Netflix, bank of america, Verizon, godaddy, etc. Is 2011 year of the corporate fuck up? Is it that corporations are making more boneheaded mistakes? Or is it that people are not willing to tolerate these boneheaded anti-customer mistakes anymore?
I don't really know if they are making more bonehead mistakes or if the public is just not as tolerant. I think the most obvious indicator of this is the Occupy Movement.
I get a bad chill up my spine when I see parent dropping off their teenage daughters at the thearter near my house. It is only 1000 m from a Sex Offender probation office on the other side of the strip mall. Great location!
Luckily Hollywood has now decided to do an English version of the films. Hollywood is out of ideas. How about this classic: Niels Arden Oplev, the director of the 2009 Swedish film adaptation, has been quoted as saying, "Why would they remake something when they can just go see the original?"
I read the books and saw the Swedish version which was very good. I have no desire to see a remake only a year after the original.
I for one can say it will likely be worse. The will get some no talent beauty, and then try to balance it out with special effects and explosions (AKA, the Michael Bay Effect).
I have a 60 inch HDTV and just watch what I want in my own home theatre now... and my popcorn has real butter on it too!
The theaters need to realize that they are competing with home theaters, where the price point is around $2 - $3. I have more choices at home, it is more comfortable, and I don't have to deal with a crowd.
And ditch 3D. Yes, 50% of the audience likes it. But they're going to come anyway, 3D or 2D. Nobody ever refused to go to the cinema because a movie was 2D. The people you need to be concerned about are the 50% who no longer go to the cinema because they hate it.
I agree. If I wanted to be sea sick I'd go fishing.
Most likely they will spend millions on a new data standard and building a proprietary network to protect the data in transit but completely forget about the physical safeguards mentioned above. This will facilitate multiple intelligence leaks caused by Congressmen leaving their phones at strip clubs and brothels.
The NSA/DOD listening is not as simple as you think. It isn't a bunch of analysts sitting around listening to everyone's phone calls to Pakistan. Computers listen passively to international phone calls looking for keywords and codewords. They score hits based on these usages and push it up for further analysis such as voice identification and stress pattern analysis.
The analysis is multi-level relying on computers for the first few levels until the computer ranks you high enough to warrant an analyst attention.
The likelihood of you being snooped on is slim, unless you do make regular phone calls to a phone number previously flagged. Like a payphone down the street from a known safe house.
Oddly enough they get around the search warrant thing by primarily listening to phone calls that leave and enter the United States. Your long distance calls fall under their charter as Foreign Intelligence because your phone calls are most likely bounced off a satellite owned by a Canadian, or other foreign subsidiary.
What is the point in patenting DNA found in Nature, isn't the source evidence of prior Art? I'm not a patent attorney but It seems if you try to patent a gean found naturally in someone or something's DNA you could point to the original DNA source as prior existance and refute any liability for license fees.
I don't know if anyone read it but someone recently placed a $1 billion bet against the US retaining their AAA rating. This level of bet does not require a longterm downgrade. It is likely this size of investment could easily be exploited quickly if rating was even called into question for a short period of time. The question is whether someone pressured or influenced S & P to make a $2 trillion math error in order to cause a temporary downgrade in order to exercise their position in the market.
The fact is the US debt to GDP ratio is lower then many other developed countries as well as many who have and recently regained their AAA rating. Further the other credit rating firms Moody's and Fitch did not downgrade the US rating.
Maybe my tinfoil hat is poisoning my brain but it sounds like conspiracy and market manipulation to me.
Virgin Mobile, they can be picked up at a supermarket or department store, have decent coverage and seem to have fair terms of service. If you plan on staying for longer than a few weeks you might try BoostMobile. They offer no contract phones and an everything plan for $50. They use Sprint's network so I set my old blackberry up with them for a month. They are the only pre-paid network that does BB.
First off, I will admit I receive mighty fine discounts from Sprint.
Well if you Slashdot daily you will have heard GSM encryption has been hacked and the code is in the wild. The fact that the major GSM providers continue to downplay this is a good reason to steer clear. That leaves you with Sprint, Verizon or a local carrier.
