Like everyone else on the Do Not Call list, I have been supremely irritated by robo-calls and cold solicitations on my phone, usually at dinnertime and often from an organization that has called several times within a single week. When I investigated how to file a complaint against these vermin, I discovered that it was very difficult. It was difficult to discover whom to contact and after that it was a fairly involved process to actually file a complaint. I decided it was easier to just not answer the phone. That is why I am surprised that any of these rats actually were caught and punished. It's good to hear that the forces of righteousness have exacted some kind of penalty -- but, the amount really isn't very much considering how much time they wasted for many, many people.
Statists who wish to pry into every detail of our lives ALWAYS use the same cop-out justification for their actions: (1) It makes everyone safer, and (2) If you don't have something to hide, you have nothing to worry about.
The simple truth is that everyone has things happening in their life that they do not wish to broadcast. These things usually contribute nothing to public safety or welfare: It could be a discussion with a friend about cheating on a test, or a lie that you told one friend to protect another friend's feelings, or your own medical diagnosis of AIDS. Any responsibility the government feels to protect us does not give them the right to record every word we say, every move we make, every book or Web site we read, or every thought we think.
Leland Yee has never met a gun law that he doesn't like and has made himself a reputation among gun-hating Californians as a dependable source of irritation for liberty-loving Americans. The printable gun is his worst nightmare; therefore he must control the means of producing it. It's a good thing the weather is so nice in California. Otherwise, I would never be able to stand living here.
The idea that the cellular providers are losing money with the current arrangement is laughable. It is a spectacular rip-off of consumers. They say they subsidize the cost of the phones through monthly bill payments, but do your bill payments get smaller once the phone is paid for? Of course not. You continue to pay the inflated phone subsidy whether you owe them money for your phone or not. I am using an extremely old Verozon phone now that was paid for several years ago and have ignored their blandishments to upgrade to a new one so that I can be free of the two-year contract that would shackle me if I took the new phone. Yet, I still pay the same high rates I paid when I had a new phone. My next phone will be purchased outright and linked to a carrier like T-Mobile who does not squeeze a hardware subsidy out of me.
While having local sports events blocked from their local cable may upset some viewers (the few that are left who actually watch TV), the real commercial problem with a la carte delivery of cable service is the money-making channels that no one will select. How many people will sign up for the Home Shopping Network or the many other shopping channels if they must pay to receive them? The religious channels also have a problem. Some number of people will pay for them, but the channels rely on people wandering in by accident or impulse for their outreach goals. They will wither and die if only the choir shows up for the service. Both the shopping and the religious channels provide a lot of income for the cable providers. If they are not there (because subscribers are forced to pay for them), then the price of everything else will go up to maintain the cable company's income stream. This should nicely accelerate the decline of cable/satellite broadcast media and move everyone to Internet services even more quickly.
What a wonderful idea. A teeny, tiny tax that would be incredibly difficult and intrusive to enforce and collect, all so that we can prop up an old business model that cannot seem to support itself. It would be a lot better to privatize the post. As it is, there are a lot of retired postal workers about 50 years old living in trailer parks in northern Florida on post office pensions.
Our current crop of US politicians has ramped up the class warfare feeling in this country to the point that many believe that everyone (or every company) that makes more money than they do needs to pay more in taxes. Google's "fair share" of the tax burden is satisfied when they comply with the tax laws and pay whatever the laws say they must pay. If you don't like the tax structure, elect new representatives who will change it. If I was big enough to move my income to an offshore tax haven legally (as Google appears to have done, and also the Kennedy family trust, FWIW) then I would do it. No one wants to pay more than the legally required amount of tax. Do they?
As many posters already have said, the arctic melt was thoroughly covered in the "mainstream media". What I found interesting is that the reports of a newly tropical arctic area did not also include the information that the Antarctic ice pack is larger than we ever have seen it and still growing, This sort of omission is typical in the highly political discussion that surrounds climate discussions now.
