I can think of at least three towns in Northern NH that don't have a single land-based broadband option open to them. Heck, landline phone and cell coverage is spotty. Low population density - you betcha. But isn't that the sort of thing the billions of dollars dumped on the communications companies by the government supposed to solve? Oh, that's right, they turned the money around and lobbied with it instead of improving their networks.
Actually I think the insanity started when it was decided that free speech = protected speech = paid political speech. It's that last bit that needs to stop, but if there's a mechanism short of armed insurrection I don't see it. If we limited political campaigns to $1e6 for president, $1e5 for Senate, and $1e5 for congress - spend it any way you like and not a dollar more - we'd possibly have some chance of our representatives not prostituting themselves like they whores they are.
Nothing wrong with it, except as someone pointed out below the banks don't want it that way, so the government makes laws to support the banks. After all, it's their government, not yours. An even larger problem with the way lending works, at least specific to mortgages, is the brokers. The broker sells you the mortgage, and they get a fee for doing so. They don't get a fee if they decide that you're not you or you can't afford the loan, so there's actually incentive for them to check the person getting the loan as little as possible. They make the loan to someone claiming to be you, take their fee, pass it off to the banks, and let it be someone else's problem (yours or the bank's, they really don't care).
I like computer gaming for the depth - Total War, Master of Orion, etc. Console gaming fulfills the high adrenaline stuff - God of War, Uncharted. Of course, computers get some of that too, but not all of it. But all of this is really off topic. What I believe he's trying to say (having not read a single line of TFA) is that there is strength in a subscription-based gaming service. It's an interesting concept. If you pay $2 an hour to play Bioshock 2, and I finish it in 6 hours, that's only 12 dollars. But I have a friend who is on like his fourth play through - he'd be up near $50. It seems to me then that a subscription service penalizes heavy gamers but would be great for mid-casual gamers like me. It would also save me the heartache of paying $60 for C&C4, when at whatever hourly rate they wanted to charge I could find out that it's awful in an hour or less. Ultimately I think there's room for both services, if for no other reason than the ability to play games in places where there is no significant connectivity.
My 1994 Mazda Protege was regularly 35-37mpg city driving. I've since replaced it with a Hyundai Elantra, which I suspect will get slightly lower mileage.
I'll bite - I was bullied in school, and the thought of suicide never crossed my mind. I did consider murder, though. Perhaps murder is too strong a word. I put a slit in the vinyl cover of my Trapper Keeper and slid in a long knife with the handle removed and replaced with a wrap of duct tape - the whole thing was about 8" long, very thin, and fit inside the cover nicely, invisibly. I said to myself that if those three kids (they were in the 11th grade, I the 8th) ever cornered me on the way home from school I would wait until they crowded me, and simply slide the knife out and drive it into the stomach of whoever was closest. I practiced it at home in my room for literally hours. Slide it out, drive it in. Easy. Would 5 or 6 inches of knife blade have killed someone? Maybe. Why didn't it happen? Because for some reason they moved on to torment someone else. It is essentially pure and random chance that lead me to not killing somone, and that thought is a little chilling. But as I started out saying, bullying, even something like daily bullying for more than a year, with some real physical injuries to show for it, and I never thought of killing myself.
Interestingly, I was one of those people who thought my internet connection was rock solid, but as I've been trying to review (shameless plug: game-over.net) CNC4 for a couple of weeks now without being able to complete a SINGLE GAME, I guess that's not the case. I've never had problems with any online games in the past - CoD:MW, CNC3, Kane's Wrath, SC2:Beta - CNC4 regularly reports that I've been dropped from the service and need to log in again (and it doesn't save your PW, BTW). I'm sure glad my game copy came through the review site and I didn't pay for it or I'd really be pissed.
The solution to that is to absolutely disallow unrelated legislation to be lumped together in the same bill, not anonymous voting. I'd personally like to see bills limited to, say, 100,000 words, the length of a fair book. Anything longer is insulting to the citizenry, and most should be well under 1000 words. If what you want accomplished can't be done in a 1000 words, you're probably biting off more than you can chew (note: see health care legislation).