Both Sprint and Verizon have good deals on plans and they have decent phones. I am an unrepentant crackberry addict and will tell you why. It lasts more than 5 hours on push and I can change the battery my damn self if needed, (haven't had too except while camping).
Sprint's everything plan is good and Verizon has followed suit with something similar. My preference for Sprint is that they discount their already low price by 25%. I have been with them for over 10 years which also means I get full upgrades on all my phones every year not two years. I pay $150/mo. for three phones with 1500 shared minutes, weekends and evenings starting at 7PM (not 9PM), any network roaming in US & Canada (quad band phone required), and everything data (including BlackBerry service). Minutes to me wasn't as big an issue as the data. I send and receive over 100 texts and emails a day.
Verizon has a better pick of phones in my opinion, something I don't hesitate to tell Sprint as often as possible, especially when I want them to knock another $100 off a new phone. Verizon has wider coverage where Sprint seems to have stronger signal in Cities. I can often get in the elevator and keep my conversation going while friends drop off. As I said my Sprint signal fades faster though when I get away from the city. Having a quad-band phone is handy I can jump over to another network and I'm up and running.
If your're dead set on the iPhone and you don't care about its limitations I say go for it. If you need a serious work phone that is rugged and long lasting I recommend a Blackberry. Keep in mind there are two families of BB, consumer (Pearl & Curve), and industrial (Tour & Bold), not sure where the touch screen one fits in since it seems to have features of both families. Android phones are getting better reviews every time I look at them. At the moment they seem to lack the finer polish of the iPhone but they perform just as well and they are an open platform.
I am not sure where to come down on the Palm Pre and Pixi, they seem to suffer from the same lack of polish that Android phones have but they are also a closed platform meaning they will likely evolve out of that phase slower. Palm was great back in the day and if the Pre came out 3 years ago I would have said it was a game changer now it's like a relief pitcher brought in too late to win the game and is only there to keep the run lead down and salvage as much of the team's reputation as possible.
My final opinion avoid the iPhone and AT&T or any other GSM carrier. Pick an Android phone if you want fun and a BlackBerry if you need a serious workhorse.
Someone smarter than me said, "Necessity is the mother of invention." I became a programer out of necessity not intent as I assume most of those great programers you speak of.
I agree with the person above that taking a class that focuses on the application of math over the pure science of it is more important at this point. Physics, Chemistry and Engineering will require you to learn the math as it applies to the problems you encounter and this will build your general problem solving ability.
I think if you pursue this course you will find math easier when you are focus on the application.
I've learned one thing. Buy a car in Truck country and vise versa.
I got a sweet deal right after college. I had a good job lined up and decent credit. I actually stopped by the dealership while they were closed so I could look without being pursuaded. When I found what I wanted I went in and haggled. I let them run my credit and talked them down as much as possible until I got a price I could pay cash. Then I dropped that bomb on them.
Dealer's get kickbacks from finance companies and they factor that into what they'll make. So if you got 15k for a car don't tell them up front. Let them run your credit and let them work the price down as far as they can relying on that kickback. Then when you get to the final signing they will have a total financed. Just say, "oh, that's all it is, I can write you a check for the whole amount right now."
To make this work, you need to be ready to pay cash and a lot of it. You need to have a set target vehicle and do your research on the model. Let their finance group do all the work, it won't matter you won't be financing. If you give them the right target payment they will cut their own legs off to meet it and end up slashing the base price of the vehicle in the process.
Using this method I paid $13,520 (tax, tag and title) for a new car that was stickered $23,975 with a dealer invoice of $17,775. Even with discounts, rebates and incentives I am guessing they lost money on the deal. They tried to back out but they had already provided me a price in writing, and I signed the bill of sale first, before the finance paperwork.
Yeah, borrow a disk. In some instances a retail CD will not accept an OEM license key, just use your friend's or one off the net for the install. You can change it during activation or use the key changer app from M$ website. I use it to change the key on my image to the key assigned to the machine I'm working on.
Love how you're trying to brag about how smart you are, yet you STILL purchased a computer from Best Buy.
It may not be that bad. I got a netbook from them although only because I got reward points from a dishwasher and frig my dad asked me to pick up for him. When I went to pick them up they asked if I wanted a reward card. I said, "Sure." After the reward points I paid $35 bucks for a Linux netbook.
