Q: So, are you just f#cking out of your tree, or what?
More to the point, what types of mind-alering substances are you taking, in what dosages, and which delivery methods do you use? Where can we get some?
Seriously, there is a time and a place for taking risks in the name of science (e.g. Marie Curie, who could probably not fully appreciate the inherent risks of working with Radium), and then there is someone setting themselves in front of good ol' Uncle Chuck (Darwin) with a big KICK ME sign on their ass.
PS - Good luck up there. Say hi to my friend Mr. Applewhite.:)
Or better yet, turn off the TV for that half-hour.
On the contrary, that is one of the few times that my TV is deliberately on, outside of construction/repair programs on Discovery/TLC, and Law and Order.
The deep satire (suicide-bombing sea monkies, Janet Reno as the Easter Bunny tossing grenades to get back immigrant children, etc.) is actually quite good if you can stomach the grotesque effects and follow the details. It's just that they used to walk a very fine line, and now they seem to have transcended polite society altogether.
I don't have kids yet (coming soon) but I wouldn't let them see this stuff until they are at least 14, and then for a couple of years with my guidance (dicussing the social and political ramifications of what they have seen). Yes my Children are going to be sheltered geeks, but smart dammit, or I will consider myself a failure.:)
No, it's the movies that teach us... don't forget South Park:
"Because the movies teach us what our parents don't have time to say!"
Offtopic PS: Is it just me or have these guys (Parker and Stone) just obliterated the line in tasteful satire? Suicide bombing sentient SeaMonkeys formed by bodily fluids and brine shrimp? This week's "time for a sleepover with all the boys and a priest?" Not that I'm complaining, but the humor is getting harder to laugh at without feeling guilty.
Not pleasing people is one thing; actively railing someone because you take deep personal offense to something funny/witty/personally revealing in you.sig take a SPECIAL kind of 15 year-old.
Nah, is this all hypothetical? You are a slashdot reader, how could you possibly have a gf...;-)
This is getting old, and has not been funny for a long time. Why do people keep modding this crap up?
I'm a 50 karma, 4-year slashdot contributor, married for 6 years (to a girl I met on the net, no less) with a kid on the way. How do I fit in the "everybody is a pimply-faced, socially-inept geek who is 16-21 years old" viewpoint that these posters take?
Just because you are unlucky in love doesn't mean everyone is. It's just not funny anymore... so save you keystrokes and your mod points. Please.
Yeah, they would be 20-something ninja turles by now, eh?
Donatello has a problem with panty-sniffing, Leonardo can't find any eligible, like-mided conservative bachelorettes to settle down with, Rafael has plumped out a little like the Simpsons' Comic Book Guy, and Michelangelo just can't seem to stop smokin' the good stuff.
With the Urban Sprawl that has been experienced in the United States, do we really need to be promoting building of homes?
Perhaps building where are previous building was torn down would not be a bad thing.
I'm assuming you're European?
That's the problem here, there aren't really any "previous buildings" being torn down. At least not in suburban areas that are desirable for new homeowners.
In England, you have restrictions to stop sprawl and re-use existing space; most of this is related to the fact that it's a small island and if there were no restrictions, the whole thing would look like a borg cube of industry and residence, with almost no greenspace.
We're at varying degrees of that is this country. (Another thing neglected by many Europeans who have not visited the central/midwestern USA is the sheer size of the land that has yet to be developed here. Remember, we haven't been putting up stone structures for a thousand years or more.)
Based on climate, time since settelment of the area, and natural resources; we go from overdeveloped (Boston, New York City) to medium/mixed (Ohio/Pennsylvania, which is medium urban areas surrounder by huge suburban sprawl, followed by forests and trees for a hundred miles til the next metro area. The other extreme is Wyoming, where I lived briefly: Beautiful, cold, sparsely populated all over, largest city of 50,000 people. You have mountainous terrain that does not lend well to utility building (electrical, water, gas, fiber)... while this can be overcome, it is not economically prudent because of the sparse population. Which doesn't entice new population to move in, because there are no utilities. Vicious cycle.
As far as the population needs/wants: More and more people are renting old homes out instead of selling them, so even traditional "apartment dwellers" are willing to rent a home until they can afford to buy one, as opposed to "flat living," which Europeans seem much more content to work with. Everyone here is looking around and seeing people in houses, and seeing themselves as inferior if they are "so poor" that they have to live in an apartment.
