinux and was a founding member of UnitedLinux (some might say THE founding member, since Ransom Love seemed to be the main force driving it). That certainly didn't stop SCO from embarking on it's current path, did it?
The fact is, the only thing stopping Novell from doing the same is that their current business plan involves them being a Linux vendor. As anyone with experience in the real world can tell you, business plans can change at the drop of a hat, even if the changes made are totally illogical (like, say, a major Linux vendor suddenly trying to destroy the very foundations upon which Linux is built). If you think this sort of thing is unusual in the business world, you are sadly mistaken.
Novell could turn on us at any moment, and the GPL is not going to stop them. (I don't think they will, but only a fool would ignore the possibility.)
I got the 18.8 from here http://www.cedmagazine.com/ced/9808/9808d.htm and have seen figures in the 18.8-19.4 range thrown around quite a bit. Scientific Atlanta says 19.25, another CED article says it varies a bit depending on content and SD is 2-3Mbps and the ATSC standard caps the HDTV MPEG-2 stream at 19.39 Mbps. OK, I found a FAQ at the FCC that places the max at 19.3 Mbps.
Interesting. That's not the limit of the standard, though, it's the limit of how much data can be transmitted in 6MHz of bandwidth. IIRC by law they have to transmit certain ancilliary data, like closed caption, hence the 18.8Mbps.
Seems low to me too but if they have the time and the right (expensive) equipment that would allow better compression.
That's just it, though, everything I'm saying is from my experience dealing with the expensive equipment. I'll admit I don't have much experience with the HD stuff (beyond what it takes to choke a 1Gb fibrechannel RAID), but I do know that SD MJPEG under about 15Mbps looks like pure ass. "Good enough for broadcast" though I guess, which is disappointing. (Yeah, I know MJPEG is an old standard, but a lot of facilities still use it.)
Odd, That slashdot article and other things that I have seen places the resolution of 35mm film at about 4000 lines, but I suspect different films have different grain size.
I've heard all kinds of numbers. I suspect the truth is probably about 4k lines, but the grains are kind of randomly distributed, so it doesn't seem improbable that there would be some occasional graininess at 2k just from the probability of a grain lining up with a scanned pixel in exactly the wrong way. I haven't seen it myself, but people get really picky when that much money is involved, so it probably isn't so bad that a casual observer would notice.
I know that my standards are a lot lower at home than at work, where part of my job is judging video quality. I Tivo the Simpsons at low quality, and that doesn't bother me. At work, though, a board that was putting out what Tivo considers high quality would be sent to the rework guy real quick.
Tell me about it, SD is very disappointing. At least the local comcast cable delivers quite a few HD signals.
When Comcast took over from AT&T the quality improved a bit, but not enough that I could even think about getting rid of my 14db line amp, without which half the channels are basically unwatchable. No digital available in my neighborhood, of course, and I just about swallowed my tongue when I saw what Dish wanted for HD service.
To be honest, though, I don't watch enough TV that I really care that much. I mostly bought the set for watching DVDs. Still, when I pay for a service I expect the quality to be good enough that it's usable.
Because the thing is that Novell is selling linux, and in fact owns SUSE and Ximian, and as a result are bound by the terms of the GPL.
Ah, right, because the company currently known as SCO never sold their own Linux distribution, and thus could certainly never have been considered "bound by the GPL"...
Are you a newbie who hacked into a low numbered account, or just completely stupid?
Sorry for the flamebait, but seriously, the only reason owning Suse would stop Novell from doing exactly what SCO is doing now is that Suse is a successful product (2nd or 3rd behind Red Hat, depending on who you ask). If you honestly believe that the GPL's MAD provisions actually force moneyed corporations to play fair, you're hopelessly naive.
Of course having said all that I think the main problem with current HDTV is not resolution but overcompression. I can see way too many motion artifacts when the camera pans fast or other fast moving scenes.
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. I'm not sure where you got the 18.8Mbps from, as that's lower than what we consider "low but acceptable" quality for SD. It doesn't suprise me that someone would try and compress it that much. For reference, what we consider low quality for SD is MPEG2 or DVCPro at 25Mbps, or MJPEG at 24Mbps. High quality is double those, and that's not including audio or ancilliary data (we store verticle blanking seperately, which adds up to 20% to the bandwidth, but preserves Closed Captioning and the like). I've been told that most broadcasters run at around 15Mbps for SD.