I turned the two large fans on my mother's computer to blow in. Then I cut a swiffer cloth and taped it over the fan intake. It doesn't restrict flow that much unless you double up the cloth and it catches most of the dust and pet hair. Now she just changes the cloths every month and the computer is dust and cat hair free.
The local shop I refer my family to does exactly that. Gets rid of vendor crippled OS, installs latest stable drivers and software you want. They will even recomend quality FOSS options to out of date payware.
They don't try to push anything on you. I got my sister in-law's laptop back with Open Office, SpyBot and AVG installed without an argument.
Not my favorite products but they are free and they took the time and didn't push payware when there was a free option.
Never Friends but In-laws are a different story. I programed a local shop into my mother in-law's phone. Sadly they won't let me shop there anymore because of that. I should have programmed geek squad's #.
I like it! Did you know you can also do that with dresses? Wear it to a party! As long as you don't get food or jizz on it just return it and say you accidentally bought the wrong size or that it doesn't match your panties or whatever.
Yeah, I use the, "it don't match my panties," excuse every time I return a dress for my wife. The clerks never ask further questions.
I'd like to have a network of these in the US to replace our aging and slow rail passenger rail system. At the very least, they are much more energy efficient than air travel.
One picky point with TFA... it suggests that the fast travel times of a high-speed rail network would not come with the security overhead of air travel. I'm not so sure about that.
I tend to agree with you on several of these points. Everytime I read something like this I ask myself, "Why not in the US." While the long distance would probably be a factor in the lack of transcontinental high speed rail but there is solid evidence to support regional high speed rail systems.
The TFA has a point that you can't secure the rails but you can counter that with, 'you can't fly a train into the pentagon.'
If they implimented a high speed rail system to cover the densly populated northeast and great lakes regions and pass legislation to limit short hop flights you could reduce air trafic in the US by 25%.
"You have been offered a 30 Earth Solar Day trial of credit advantage. Text 'Stop' within next 30 Earth Solar Days to cancel. If you continue you're planet will be charged $9.99/mo."
With interest and late penalties we should be able to file a judgement and forclose on their planet by the time they receive the message.
Slashdot Mirror
Netflix, bank of america, Verizon, godaddy, etc. Is 2011 year of the corporate fuck up? Is it that corporations are making more boneheaded mistakes? Or is it that people are not willing to tolerate these boneheaded anti-customer mistakes anymore?
I don't really know if they are making more bonehead mistakes or if the public is just not as tolerant. I think the most obvious indicator of this is the Occupy Movement.
It appears they are doing the same thing, if you are late and trying to avoid being turned off then they're going to milk you for another $2.00
If you don't care that your TV is 7" thick not 0.7 a low end 1080P plasma is just dandy.
I get a bad chill up my spine when I see parent dropping off their teenage daughters at the thearter near my house. It is only 1000 m from a Sex Offender probation office on the other side of the strip mall. Great location!
Luckily Hollywood has now decided to do an English version of the films. Hollywood is out of ideas. How about this classic: Niels Arden Oplev, the director of the 2009 Swedish film adaptation, has been quoted as saying, "Why would they remake something when they can just go see the original?"
I read the books and saw the Swedish version which was very good. I have no desire to see a remake only a year after the original.
I for one can say it will likely be worse. The will get some no talent beauty, and then try to balance it out with special effects and explosions (AKA, the Michael Bay Effect).
I have a 60 inch HDTV and just watch what I want in my own home theatre now... and my popcorn has real butter on it too!
The theaters need to realize that they are competing with home theaters, where the price point is around $2 - $3. I have more choices at home, it is more comfortable, and I don't have to deal with a crowd.
And ditch 3D. Yes, 50% of the audience likes it. But they're going to come anyway, 3D or 2D. Nobody ever refused to go to the cinema because a movie was 2D. The people you need to be concerned about are the 50% who no longer go to the cinema because they hate it.
I agree. If I wanted to be sea sick I'd go fishing.