Myself, I'm planning on living in my apartment for a fifth year yet before I buy a house. And I won't be building new, as land costs are usually outrageous in desirable locations.
...Many of us are out of job and... something like "Custome Business Book" review... run a/. polls... able to shelf out...
Well, if you're in the English-speaking world, I think I know why you're having a hard time finding a job, boss.
Those of us in stable jobs are shelling out big bucks for our apartments/houses, and are doing just fine, thanks. I have dozens of friends in technology, and the only ones not able to keep decent work are the ones who only know VB or C++ (programmers), or who are "A+ Certified" to be able to correctly distinguish a LAN card from a Video card 75% of the time (hardware people).
Did Lindows really fail to live up to the compatibility hype or did Steve Ballmer come in and say, "All your Windows interoperability claims are belong to us; there is no chance to survive, make your changed specs!"
(Lame, I know. I'm sorry.)
But the question is; how sure can we be that the technical compatibility (which you and I know was not nearly as good as it should be, thanks to threat of MS suit and hidden APIs) causing this pullback, and not legal threats for using MS Trademarks on their marketing materials?
Decent replacement for floppies? If CD-Rs aren't up to snuff, how about thumb drives? (Little USB keyfob-sized devices with up to 256 megs of flash memory?)
I got a 128 meg model for $64, and it is plug & chug on most OSes (including XP and OS X).
Many mobo manufacturers have USB boot/USB Thumb Drive as a boot device option in their BIOSes these days, too.
I can't think of any reason why you'd want a $321 5GB removable hard drive as a "floppy replacement" before you looked at a small, portable, bootable USB device first. Or were you just first posting?:)
....when so many people are under the poverty line, voting seems like a grand waste of money...
Thank you, Emporer Palpatine.
Or, for the non Sci-Fi, politiTrolls out there:
Thank you, Grand Emporer Ashcroft.
Voting is never a waste of money. Costs of manning an election are easily justified by the benfits of a democracy; and in India's case, I think we can easily say the government has been spending a LOT of money where it should not be... *cough* NUCLEAR WEAPONS *cough*
... just consider the expense of running elections in a place that has a $2200 per capita GNP.
Please consider, though, that you only need to pay election workers based on that GNP. And that that GNP is based on an entirely different economy of scale than the US economy. And that most Indians are not picketing in West Palm beach for new electronic balloting boxes and banning butterfly ballots.
For instance: A starter home in San Mateo, California costs $399,995. A starter home in Cleveland, Ohio (comparably equipped), costs you $79,995. So while it may cost americans $10 for a reasonable dinner out, the pedestrian restaurants of India may only charge $2 for a comparable meal.
A very simplistic example, but an important distinction. You're directly comparing currencies, but not costs based on the differences in economies.
The one listed above is the newer model of the one I own, and the same model my friend bought. Apex is not a huge brand here yet, but these are nice little units and play VCDs and MP3 CDs as well; a nice selling point for geeks.
What you are going to read here are two sides of the same truth. You will have idealists who believe that the company is doing nothing more than making a good-will offer to keep a good employee with the company. You will also have cynnicists who will tell you that they now no longer trust you, as you are unloyal; and are ripe to be cut.
Neither and both are likely true, to one degree or another.
I work for a large corporation (30,000 emploees), and have seen counter-offered employees treated both ways. Generally, the end result is decided by the actions of the employee, not the corporation or management. The employee will perceive things and act on those perceptions, whether there is merit to their paranoia or not. There have been a few poorly-reared managers who have given "theatened-to-leave but stayed" employees a hard time, but this is the exception and is not necessarily a reflection on corporate culture. I can see this being a bigger POTENTIAL problem in smaller companies, where the politics tend to be more vicious.
My advice it to take the offer; changing companies is a lot hard than staying put for the same money. Sit back and relax, and if anything bad happens, or people really do give you a hard time... you can obviously find a job somewhere else if you have to.
But predicting the future based on the assumption that people will stick to the rules is not a good idea.
Also promoting a culture of anarchy and lawlessness by saying "it happens, so we should just allow it to continue" is likewise not a good idea.
