Actually in my experience the Federal Government is less concerned about degress for techies than most private corporations in my area. Most of the GS-12 2210 listings I've seen specifically state "Education is not a replacement for experience at this level". The big catch most of the time though is that once a job is wide open to the public a large enough chunk of your competition will have a degree and so it becomes a filter that HR uses anyways.
Each planet having it's own God is not a cannonical belief, or at least not that I've ever heard anyone claim or preach. Although there is an element of that which is, I'll get to it in a minute. In the same vein the bit about great Mormons becoming Gods if they have enough children is also not true although elements of it are.
Mormons don't believe in the Trinity, that is to say that God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost are all seperate beings. All references to them being one are viewed in terms of them being one in purpose and not literally being the same being.
Given that view of the God Head, Mormons believe that all people are spiritual children of God the Father. They also believe that all of these children were created, whether by a spiritual birth or not I don't know, before the creation. They believe that our life on earth is part of a process of learning and growing. This process eventually at some point can culminate in an individual becoming like God, possibly a God in their own right. I think a famousish quote expressing this is "As God once was, Man is. As God is, Man may become."
Polygammy enters the picture in a doctrinal way because of the belief that one must be married, with both spouses being members of the church, in order to achieve the highest degree of heaven. If you don't make the cut for the highest degree of heaven then you will eventually stop progressing and can not become like God.
Historically and in my experience there are more women than men actively involved in the church. And men have often been seen as the ones in power when it comes to entering a marriage. With those two things in mind, think about the consequences of telling the majority of your believers that their exultation depends on finding a worthy man to marry in this life to take to the next. The solution it would seem is to preach that polygammy is possible so that you aren't damning some of your most faithful believers. Tempering this is the doctrine that marriage after death is possible. Although I've only heard this taught in relation to women, so if you are a guy and don't get yourself married you are out of luck.
I suppose that Mormons are polytheistic in the sense that they believe there are or could be other beings like God out there somewhere, heck they hope to be like that themselves. But they only worship their God and believe that he reigns supreme so far as we are concerned. So that even if there are other Gods they would not or could not interfere here, thus any God that isn't ours is a false God.
I seem to remember seeing somewhere that 1/3 of the US population will be diagnosed with Cancer at some point in their life. Given that I can't see how it's seen as abnormal that you or a dependant would get cancer. And that single illness could easily bring most families to the brink of indentured servitude..
I just don't percieve a need for a smart phone in my families daily life. I can't even take a dump phone to my place of work. I live very close to work and 98% of my life is spent either at home or at work. Why would I pay for an over priced dataplan 12 months a year that could possibly prove useful 2% of the time.
Insider trading also refers to trades made between insiders to drive up the amount of shares being traded. This can make it appear that a stock is getting a lot of activity and hence generate interest and a rise in the price of the stock. Which can then be manipulated by the insiders to sell their shares at the inflated price.
A quick example:
Bob and Jim are buddies who own lots of stock in the same company. They collude with each other to sell their shares back and forth for increasingly higher prices such that they both neither gain or lose money and shares. They do this in such a way that it is not immediately apparent to any outsiders.
Dave an outsider doesn't know who is selling or buying the stock he just sees lots of trading activity and that the price is steadily climbing. Not wanting to be left out in the cold on what appears to be a hot stock he jumps at the chance to buy all the shares he can afford when he has a chance to at a price above yesterday's value but slightly lower than the most current trade, which was offered by Bob or Jim.
Bob and Jim find enough Dave's to sell their stock to at the price that they have artificially inflated it to and take a vacation. The stock settles back to where it was and all those Daves instantly have less value than they thought they were purchasing.
This can actually be pulled off by a single share holder if they are clever enough with using proxies and what not. This kind of con is part of what led to the creation of the SEC. And the way our market's transactions are handled today are specifically geared to make this harder to accomplish.
ABS still leaves skid marks. The difference being that ABS leaves a series of very short skid marks spaced pretty evenly. If I remember right they aren't actually that much more effective at stopping your vehicle either. What ABS offers though is continued steering control of your vehicle rather than entering an uncontrolled slide when you floor the brakes.
In order to make it accurate though you'd need one phone for each variation you intend to test and running the test at the same time. Otherwise the tests could come up with different sized updates and such. It'd be simpler if the phones are all identical to start with and are tested for the same time and time period.
I'm not an anti-vax person generally either. The thing that really got me though was when they wanted to give my daughter a vaccine for Chicken Pox. I mean seriously, Chicken Pox, the relatively harmless childhood illness. In our state it's mandatory to recieve it if the kid hasn't contracted it already by the time they attend school.
