This is how the original post played out in my head:
What about suicide?
me: depression is supposed to help you work through problems, ignoring the problems makes depression worse and leads to frustration and suicide attempts. And then I attempted to illustrate how the modern world does not reflect the world in which this would have evolved. Specifically, it would offer survival advantage as long as people don't just ignore its warnings.
Why do people who use antidepressants kill themselves frequently enough to merit black box warnings on medications, if the meds are supposed to be helping?
me: Because using pills as a crutch, instead of fixing the underlying problems, doesn't allow the brain to get back to normal. Keep in mind, we have no idea how depression gets cured. If it were a simple chemical imbalance then restoring the balance would restore normal function. But once prozac came out we stopped the research. If it were an imbalance, you wouldn't have a waiting period of several months for it to kick in, it would work immediately. The latest research I found before this report suggests the brain actually gets damaged, and restoring the chemical imbalance allows it to heal, which takes time. Once it's healed you can function normally again. However this new research/theory suggests that using medications simply buys you enough energy as you suggested to fix the problems, letting the brain return to its normal state and then probably physically healing. In short, pills are good but you have to address the cause as well.
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According to this new research, depression is not a modern disease. And according to this new theory, distractions which take your mind off your problems are the opposite of helpful. They don't let you solve your problem and get past it - they just prolong the problem while making you feel better. Like a pain reliever that masks the symptoms. That was my point about pills and TV and internet and all of the toys we have today - it's easy to simply ignore that you feel bad, solve no problems, and not feel better. Not feel horrible, but not feel better either.
A hunter-gatherer society would likely present fewer complicated issues which require problem solving. When we settled down into an agrarian society and depended on rain for crops, problem solving probably became more important.
In my own personal experience, the thing to do when I feel the first sign of depression is to change something. I don't always know what to change, but simply cleaning the house or sorting through papers which have piled up or calling a business to work out why something isn't right - these things tend to help. Avoidance behavior seems to make things worse, which matches this theory. Doing nothing when your brain is trying to fix something for you is just working against yourself. So in my personal experience, this new theory does make sense where others have not.
My point was, back in the day they wouldn't have the option to "not leave their house". If you read my comment again, hopefully you will see it as a comment on man's natural state. In the modern world, we do have things like alcohol and staying in the house, and absolutely medications can help when a person is not capable of escaping those distractions.
When the body adapts to challenges, but you don't change anything and don't solve the problems the body has adapted to, the brain's functions go haywire.
So this research says you have a problem, or several problems. Instead of using depression to advantage and actually resolving things, people tend to distract themselves with TV and alcohol or other drugs. They even take antidepressants, which make them feel they don't have to change anything at all.
Eventually the brain can't cope, and it basically says "HEY, I'M TRYING TO HELP YOU, PLEASE LISTEN" and then it just gets frustrated and gives up. That could be why you have "cry for help" suicide attempts with depressed people, instead of actual success.
Yes they do kill themselves, but in a world without plentiful and available alcohol, and without TV, and other distractions, it could help you focus on the problem at hand. Remember, survival advantage is usually measured on an organism and its natural environment - abnormal environments yield abnormal behaviour.
That's what we *used to* think. This research suggests that we were in fact incorrect.
Correlation and causation are difficult to disentangle, and I'm usually the first to point out what you did. But this research is specifically into temporary advantages, not actual intelligence boosting.
The idea is you shut everything out, except for what you're trying to solve - putting the blinders on, so to speak. You get no pleasure from nor have desire for things which might distract you from the issue at hand.
It's not an intelligence boost, just a way of coping with a problem. Usually its' several problems, my opinion creeping in. Too much to do, too much stress, and the mind revolts and says "one thing at a time, my friend".
Why couldn't you do both? Give it a name, and also give it a serial or unique id. The name might change, but the asset database can translated that into the serial, which is what all of the other records are tied to. Along with a cross-indexed naming history of course.
All of the advantages of naming, all the advantages of unique id.
If your asset database can't deal with that, maybe it's time to ask them to upgrade their software before the next purchasing round.
This has always bothered me. There are perfectly useful numbers like PI and e and others (leaving out things like the square roots of other things) which don't fit in to our number system, yet describe the mathematics of our system perfectly.
It makes me wonder if we're just using the wrong number system. Base 10 is simple to use and understand, but when you need things like pi and e to make it work, maybe it's not the best. The part that bothers me is that using a different number system might help us think in a different way, with different relationships, and more meaning.
And now I'll go get some coffee, and do some work, so I can come back to this post and wonder what I was thinking.
You're stretching point 3, or not making any sense. If you actually lend someone a physical copy, you no longer have use of it. The only internet-enhanced way of doing that would be a swapping website where you find people who want to trade with you. They exist, and they are legal. So the first half of your statement is not true.