Well, that's of course the problem with a publicly financed health care system. It's also furthermore a problem of a health care system where apparently only people who can afford medical care get medical care. The reality of the current health care system in America is in fact the worst of both worlds - everyone is paying for the medical care of those who can't afford it, but the only way people who can't afford it manage to get it is through emergency rooms - far from the most efficient or cost effective way for it to happen. And to sort of go offtopic for a moment if I might, I'll add that from a societal spending money standpoint, if you gave the average citizen the choice to either spend their money on someone else's medical care or cable for death row inmates, which do you think the average person would choose? We have this enormous wasteful government, and I think wasting money on health care would be among the least offensive holes they could dump it down, at least for me.
And as a guy who lives in NH, I've got to say that this system works, but not for the reason that most people think. It's not that people who use the services pay for the services - the vast majority of waste is on the government side, not the user side. The reason that our system works is because it's inherently limited. You can't just raise X% of tax on the highest Y% of the earners, because you can't tell how much someone earns based upon the house they live in. Lots of people who have no or a fixed income live on a 100 acres because its been in their family for ten generations. So the process is that the politicians try and raise taxes, someone ninety year old grandmother goes on TV saying that she's going to lose the farm her great great great grandfather left to her because she can't afford the property tax increase, and the politicians back off. Is it regressive? As all hells yes. But it's also iron clad, and it leaves NH with the lowest taxes in the nation and politicians who can't spend on every whim and corporate welfare program that gets into their tiny greedy brains.
Been there, done that. Last time I flew I had the aisle seat. The guy by the window was huge, and lifted the arm rest when he arrived. The woman in the middle seat was only marginally smaller and also lifted the armrest. When I got to my seat I had literally 9", perhaps a little less. Naturally a full flight. I don't think the policy to force people who need two seats to buy two seats is wrong. I'd extend it people who only need 20% of the next seat.
You read reviews from the big three (I'm not even going to say who they are, but you know them, the sites with big flashy game banners), yes, you're getting bought and paid for advertising. Big surprise. But there are lots of other sites out there, including the one that I've been writing at for almost a decade that are different - no salary, no game-related ads, just people who love videogames and want to share a means of separating quality from crap with readers. Incidentally, Activision called us with the MW2 review offer, and we turned it down flat. Sort of ironic, because on the whole I've found it a pretty good game (though I can't say anything about the game at review time).
Because Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is somehow less at risk now that 2007? Because Iran is somehow farther away from nuclear enrichment than in 2007? Because Russia and China have both become friendlier with the West since 2007? Hmmm.
I'll second this. EA to me was almost a joke in terms of developed IP. Oh, wow, here's another version of Madden, now with Fred Taylor stats after the knee surgery! And yet another C&C/Red Alert? That has hit written all over it! I had written EA off as dead until Mirror's Edge, Dead Space, and Dragon Age, which were probably the first games had purchased from EA in over 5 years.
A long time ago I was working on a program that used a large fixed telescope, and when the primary would collect dust rather than try and blow it off or wipe it off, both of which might damage the coating, we went with a product called collodian (it's sold as a special effect makeup). It would pour on, something like runny snot, and quickly harden (it was alcohol based). As it hardened it shrank, and it would pull off of the mirror in a sheet, taking any surface impurities with it.
Saw Holmes this weekend, and personally I was disappointed. Beautifully filmed, wonderfully cast, but fairly uninspired and somewhat dull story. I had also been expecting, though realistically I don't think anything in either the commercials or previews pointed to this, a sort of new spin on the Holmes character. Downey Jr played Holmes absolutely straight, and the plot obliged him right down to the end-of-film-how-they-did-it reveal. "I noticed a rare orchid in the study from which a unique paralytic can be distilled." Seriously? Haven't we as a movie-going group gotten past such lame plot devices?
Except, and I say this as an overall King fan, he seriously screwed over his readers with his ebook. He released it as single chapters, with each chapter being 99 cents. He ultimately released 8 (don't hold me to that, but it was close to that) chapters, for which I paid $8, about the cost of a paperback novel, which he then decided to never finish. $8, for perhaps 30% of a book. Nice deal for him, not so nice for his readers. He kept saying on his website that you could just download it without paying, but that would be like stealing from a blind paperboy. I think if I knew that the paperboy was only selling a piece of the newspaper and not a complete one, I'd have taken my business elsewhere.
I've never seen that video, but part of my firefighter training including hybrid extrication techniques concentrating on where not to cut on many of the most popular hybrid models (admittedly someone in a rare hybrid could still be something of a challenge).