I have visited the webpages listed in your profile, and read your other posts. You seem to be intelligent and not a troll; and I appreciate you replying to these posts thoughtfully. I just don't agree that because you can hack, we should "ebrace" the idea of creating a black market and series of gray markets to fulfill a niche based on the wants of a few selfish people, based on the notion that it's "what the masses have been waiting for."
If I owned an XBox, I'd probably play games on it. If I wanted to hack it into a Linux/Divx/MP3 box, I'd wait until I can buy one for $30 at a garage sale. Think about it, if I had $300 to blow on a modified Xbox and then blow bucks on pirated, poor quality movies, why wouldn't I just go buy a $399 e-machines PC with lots more capabilities, and a licensed copy of WinXP? Then I can watch DVDs that I rent for $4 (or buy), surf the web, play games, etc?
I'm not just some fatcat poo-pooing the idea in favor of corporate interests... far from it. But XBox is NOT all that you think it is, and I'm seeing that more people seem to agree with my point of view than yours.
On the other hand, I don't think my point of view is necessarily 100% right just because it's popular or more enlightened than yours; I just think I'm coming from a point of view more consistent with reality than your ideological assertion of pirates on every corner. The IP revolution will come, but I've decded to largely spectate by sitting back and donating money to the EFF, instead of speculating on and promoting ways to screw the media cartels.
In somes cases the prices will be even lower than this as budding entrepaneurs, just like MS themselves, will subsidize the initial costs in the interests of developing a substantial customer-base in their own community to whom they can sell films and games on an ongoing basis.
This is my beef: you're talking about blatant, illegal (duh) piracy of games and movies. "Budding enterpaneurs" in this field are underground morons who think that they won't get caught, but always do; and giant asian piracy cartels, who also generaly get caught with a shipment of 37,000 units before they hit the streets.
That is a lot different that people who "preview" movies on KaZaa and then go see them. This is "pay $4 to me, d00d, and get SpiderMan instead of/before the DVD."
Re:Writer believes everyone is rich?
on
The Almighty Buck
·
· Score: 2
Agreed; This guy makes a tremendous amount of sense. Especially his point about the money flowing all around, and we're so busy spending it we don't have time or urge to accumulate it in the bank anymore.
This is actually a problem for people in the banking industry; banks have FAR FAR less on deposit to use for loans, and so borrow money from The Fed to provide loans. If they have to pay The Fed interest, it costs them much more to make loans than if they just paid 2% to the owner of the savings accounts on deposit, while charging 8% interest on the loan.
And my other point... I just looked back at my taxes; my household pre-tax income was insanely high! My post-tax sucked, obviously, but compared to the other people in the world I AM FREAKING RICH. I don't have a college degree; I worked my way up from a "starving college student"/dropout who was racking up debt buying RAM upgrades for my computer, not stomping for a dishwashing job to buy Ramen noodles.
Admit it, you're deperately trying to find a way to afford a GeForce4 Ti 4600 or finance a 42" plasma screen, not worrying about how to afford groceries!
Yes, not everyone is rich. The signs of poverty are everywhere, and there are those here in need. But even the most desperate are nowhere near the state of the masses of New Dehli, or the villagers of Somalia. But our society is insanely wealthy in comparison to the world of today, and of days past. And it doesn't look to be slowing down.
More than once Slashdot has published stories from questionable sources which turned out to be completely false.
I just got an IM from somebody replying to this:
HELLO MY AMERICAN FRIENDs! THIS IS JUNIS FROM AFGHANISTAN! I AM NOW ABLE TO HAVE MUCH BETTER INTERNETTING, THANKS TO THE BANDWIDTH PROVIDED BY THE GREAT AMERICAN LIBERATORS! LONG LIVE THE COMMODORE 64!
Eat your heart out, JonKatz. I still haven't seen a retraction or an apology for perpetrating that one against our collective intellect.
This is funny, since my mom-in-law was just in town last weekend and we talked at length about StarOffice. She is the director of a large educational outreach program in a large midwestern US state, designed to get poorer school disricts online with current technologies.
I love my mother-in-law, she is awesome. She has an advanced degree and an uncanny ability to understand where things are going and why they are important in the grand scheme of things. The devil is in the details though... she can't understand StarOffice very well at all, from a UI point of view.