It's legal for me to trade or lend CDs, DVDs, etc. with friends I know, or to buy or sell used copies, as long as they're legitimate (not pirated), but it's illegal for me to use the internet to facilitate either the search or the trading or to expand my group of "friends", even though I could go to a public library and essentially achieve the same ends by swapping media with a large group of people (the public) who I don't actually know.
You might be confusing the physical object for an electronic copy, which is something you do not have the rights to do. You seem to be implying that sharing something over p2p is the same as having it available at the library.
You aren't "swapping media" with the library any more than you are doing the same thing with your friends - someone has to buy it, then you can trade with all your friends. But you have to have something to trade FOR, which spurs additional purchases. so a group of 18 friends buys 18 products and trades. A city of 100k people could buy 100k items and then effectively trades via library.
Going to the library does achieve the same ends as trading with your friends, as there is a finite number of copies available. If the library has 2 copies, 2 people can watch/read/whatever at a time, then they have to return it. And only the library has the right to make a backup copy, not the borrowers. Content owners don't mind the library purchase typically because library patrons are not going to buy the item directly. Instead, the government makes purchase decisions (sometimes with input). The demand for more "free" books available at the library is matched with the available funding based on the tax revenues for the city typically. The collective demand results in a "virtual purchaser", who would not otherwise exist. It's as if someone magically appeared in your circle of friends with a bunch of things you could borrow - but they bought those things using your and your friends' money.
The trick here is you don't get to buy it in Spokane and let it out to someone from Springfield. Springfield has at least one copy and Spokane as well, or else it is not available to the people there (some cities have reciprocal agreements with neighboring cities, but since you have people who live one place and work another that makes sense).
This paragraph is assuming you are implying that p2p sharing is the same as a library. With 20,000 cities in the US (estimate), that means that for you to share something over the internet, someone would have to purchase 20,000 copies in order for every city to have legal access to it. Consider some cities have recip agreements, but others would need more copies to meet demand, and it evens out. Then figure how many library purchases would need to be made to be the equivalent number of purchases needed to support the entire online population. At $20 per CD, you would need to spend $400,000 in order to make a copy available to everyone in USA, which makes the Jammie Thomas damage awards look like a reasonable deal.
Minor quibble: you can broadcast if you buy a license to do so. It's not illegal, it's just also not free. Also, you can capture the stream depending on the license. If the broadcaster has the right to copy it, you can save it. If not, you can't. Most likely this would make a great court case - why can I record OTA radio but not internet radio? Ultimately, the argument will fall into the realm of you can record for personal use as long as there is no DRM type encryption to circumvent, making this second point a copy of the first point.
I'd appreciate a link to the neo-cons passing a drug policy that pays top dollar. I would like the opportunity to embarrass my representatives publically with that information.
I'm more interested in the "fire expensive people -> fail" cycle of Circuit City. My company is doing that right now (I imagine most are) and it's incredibly frustrating to deal with the leftover people.
Everyone with brains is seeing this happen and jumping ship, so the number of smart people is dropping even more than they intended. End result is the company is dumber every day.
I have a problem - who can figure out the answer? The smart guy who is at home looking for a job and couldn't care any less about his ex-employer.
I think there's no difference at all. My friend said vista sucked, so I'm skipping it. Same person said iPod is cool and they have on and I saw it and I liked it so I'm getting one.
The difference is, you don't just run out and upgrade your OS like you buy a new tech toy. My computer came with XP so that's what I use, or it came with Vista so that's what I use. And lots of people are saying don't buy a computer if it has Vista, choose XP if you have a choice.
The people we're talking about (and from whose perspective I have been speaking) think about an OS upgrade like buying a new car, not like an oil change. Or maybe like re-upholstering the seats instead of an oil change. Or maybe like getting the car painted, or a new door, vs. an oil change. Point is, the OS is part of the computer to them, not something you normally just pull out and replace.
Compared with Mac where it's all OS X. You might pay for the latest update to OS X, but it's just an update. People are used to software updates now with their anti-virus updates and phone OS updates and Firefox updates... if MS marketed Vista as a paid update you can install with a few clicks instead of a whole new OS, it would have much greater market share. But replacing the OS is a mystery, like replacing a hard drive or ram, and a lot like auto repair where you could do it yourself but people prefer to just run it into the ground.
My gf has it, and I hate it. The keyboard interface is almost non-existent. They intentionally hide shortcuts. Sweet naive little thing she is, she has no idea about shortcuts and doesn't mind moving the mouse, clicking, moving, clicking. I show her shortcuts and her response isn't "show me more ways to save time" it's "cool, thanks".