We've had the exact opposite happen at my company - after years of promoting people to managers the company looked around and realized that they were too thick in middle managers and had an overhead rate that was completely unsustainable. Suddenly all these managers had to find actual technical work in the company (a limited number of roles) and those who couldn't find something when the rif hit found themselves out.
As for avoiding a promotion to management, I've done it several times. I just said no, early, often, and sometimes even pre-emptively if I felt an offer was forthcoming. I think even in this economy smart people continue to find jobs, and if the general feeling in the company is that I have to become a manager or ship out, I'll pack my desk and bid you adieu. I've been doing this for more than a decade, and thus far this game of management chicken has always gone my way. Your mileage of course may vary.
I'll go you one better - I have a single facebook account with no real information in it at all. I made this account because people were constantly sending me facebook links, and you can't look at them without having an account. More perplexing still is that account, essentially completely inactive from a facebook perspective without posts, pictures, or any meaningful personal data (it lists, for example, the age as 109 because at one time the default birthday was 1/1/1900 and I didn't change it), still gets friend requests, lots and lots of them. Who are these people? Or are they programs that simply send out friend requests in bulk like spam?
The man's a bestseller so clearly he appeals to someone; that someone is just not you. I've read four or five Reacher novels. They read like action movies - low brain power, lots of explosions - and for that I find his style enjoyable. Like Robert Parker, you can literally read the entire novel in about 3 hours. Easy to take, easy to forget. If suddenly I was the supreme arbiter on what constitutes an entertaining book, Stephanie Meyer would be mopping floors as McDonalds.
I've been doing game reviews online for about a decade now, and as I look back over my reviews I find the ratings pretty much hit the full spectrum from 95% (Bioshock) all the way down to 14% (Dukes of Hazard - Racing for Home). I'm also a constant consumer of game reviews for games that I buy that I don't review. I think for all reviews that have a high degree of opinion (movies, books, videogames) it is important to find a couple of reviewers who feel like you do and stick with them. It's clear that specifically to the videogame realm there is a high degree of sellout (I won't name names) but here's a hint - avoid a review for a game that has a banner ad for that game on the same page as the review.
I've always said that if we could just get everyone to agree not to have children for the next 100 years or so, all the other problems facing the human race would solve themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
I can think of at least three towns in Northern NH that don't have a single land-based broadband option open to them. Heck, landline phone and cell coverage is spotty. Low population density - you betcha. But isn't that the sort of thing the billions of dollars dumped on the communications companies by the government supposed to solve? Oh, that's right, they turned the money around and lobbied with it instead of improving their networks.
Won't someone think of the octopi?!?
Actually I think the insanity started when it was decided that free speech = protected speech = paid political speech. It's that last bit that needs to stop, but if there's a mechanism short of armed insurrection I don't see it. If we limited political campaigns to $1e6 for president, $1e5 for Senate, and $1e5 for congress - spend it any way you like and not a dollar more - we'd possibly have some chance of our representatives not prostituting themselves like they whores they are.
Nothing wrong with it, except as someone pointed out below the banks don't want it that way, so the government makes laws to support the banks. After all, it's their government, not yours. An even larger problem with the way lending works, at least specific to mortgages, is the brokers. The broker sells you the mortgage, and they get a fee for doing so. They don't get a fee if they decide that you're not you or you can't afford the loan, so there's actually incentive for them to check the person getting the loan as little as possible. They make the loan to someone claiming to be you, take their fee, pass it off to the banks, and let it be someone else's problem (yours or the bank's, they really don't care).
I like computer gaming for the depth - Total War, Master of Orion, etc. Console gaming fulfills the high adrenaline stuff - God of War, Uncharted. Of course, computers get some of that too, but not all of it. But all of this is really off topic. What I believe he's trying to say (having not read a single line of TFA) is that there is strength in a subscription-based gaming service. It's an interesting concept. If you pay $2 an hour to play Bioshock 2, and I finish it in 6 hours, that's only 12 dollars. But I have a friend who is on like his fourth play through - he'd be up near $50. It seems to me then that a subscription service penalizes heavy gamers but would be great for mid-casual gamers like me. It would also save me the heartache of paying $60 for C&C4, when at whatever hourly rate they wanted to charge I could find out that it's awful in an hour or less. Ultimately I think there's room for both services, if for no other reason than the ability to play games in places where there is no significant connectivity.