Our doctor explained that it was made mandatory so that insurance companies would pay for it. And the vaccine was developed because a bunch of kids in Chicago or somewhere died when they got staph infections because their parents didn't keep the sores clean.
If the vaccine actually provided immunity I'd be for it even if it seems like a frivolous disease to make a vaccine for. But the vaccine is actually highly likely to cause your child to have a weak case of Chicken Pox. So weak in fact that your child won't develop the proper antibodies to fend it off in the future. I know at least a half dozen kids that recieved the vaccine and then immediately got sick with Chicken Pox. Then later in the year they all got a second case of it for real from kids at school. And I know at least one child that ended up with Shingles as a result of the vaccine. The vaccine also requires booster shots each of which can make you sick all over again.
So in summary we go from having a disease, Chicken Pox, that has serious side affects maybe 1% of the time. And less than 5% of people who get it will have a second case of it. Now with the vaccine we have a similiar rate of serious side affects, but instead of running that risk once in a lifetime they'll be getting two or three shots at it. And if the vaccine does actually reduce the prevalence of Chicken Pox in general it means that more people will make it to adulthood without real immunity to it. And of course adulthood is when Chicken Pox goes from being a laughable childhood illness to a deadly disease. So our pathetic Chicken Pox vaccine could actually be helping to set us up for a Chicken Pox epidemic among adults.
We named our guy "Billy Reboot" he wasn't a member of the cleaning staff though. He worked in the PC troubleshooting group. He would show up some random number of days or hours after you submitted a request for something to be done on your workstation. So whenever he arrived without warning and you weren't around to unlock your account and log off he'd do it for you by rebooting. After we made a formalized complaint to his boss someone else decided to hire him on as a permanent employee, go figure.
The dome house is actually appealing to me in a few ways.
1. It's a dome, and as we all know, from geometry class, that means it has less surface area in ratio to the volume that it encloses. This means less building materials used to provide the same amount of living space. Also with less surface area there is less loss or gain of heat.
2. Because it's a dome it should be more structurally resistant to natural disaster scenarios. It will be affected less by high winds and if constructed properly to earthquakes as well.
3. The extra expense in materials and energy to make it rotate may or not pay off in energy savings depending on where it's located. But being able to change the view is probably appealing to a lot of people.
4. It's construction using untreated lumber and other renewable and environmentally friendly materials should be applauded.
Personally though I'd rather have a monolithic cement dome home, which wouldn't be practical to rotate.
Actually I think you could watch four 1080 signals with that TV, since it actually has four time the pixels. It's a rectangle so if both dimensions are doubled you get four times the surface area.
Go to the rural parts of Florida'a panhandle, where the recession is still in full swing. My sister in law was telling me that horses in great health and condition generally were selling for $25. The owners can't afford to feed them and the risk of a vet bill is just too much. Mules I think she said were 5 for $5.
I believe the post you are responding to directly addressed the idea that a specific game can only sell a specific number of copies regardless of price.
My budgeted monthly free spending allowance comes to $40. That's for me to use however I see fit, eating out for lunch, buying a snack at work, buying a book for entertainment, buying a video game etc etc. Do you see how making the starting point for a game $60 puts me out of the market for a new copy. If I ever do get that game it'll likely be a second hand sale or 5 years after it's release during an extreme sale from Steam or someone.
The reality is that the lower the price of your product to the consumer the more sales you are likely to get. The rate at which the price to sales ratio changes probably isn't linear. And I would really think that these huge corporations have analysts for this sort of thing to research the optimal price point for their products. It may well be though that $60 is that pricepoint, and because of our unique perspective and outlook on the industry here at slashdot, we just don't fall evenly into their statistics.
The flashy graphics thing is dead on in my opinion.
Look at the success of Minecraft as an extreme example. Laughably bad graphics but superb gameplay so far as a giant sandbox game goes.
WoW is/was a more moderate example. The graphics were never really great, but the art and style it delivers along with the quality of gameplay has hooked millions into subscribing.
I don't know about making it identical to perjury. But it should definitely be grounds for immediate dismissal should it be proven that the lie was deliberate.
China can threaten to call in their debts but it'd argueably hurt them more than us. I seem to remember seeing where it was shown that China didn't own as much of our debt as the fear mongers claimed by a long shot. Additionally China has pegged their currency to ours, so anything that hurts the value of the dollar hurts them. Meanwhile the treasury can just print money to pay them with, it would cause some inflation for us but it's still a tiny amount of cash compared to what is in circulation.