The climate has changed drastically over the centuries, sometimes warming, sometimes cooling. I am willing to bow to the evidence that the globe is warming by fractional degrees each year -- though the Northern hemisphere just experienced one of the coldest winters we have had for a very long time -- but I fail to see how changing the amount of carbon dioxide my car emits will reverse any change that is happening. I certainly doubt that passing new taxes on energy use in Europe and the US will cause the weather to change. If we really want the globe to cool down for a couple of years, what we need is a big volcanic explosion that blankets the earth with smoke for a good long time. This would cool things off, but the other effects might not be so desirable.
I think the judge's order should include instructions on how to remove a Facebook page. I tried to delete mine once, and couldn't find a way to make it go away completely. I had to settle for removing all the personal info from it....
This is not negotiation, as happens during bartering. It is the worst sort of "grab whatever this particular sucker will pay" profiteering. When I see a price posted on an online shopping site, I have a reasonable expectation that everyone else viewing the same page will see the same price. Apparently, this is not true at present. How can we stop these characters from gouging us?
I bought a Samsung Laser printer several years ago for less than $200 to use with Linux. The first cartridge was a starter one, only half-full, but it still lasted me over a year. The replacement (full) cartridge cost about $60 and has already lasted over two years of moderate use -- the cartridge is good for a couple thousand pages. The output is a dark and crisp 600 DPI and the output speed is a lot faster than any inkjet I have seen.
The ugly truth is that most companies are afraid to give any reference for a departed employee beyond verifying dates of past employment. Many companies have been sued over bad references.
The legal department in my company (a moderately-large high-tech firm in Silicon Valley) instructs all managers to never give any references for past employees, and to refer all enquiries to the HR department -- where they will verify employment dates and nothing else.
So, even though your current boss is being a jerk with this sort of threat, it is likely to be empty. You might want to ask your company's HR department to verify the boss's claim, as another poster suggested.
I am writing this on an old Fujitsu P2010 running Puppy Linux. I am completely satisfied with this setup. A full-sized Linux distribution is slow to boot and slow to run on this machine. I used to have Ubuntu installed on it and the performance was not acceptable. Puppy boots quickly and provides all the facilities that you asked for.
I have read several articles in recent weeks about this controversy, and the New Scientist article is unique in that it references an independent replication of Taleyarkhan's results. None of the other articles have said anything about this.
Instead, they described the Purdue investigation as being constrained to some very specific procedural matters in the way a paper from his group was published last year without Taleyarkhan's name on it. In this, he was absolved of any wrongdoing.
But, I haven't heard of any independent verification that the "sonofusion" Taleyarkhan described actually works.
Japanese kana are a lot simpler to use than the letters in English, it's true, but the spelling of every word is not easily predictable as the previous poster has posited. I find that the kana for 'tsu' can be inserted almost randomly in some words. My wife (native Japanese speaker) claims to be able to hear the 'tsu', but I think this is because she knows it is supposed to be there. This is not nearly as big a problem as the whimsical spelling of a lot of words in English, but it is still not completely regular and predictable.
The way Japanese people pronounce kanji ideograms is extremely complicated, and makes up for any simplification provided by the kana alphabets. The kanji characters are very close in rendering to Chinese characters and have the same meanings as Chinese characters. But, each kanji may have two or more distinct pronunciations. The pronunciations are difficult to predict, requiring businesses like insurance companies to keep customer records filed with both a kanji and a kana (phonetic) spelling of the customer's name so that they pronounce the name properly when they telephone the customer. This is very different from Chinese where, within each dialect, only one or two characters have multiple pronunciations and most are only pronounced in one way.
The main problem remaining in the US is that non-profit organizations, charities, opinion pollsters, and other such groups are still free to call and bother you. I find that they like to do it at about 6:30 PM when they suspect someone will be at home eating their supper (as I usually am when these calls come). The best remedy I have found is my teenage daughter. I gave her free rein on how she treats these people after she is sure who they are, and she enjoys jerking them around. Very few of the calls get through to me now.