My 1994 Mazda Protege was regularly 35-37mpg city driving. I've since replaced it with a Hyundai Elantra, which I suspect will get slightly lower mileage.
I'll bite - I was bullied in school, and the thought of suicide never crossed my mind. I did consider murder, though. Perhaps murder is too strong a word. I put a slit in the vinyl cover of my Trapper Keeper and slid in a long knife with the handle removed and replaced with a wrap of duct tape - the whole thing was about 8" long, very thin, and fit inside the cover nicely, invisibly. I said to myself that if those three kids (they were in the 11th grade, I the 8th) ever cornered me on the way home from school I would wait until they crowded me, and simply slide the knife out and drive it into the stomach of whoever was closest. I practiced it at home in my room for literally hours. Slide it out, drive it in. Easy. Would 5 or 6 inches of knife blade have killed someone? Maybe. Why didn't it happen? Because for some reason they moved on to torment someone else. It is essentially pure and random chance that lead me to not killing somone, and that thought is a little chilling. But as I started out saying, bullying, even something like daily bullying for more than a year, with some real physical injuries to show for it, and I never thought of killing myself.
Interestingly, I was one of those people who thought my internet connection was rock solid, but as I've been trying to review (shameless plug: game-over.net) CNC4 for a couple of weeks now without being able to complete a SINGLE GAME, I guess that's not the case. I've never had problems with any online games in the past - CoD:MW, CNC3, Kane's Wrath, SC2:Beta - CNC4 regularly reports that I've been dropped from the service and need to log in again (and it doesn't save your PW, BTW). I'm sure glad my game copy came through the review site and I didn't pay for it or I'd really be pissed.
The solution to that is to absolutely disallow unrelated legislation to be lumped together in the same bill, not anonymous voting. I'd personally like to see bills limited to, say, 100,000 words, the length of a fair book. Anything longer is insulting to the citizenry, and most should be well under 1000 words. If what you want accomplished can't be done in a 1000 words, you're probably biting off more than you can chew (note: see health care legislation).
Well, that's of course the problem with a publicly financed health care system. It's also furthermore a problem of a health care system where apparently only people who can afford medical care get medical care. The reality of the current health care system in America is in fact the worst of both worlds - everyone is paying for the medical care of those who can't afford it, but the only way people who can't afford it manage to get it is through emergency rooms - far from the most efficient or cost effective way for it to happen. And to sort of go offtopic for a moment if I might, I'll add that from a societal spending money standpoint, if you gave the average citizen the choice to either spend their money on someone else's medical care or cable for death row inmates, which do you think the average person would choose? We have this enormous wasteful government, and I think wasting money on health care would be among the least offensive holes they could dump it down, at least for me.
It's time to quit when the patient says it's time, and it's not the business of the spouse, the church, or the government to decide otherwise.
And as a guy who lives in NH, I've got to say that this system works, but not for the reason that most people think. It's not that people who use the services pay for the services - the vast majority of waste is on the government side, not the user side. The reason that our system works is because it's inherently limited. You can't just raise X% of tax on the highest Y% of the earners, because you can't tell how much someone earns based upon the house they live in. Lots of people who have no or a fixed income live on a 100 acres because its been in their family for ten generations. So the process is that the politicians try and raise taxes, someone ninety year old grandmother goes on TV saying that she's going to lose the farm her great great great grandfather left to her because she can't afford the property tax increase, and the politicians back off. Is it regressive? As all hells yes. But it's also iron clad, and it leaves NH with the lowest taxes in the nation and politicians who can't spend on every whim and corporate welfare program that gets into their tiny greedy brains.
Been there, done that. Last time I flew I had the aisle seat. The guy by the window was huge, and lifted the arm rest when he arrived. The woman in the middle seat was only marginally smaller and also lifted the armrest. When I got to my seat I had literally 9", perhaps a little less. Naturally a full flight. I don't think the policy to force people who need two seats to buy two seats is wrong. I'd extend it people who only need 20% of the next seat.
You read reviews from the big three (I'm not even going to say who they are, but you know them, the sites with big flashy game banners), yes, you're getting bought and paid for advertising. Big surprise. But there are lots of other sites out there, including the one that I've been writing at for almost a decade that are different - no salary, no game-related ads, just people who love videogames and want to share a means of separating quality from crap with readers. Incidentally, Activision called us with the MW2 review offer, and we turned it down flat. Sort of ironic, because on the whole I've found it a pretty good game (though I can't say anything about the game at review time).