All of her project schools are going to get StarOffice, and all of her staff is undergoing training. The problem is that they have been using MSOffice for so long, they dcan't be "untrained" easily at all. She says the third graders pick up StarOffice - piece of cake... but for the people in charge... teachers, administrators, etc, StarOffice is counter-intuitive.
So the question begs... even if it is free, and can do everything they need, will it work?
The Leasing of equipment always helps subsidize "other costs."
I have been paying $3 a month for 50 months (so far) to "rent" a set-top cable descrambler, that probably cost the cable company $20 in bulk. Also, I pay $1.35 "remote control rental" for the remote for that box... $65 so far. Why? "Because it is part of the cost of service."
I'm more concerned as to why my local cable monopoly has been promising digital cable to our community for four years, and still has not delivered. 100,000 residents of surrounding communities have subscribed to it, but not us. After getting the third ad in a month via mail, I finally called and said "do you have it for our city yet?" "THEY'RE working VERY HARD on it."
What is there to work on, and who are THEY? This town was built mostly from the ground up about 15 years ago from a farming community into a surging suburb! They should have "it" done by now!
I'm just pissed because they don't have Cartoon Network. Too many frickin' movie channels...
ide? you mean scsi, scsi cables can be long enough to allow for the distance stretched
Wrong, most Macs since 1998 are not SCSI unless you pay for an additional PCI card and drives.
And you can buy 24" ATA100 cables that are within spec, so I don't see the issue. In the Mac cases, the cable goes from edge of bobo, over tray, across hinge, to drive bays in bottom of case. (Or to top of case for CD/DVD.)
Slashdot Mirror
Q: So, are you just f#cking out of your tree, or what?
:)
More to the point, what types of mind-alering substances are you taking, in what dosages, and which delivery methods do you use? Where can we get some?
Seriously, there is a time and a place for taking risks in the name of science (e.g. Marie Curie, who could probably not fully appreciate the inherent risks of working with Radium), and then there is someone setting themselves in front of good ol' Uncle Chuck (Darwin) with a big KICK ME sign on their ass.
PS - Good luck up there. Say hi to my friend Mr. Applewhite.
Or better yet, turn off the TV for that half-hour.
:)
On the contrary, that is one of the few times that my TV is deliberately on, outside of construction/repair programs on Discovery/TLC, and Law and Order.
The deep satire (suicide-bombing sea monkies, Janet Reno as the Easter Bunny tossing grenades to get back immigrant children, etc.) is actually quite good if you can stomach the grotesque effects and follow the details. It's just that they used to walk a very fine line, and now they seem to have transcended polite society altogether.
I don't have kids yet (coming soon) but I wouldn't let them see this stuff until they are at least 14, and then for a couple of years with my guidance (dicussing the social and political ramifications of what they have seen). Yes my Children are going to be sheltered geeks, but smart dammit, or I will consider myself a failure.
Doesn't TV teach us anything?
No, it's the movies that teach us... don't forget South Park:
"Because the movies teach us what our parents don't have time to say!"
Offtopic PS: Is it just me or have these guys (Parker and Stone) just obliterated the line in tasteful satire? Suicide bombing sentient SeaMonkeys formed by bodily fluids and brine shrimp? This week's "time for a sleepover with all the boys and a priest?" Not that I'm complaining, but the humor is getting harder to laugh at without feeling guilty.
Not pleasing people is one thing; actively railing someone because you take deep personal offense to something funny/witty/personally revealing in you .sig take a SPECIAL kind of 15 year-old.
:)
Nah, is this all hypothetical? You are a slashdot reader, how could you possibly have a gf... ;-)
This is getting old, and has not been funny for a long time. Why do people keep modding this crap up?
I'm a 50 karma, 4-year slashdot contributor, married for 6 years (to a girl I met on the net, no less) with a kid on the way. How do I fit in the "everybody is a pimply-faced, socially-inept geek who is 16-21 years old" viewpoint that these posters take?
Just because you are unlucky in love doesn't mean everyone is. It's just not funny anymore... so save you keystrokes and your mod points. Please.
Why, Mutant Ninja Turtles, of course!!!
Yeah, they would be 20-something ninja turles by now, eh?