I've never seen the folder merging in XP, did you mean in Vista? I see the opposite behavior on XP sp1-3: "If a file name is the same it will be overwritten - continue?" so I wrote my own app to merge folders. How do I enable the merge functionality?
Anyway, my gf uses the popularity rating to indicate that a folder has been arranged to her liking. No stars means it's a bunch of random files (mp3 mostly) and 5 stars or whatever means you can find what you want to find. you can sort by popularity, so no need to use leading underscores or zzz_ in order to get the good ones at the top, or the "work in progress" at the top for some rearranging work. She is slightly OCD. If a folder has media files, it's probably a media folder, so the media view is exactly what she wants. She has never had DRM issues. She doesn't care about sort because she always wants it sorted a different way. And as I said, it never occurs to her that software should do what she wants, since it's designed to be used by everyone, not just her.
I hate it, she likes it. Who is Microsoft's target customer?
The biggest advandage over XP is I/O prioritization. Auto updates and large file operations can be a serious bottleneck on my XP SP3, and it has gotten worse since running NT 4 on a p-233, not better. Probably because apps use more disk space and less optimization work.
Of course, vista also had this but I never found out until Windows 7 came out on MSDN. I would have updated just for that alone.
Previous studies on cocaine in banknotes, however, had several drawbacks. They often were based on sampling only a small number of banknotes, for instance. Some tests destroyed the currency.
In the new study, Zuo and colleagues describe use of a modified form of a standard laboratory instrument termed a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer. It allows a faster, simpler and more accurate measurement of cocaine contamination than other methods, without destroying the currency. The researchers used the method to analyze banknotes of several different denominations from the five countries surveyed.
It's not clear, but it sounds like this study was more sensitive than the others.
Not entirely true, you can rely on jury nullification to keep a law in place (for your competitors) but give you a free pass. I'm betting the judge didn't like the hinting about nullification - any time the people of the country can just decide laws don't apply, that tends to put the legal profession on edge.
The PROPER way to do it is to change the law, but it won't get changed retroactively unless this particular case gets all the way to the supreme court. Plus, it's not in Microsoft's best interests to fight a court case and then turn around and make it easier for their competitors. That doesn't make any sense.
Plus, MS is fighting for SOME patent reform, but they firmly believe that if you invent something you should be able to capitalize on it. So they don't actually want the laws to go away, which is what a supreme court ruling COULD effectively do depending on how the justices understood the scope. They just want certain parts to be changed, leaving the rest intact. That would be a tricky case to argue, just as it would be a tricky law to get passed.
So the only logical thing left is to do anything you can think of to get out of this case, and leave the mess there for your competitors until you get a decent amount of patent reform that works the way you want it to do. So they chose that and basically told the jury - this law sucks and it's stupid, so just let us ignore it, mkay?
If everyone contacts Congress, you'd see an instant change in the law. Most people think no one else will, so they don't bother. So no one ends up actually contacting Congress, so the only input they get is whomever meets them for lunch, aka RIAA guy.
They want to be re-elected first and foremost, and second have money to be re-elected. One lunatic calling repeatedly won't sway opinion, but if everyone who cares calls, yo suddenly have a "situation".
Being awake at night, and especially gathering food, puts you in competition with nocturnal animals. If you don't have a mutation to see better at night, or hear better, or something like that, it's probably going to expose to you more danger than you would get at night.
A species that can somehow spend 8 hours asleep without getting eaten won't find additional benefit from working at night. If we had more predators that liked eating sleeping people, it would be a quick and obvious benefit.
You would be training yourself to be tolerant of sleep deprivation. This gene means you don't have any awareness of or ill effects as a result of sleep deprivation, because you are not deprived.
It is not illegal to REQUEST SSN. They can also refuse to do business with you if you don't provide it (anyone can refuse service to anyone for any reason, although you'll get a lawsuit if the reason given is a protected attribute like race or gender - regardless of whether the suit has merit). So in order to have DirectTV, you effectively must provide SSN. That's probably what possessed them. They don't have to have a reason to require it, they just require it.
Chances are, this person is just now learning about privacy and did not consider whether to do business with someone who required it. And chances are they will consider this in the future. They did not think to ask if an alternate ID could be used. That was pretty obvious, I'm surprised you asked the question unless you just felt like trolling. Someone's arm falls off and you're probably the type of person to say "Well why would anyone get leprosy?"
Here's the real zinger. Most companies which provide subscription services tend to do credit checks, and it's going to be a lot harder to avoid this in the future. Cable, satellite, cell phone... anything that charges by the month tends to do a check to make sure you can afford the extra service. It cuts down on having to go after people who stiff you... a normal company would send out a bill, send out a warning, then cut you off until you pay in full plus a reconnection fee. Turns out it's more profitable to simply refuse service to someone who has a chance of not paying. So subscription services cut down on "reminder billing" to late payers, and trying to recover money from non-payers, and lawsuits and selling debt for pennies on the dollar.