My experience with Fujitsu was exactly the same, but the circumstances were a little different. I erased the disk and installed Linux immediately when I bought the notebook, then tried to re-install the XP that came with it a few months later when it became obvious that I needed it for office-related work. That's when I discovered that there was no real recovery disk provided.
When I wrote to Fujitsu they told me that Microsoft did not allow them to distribute any media except the HD in the notebook, and that they would not send me any. The only alternative they offered was to re-burn the initial installation on my hard disk if I sent them the entire notebook and paid them $150 for the service.
I like the notebook a lot, but I will not buy another Fujitsu product until this customer-hostile policy disappears.
The CIE color map was developed as an industrial tool to identify the colors used in paints, etc quantitatively. It was calculated based on psychophysical measurements of color appearance, but it is an engineering approximation. For example, the calculated CIE color space has three dimensions, and the paper representation that is commonly used is a two-dimensional projection of the calculated space. The CIE representation of color space is robustly nonlinear; it was intended only as a way to identify a color, not as a way to document the differences among colors.
As other posters have already pointed out, the differences between colors are quite complex and have not been studied and documented enough to provide a measure you can use to predict objectively the differences between colors you are using. As a former vision and color scientist, my advice is to eyeball the differences in the work you are doing now.
I recently bought a Micron Millenia with PIII 667 and a VIA chipset with 100 MH FSB. Wow, was I disappointed to see two different Linux distributions (RH6 and SuSE6.3) both repeatedly lock up the display and keyboard when I did the same sorts of things that you describe. Finally, I noticed the special PCI setting for the VIA PCI bridge when I was building a new kernel. This patch tests and splits the timing for DMA in a non-standard way for VIA chips. So far, it seems to work for me. Read the description and follow the installation instructions when you do you make config, and it may solve your timing problems. Good luck.
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Like everyone else on the Do Not Call list, I have been supremely irritated by robo-calls and cold solicitations on my phone, usually at dinnertime and often from an organization that has called several times within a single week. When I investigated how to file a complaint against these vermin, I discovered that it was very difficult. It was difficult to discover whom to contact and after that it was a fairly involved process to actually file a complaint. I decided it was easier to just not answer the phone. That is why I am surprised that any of these rats actually were caught and punished. It's good to hear that the forces of righteousness have exacted some kind of penalty -- but, the amount really isn't very much considering how much time they wasted for many, many people.
Statists who wish to pry into every detail of our lives ALWAYS use the same cop-out justification for their actions: (1) It makes everyone safer, and (2) If you don't have something to hide, you have nothing to worry about.
The simple truth is that everyone has things happening in their life that they do not wish to broadcast. These things usually contribute nothing to public safety or welfare: It could be a discussion with a friend about cheating on a test, or a lie that you told one friend to protect another friend's feelings, or your own medical diagnosis of AIDS. Any responsibility the government feels to protect us does not give them the right to record every word we say, every move we make, every book or Web site we read, or every thought we think.
Leland Yee has never met a gun law that he doesn't like and has made himself a reputation among gun-hating Californians as a dependable source of irritation for liberty-loving Americans. The printable gun is his worst nightmare; therefore he must control the means of producing it. It's a good thing the weather is so nice in California. Otherwise, I would never be able to stand living here.
The idea that the cellular providers are losing money with the current arrangement is laughable. It is a spectacular rip-off of consumers. They say they subsidize the cost of the phones through monthly bill payments, but do your bill payments get smaller once the phone is paid for? Of course not. You continue to pay the inflated phone subsidy whether you owe them money for your phone or not. I am using an extremely old Verozon phone now that was paid for several years ago and have ignored their blandishments to upgrade to a new one so that I can be free of the two-year contract that would shackle me if I took the new phone. Yet, I still pay the same high rates I paid when I had a new phone. My next phone will be purchased outright and linked to a carrier like T-Mobile who does not squeeze a hardware subsidy out of me.