Donatello has a problem with panty-sniffing, Leonardo can't find any eligible, like-mided conservative bachelorettes to settle down with, Rafael has plumped out a little like the Simpsons' Comic Book Guy, and Michelangelo just can't seem to stop smokin' the good stuff.
Just conjecture, though.
They expect to find some people living in there, but only end up interviewing a couple of bums who live there.
Gee, they didn't find any people that lived there, only some bums who lived there.
What exact species classiciation are bums, if not Homo Sapiens (people)?
Just wondering...
With the Urban Sprawl that has been experienced in the United States, do we really need to be promoting building of homes?
Perhaps building where are previous building was torn down would not be a bad thing.
I'm assuming you're European?
That's the problem here, there aren't really any "previous buildings" being torn down. At least not in suburban areas that are desirable for new homeowners.
In England, you have restrictions to stop sprawl and re-use existing space; most of this is related to the fact that it's a small island and if there were no restrictions, the whole thing would look like a borg cube of industry and residence, with almost no greenspace.
We're at varying degrees of that is this country. (Another thing neglected by many Europeans who have not visited the central/midwestern USA is the sheer size of the land that has yet to be developed here. Remember, we haven't been putting up stone structures for a thousand years or more.)
Based on climate, time since settelment of the area, and natural resources; we go from overdeveloped (Boston, New York City) to medium/mixed (Ohio/Pennsylvania, which is medium urban areas surrounder by huge suburban sprawl, followed by forests and trees for a hundred miles til the next metro area. The other extreme is Wyoming, where I lived briefly: Beautiful, cold, sparsely populated all over, largest city of 50,000 people. You have mountainous terrain that does not lend well to utility building (electrical, water, gas, fiber)... while this can be overcome, it is not economically prudent because of the sparse population. Which doesn't entice new population to move in, because there are no utilities. Vicious cycle.
As far as the population needs/wants: More and more people are renting old homes out instead of selling them, so even traditional "apartment dwellers" are willing to rent a home until they can afford to buy one, as opposed to "flat living," which Europeans seem much more content to work with. Everyone here is looking around and seeing people in houses, and seeing themselves as inferior if they are "so poor" that they have to live in an apartment.
Myself, I'm planning on living in my apartment for a fifth year yet before I buy a house. And I won't be building new, as land costs are usually outrageous in desirable locations.
...Many of us are out of job and ... something like "Custome Business Book" review ... run a /. polls ... able to shelf out...
Well, if you're in the English-speaking world, I think I know why you're having a hard time finding a job, boss.
Those of us in stable jobs are shelling out big bucks for our apartments/houses, and are doing just fine, thanks. I have dozens of friends in technology, and the only ones not able to keep decent work are the ones who only know VB or C++ (programmers), or who are "A+ Certified" to be able to correctly distinguish a LAN card from a Video card 75% of the time (hardware people).
Did Lindows really fail to live up to the compatibility hype or did Steve Ballmer come in and say, "All your Windows interoperability claims are belong to us; there is no chance to survive, make your changed specs!"
(Lame, I know. I'm sorry.)
But the question is; how sure can we be that the technical compatibility (which you and I know was not nearly as good as it should be, thanks to threat of MS suit and hidden APIs) causing this pullback, and not legal threats for using MS Trademarks on their marketing materials?
Decent replacement for floppies? If CD-Rs aren't up to snuff, how about thumb drives? (Little USB keyfob-sized devices with up to 256 megs of flash memory?)
:)
I got a 128 meg model for $64, and it is plug & chug on most OSes (including XP and OS X).
Many mobo manufacturers have USB boot/USB Thumb Drive as a boot device option in their BIOSes these days, too.
I can't think of any reason why you'd want a $321 5GB removable hard drive as a "floppy replacement" before you looked at a small, portable, bootable USB device first. Or were you just first posting?
....when so many people are under the poverty line, voting seems like a grand waste of money...
Thank you, Emporer Palpatine.
Or, for the non Sci-Fi, politiTrolls out there:
Thank you, Grand Emporer Ashcroft.
Voting is never a waste of money. Costs of manning an election are easily justified by the benfits of a democracy; and in India's case, I think we can easily say the government has been spending a LOT of money where it should not be... *cough* NUCLEAR WEAPONS *cough*
... just consider the expense of running elections in a place that has a $2200 per capita GNP.