The solution to this is going to be pre-pay plans. Instead of using it for a month and getting a bill, you pay in advance so you can get pre-paid service with no credit check. No pay, no play. But consumers will revolt against this, because they have no way to refuse payment if services are not provided (long outages, or failure to provision, or whatever). The consumer would need a lawsuit to get anywhere with this setup, and is unlikely to choose a company that does this over one that bills for service used. Plus, this only works with carefully metered (that is, cut off when you reach the limit like a pre-pay gas pump) or unlimited usage, and the companies are unable to retroactively add charges for roaming, excessive usage, saying certain key words, or wearing mismatched colors like they are used to doing. So we will never avoid the credit check until it is outlawed. If you are paying off a debt, checking makes sense. If you are renting equipment that can be reposessed at any time, it's still an advantage because pick-up costs come in to play. If you are using service that can be remotely terminated fairly easy, a month at a time, checking makes no sense at all. But we're stuck with it until a better business model comes along.
A database usually has the other information as well. SSN, name, date of birth, address... if it has an SSN in it, it probably has enough other information to be 100% successful at identity theft.
No database would have just a list of SSN with nothing else attached to it.
This is the difficulty with large companies. Everyone is treated as a "resource" where their availability and work load is fully quantified and estimated several months out. If someone looks under-utilized, they are either assigned secondary responsibilities or made redundant and let go or shifted elsewhere.
So every project has an estimate. Every estimate is padded so that we are sure to meet our goal of being correct within +/- 15%. That is, no one cares how long it takes but if you take longer than you SAID, you're costing the company money. Then they look at the worksheets (undoubtedly the one management type who knows a little about Excel made a template for you to put numbers in). Juggle a bit, rearrange, justify, have some new numbers, and provide an estimate to the client.
Now, instead of using "agile" methods and getting something done as soon as possible or for as little cost as possible, you have all of the planning and overhead that it takes to get an estimate, and engineers sitting around waiting for approvals and also sitting around waiting to announce completion in order to be close to their estimate. Then you're slightly under due to some other team, so next time you estimate higher. You could do it in under 4 hours, but you know you'll have to wait for security clearance (1 week), maybe for the servers to be built (one week), time to get something officially reviewed by some gate (1 week), lots of other things. Bill time for everyone involved and suddenly the costs are through the roof.
If a company quantifies everything about its operations, it's spending too much time in overhead and not enough time actually working. I'm seeing it right now at a fortune 50 company - we fire all of the people who do work, double up work on the remaining people, and the overhead gets more burdonsome because everyone wants to have good numbers. So I have to track everything I do, every minute of every day, regardless of whether my activity is internal or client-billable.
Large companies intent on outsourcing are quite possibly the worst idea ever. Small companies dedicated to a single operation are a much better idea, because people are on the same page as far as what is expected and how long things should take and what the policies are. And there are fewer levels of management to request charts and graphs and such. I actually worked for several years thinking Dilbert was exaggerating things a bit, but I recently saw the light. Go with a small, dedicated company - not a behemoth jack-of-all-trades master-of-none.
Unless it's part of stimulus dollars, which the transparency website is intended to show, there's no problem. And if it actually IS part of stimulus dollars, then I wouldn't expect to see it until the site goes live.
If we see all of the details, all we're going to do is bitch about it and probably end up delaying the website with investigations into no-bid contracts or who designed this crappy thing or other junk. So just let it ride until the damned thing's ready.
Or to say it in a way less likely to have knee-jerk counter-anecdotes, having only a sales tax means that saving vs. spending nets you more net worth. Making a $100 purchase gives you an item valued at $85 (sales tax eats the missing money). I and other financially responsible people would think twice before spending money with a high enough sales tax to replace income tax. Basically, you get to choose whether you are taxed. Right now USA has very little savings compared to other countries, and it would benefit to discourage excessive spending. But when people stop spending, it's almost automatically a recession.
It is a dangerous gamble when you consider the top 1% of the people hold over 90% of the money - these people can stop buying expensive things from this country, and the sales tax disappears from federal coffers. So then you have to bring back the use tax where you get taxed on foreign purchases.
One thing I've learned is there will always be unintended consequences from any major change, so I don't buy in to the fair tax idea. I'm all for taking out most of the write-offs and readjusting tax brackets based on historical (existing) data to make sure most people are paying about the same amount. A tax scheme which is not understandable by the average taxpayer cannot be legal. I'm basing that on the fact that most people are probably overpaying due to not understanding the entirety of the law. Having to pay someone $100 to get all of your refund makes no sense, especially when I see so many "review last year's return for free" advertisements. That means they know they missed something and can make a quick change and re-file. How many do they miss? So it comes down to the government getting more revenue than it should - and I can see why people simply skip paying altogether given that.