I'm soon to be trained on our HD servers, but IIRC 70Mbps MPEG2 is considered good quality.
1080p @ 30Hz is in the ATSC standard and has the same datarate as 1080i @ 60hz
You are correct. For some reason I was thinking 1080p@60. Now that I've checked the spec I see 1080p@30, 1080i@60, and 720p@60.
In the future I'm sure we will have higher resolution content, currently they are scanning in films at much higher resultions (4000 lines, progrssive), partially to alow for new, better formats.
Another product I nominally support (actual repairs are done in Germany, I just make sure the boards we send out have the correct firmware) is the Spirit Datacine, which is the absolute top film scanner available. It does 2k lines in realtime, or 4k lines at 7.5fps (both 4:3, and it's all progressive until it's downconverted to the distribution format). I don't have a frame handy, as the base model is $1.2M, but IIRC the data bus is 16 optical fibers in paralell.
So, yeah, we can do it, but I wouldn't expect to see it in your home any time soon.
Also I should note that when we went to 2k operators started to complain that the image was grainy. It turns out that's because they were actually able to see the grain of the film. That can be cleaned up a bit of course, but I think for 4k to really be viable it's going to have to be all digital.
Related amusing annectdote: When my wife came home after I got done hooking up our HDTV (to our super-crappy AT&T cable) her innitial reaction was "That looks like shit! We paid $1000 for that?!" I had to explain to her that our signal had always looked like shit, it's just that now we had a TV that was good enough that we could tell.
Thanks for clearing that up. I was actually aware of most of it, but I'm used to dealing with it at the "other end" (I'm a technician at Thomson Broadcast & media Solutions, aka Grass Valley Group). I never paid attention to the LCD TVs, though, as I never wanted one.
That is the ultimate goal for many HD fanatics though - 1080 progressive.
"Yes, I've-a seen it, it's-a very nice-a!"
Seriously though, I understand the desire to own the best, but where do these folks think they're going to get 1080p content? To my knowledge nobody broadcasts 1080p, if for no other reason than that it really sucks when your $75k video server is suddenly reduced to one play/record channel (unless you want to sell your firstborn to upgrade to 2GB fibrechannel, and even then, well, I haven't tested it myself).
Still, given the limitations, I wonder why everyone seems to be switching to fixed pixel. My 40" RCA uses high output tubes and has a max res of 1097 lines, progressive. It looks like all the newer Sceniums are DLP and down-convert everything to 720p as you describe.
HD resolution is 1920x1080 (or 1280x720, but I've never seen an HDTV that couldn't do at least 1080i). The aspect ratio on an HDTV is 16:9, aka letterbox, so the resolutions you're thinking of don't really apply.
For standard def TV it makes perfect sense to top out at 800x600, since SDTV has a resolution of only 700x525 (NTSC, PAL is 833x625, but then you have to deal with the 50Hz refresh, which drives me nuts. I'd rather have inconsistent color, thank you very much.)
Anyway, the real problem with using a TV as a monitor is that (a) they're limited to only those resolutions which are used for TV/video, which is like 4 at most, and more importantly (b) they're limited to standard refresh rates, which means 60Hz interlaced, which is NOT the same as the 60Hz progressive you're used to enjoying with a real computer monitor. HD does include a progresive scan standard, but I don't know off the top of my head if it's 60Hz or 30Hz.
I have no problem giving, in fact I enjoy it. She was never into recieving, though she's gotten so she won't try and talk me out of it when I'm in the mood.
Another saying about marriage applies here, I think:
She goes into it thinking he'll change. He goes into it thinking she won't. They're both wrong.
Actually, living in the modern world is often more stressful.
At least in the third world situation your natural "fight or flight" response is typically helpful. If someone is shooting at you, you shoot back, or run away, or maybe get shot. However it works out, the situation is at least resolved, and you come down off your adrenaline high.