Please consider, though, that you only need to pay election workers based on that GNP. And that that GNP is based on an entirely different economy of scale than the US economy. And that most Indians are not picketing in West Palm beach for new electronic balloting boxes and banning butterfly ballots.
For instance: A starter home in San Mateo, California costs $399,995. A starter home in Cleveland, Ohio (comparably equipped), costs you $79,995. So while it may cost americans $10 for a reasonable dinner out, the pedestrian restaurants of India may only charge $2 for a comparable meal.
A very simplistic example, but an important distinction. You're directly comparing currencies, but not costs based on the differences in economies.
With reasonable quality DVD players going for $69, who can blame them?
The one listed above is the newer model of the one I own, and the same model my friend bought. Apex is not a huge brand here yet, but these are nice little units and play VCDs and MP3 CDs as well; a nice selling point for geeks.
Plus, it says he has grossed a million, which means that doesn't include materials, tools, and shipping. And he's still working out of his garage.
I'd be surprised if he makes for than $40,000 US a year.
(Before taxes. AIEEE!)
It was just so obvious, and has been done SO many times in the 4 years that I've been here, it's just old.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
What you are going to read here are two sides of the same truth. You will have idealists who believe that the company is doing nothing more than making a good-will offer to keep a good employee with the company. You will also have cynnicists who will tell you that they now no longer trust you, as you are unloyal; and are ripe to be cut.
Neither and both are likely true, to one degree or another.
I work for a large corporation (30,000 emploees), and have seen counter-offered employees treated both ways. Generally, the end result is decided by the actions of the employee, not the corporation or management. The employee will perceive things and act on those perceptions, whether there is merit to their paranoia or not. There have been a few poorly-reared managers who have given "theatened-to-leave but stayed" employees a hard time, but this is the exception and is not necessarily a reflection on corporate culture. I can see this being a bigger POTENTIAL problem in smaller companies, where the politics tend to be more vicious.
My advice it to take the offer; changing companies is a lot hard than staying put for the same money. Sit back and relax, and if anything bad happens, or people really do give you a hard time... you can obviously find a job somewhere else if you have to.
But predicting the future based on the assumption that people will stick to the rules is not a good idea.
Also promoting a culture of anarchy and lawlessness by saying "it happens, so we should just allow it to continue" is likewise not a good idea.
I have visited the webpages listed in your profile, and read your other posts. You seem to be intelligent and not a troll; and I appreciate you replying to these posts thoughtfully. I just don't agree that because you can hack, we should "ebrace" the idea of creating a black market and series of gray markets to fulfill a niche based on the wants of a few selfish people, based on the notion that it's "what the masses have been waiting for."
If I owned an XBox, I'd probably play games on it. If I wanted to hack it into a Linux/Divx/MP3 box, I'd wait until I can buy one for $30 at a garage sale. Think about it, if I had $300 to blow on a modified Xbox and then blow bucks on pirated, poor quality movies, why wouldn't I just go buy a $399 e-machines PC with lots more capabilities, and a licensed copy of WinXP? Then I can watch DVDs that I rent for $4 (or buy), surf the web, play games, etc?
I'm not just some fatcat poo-pooing the idea in favor of corporate interests... far from it. But XBox is NOT all that you think it is, and I'm seeing that more people seem to agree with my point of view than yours.
On the other hand, I don't think my point of view is necessarily 100% right just because it's popular or more enlightened than yours; I just think I'm coming from a point of view more consistent with reality than your ideological assertion of pirates on every corner. The IP revolution will come, but I've decded to largely spectate by sitting back and donating money to the EFF, instead of speculating on and promoting ways to screw the media cartels.
In somes cases the prices will be even lower than this as budding entrepaneurs, just like MS themselves, will subsidize the initial costs in the interests of developing a substantial customer-base in their own community to whom they can sell films and games on an ongoing basis.
This is my beef: you're talking about blatant, illegal (duh) piracy of games and movies. "Budding enterpaneurs" in this field are underground morons who think that they won't get caught, but always do; and giant asian piracy cartels, who also generaly get caught with a shipment of 37,000 units before they hit the streets.