Slashdot Mirror
They usually get 2 or 3 chances to hone a good headline.
This is how the original post played out in my head:
What about suicide?
me: depression is supposed to help you work through problems, ignoring the problems makes depression worse and leads to frustration and suicide attempts. And then I attempted to illustrate how the modern world does not reflect the world in which this would have evolved. Specifically, it would offer survival advantage as long as people don't just ignore its warnings.
Why do people who use antidepressants kill themselves frequently enough to merit black box warnings on medications, if the meds are supposed to be helping?
me: Because using pills as a crutch, instead of fixing the underlying problems, doesn't allow the brain to get back to normal. Keep in mind, we have no idea how depression gets cured. If it were a simple chemical imbalance then restoring the balance would restore normal function. But once prozac came out we stopped the research. If it were an imbalance, you wouldn't have a waiting period of several months for it to kick in, it would work immediately. The latest research I found before this report suggests the brain actually gets damaged, and restoring the chemical imbalance allows it to heal, which takes time. Once it's healed you can function normally again. However this new research/theory suggests that using medications simply buys you enough energy as you suggested to fix the problems, letting the brain return to its normal state and then probably physically healing. In short, pills are good but you have to address the cause as well.
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According to this new research, depression is not a modern disease. And according to this new theory, distractions which take your mind off your problems are the opposite of helpful. They don't let you solve your problem and get past it - they just prolong the problem while making you feel better. Like a pain reliever that masks the symptoms. That was my point about pills and TV and internet and all of the toys we have today - it's easy to simply ignore that you feel bad, solve no problems, and not feel better. Not feel horrible, but not feel better either.
A hunter-gatherer society would likely present fewer complicated issues which require problem solving. When we settled down into an agrarian society and depended on rain for crops, problem solving probably became more important.
In my own personal experience, the thing to do when I feel the first sign of depression is to change something. I don't always know what to change, but simply cleaning the house or sorting through papers which have piled up or calling a business to work out why something isn't right - these things tend to help. Avoidance behavior seems to make things worse, which matches this theory. Doing nothing when your brain is trying to fix something for you is just working against yourself. So in my personal experience, this new theory does make sense where others have not.
My point was, back in the day they wouldn't have the option to "not leave their house". If you read my comment again, hopefully you will see it as a comment on man's natural state. In the modern world, we do have things like alcohol and staying in the house, and absolutely medications can help when a person is not capable of escaping those distractions.
When the body adapts to challenges, but you don't change anything and don't solve the problems the body has adapted to, the brain's functions go haywire.
So this research says you have a problem, or several problems. Instead of using depression to advantage and actually resolving things, people tend to distract themselves with TV and alcohol or other drugs. They even take antidepressants, which make them feel they don't have to change anything at all.
Eventually the brain can't cope, and it basically says "HEY, I'M TRYING TO HELP YOU, PLEASE LISTEN" and then it just gets frustrated and gives up. That could be why you have "cry for help" suicide attempts with depressed people, instead of actual success.
Yes they do kill themselves, but in a world without plentiful and available alcohol, and without TV, and other distractions, it could help you focus on the problem at hand. Remember, survival advantage is usually measured on an organism and its natural environment - abnormal environments yield abnormal behaviour.
That's what we *used to* think. This research suggests that we were in fact incorrect.
Correlation and causation are difficult to disentangle, and I'm usually the first to point out what you did. But this research is specifically into temporary advantages, not actual intelligence boosting.
The idea is you shut everything out, except for what you're trying to solve - putting the blinders on, so to speak. You get no pleasure from nor have desire for things which might distract you from the issue at hand.
It's not an intelligence boost, just a way of coping with a problem. Usually its' several problems, my opinion creeping in. Too much to do, too much stress, and the mind revolts and says "one thing at a time, my friend".
Guessing there's a company policy against that...
Why couldn't you do both? Give it a name, and also give it a serial or unique id. The name might change, but the asset database can translated that into the serial, which is what all of the other records are tied to. Along with a cross-indexed naming history of course.
All of the advantages of naming, all the advantages of unique id.
If your asset database can't deal with that, maybe it's time to ask them to upgrade their software before the next purchasing round.
This has always bothered me. There are perfectly useful numbers like PI and e and others (leaving out things like the square roots of other things) which don't fit in to our number system, yet describe the mathematics of our system perfectly.
It makes me wonder if we're just using the wrong number system. Base 10 is simple to use and understand, but when you need things like pi and e to make it work, maybe it's not the best. The part that bothers me is that using a different number system might help us think in a different way, with different relationships, and more meaning.