Most likely they will spend millions on a new data standard and building a proprietary network to protect the data in transit but completely forget about the physical safeguards mentioned above. This will facilitate multiple intelligence leaks caused by Congressmen leaving their phones at strip clubs and brothels.
The NSA/DOD listening is not as simple as you think. It isn't a bunch of analysts sitting around listening to everyone's phone calls to Pakistan. Computers listen passively to international phone calls looking for keywords and codewords. They score hits based on these usages and push it up for further analysis such as voice identification and stress pattern analysis.
The analysis is multi-level relying on computers for the first few levels until the computer ranks you high enough to warrant an analyst attention.
The likelihood of you being snooped on is slim, unless you do make regular phone calls to a phone number previously flagged. Like a payphone down the street from a known safe house.
Oddly enough they get around the search warrant thing by primarily listening to phone calls that leave and enter the United States. Your long distance calls fall under their charter as Foreign Intelligence because your phone calls are most likely bounced off a satellite owned by a Canadian, or other foreign subsidiary.
What is the point in patenting DNA found in Nature, isn't the source evidence of prior Art? I'm not a patent attorney but It seems if you try to patent a gean found naturally in someone or something's DNA you could point to the original DNA source as prior existance and refute any liability for license fees.
I don't know if anyone read it but someone recently placed a $1 billion bet against the US retaining their AAA rating. This level of bet does not require a longterm downgrade. It is likely this size of investment could easily be exploited quickly if rating was even called into question for a short period of time. The question is whether someone pressured or influenced S & P to make a $2 trillion math error in order to cause a temporary downgrade in order to exercise their position in the market. The fact is the US debt to GDP ratio is lower then many other developed countries as well as many who have and recently regained their AAA rating. Further the other credit rating firms Moody's and Fitch did not downgrade the US rating. Maybe my tinfoil hat is poisoning my brain but it sounds like conspiracy and market manipulation to me.
Virgin Mobile, they can be picked up at a supermarket or department store, have decent coverage and seem to have fair terms of service. If you plan on staying for longer than a few weeks you might try BoostMobile. They offer no contract phones and an everything plan for $50. They use Sprint's network so I set my old blackberry up with them for a month. They are the only pre-paid network that does BB.
Well if you Slashdot daily you will have heard GSM encryption has been hacked and the code is in the wild. The fact that the major GSM providers continue to downplay this is a good reason to steer clear. That leaves you with Sprint, Verizon or a local carrier.
Both Sprint and Verizon have good deals on plans and they have decent phones. I am an unrepentant crackberry addict and will tell you why. It lasts more than 5 hours on push and I can change the battery my damn self if needed, (haven't had too except while camping).
Sprint's everything plan is good and Verizon has followed suit with something similar. My preference for Sprint is that they discount their already low price by 25%. I have been with them for over 10 years which also means I get full upgrades on all my phones every year not two years. I pay $150/mo. for three phones with 1500 shared minutes, weekends and evenings starting at 7PM (not 9PM), any network roaming in US & Canada (quad band phone required), and everything data (including BlackBerry service). Minutes to me wasn't as big an issue as the data. I send and receive over 100 texts and emails a day.
Verizon has a better pick of phones in my opinion, something I don't hesitate to tell Sprint as often as possible, especially when I want them to knock another $100 off a new phone. Verizon has wider coverage where Sprint seems to have stronger signal in Cities. I can often get in the elevator and keep my conversation going while friends drop off. As I said my Sprint signal fades faster though when I get away from the city. Having a quad-band phone is handy I can jump over to another network and I'm up and running.
If your're dead set on the iPhone and you don't care about its limitations I say go for it. If you need a serious work phone that is rugged and long lasting I recommend a Blackberry. Keep in mind there are two families of BB, consumer (Pearl & Curve), and industrial (Tour & Bold), not sure where the touch screen one fits in since it seems to have features of both families. Android phones are getting better reviews every time I look at them. At the moment they seem to lack the finer polish of the iPhone but they perform just as well and they are an open platform.
I am not sure where to come down on the Palm Pre and Pixi, they seem to suffer from the same lack of polish that Android phones have but they are also a closed platform meaning they will likely evolve out of that phase slower. Palm was great back in the day and if the Pre came out 3 years ago I would have said it was a game changer now it's like a relief pitcher brought in too late to win the game and is only there to keep the run lead down and salvage as much of the team's reputation as possible.