That is a lot different that people who "preview" movies on KaZaa and then go see them. This is "pay $4 to me, d00d, and get SpiderMan instead of/before the DVD."
Agreed; This guy makes a tremendous amount of sense. Especially his point about the money flowing all around, and we're so busy spending it we don't have time or urge to accumulate it in the bank anymore.
This is actually a problem for people in the banking industry; banks have FAR FAR less on deposit to use for loans, and so borrow money from The Fed to provide loans. If they have to pay The Fed interest, it costs them much more to make loans than if they just paid 2% to the owner of the savings accounts on deposit, while charging 8% interest on the loan.
And my other point... I just looked back at my taxes; my household pre-tax income was insanely high! My post-tax sucked, obviously, but compared to the other people in the world I AM FREAKING RICH. I don't have a college degree; I worked my way up from a "starving college student"/dropout who was racking up debt buying RAM upgrades for my computer, not stomping for a dishwashing job to buy Ramen noodles.
Admit it, you're deperately trying to find a way to afford a GeForce4 Ti 4600 or finance a 42" plasma screen, not worrying about how to afford groceries!
Yes, not everyone is rich. The signs of poverty are everywhere, and there are those here in need. But even the most desperate are nowhere near the state of the masses of New Dehli, or the villagers of Somalia. But our society is insanely wealthy in comparison to the world of today, and of days past. And it doesn't look to be slowing down.
More than once Slashdot has published stories from questionable sources which turned out to be completely false.
I just got an IM from somebody replying to this:
HELLO MY AMERICAN FRIENDs! THIS IS JUNIS FROM AFGHANISTAN! I AM NOW ABLE TO HAVE MUCH BETTER INTERNETTING, THANKS TO THE BANDWIDTH PROVIDED BY THE GREAT AMERICAN LIBERATORS! LONG LIVE THE COMMODORE 64!
Eat your heart out, JonKatz. I still haven't seen a retraction or an apology for perpetrating that one against our collective intellect.
This is funny, since my mom-in-law was just in town last weekend and we talked at length about StarOffice. She is the director of a large educational outreach program in a large midwestern US state, designed to get poorer school disricts online with current technologies.
I love my mother-in-law, she is awesome. She has an advanced degree and an uncanny ability to understand where things are going and why they are important in the grand scheme of things. The devil is in the details though... she can't understand StarOffice very well at all, from a UI point of view.
All of her project schools are going to get StarOffice, and all of her staff is undergoing training. The problem is that they have been using MSOffice for so long, they dcan't be "untrained" easily at all. She says the third graders pick up StarOffice - piece of cake... but for the people in charge... teachers, administrators, etc, StarOffice is counter-intuitive.
So the question begs... even if it is free, and can do everything they need, will it work?
Just my thoughts on the matter.
The Leasing of equipment always helps subsidize "other costs."
I have been paying $3 a month for 50 months (so far) to "rent" a set-top cable descrambler, that probably cost the cable company $20 in bulk. Also, I pay $1.35 "remote control rental" for the remote for that box... $65 so far. Why? "Because it is part of the cost of service."
I'm more concerned as to why my local cable monopoly has been promising digital cable to our community for four years, and still has not delivered. 100,000 residents of surrounding communities have subscribed to it, but not us. After getting the third ad in a month via mail, I finally called and said "do you have it for our city yet?" "THEY'RE working VERY HARD on it."
What is there to work on, and who are THEY? This town was built mostly from the ground up about 15 years ago from a farming community into a surging suburb!
They should have "it" done by now!
I'm just pissed because they don't have Cartoon Network. Too many frickin' movie channels...
ide? you mean scsi, scsi cables can be long enough to allow for the distance stretched
Wrong, most Macs since 1998 are not SCSI unless you pay for an additional PCI card and drives.
And you can buy 24" ATA100 cables that are within spec, so I don't see the issue. In the Mac cases, the cable goes from edge of bobo, over tray, across hinge, to drive bays in bottom of case. (Or to top of case for CD/DVD.)
No biggie, and still under 24".
Thanks for the heads-up; on your suggestion, I just ordered the DVD from Amazon.
:( No new jacuzzi (or server upgrade) for Taco!
Whoops, I forgot to use the Slashdot link.