And now I'll go get some coffee, and do some work, so I can come back to this post and wonder what I was thinking.
You're stretching point 3, or not making any sense. If you actually lend someone a physical copy, you no longer have use of it. The only internet-enhanced way of doing that would be a swapping website where you find people who want to trade with you. They exist, and they are legal. So the first half of your statement is not true.
You might be confusing the physical object for an electronic copy, which is something you do not have the rights to do. You seem to be implying that sharing something over p2p is the same as having it available at the library.
You aren't "swapping media" with the library any more than you are doing the same thing with your friends - someone has to buy it, then you can trade with all your friends. But you have to have something to trade FOR, which spurs additional purchases. so a group of 18 friends buys 18 products and trades. A city of 100k people could buy 100k items and then effectively trades via library.
Going to the library does achieve the same ends as trading with your friends, as there is a finite number of copies available. If the library has 2 copies, 2 people can watch/read/whatever at a time, then they have to return it. And only the library has the right to make a backup copy, not the borrowers. Content owners don't mind the library purchase typically because library patrons are not going to buy the item directly. Instead, the government makes purchase decisions (sometimes with input). The demand for more "free" books available at the library is matched with the available funding based on the tax revenues for the city typically. The collective demand results in a "virtual purchaser", who would not otherwise exist. It's as if someone magically appeared in your circle of friends with a bunch of things you could borrow - but they bought those things using your and your friends' money.
The trick here is you don't get to buy it in Spokane and let it out to someone from Springfield. Springfield has at least one copy and Spokane as well, or else it is not available to the people there (some cities have reciprocal agreements with neighboring cities, but since you have people who live one place and work another that makes sense).
This paragraph is assuming you are implying that p2p sharing is the same as a library. With 20,000 cities in the US (estimate), that means that for you to share something over the internet, someone would have to purchase 20,000 copies in order for every city to have legal access to it. Consider some cities have recip agreements, but others would need more copies to meet demand, and it evens out. Then figure how many library purchases would need to be made to be the equivalent number of purchases needed to support the entire online population. At $20 per CD, you would need to spend $400,000 in order to make a copy available to everyone in USA, which makes the Jammie Thomas damage awards look like a reasonable deal.
Minor quibble: you can broadcast if you buy a license to do so. It's not illegal, it's just also not free. Also, you can capture the stream depending on the license. If the broadcaster has the right to copy it, you can save it. If not, you can't. Most likely this would make a great court case - why can I record OTA radio but not internet radio? Ultimately, the argument will fall into the realm of you can record for personal use as long as there is no DRM type encryption to circumvent, making this second point a copy of the first point.
I'd appreciate a link to the neo-cons passing a drug policy that pays top dollar. I would like the opportunity to embarrass my representatives publically with that information.
The point was to write an OS in assembly, so all of your analysis is irrelevant.
It's monumentally cool, and academic. The point wasn't to have a portable OS, and assembly can be very maintainable if structured correctly.
If they wanted a lightweight, portable OS they would have chosen a different language.
I'm more interested in the "fire expensive people -> fail" cycle of Circuit City. My company is doing that right now (I imagine most are) and it's incredibly frustrating to deal with the leftover people.
Everyone with brains is seeing this happen and jumping ship, so the number of smart people is dropping even more than they intended. End result is the company is dumber every day.
I have a problem - who can figure out the answer? The smart guy who is at home looking for a job and couldn't care any less about his ex-employer.
I think there's no difference at all. My friend said vista sucked, so I'm skipping it. Same person said iPod is cool and they have on and I saw it and I liked it so I'm getting one.
The difference is, you don't just run out and upgrade your OS like you buy a new tech toy. My computer came with XP so that's what I use, or it came with Vista so that's what I use. And lots of people are saying don't buy a computer if it has Vista, choose XP if you have a choice.
The people we're talking about (and from whose perspective I have been speaking) think about an OS upgrade like buying a new car, not like an oil change. Or maybe like re-upholstering the seats instead of an oil change. Or maybe like getting the car painted, or a new door, vs. an oil change. Point is, the OS is part of the computer to them, not something you normally just pull out and replace.
Compared with Mac where it's all OS X. You might pay for the latest update to OS X, but it's just an update. People are used to software updates now with their anti-virus updates and phone OS updates and Firefox updates... if MS marketed Vista as a paid update you can install with a few clicks instead of a whole new OS, it would have much greater market share. But replacing the OS is a mystery, like replacing a hard drive or ram, and a lot like auto repair where you could do it yourself but people prefer to just run it into the ground.
My gf has it, and I hate it. The keyboard interface is almost non-existent. They intentionally hide shortcuts. Sweet naive little thing she is, she has no idea about shortcuts and doesn't mind moving the mouse, clicking, moving, clicking. I show her shortcuts and her response isn't "show me more ways to save time" it's "cool, thanks".