In the modern world it's generally the exact opposite of what you need, making your situation harder to resolve, not easier. The situation is prolonged, actually building on itself in a vicious cycle of adrenaline rushes until you either somehow fight through and find some sort of solution or you burn out.
What we call stress is in most cases just a chemical reaction to stimulus. We evolved that way in order to cope with the stress of the primitive world, now known as the third world. In the modern world those mechanisms just make things worse, thus creating more stress.
The problem with chemical coping mechanisms is that the problem is still there, and usually bigger, when you come down. As an added bonus, your ability to find an actual solution is diminished.
If you're not already doing, I don't suggest taking it up.
That's quite possibly the most mind-bogglingly ignorant thing I've ever heard.
Perhaps you should study some sociology, and then consider the repercussions of your statement, not just for society as a whole, but for you personally.
I'll give you a clue: I'd gladly kill you to provide for my daughter, if that's what it came down to, and I wouldn't regret it for an instant. I'm willing to bet just about any parent you care to ask feels the same.
Don't think for a moment that all this socialist "subsidizing the poor planning of others" doesn't have direct benefit to you.
I second this. My dad was a contractor, and I worked construction on and off for 10 years.
My dad is 53, and his body is basically broken, and he was one of the few who actually took care of himself. It's hard work, and the money's not that good.
The only guys I knew who were making anywhere near 6 figures were the ones who bet everything on a spec house and got lucky, and were smart about rolling that over into the next spec house. After a few years, if they could maintain, they might have been making 6 figures. I knew just as many who didn't get lucky and spent the next 10 years paying off their debts.
Oh, and those guys working more overtime than should be humanly possible? Most of them are doing speed.
Why? Both have the same effect on the employer: increased cost. (Or, at least, that's what they would have us believe every time the rules change in favor of the employee. If they're not going to differentiate, why should we?)
I think it would be better to base it on some cost of living metric, like housing for example.
When qualifying for a home loan, they typically pick 1/3 your income as the maximum payment you can afford. Based on my own experience, one can scrape by on twice their housing cost. So, 2.5 * Average Rent would seem reasonable. I don't have the average, but the median rent for 2000 was $469, which would put the minimum wage at roughly $6.75
I have to agree, but it's important to remember that "many" is not the same as "all", or even "most". There are unions that really do care about their members and work for their benefit, and there are industries which really do need union protection.
My mom is a union rep for a small union (United Domestic Workers) that does take care of its members. A while back they thought they would be able to get more bargaining power by joining with one of the bigger unions (AFSCME I think, but I'm not positive). They got screwed. The big union didn't give a crap about them, just their membership dues, so all the UDW members voted "Screw you guys, I'm going home", and are now back to having at least the meager resources they had before.
I would be in support of a tech union, or something like it, as long as it remained an independent entity focused on the needs of IT folk. I would absolutely not join one affiliated with AFL-CIO, AFSCME, or any of the other big unions, which I don't believe have any interest in representing the interests of their members.
Plus, even if she's not your type, you could have a nice time for one evening. Sometimes a date is *more* fun for both parties if you know there won't be another.
I never understood that point of view. If there's no future in it, what's the point? If I can already tell she's not my type, why would I want to subject myself to whatever negative quality I see in her for an entire evening? Chances are I'd end up being too annoyed to enjoy myself.
Then again, I'm not really interested in owning a ps2 either, so I guess it would be a toss-up for me.
They do have to pay it. Granted, not as much, but if it is the case that productivity decreases, I doubt you'll see too many 70-90 hour work weeks.
I've tutored too many business majors to believe that management would ever notice such a corellation.
"More hours == more productivity" is just one of those ideas that's stuck in their head, like "inventory reduction" or "6-sigma". They believe it's the solution to all their problems, and they'll keep on believing regardless of what the evidence actually shows.
Every few months, I will install a copy of norton and run it with the latest signatures just to check that I am clean, and I have yet to find a virus on my box.
You know you can do that without having to install anything, right? I like housecall.antivirus.com , but there are others.
NAV used to be really good back in '99 or so, but recent versions have been bloatware hogs like nothing else I've ever seen!
I wouldn't go that far!