While having local sports events blocked from their local cable may upset some viewers (the few that are left who actually watch TV), the real commercial problem with a la carte delivery of cable service is the money-making channels that no one will select. How many people will sign up for the Home Shopping Network or the many other shopping channels if they must pay to receive them? The religious channels also have a problem. Some number of people will pay for them, but the channels rely on people wandering in by accident or impulse for their outreach goals. They will wither and die if only the choir shows up for the service. Both the shopping and the religious channels provide a lot of income for the cable providers. If they are not there (because subscribers are forced to pay for them), then the price of everything else will go up to maintain the cable company's income stream. This should nicely accelerate the decline of cable/satellite broadcast media and move everyone to Internet services even more quickly.
One article was funny. Doing this to all of them, all day, is lame. Give us a break.
What a wonderful idea. A teeny, tiny tax that would be incredibly difficult and intrusive to enforce and collect, all so that we can prop up an old business model that cannot seem to support itself. It would be a lot better to privatize the post. As it is, there are a lot of retired postal workers about 50 years old living in trailer parks in northern Florida on post office pensions.
Our current crop of US politicians has ramped up the class warfare feeling in this country to the point that many believe that everyone (or every company) that makes more money than they do needs to pay more in taxes. Google's "fair share" of the tax burden is satisfied when they comply with the tax laws and pay whatever the laws say they must pay. If you don't like the tax structure, elect new representatives who will change it. If I was big enough to move my income to an offshore tax haven legally (as Google appears to have done, and also the Kennedy family trust, FWIW) then I would do it. No one wants to pay more than the legally required amount of tax. Do they?
As many posters already have said, the arctic melt was thoroughly covered in the "mainstream media". What I found interesting is that the reports of a newly tropical arctic area did not also include the information that the Antarctic ice pack is larger than we ever have seen it and still growing, This sort of omission is typical in the highly political discussion that surrounds climate discussions now.
The climate has changed drastically over the centuries, sometimes warming, sometimes cooling. I am willing to bow to the evidence that the globe is warming by fractional degrees each year -- though the Northern hemisphere just experienced one of the coldest winters we have had for a very long time -- but I fail to see how changing the amount of carbon dioxide my car emits will reverse any change that is happening. I certainly doubt that passing new taxes on energy use in Europe and the US will cause the weather to change. If we really want the globe to cool down for a couple of years, what we need is a big volcanic explosion that blankets the earth with smoke for a good long time. This would cool things off, but the other effects might not be so desirable.
I think the judge's order should include instructions on how to remove a Facebook page. I tried to delete mine once, and couldn't find a way to make it go away completely. I had to settle for removing all the personal info from it....
This is not negotiation, as happens during bartering. It is the worst sort of "grab whatever this particular sucker will pay" profiteering. When I see a price posted on an online shopping site, I have a reasonable expectation that everyone else viewing the same page will see the same price. Apparently, this is not true at present. How can we stop these characters from gouging us?
I bought a Samsung Laser printer several years ago for less than $200 to use with Linux. The first cartridge was a starter one, only half-full, but it still lasted me over a year. The replacement (full) cartridge cost about $60 and has already lasted over two years of moderate use -- the cartridge is good for a couple thousand pages. The output is a dark and crisp 600 DPI and the output speed is a lot faster than any inkjet I have seen.
I will never buy another ink-jet money-sink.
The ugly truth is that most companies are afraid to give any reference for a departed employee beyond verifying dates of past employment. Many companies have been sued over bad references.
The legal department in my company (a moderately-large high-tech firm in Silicon Valley) instructs all managers to never give any references for past employees, and to refer all enquiries to the HR department -- where they will verify employment dates and nothing else.
So, even though your current boss is being a jerk with this sort of threat, it is likely to be empty. You might want to ask your company's HR department to verify the boss's claim, as another poster suggested.