The government is often just as likely to cut corners where possible to save money, especially when it's a small group of bean counters making a decision for a bunch of other people they don't work with.
My favorite example: In an early cold war era building we had several layers of tile layered on top of each other. Every contractor that came in to give an estimate said the old stuff should be removed first and the concrete slab sealed because adding another layer would likely cause all of it to breakdown and hence ruin the newly laid floor tiles.
The group making the funding decision refused to follow the unaminous warnings from the professionals because it would add $75k on top of a $500k project. So they signed a legal waiver and laid the new tile over the old. Six months later moisture that had been building up under the tiling started to seep through in significant quantity flushing out disolved glue and such. This created pockets of empty space and so the floor developed soft spots. The soft spots quickly cracked and now we have holes in the tiling where you can see down through multiple layers.
So now they have to pay for the tile removal they originally refused to do. And they need to tile the floor again once the underlying slab is sealed properly.
The extra joy in all of this is that the bottom layer of tile is known to contain asbestos. In the attempt to prevent the asbestos from being exposed at all and save a buck they actually made it worse. Rather than removing it quickly in a controlled manner we are now stuck with it slowly becoming exposed until they get their acts together and have it removed.
While it's true that the demand for whatever they made may still be there with today's technology the only reason the supply isn't infinite are legal constructs like Copyright Law.
I'm pretty sure I head something about Bill Gates and Warren Buffet actually promoting letting the tax cuts for the wealthy expire if not actually go up.
I seem to recall that Britain pioneered the use of iron in the construction of sailing vesseles because appropriate lumber was getting scarce.
I'd agree though that space was probably the biggest resource at issue. They could have actually farmed wood for ship except that the lack of space probably made it infeasible.
The issue is that the setup to avoid taxes in the same way has a high cost to enter. You'd need to set up several shell companies around the world and then pay to route your money through them all in the appropriate order. This requires enough labor and money that it's simply not feasible or worth the investment for private middle class individuals. But the more you make the more beneficial something like this is and the higher the return on doing so. So it really isn't a useful loophole for the masses. But for companies and rich individuals it's totally worth it.
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Actually in my experience the Federal Government is less concerned about degress for techies than most private corporations in my area. Most of the GS-12 2210 listings I've seen specifically state "Education is not a replacement for experience at this level". The big catch most of the time though is that once a job is wide open to the public a large enough chunk of your competition will have a degree and so it becomes a filter that HR uses anyways.
Each planet having it's own God is not a cannonical belief, or at least not that I've ever heard anyone claim or preach. Although there is an element of that which is, I'll get to it in a minute. In the same vein the bit about great Mormons becoming Gods if they have enough children is also not true although elements of it are.
Mormons don't believe in the Trinity, that is to say that God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost are all seperate beings. All references to them being one are viewed in terms of them being one in purpose and not literally being the same being.
Given that view of the God Head, Mormons believe that all people are spiritual children of God the Father. They also believe that all of these children were created, whether by a spiritual birth or not I don't know, before the creation. They believe that our life on earth is part of a process of learning and growing. This process eventually at some point can culminate in an individual becoming like God, possibly a God in their own right. I think a famousish quote expressing this is "As God once was, Man is. As God is, Man may become."
Polygammy enters the picture in a doctrinal way because of the belief that one must be married, with both spouses being members of the church, in order to achieve the highest degree of heaven. If you don't make the cut for the highest degree of heaven then you will eventually stop progressing and can not become like God.
Historically and in my experience there are more women than men actively involved in the church. And men have often been seen as the ones in power when it comes to entering a marriage. With those two things in mind, think about the consequences of telling the majority of your believers that their exultation depends on finding a worthy man to marry in this life to take to the next. The solution it would seem is to preach that polygammy is possible so that you aren't damning some of your most faithful believers. Tempering this is the doctrine that marriage after death is possible. Although I've only heard this taught in relation to women, so if you are a guy and don't get yourself married you are out of luck.
I suppose that Mormons are polytheistic in the sense that they believe there are or could be other beings like God out there somewhere, heck they hope to be like that themselves. But they only worship their God and believe that he reigns supreme so far as we are concerned. So that even if there are other Gods they would not or could not interfere here, thus any God that isn't ours is a false God.
I seem to remember seeing somewhere that 1/3 of the US population will be diagnosed with Cancer at some point in their life. Given that I can't see how it's seen as abnormal that you or a dependant would get cancer. And that single illness could easily bring most families to the brink of indentured servitude..