Last time I used anything Norton was '97 or '98, when I made the collosal mistake of buying Norton System Works. NAV definately slowed my system down, and caused some instability as well, but it wasn't the worst offender. CrashGaurd (or whatever Symantec's version was called) made my previously very stable system crash constantly, and rather than helping it recover gracefuly like it was supposed to, actually locked it up harder than just a plain old Win95 crash. I started refering to the whole thing as Norton Anti-System.
For the record, I tried the McCaffee equivalent around the same time. It caused most of the same problems, just not quite as bad. After that I decided to just not be an idiot, and was able to run sans AV for several years. In fact, I got my first and only virus in '02, when my wife got suckered by one of those "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" pr0n emails.
Of course, I switched the whole family over to Linux in Dec. '02 and haven't worried about it since.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey now, that's hardly fair. Reagan was an idiot too...
That makes it doubly unenforcable. Not only are they on tenuous legal ground to begin with, but at no point did you actually agree to be bound by that clause.
Remember that there is no such thing as a "license to use" a copyrighted work. There are contracts which may govern usage, and software vendors are quite fond of calling them licenses, but they are still just contracts and thus need to play by the rules of contract law, like for example one must be able to read the full terms of the contract before entering into it. If what you say is indeed true, it fails the most basic test of a legally valid contract.
Other key points are negotiability and quid pro quo. Obviously, if you can't see the terms until after you're supposedly bound by them, there's no chance to negotiate. It fails quid pro quo as well, since it doesn't give you anything in return for the rights it attempts to take away. The common arguement there is that what you're getting is the right to use the software, but according to copyright law you already had that right, so long as you didn't break any other laws in obtaining your copy and getting it installed, which in this case you clearly haven't.
Given id's history, I think it's safe to assume there will be one. Besides, even though there hasn't been an official announcement regarding a Linux client, it has been strongly suggested, like for example Carmack saying that innitial developement would be done on Linux, and mentioning various options for distributing the Linux client in a way that suggested that was the only decision to be made.
It's interesting to note that the Linux version of UT2004 does not have this 'feature' while the Windows one does.
IIRC ut2k3 didn't do cd-check on Linux either.
Myself and everyone I know usually have to install cracks or patches just to play our legally bought games without having to keep bring out the disks. Sometimes the CD checks are so badly writtin that even with the disks we cannot play them - so we *have* to install the patchs.
The worst was Diablo 2. I swore never to buy another Blizzard game after that. It's one thing to have some copy protection, and I can even respect that, but it's quite another when your copy protection causes enough problems that you have an entry in the FAQ about it, and yet you refuse to do anything to fix the problem. Between that and the bnetd thing, I decided to give my money to companies that at least pretend to care about their customers.
The fact is, SCO doesn't prove much of anything because SCO is failing at what they are doing.
Bzzzt! Wrong!
SCO proves my point: that the GPL is no protection from the kind of thing SCO is doing.
You claimed that Novell wouldn't/couldn't do the same because they own Suse and Ximian. Well, SCO owns OpenLinux and was a founding member of UnitedLinux (some might say THE founding member, since Ransom Love seemed to be the main force driving it). That certainly didn't stop SCO from embarking on it's current path, did it?
The fact is, the only thing stopping Novell from doing the same is that their current business plan involves them being a Linux vendor. As anyone with experience in the real world can tell you, business plans can change at the drop of a hat, even if the changes made are totally illogical (like, say, a major Linux vendor suddenly trying to destroy the very foundations upon which Linux is built). If you think this sort of thing is unusual in the business world, you are sadly mistaken.
Novell could turn on us at any moment, and the GPL is not going to stop them. (I don't think they will, but only a fool would ignore the possibility.)
I got the 18.8 from here http://www.cedmagazine.com/ced/9808/9808d.htm and have seen figures in the 18.8-19.4 range thrown around quite a bit. Scientific Atlanta says 19.25, another CED article says it varies a bit depending on content and SD is 2-3Mbps and the ATSC standard caps the HDTV MPEG-2 stream at 19.39 Mbps. OK, I found a FAQ at the FCC that places the max at 19.3 Mbps.
Interesting. That's not the limit of the standard, though, it's the limit of how much data can be transmitted in 6MHz of bandwidth. IIRC by law they have to transmit certain ancilliary data, like closed caption, hence the 18.8Mbps.