I've never seen the folder merging in XP, did you mean in Vista? I see the opposite behavior on XP sp1-3: "If a file name is the same it will be overwritten - continue?" so I wrote my own app to merge folders. How do I enable the merge functionality?
Anyway, my gf uses the popularity rating to indicate that a folder has been arranged to her liking. No stars means it's a bunch of random files (mp3 mostly) and 5 stars or whatever means you can find what you want to find. you can sort by popularity, so no need to use leading underscores or zzz_ in order to get the good ones at the top, or the "work in progress" at the top for some rearranging work. She is slightly OCD. If a folder has media files, it's probably a media folder, so the media view is exactly what she wants. She has never had DRM issues. She doesn't care about sort because she always wants it sorted a different way. And as I said, it never occurs to her that software should do what she wants, since it's designed to be used by everyone, not just her.
I hate it, she likes it. Who is Microsoft's target customer?
The biggest advandage over XP is I/O prioritization. Auto updates and large file operations can be a serious bottleneck on my XP SP3, and it has gotten worse since running NT 4 on a p-233, not better. Probably because apps use more disk space and less optimization work.
Of course, vista also had this but I never found out until Windows 7 came out on MSDN. I would have updated just for that alone.
It's not clear, but it sounds like this study was more sensitive than the others.
Not entirely true, you can rely on jury nullification to keep a law in place (for your competitors) but give you a free pass. I'm betting the judge didn't like the hinting about nullification - any time the people of the country can just decide laws don't apply, that tends to put the legal profession on edge.
The PROPER way to do it is to change the law, but it won't get changed retroactively unless this particular case gets all the way to the supreme court. Plus, it's not in Microsoft's best interests to fight a court case and then turn around and make it easier for their competitors. That doesn't make any sense.
Plus, MS is fighting for SOME patent reform, but they firmly believe that if you invent something you should be able to capitalize on it. So they don't actually want the laws to go away, which is what a supreme court ruling COULD effectively do depending on how the justices understood the scope. They just want certain parts to be changed, leaving the rest intact. That would be a tricky case to argue, just as it would be a tricky law to get passed.
So the only logical thing left is to do anything you can think of to get out of this case, and leave the mess there for your competitors until you get a decent amount of patent reform that works the way you want it to do. So they chose that and basically told the jury - this law sucks and it's stupid, so just let us ignore it, mkay?
If everyone contacts Congress, you'd see an instant change in the law. Most people think no one else will, so they don't bother. So no one ends up actually contacting Congress, so the only input they get is whomever meets them for lunch, aka RIAA guy.
They want to be re-elected first and foremost, and second have money to be re-elected. One lunatic calling repeatedly won't sway opinion, but if everyone who cares calls, yo suddenly have a "situation".
Being awake at night, and especially gathering food, puts you in competition with nocturnal animals. If you don't have a mutation to see better at night, or hear better, or something like that, it's probably going to expose to you more danger than you would get at night.
A species that can somehow spend 8 hours asleep without getting eaten won't find additional benefit from working at night. If we had more predators that liked eating sleeping people, it would be a quick and obvious benefit.
You would be training yourself to be tolerant of sleep deprivation. This gene means you don't have any awareness of or ill effects as a result of sleep deprivation, because you are not deprived.
It is not illegal to REQUEST SSN. They can also refuse to do business with you if you don't provide it (anyone can refuse service to anyone for any reason, although you'll get a lawsuit if the reason given is a protected attribute like race or gender - regardless of whether the suit has merit). So in order to have DirectTV, you effectively must provide SSN. That's probably what possessed them. They don't have to have a reason to require it, they just require it.
Chances are, this person is just now learning about privacy and did not consider whether to do business with someone who required it. And chances are they will consider this in the future. They did not think to ask if an alternate ID could be used. That was pretty obvious, I'm surprised you asked the question unless you just felt like trolling. Someone's arm falls off and you're probably the type of person to say "Well why would anyone get leprosy?"
Here's the real zinger. Most companies which provide subscription services tend to do credit checks, and it's going to be a lot harder to avoid this in the future. Cable, satellite, cell phone... anything that charges by the month tends to do a check to make sure you can afford the extra service. It cuts down on having to go after people who stiff you... a normal company would send out a bill, send out a warning, then cut you off until you pay in full plus a reconnection fee. Turns out it's more profitable to simply refuse service to someone who has a chance of not paying. So subscription services cut down on "reminder billing" to late payers, and trying to recover money from non-payers, and lawsuits and selling debt for pennies on the dollar.