I just don't percieve a need for a smart phone in my families daily life. I can't even take a dump phone to my place of work. I live very close to work and 98% of my life is spent either at home or at work. Why would I pay for an over priced dataplan 12 months a year that could possibly prove useful 2% of the time.
Insider trading also refers to trades made between insiders to drive up the amount of shares being traded. This can make it appear that a stock is getting a lot of activity and hence generate interest and a rise in the price of the stock. Which can then be manipulated by the insiders to sell their shares at the inflated price.
A quick example:
Bob and Jim are buddies who own lots of stock in the same company. They collude with each other to sell their shares back and forth for increasingly higher prices such that they both neither gain or lose money and shares. They do this in such a way that it is not immediately apparent to any outsiders.
Dave an outsider doesn't know who is selling or buying the stock he just sees lots of trading activity and that the price is steadily climbing. Not wanting to be left out in the cold on what appears to be a hot stock he jumps at the chance to buy all the shares he can afford when he has a chance to at a price above yesterday's value but slightly lower than the most current trade, which was offered by Bob or Jim.
Bob and Jim find enough Dave's to sell their stock to at the price that they have artificially inflated it to and take a vacation. The stock settles back to where it was and all those Daves instantly have less value than they thought they were purchasing.
This can actually be pulled off by a single share holder if they are clever enough with using proxies and what not. This kind of con is part of what led to the creation of the SEC. And the way our market's transactions are handled today are specifically geared to make this harder to accomplish.
ABS still leaves skid marks. The difference being that ABS leaves a series of very short skid marks spaced pretty evenly. If I remember right they aren't actually that much more effective at stopping your vehicle either. What ABS offers though is continued steering control of your vehicle rather than entering an uncontrolled slide when you floor the brakes.
In order to make it accurate though you'd need one phone for each variation you intend to test and running the test at the same time. Otherwise the tests could come up with different sized updates and such. It'd be simpler if the phones are all identical to start with and are tested for the same time and time period.
I'm not an anti-vax person generally either. The thing that really got me though was when they wanted to give my daughter a vaccine for Chicken Pox. I mean seriously, Chicken Pox, the relatively harmless childhood illness. In our state it's mandatory to recieve it if the kid hasn't contracted it already by the time they attend school.
Our doctor explained that it was made mandatory so that insurance companies would pay for it. And the vaccine was developed because a bunch of kids in Chicago or somewhere died when they got staph infections because their parents didn't keep the sores clean.
If the vaccine actually provided immunity I'd be for it even if it seems like a frivolous disease to make a vaccine for. But the vaccine is actually highly likely to cause your child to have a weak case of Chicken Pox. So weak in fact that your child won't develop the proper antibodies to fend it off in the future. I know at least a half dozen kids that recieved the vaccine and then immediately got sick with Chicken Pox. Then later in the year they all got a second case of it for real from kids at school. And I know at least one child that ended up with Shingles as a result of the vaccine. The vaccine also requires booster shots each of which can make you sick all over again.
So in summary we go from having a disease, Chicken Pox, that has serious side affects maybe 1% of the time. And less than 5% of people who get it will have a second case of it. Now with the vaccine we have a similiar rate of serious side affects, but instead of running that risk once in a lifetime they'll be getting two or three shots at it. And if the vaccine does actually reduce the prevalence of Chicken Pox in general it means that more people will make it to adulthood without real immunity to it. And of course adulthood is when Chicken Pox goes from being a laughable childhood illness to a deadly disease. So our pathetic Chicken Pox vaccine could actually be helping to set us up for a Chicken Pox epidemic among adults.
We named our guy "Billy Reboot" he wasn't a member of the cleaning staff though. He worked in the PC troubleshooting group. He would show up some random number of days or hours after you submitted a request for something to be done on your workstation. So whenever he arrived without warning and you weren't around to unlock your account and log off he'd do it for you by rebooting. After we made a formalized complaint to his boss someone else decided to hire him on as a permanent employee, go figure.
The dome house is actually appealing to me in a few ways.
1. It's a dome, and as we all know, from geometry class, that means it has less surface area in ratio to the volume that it encloses. This means less building materials used to provide the same amount of living space. Also with less surface area there is less loss or gain of heat.
2. Because it's a dome it should be more structurally resistant to natural disaster scenarios. It will be affected less by high winds and if constructed properly to earthquakes as well.
3. The extra expense in materials and energy to make it rotate may or not pay off in energy savings depending on where it's located. But being able to change the view is probably appealing to a lot of people.
4. It's construction using untreated lumber and other renewable and environmentally friendly materials should be applauded.
Personally though I'd rather have a monolithic cement dome home, which wouldn't be practical to rotate.