Seems low to me too but if they have the time and the right (expensive) equipment that would allow better compression.
That's just it, though, everything I'm saying is from my experience dealing with the expensive equipment. I'll admit I don't have much experience with the HD stuff (beyond what it takes to choke a 1Gb fibrechannel RAID), but I do know that SD MJPEG under about 15Mbps looks like pure ass. "Good enough for broadcast" though I guess, which is disappointing. (Yeah, I know MJPEG is an old standard, but a lot of facilities still use it.)
Odd, That slashdot article and other things that I have seen places the resolution of 35mm film at about 4000 lines, but I suspect different films have different grain size.
I've heard all kinds of numbers. I suspect the truth is probably about 4k lines, but the grains are kind of randomly distributed, so it doesn't seem improbable that there would be some occasional graininess at 2k just from the probability of a grain lining up with a scanned pixel in exactly the wrong way. I haven't seen it myself, but people get really picky when that much money is involved, so it probably isn't so bad that a casual observer would notice.
I know that my standards are a lot lower at home than at work, where part of my job is judging video quality. I Tivo the Simpsons at low quality, and that doesn't bother me. At work, though, a board that was putting out what Tivo considers high quality would be sent to the rework guy real quick.
Tell me about it, SD is very disappointing. At least the local comcast cable delivers quite a few HD signals.
When Comcast took over from AT&T the quality improved a bit, but not enough that I could even think about getting rid of my 14db line amp, without which half the channels are basically unwatchable. No digital available in my neighborhood, of course, and I just about swallowed my tongue when I saw what Dish wanted for HD service.
To be honest, though, I don't watch enough TV that I really care that much. I mostly bought the set for watching DVDs. Still, when I pay for a service I expect the quality to be good enough that it's usable.
Because the thing is that Novell is selling linux, and in fact owns SUSE and Ximian, and as a result are bound by the terms of the GPL.
Ah, right, because the company currently known as SCO never sold their own Linux distribution, and thus could certainly never have been considered "bound by the GPL"...
Are you a newbie who hacked into a low numbered account, or just completely stupid?
Sorry for the flamebait, but seriously, the only reason owning Suse would stop Novell from doing exactly what SCO is doing now is that Suse is a successful product (2nd or 3rd behind Red Hat, depending on who you ask). If you honestly believe that the GPL's MAD provisions actually force moneyed corporations to play fair, you're hopelessly naive.
Of course having said all that I think the main problem with current HDTV is not resolution but overcompression. I can see way too many motion artifacts when the camera pans fast or other fast moving scenes.
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. I'm not sure where you got the 18.8Mbps from, as that's lower than what we consider "low but acceptable" quality for SD. It doesn't suprise me that someone would try and compress it that much. For reference, what we consider low quality for SD is MPEG2 or DVCPro at 25Mbps, or MJPEG at 24Mbps. High quality is double those, and that's not including audio or ancilliary data (we store verticle blanking seperately, which adds up to 20% to the bandwidth, but preserves Closed Captioning and the like). I've been told that most broadcasters run at around 15Mbps for SD.
I'm soon to be trained on our HD servers, but IIRC 70Mbps MPEG2 is considered good quality.
1080p @ 30Hz is in the ATSC standard and has the same datarate as 1080i @ 60hz
You are correct. For some reason I was thinking 1080p@60. Now that I've checked the spec I see 1080p@30, 1080i@60, and 720p@60.
In the future I'm sure we will have higher resolution content, currently they are scanning in films at much higher resultions (4000 lines, progrssive), partially to alow for new, better formats.
Another product I nominally support (actual repairs are done in Germany, I just make sure the boards we send out have the correct firmware) is the Spirit Datacine, which is the absolute top film scanner available. It does 2k lines in realtime, or 4k lines at 7.5fps (both 4:3, and it's all progressive until it's downconverted to the distribution format). I don't have a frame handy, as the base model is $1.2M, but IIRC the data bus is 16 optical fibers in paralell.
So, yeah, we can do it, but I wouldn't expect to see it in your home any time soon.