Because Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is somehow less at risk now that 2007? Because Iran is somehow farther away from nuclear enrichment than in 2007? Because Russia and China have both become friendlier with the West since 2007? Hmmm.
I'll second this. EA to me was almost a joke in terms of developed IP. Oh, wow, here's another version of Madden, now with Fred Taylor stats after the knee surgery! And yet another C&C/Red Alert? That has hit written all over it! I had written EA off as dead until Mirror's Edge, Dead Space, and Dragon Age, which were probably the first games had purchased from EA in over 5 years.
A long time ago I was working on a program that used a large fixed telescope, and when the primary would collect dust rather than try and blow it off or wipe it off, both of which might damage the coating, we went with a product called collodian (it's sold as a special effect makeup). It would pour on, something like runny snot, and quickly harden (it was alcohol based). As it hardened it shrank, and it would pull off of the mirror in a sheet, taking any surface impurities with it.
Saw Holmes this weekend, and personally I was disappointed. Beautifully filmed, wonderfully cast, but fairly uninspired and somewhat dull story. I had also been expecting, though realistically I don't think anything in either the commercials or previews pointed to this, a sort of new spin on the Holmes character. Downey Jr played Holmes absolutely straight, and the plot obliged him right down to the end-of-film-how-they-did-it reveal. "I noticed a rare orchid in the study from which a unique paralytic can be distilled." Seriously? Haven't we as a movie-going group gotten past such lame plot devices?
Except, and I say this as an overall King fan, he seriously screwed over his readers with his ebook. He released it as single chapters, with each chapter being 99 cents. He ultimately released 8 (don't hold me to that, but it was close to that) chapters, for which I paid $8, about the cost of a paperback novel, which he then decided to never finish. $8, for perhaps 30% of a book. Nice deal for him, not so nice for his readers. He kept saying on his website that you could just download it without paying, but that would be like stealing from a blind paperboy. I think if I knew that the paperboy was only selling a piece of the newspaper and not a complete one, I'd have taken my business elsewhere.
I've never seen that video, but part of my firefighter training including hybrid extrication techniques concentrating on where not to cut on many of the most popular hybrid models (admittedly someone in a rare hybrid could still be something of a challenge).
As for avoiding a promotion to management, I've done it several times. I just said no, early, often, and sometimes even pre-emptively if I felt an offer was forthcoming. I think even in this economy smart people continue to find jobs, and if the general feeling in the company is that I have to become a manager or ship out, I'll pack my desk and bid you adieu. I've been doing this for more than a decade, and thus far this game of management chicken has always gone my way. Your mileage of course may vary.
I'll go you one better - I have a single facebook account with no real information in it at all. I made this account because people were constantly sending me facebook links, and you can't look at them without having an account. More perplexing still is that account, essentially completely inactive from a facebook perspective without posts, pictures, or any meaningful personal data (it lists, for example, the age as 109 because at one time the default birthday was 1/1/1900 and I didn't change it), still gets friend requests, lots and lots of them. Who are these people? Or are they programs that simply send out friend requests in bulk like spam?
The man's a bestseller so clearly he appeals to someone; that someone is just not you. I've read four or five Reacher novels. They read like action movies - low brain power, lots of explosions - and for that I find his style enjoyable. Like Robert Parker, you can literally read the entire novel in about 3 hours. Easy to take, easy to forget. If suddenly I was the supreme arbiter on what constitutes an entertaining book, Stephanie Meyer would be mopping floors as McDonalds.
I've been doing game reviews online for about a decade now, and as I look back over my reviews I find the ratings pretty much hit the full spectrum from 95% (Bioshock) all the way down to 14% (Dukes of Hazard - Racing for Home). I'm also a constant consumer of game reviews for games that I buy that I don't review. I think for all reviews that have a high degree of opinion (movies, books, videogames) it is important to find a couple of reviewers who feel like you do and stick with them. It's clear that specifically to the videogame realm there is a high degree of sellout (I won't name names) but here's a hint - avoid a review for a game that has a banner ad for that game on the same page as the review.
I've always said that if we could just get everyone to agree not to have children for the next 100 years or so, all the other problems facing the human race would solve themselves.