Actually I think you could watch four 1080 signals with that TV, since it actually has four time the pixels. It's a rectangle so if both dimensions are doubled you get four times the surface area.
Go to the rural parts of Florida'a panhandle, where the recession is still in full swing. My sister in law was telling me that horses in great health and condition generally were selling for $25. The owners can't afford to feed them and the risk of a vet bill is just too much. Mules I think she said were 5 for $5.
I believe the post you are responding to directly addressed the idea that a specific game can only sell a specific number of copies regardless of price.
My budgeted monthly free spending allowance comes to $40. That's for me to use however I see fit, eating out for lunch, buying a snack at work, buying a book for entertainment, buying a video game etc etc. Do you see how making the starting point for a game $60 puts me out of the market for a new copy. If I ever do get that game it'll likely be a second hand sale or 5 years after it's release during an extreme sale from Steam or someone.
The reality is that the lower the price of your product to the consumer the more sales you are likely to get. The rate at which the price to sales ratio changes probably isn't linear. And I would really think that these huge corporations have analysts for this sort of thing to research the optimal price point for their products. It may well be though that $60 is that pricepoint, and because of our unique perspective and outlook on the industry here at slashdot, we just don't fall evenly into their statistics.
The flashy graphics thing is dead on in my opinion.
Look at the success of Minecraft as an extreme example. Laughably bad graphics but superb gameplay so far as a giant sandbox game goes.
WoW is/was a more moderate example. The graphics were never really great, but the art and style it delivers along with the quality of gameplay has hooked millions into subscribing.
I don't know about making it identical to perjury. But it should definitely be grounds for immediate dismissal should it be proven that the lie was deliberate.
"The The Impotence of Proofreading" by Taylor Mali is an excellent example of the folly in relying on a spell checker.
Dropping the WTO is the way to go in my opinion.
China can threaten to call in their debts but it'd argueably hurt them more than us. I seem to remember seeing where it was shown that China didn't own as much of our debt as the fear mongers claimed by a long shot. Additionally China has pegged their currency to ours, so anything that hurts the value of the dollar hurts them. Meanwhile the treasury can just print money to pay them with, it would cause some inflation for us but it's still a tiny amount of cash compared to what is in circulation.
The government is often just as likely to cut corners where possible to save money, especially when it's a small group of bean counters making a decision for a bunch of other people they don't work with.
My favorite example:
In an early cold war era building we had several layers of tile layered on top of each other. Every contractor that came in to give an estimate said the old stuff should be removed first and the concrete slab sealed because adding another layer would likely cause all of it to breakdown and hence ruin the newly laid floor tiles.
The group making the funding decision refused to follow the unaminous warnings from the professionals because it would add $75k on top of a $500k project. So they signed a legal waiver and laid the new tile over the old. Six months later moisture that had been building up under the tiling started to seep through in significant quantity flushing out disolved glue and such. This created pockets of empty space and so the floor developed soft spots. The soft spots quickly cracked and now we have holes in the tiling where you can see down through multiple layers.
So now they have to pay for the tile removal they originally refused to do. And they need to tile the floor again once the underlying slab is sealed properly.
The extra joy in all of this is that the bottom layer of tile is known to contain asbestos. In the attempt to prevent the asbestos from being exposed at all and save a buck they actually made it worse. Rather than removing it quickly in a controlled manner we are now stuck with it slowly becoming exposed until they get their acts together and have it removed.
That's all true, except that I bet the occasions where someone has started a company just so they could employee people is vanishingly rare.
While it's true that the demand for whatever they made may still be there with today's technology the only reason the supply isn't infinite are legal constructs like Copyright Law.
I'm pretty sure I head something about Bill Gates and Warren Buffet actually promoting letting the tax cuts for the wealthy expire if not actually go up.
I seem to recall that Britain pioneered the use of iron in the construction of sailing vesseles because appropriate lumber was getting scarce.
I'd agree though that space was probably the biggest resource at issue. They could have actually farmed wood for ship except that the lack of space probably made it infeasible.
Did James Cameron actually invent this system? I thought he was a director.
The issue is that the setup to avoid taxes in the same way has a high cost to enter. You'd need to set up several shell companies around the world and then pay to route your money through them all in the appropriate order. This requires enough labor and money that it's simply not feasible or worth the investment for private middle class individuals. But the more you make the more beneficial something like this is and the higher the return on doing so. So it really isn't a useful loophole for the masses. But for companies and rich individuals it's totally worth it.
Thanks for the link. The video was a good summary for the very lengthy article.