Also I should note that when we went to 2k operators started to complain that the image was grainy. It turns out that's because they were actually able to see the grain of the film. That can be cleaned up a bit of course, but I think for 4k to really be viable it's going to have to be all digital.
Related amusing annectdote: When my wife came home after I got done hooking up our HDTV (to our super-crappy AT&T cable) her innitial reaction was "That looks like shit! We paid $1000 for that?!" I had to explain to her that our signal had always looked like shit, it's just that now we had a TV that was good enough that we could tell.
Thanks for clearing that up. I was actually aware of most of it, but I'm used to dealing with it at the "other end" (I'm a technician at Thomson Broadcast & media Solutions, aka Grass Valley Group). I never paid attention to the LCD TVs, though, as I never wanted one.
That is the ultimate goal for many HD fanatics though - 1080 progressive.
"Yes, I've-a seen it, it's-a very nice-a!"
Seriously though, I understand the desire to own the best, but where do these folks think they're going to get 1080p content? To my knowledge nobody broadcasts 1080p, if for no other reason than that it really sucks when your $75k video server is suddenly reduced to one play/record channel (unless you want to sell your firstborn to upgrade to 2GB fibrechannel, and even then, well, I haven't tested it myself).
Still, given the limitations, I wonder why everyone seems to be switching to fixed pixel. My 40" RCA uses high output tubes and has a max res of 1097 lines, progressive. It looks like all the newer Sceniums are DLP and down-convert everything to 720p as you describe.
Dude, he said HD, not SD.
HD resolution is 1920x1080 (or 1280x720, but I've never seen an HDTV that couldn't do at least 1080i). The aspect ratio on an HDTV is 16:9, aka letterbox, so the resolutions you're thinking of don't really apply.
For standard def TV it makes perfect sense to top out at 800x600, since SDTV has a resolution of only 700x525 (NTSC, PAL is 833x625, but then you have to deal with the 50Hz refresh, which drives me nuts. I'd rather have inconsistent color, thank you very much.)
Anyway, the real problem with using a TV as a monitor is that (a) they're limited to only those resolutions which are used for TV/video, which is like 4 at most, and more importantly (b) they're limited to standard refresh rates, which means 60Hz interlaced, which is NOT the same as the 60Hz progressive you're used to enjoying with a real computer monitor. HD does include a progresive scan standard, but I don't know off the top of my head if it's 60Hz or 30Hz.
Clearly you've never been married.
I have no problem giving, in fact I enjoy it. She was never into recieving, though she's gotten so she won't try and talk me out of it when I'm in the mood.
Another saying about marriage applies here, I think:
She goes into it thinking he'll change. He goes into it thinking she won't. They're both wrong.
Actually, living in the modern world is often more stressful.
At least in the third world situation your natural "fight or flight" response is typically helpful. If someone is shooting at you, you shoot back, or run away, or maybe get shot. However it works out, the situation is at least resolved, and you come down off your adrenaline high.
In the modern world it's generally the exact opposite of what you need, making your situation harder to resolve, not easier. The situation is prolonged, actually building on itself in a vicious cycle of adrenaline rushes until you either somehow fight through and find some sort of solution or you burn out.
What we call stress is in most cases just a chemical reaction to stimulus. We evolved that way in order to cope with the stress of the primitive world, now known as the third world. In the modern world those mechanisms just make things worse, thus creating more stress.
I say, "Who's been drinking my vodka?"
There are actually women who don't do oral?
Yes, they're called "wives". It's like the old joke: How are eggs benedict like oral sex? They're both something you can't get at home.
FWIW, my wife was quite oral, until we were married...
The problem with chemical coping mechanisms is that the problem is still there, and usually bigger, when you come down. As an added bonus, your ability to find an actual solution is diminished.
If you're not already doing, I don't suggest taking it up.
That's quite possibly the most mind-bogglingly ignorant thing I've ever heard.
Perhaps you should study some sociology, and then consider the repercussions of your statement, not just for society as a whole, but for you personally.
I'll give you a clue: I'd gladly kill you to provide for my daughter, if that's what it came down to, and I wouldn't regret it for an instant. I'm willing to bet just about any parent you care to ask feels the same.