I am writing this on an old Fujitsu P2010 running Puppy Linux. I am completely satisfied with this setup. A full-sized Linux distribution is slow to boot and slow to run on this machine. I used to have Ubuntu installed on it and the performance was not acceptable. Puppy boots quickly and provides all the facilities that you asked for.
I have read several articles in recent weeks about this controversy, and the New Scientist article is unique in that it references an independent replication of Taleyarkhan's results. None of the other articles have said anything about this.
Instead, they described the Purdue investigation as being constrained to some very specific procedural matters in the way a paper from his group was published last year without Taleyarkhan's name on it. In this, he was absolved of any wrongdoing.
But, I haven't heard of any independent verification that the "sonofusion" Taleyarkhan described actually works.
Japanese kana are a lot simpler to use than the letters in English, it's true, but the spelling of every word is not easily predictable as the previous poster has posited. I find that the kana for 'tsu' can be inserted almost randomly in some words. My wife (native Japanese speaker) claims to be able to hear the 'tsu', but I think this is because she knows it is supposed to be there. This is not nearly as big a problem as the whimsical spelling of a lot of words in English, but it is still not completely regular and predictable.
The way Japanese people pronounce kanji ideograms is extremely complicated, and makes up for any simplification provided by the kana alphabets. The kanji characters are very close in rendering to Chinese characters and have the same meanings as Chinese characters. But, each kanji may have two or more distinct pronunciations. The pronunciations are difficult to predict, requiring businesses like insurance companies to keep customer records filed with both a kanji and a kana (phonetic) spelling of the customer's name so that they pronounce the name properly when they telephone the customer. This is very different from Chinese where, within each dialect, only one or two characters have multiple pronunciations and most are only pronounced in one way.
The main problem remaining in the US is that non-profit organizations, charities, opinion pollsters, and other such groups are still free to call and bother you. I find that they like to do it at about 6:30 PM when they suspect someone will be at home eating their supper (as I usually am when these calls come). The best remedy I have found is my teenage daughter. I gave her free rein on how she treats these people after she is sure who they are, and she enjoys jerking them around. Very few of the calls get through to me now.
My experience with Fujitsu was exactly the same, but the circumstances were a little different. I erased the disk and installed Linux immediately when I bought the notebook, then tried to re-install the XP that came with it a few months later when it became obvious that I needed it for office-related work. That's when I discovered that there was no real recovery disk provided.
When I wrote to Fujitsu they told me that Microsoft did not allow them to distribute any media except the HD in the
notebook, and that they would not send me any. The only alternative they offered was to re-burn the initial installation on my hard disk if I sent them the entire notebook and paid them $150 for the service.
I like the notebook a lot, but I will not buy another Fujitsu product until this customer-hostile policy disappears.
These people don't deserve our business.
The CIE color map was developed as an industrial tool to identify the colors used in paints, etc quantitatively. It was calculated based on psychophysical measurements of color appearance, but it is an engineering approximation. For example, the calculated CIE color space has three dimensions, and the paper representation that is commonly used is a two-dimensional projection of the calculated space. The CIE representation of color space is robustly nonlinear; it was intended only as a way to identify a color, not as a way to document the differences among colors.
As other posters have already pointed out, the differences between colors are quite complex and have not been studied and documented enough to provide a measure you can use to predict objectively the differences between colors you are using. As a former vision and color scientist, my advice is to eyeball the differences in the work you are doing now.
I recently bought a Micron Millenia with PIII 667 and a VIA chipset with 100 MH FSB. Wow, was I disappointed to see two different Linux distributions (RH6 and SuSE6.3) both repeatedly lock up the display and keyboard when I did the same sorts of things that you describe. Finally, I noticed the special PCI setting for the VIA PCI bridge when I was building a new kernel. This patch tests and splits the timing for DMA in a non-standard way for VIA chips. So far, it seems to work for me. Read the description and follow the installation instructions when you do you make config, and it may solve your timing problems. Good luck.