My final opinion avoid the iPhone and AT&T or any other GSM carrier. Pick an Android phone if you want fun and a BlackBerry if you need a serious workhorse.
I agree with the person above that taking a class that focuses on the application of math over the pure science of it is more important at this point. Physics, Chemistry and Engineering will require you to learn the math as it applies to the problems you encounter and this will build your general problem solving ability.
I think if you pursue this course you will find math easier when you are focus on the application.
Not any more.
Dealer's get kickbacks from finance companies and they factor that into what they'll make. So if you got 15k for a car don't tell them up front. Let them run your credit and let them work the price down as far as they can relying on that kickback. Then when you get to the final signing they will have a total financed. Just say, "oh, that's all it is, I can write you a check for the whole amount right now."
To make this work, you need to be ready to pay cash and a lot of it. You need to have a set target vehicle and do your research on the model. Let their finance group do all the work, it won't matter you won't be financing. If you give them the right target payment they will cut their own legs off to meet it and end up slashing the base price of the vehicle in the process.
Using this method I paid $13,520 (tax, tag and title) for a new car that was stickered $23,975 with a dealer invoice of $17,775. Even with discounts, rebates and incentives I am guessing they lost money on the deal. They tried to back out but they had already provided me a price in writing, and I signed the bill of sale first, before the finance paperwork.
Yeah, borrow a disk. In some instances a retail CD will not accept an OEM license key, just use your friend's or one off the net for the install. You can change it during activation or use the key changer app from M$ website. I use it to change the key on my image to the key assigned to the machine I'm working on.
Love how you're trying to brag about how smart you are, yet you STILL purchased a computer from Best Buy.
It may not be that bad. I got a netbook from them although only because I got reward points from a dishwasher and frig my dad asked me to pick up for him. When I went to pick them up they asked if I wanted a reward card. I said, "Sure." After the reward points I paid $35 bucks for a Linux netbook.
I turned the two large fans on my mother's computer to blow in. Then I cut a swiffer cloth and taped it over the fan intake. It doesn't restrict flow that much unless you double up the cloth and it catches most of the dust and pet hair. Now she just changes the cloths every month and the computer is dust and cat hair free.
The local shop I refer my family to does exactly that. Gets rid of vendor crippled OS, installs latest stable drivers and software you want. They will even recomend quality FOSS options to out of date payware. They don't try to push anything on you. I got my sister in-law's laptop back with Open Office, SpyBot and AVG installed without an argument. Not my favorite products but they are free and they took the time and didn't push payware when there was a free option.
Never Friends but In-laws are a different story. I programed a local shop into my mother in-law's phone. Sadly they won't let me shop there anymore because of that. I should have programmed geek squad's #.
I like it! Did you know you can also do that with dresses? Wear it to a party! As long as you don't get food or jizz on it just return it and say you accidentally bought the wrong size or that it doesn't match your panties or whatever.
Yeah, I use the, "it don't match my panties," excuse every time I return a dress for my wife. The clerks never ask further questions.
I'd like to have a network of these in the US to replace our aging and slow rail passenger rail system. At the very least, they are much more energy efficient than air travel. One picky point with TFA... it suggests that the fast travel times of a high-speed rail network would not come with the security overhead of air travel. I'm not so sure about that.
I tend to agree with you on several of these points. Everytime I read something like this I ask myself, "Why not in the US." While the long distance would probably be a factor in the lack of transcontinental high speed rail but there is solid evidence to support regional high speed rail systems.
The TFA has a point that you can't secure the rails but you can counter that with, 'you can't fly a train into the pentagon.'
If they implimented a high speed rail system to cover the densly populated northeast and great lakes regions and pass legislation to limit short hop flights you could reduce air trafic in the US by 25%.
The fight for ratings can be murder.
"You have been offered a 30 Earth Solar Day trial of credit advantage. Text 'Stop' within next 30 Earth Solar Days to cancel. If you continue you're planet will be charged $9.99/mo." With interest and late penalties we should be able to file a judgement and forclose on their planet by the time they receive the message.