Don't think for a moment that all this socialist "subsidizing the poor planning of others" doesn't have direct benefit to you.
I second this. My dad was a contractor, and I worked construction on and off for 10 years.
My dad is 53, and his body is basically broken, and he was one of the few who actually took care of himself. It's hard work, and the money's not that good.
The only guys I knew who were making anywhere near 6 figures were the ones who bet everything on a spec house and got lucky, and were smart about rolling that over into the next spec house. After a few years, if they could maintain, they might have been making 6 figures. I knew just as many who didn't get lucky and spent the next 10 years paying off their debts.
Oh, and those guys working more overtime than should be humanly possible? Most of them are doing speed.
Why? Both have the same effect on the employer: increased cost. (Or, at least, that's what they would have us believe every time the rules change in favor of the employee. If they're not going to differentiate, why should we?)
I think it would be better to base it on some cost of living metric, like housing for example.
When qualifying for a home loan, they typically pick 1/3 your income as the maximum payment you can afford. Based on my own experience, one can scrape by on twice their housing cost. So, 2.5 * Average Rent would seem reasonable. I don't have the average, but the median rent for 2000 was $469, which would put the minimum wage at roughly $6.75
OK, so how is the H-1B mess ever going to get fixed if there isn't an organized opposition to the likes of Sun?
Unions do a lot more than just negotiate benefits.
Call it a "Professional Association" or something if "union" is a dirty word to you, but something needs to be done.
I have to agree, but it's important to remember that "many" is not the same as "all", or even "most". There are unions that really do care about their members and work for their benefit, and there are industries which really do need union protection.
My mom is a union rep for a small union (United Domestic Workers) that does take care of its members. A while back they thought they would be able to get more bargaining power by joining with one of the bigger unions (AFSCME I think, but I'm not positive). They got screwed. The big union didn't give a crap about them, just their membership dues, so all the UDW members voted "Screw you guys, I'm going home", and are now back to having at least the meager resources they had before.
I would be in support of a tech union, or something like it, as long as it remained an independent entity focused on the needs of IT folk. I would absolutely not join one affiliated with AFL-CIO, AFSCME, or any of the other big unions, which I don't believe have any interest in representing the interests of their members.
Plus, even if she's not your type, you could have a nice time for one evening. Sometimes a date is *more* fun for both parties if you know there won't be another.
I never understood that point of view. If there's no future in it, what's the point? If I can already tell she's not my type, why would I want to subject myself to whatever negative quality I see in her for an entire evening? Chances are I'd end up being too annoyed to enjoy myself.
Then again, I'm not really interested in owning a ps2 either, so I guess it would be a toss-up for me.
They do have to pay it. Granted, not as much, but if it is the case that productivity decreases, I doubt you'll see too many 70-90 hour work weeks.
I've tutored too many business majors to believe that management would ever notice such a corellation.
"More hours == more productivity" is just one of those ideas that's stuck in their head, like "inventory reduction" or "6-sigma". They believe it's the solution to all their problems, and they'll keep on believing regardless of what the evidence actually shows.
Every few months, I will install a copy of norton and run it with the latest signatures just to check that I am clean, and I have yet to find a virus on my box.
You know you can do that without having to install anything, right? I like housecall.antivirus.com , but there are others.
NAV used to be really good back in '99 or so, but recent versions have been bloatware hogs like nothing else I've ever seen!
I wouldn't go that far!
Last time I used anything Norton was '97 or '98, when I made the collosal mistake of buying Norton System Works. NAV definately slowed my system down, and caused some instability as well, but it wasn't the worst offender. CrashGaurd (or whatever Symantec's version was called) made my previously very stable system crash constantly, and rather than helping it recover gracefuly like it was supposed to, actually locked it up harder than just a plain old Win95 crash. I started refering to the whole thing as Norton Anti-System.
For the record, I tried the McCaffee equivalent around the same time. It caused most of the same problems, just not quite as bad. After that I decided to just not be an idiot, and was able to run sans AV for several years. In fact, I got my first and only virus in '02, when my wife got suckered by one of those "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" pr0n emails.
Of course, I switched the whole family over to Linux in Dec. '02 and haven't worried about it since.