The solution to this is going to be pre-pay plans. Instead of using it for a month and getting a bill, you pay in advance so you can get pre-paid service with no credit check. No pay, no play. But consumers will revolt against this, because they have no way to refuse payment if services are not provided (long outages, or failure to provision, or whatever). The consumer would need a lawsuit to get anywhere with this setup, and is unlikely to choose a company that does this over one that bills for service used. Plus, this only works with carefully metered (that is, cut off when you reach the limit like a pre-pay gas pump) or unlimited usage, and the companies are unable to retroactively add charges for roaming, excessive usage, saying certain key words, or wearing mismatched colors like they are used to doing. So we will never avoid the credit check until it is outlawed. If you are paying off a debt, checking makes sense. If you are renting equipment that can be reposessed at any time, it's still an advantage because pick-up costs come in to play. If you are using service that can be remotely terminated fairly easy, a month at a time, checking makes no sense at all. But we're stuck with it until a better business model comes along.
A database usually has the other information as well. SSN, name, date of birth, address... if it has an SSN in it, it probably has enough other information to be 100% successful at identity theft.
No database would have just a list of SSN with nothing else attached to it.
This is the difficulty with large companies. Everyone is treated as a "resource" where their availability and work load is fully quantified and estimated several months out. If someone looks under-utilized, they are either assigned secondary responsibilities or made redundant and let go or shifted elsewhere.
So every project has an estimate. Every estimate is padded so that we are sure to meet our goal of being correct within +/- 15%. That is, no one cares how long it takes but if you take longer than you SAID, you're costing the company money. Then they look at the worksheets (undoubtedly the one management type who knows a little about Excel made a template for you to put numbers in). Juggle a bit, rearrange, justify, have some new numbers, and provide an estimate to the client.
Now, instead of using "agile" methods and getting something done as soon as possible or for as little cost as possible, you have all of the planning and overhead that it takes to get an estimate, and engineers sitting around waiting for approvals and also sitting around waiting to announce completion in order to be close to their estimate. Then you're slightly under due to some other team, so next time you estimate higher. You could do it in under 4 hours, but you know you'll have to wait for security clearance (1 week), maybe for the servers to be built (one week), time to get something officially reviewed by some gate (1 week), lots of other things. Bill time for everyone involved and suddenly the costs are through the roof.
If a company quantifies everything about its operations, it's spending too much time in overhead and not enough time actually working. I'm seeing it right now at a fortune 50 company - we fire all of the people who do work, double up work on the remaining people, and the overhead gets more burdonsome because everyone wants to have good numbers. So I have to track everything I do, every minute of every day, regardless of whether my activity is internal or client-billable.
Large companies intent on outsourcing are quite possibly the worst idea ever. Small companies dedicated to a single operation are a much better idea, because people are on the same page as far as what is expected and how long things should take and what the policies are. And there are fewer levels of management to request charts and graphs and such. I actually worked for several years thinking Dilbert was exaggerating things a bit, but I recently saw the light. Go with a small, dedicated company - not a behemoth jack-of-all-trades master-of-none.
Unless it's part of stimulus dollars, which the transparency website is intended to show, there's no problem. And if it actually IS part of stimulus dollars, then I wouldn't expect to see it until the site goes live.
If we see all of the details, all we're going to do is bitch about it and probably end up delaying the website with investigations into no-bid contracts or who designed this crappy thing or other junk. So just let it ride until the damned thing's ready.
Sales tax discourages spending.
Or to say it in a way less likely to have knee-jerk counter-anecdotes, having only a sales tax means that saving vs. spending nets you more net worth. Making a $100 purchase gives you an item valued at $85 (sales tax eats the missing money). I and other financially responsible people would think twice before spending money with a high enough sales tax to replace income tax. Basically, you get to choose whether you are taxed. Right now USA has very little savings compared to other countries, and it would benefit to discourage excessive spending. But when people stop spending, it's almost automatically a recession.
It is a dangerous gamble when you consider the top 1% of the people hold over 90% of the money - these people can stop buying expensive things from this country, and the sales tax disappears from federal coffers. So then you have to bring back the use tax where you get taxed on foreign purchases.
One thing I've learned is there will always be unintended consequences from any major change, so I don't buy in to the fair tax idea. I'm all for taking out most of the write-offs and readjusting tax brackets based on historical (existing) data to make sure most people are paying about the same amount. A tax scheme which is not understandable by the average taxpayer cannot be legal. I'm basing that on the fact that most people are probably overpaying due to not understanding the entirety of the law. Having to pay someone $100 to get all of your refund makes no sense, especially when I see so many "review last year's return for free" advertisements. That means they know they missed something and can make a quick change and re-file. How many do they miss? So it comes down to the government getting more revenue than it should - and I can see why people simply skip paying altogether given that.